Japanese Frieren fans ask themselves what Himmel would do.
American Frieren fans ask themselves what Himler would do
Modern storytelling doesn’t have a villain problem you just don’t like the villains that are portrayed as objectively evil because they’re usually the nobility in the fantasy setting or billionaires in the modern setting. Or like vampires or some shit which are just a stand-in for capitalists literally sucking the blood of the working class.
Objectively evil villains exist in many works you’re just pretending they don’t exist because the right are on the same side as those objectively evil villains.
The works that don’t have objectively evil villains are not stories of good vs bad, they’re usually something else entirely. Things like found family and other topics are pretty popular these days which is in fact one of the secondary threads of Frieren, the more interesting thread in fact. Found family for a being that lives hundreds of years and always outlives that found family is genuinely horrible.
Most of the time in more modern work, killing children children is regarded as bad. Frieren takes the brave stance that this is not so depending on the type of child. I agree that the rest of Frieren is more interesting and worthwhile.
The demon stuff, or even direct and violent conflict between two parties is the weaker side of Frieren. It’s the character stuff and grappling with immortality, death and family that is interesting.
Agree, although the system of magic and the pacing of a battle as an event that practically lasts just 10-60 seconds due to the highly advanced level of magic is extremely appealing. The doctrine of battle is set beforehand and if you haven’t really planned out a particular strategy for a particular problem you’re toast. It’s good.
I am once again reminding you that the demons in Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End are white people
“Villains are too complex these days! Damn wokes!”
You’re a Disney adult. Go back to watching Disney movies and other Amerislop. The MCU is more your speed. Better yet, don’t. You’ll see the obviously evil villains and then start emulating them because “villains are cooler”.
Even Disney slop can be too complicated for these dorks - remember the backlash about Star Wars sequel Luke?
Far be it from me agreeing with a Twitter fash poster, but i do miss villains who might have had a good point, but who also were really enjoying being villains. There’s fun in watching a joyful villain, and it’s even more fun to watch them fall, too.
Same. Especially since “complicated” villains is usually just an excuse to do the swerve.
And even when it’s not the swerve, it’s something like making some incoherent and aimlessly aggrieved victim who’s just lashing out because of how they’d been victimized. Like not even doing some cycle of abuse commentary thing, just a character aimlessly out for revenge and it’s bad because victims shouldn’t stand up for themselves or seek any sort of redress because that’s a villain thing, they should just be special good boys and redeem enough good boy points for a bandaid for their arterial wounds instead.
When real villains are the ones with power, who want more power or who want to cling to what power they have or who are just abusive predatory scumbags. They’re not victims getting back at society, they’re bullies trying to assert dominance or get their kicks by hurting others.
I’m sure there are plenty Maltusian MCU fans that fuck with Thanos.
I mean, I don’t like Thanos methods. I would have to assume it works. He doubbled housing stock halved greenhouse gasses emotions. Probbaly killed a few billionairs. He did a retroactive one child policy. He could have just made it a one child policy going forward and it would have been fine.
He could have just doubled the available resources for everyone, instead of killing half of all the people
He is a liberal. As the rules of liberalism dictate things cannot be improved. So as a liberal subject he could not have.
The irony is that the MCU tried to make Thanos more sympathetic and “accomplished” that by rewriting him to be an eco-fascist.
Then 180 him immediately to “everyone must die, I’m evil”
The fucked up thing is that it’s not even a 180, he’s committing super-genocide but for “sympathetic” (ecofascist) reasons.
I meant 180 into back to his usual shtick of being Marvel Darkseid
The demons are a metaphor for aristocrats and the capitalist class, a brutal force of Victorian looking motherfuckers with German names hell bent on colonizing human land and one uping each on a arbitrary scoreboard (mana/capital) for the sake of status
Hallucinating some nod toward a white supremacist narrative because some illiterate chuds said so, has always been a favorite hobby horse for bored leftists who always follow the chuds lead and take a reactive/contrarian stance to popular media
In Frieren, a crying demon child is discovered, and they are about to kill it but someone objects, because it’s just a child. Some time later, the child kills her human foster family, seemingly just for her own amusement, and after checking if there are any objections this time, the child is killed. This story is relayed to someone to explain that demons are always evil and only speak in order to lie and must all be killed.
The point of those scenes is that appearance can be deceptive
Almost like that’s a common through line in anti-colonial narratives where despite the seeming innocence of individual colonists, the end result is still genocide or enslavement
Almost like that’s a common through line in anti-colonial narratives
This is a really smarmy response for a scene that beats you over the head with “kill children if they’re from the Bad Group.” Saying every individual, even someone who to the best of your knowledge seems to be an innocent child, must be killed is not some nuanced anti-colonial narrative, and honestly an insult to anti-colonial theory and writing (and as an aside, do what you need to to fight colonialism, but you probably don’t need to kill every last white child in the colony). What you’re describing in real life is a systemic problem that extends beyond the intentions of the “seemingly innocent” colonists, what Frieren is describing is very clearly that every single member of Bad Species needs to die because all of them are evil and just waiting to kill you no matter what you do.
Though I don’t think it’s what the author had in mind despite their very apparent thing for old-timey German aesthetics, it’s literally something that Nazis said about Jews (and Zionists also said a version of this about Jews, incidentally, that even a Jewish baby raised by gentiles will, on account of their different blood, have a different nature that cannot be reconciled with that of the gentiles).
I don’t know what you want me to conclude from from “appearance can be deceptive,” but the function in the narrative is that a demon being innocent or repentant is always a lie, no matter what, so we must follow an unfalsifiable orthodoxy that any such expression is always a lie, no matter what. They aren’t subtle in repeatedly saying “demons only learned to speak so that they can lie” (which incidentally seems to not even be true, since they speak honestly to each other and occassionally even speak honestly to others, like the Child That Had to Die explaining to Frieren that she didn’t really know the significance of crying “mother” and just said it because she saw how humans responded to it).
I do need to wonder if I’m giving the author too much credit with assuming it’s not meant to be fash, since when I think of major anime that really heavily emphasize being Deutscheaboos, the next two examples I think of are Attack on Titan and Bleach: TYBW, both of which were clearly writing with awareness of western racial ideology and some level of justification for it (though Bleach at least says you can be a good Quincy, something Frieren strenuously refuses about demons).
“kill children if they’re from the Bad Group.”
The point is, though, it’s not a child. It’s not a “bad group.” It doesn’t have emotions. It is a predator which exploits your empathy in order to kill you. You don’t think twice when the group kills bloodthirsty wolf monsters or slimes or giant carnivorous plants, but when the monster can talk and pretend to have emotions now it’s a problem. That’s exactly what it’s betting on.
It’s not a “bad group.”
A species is a group.
It doesn’t have emotions.
They display emotions repeatedly to each other in private, in their internal monologues, and when there is clearly no further gambit because they are about to die and what they are saying clearly won’t save them.
Anyway, beyond those statements being false, this is again a “curtains are blue” argument because you are saying that “they are a race of creature that shares countless behavioral traits with humans but has an unfalsifiable malevolence underneath that can never be removed and that means it’s good to kill them” and that is also what I am saying and that a story element like that is bad because of the significance of such a portrayal of a race of creature. It’s just a way of producing a genocide fantasy where you get to be the good guy for exterminating all of the bad people, even the powerless ones who beg for mercy.
Part of the issue is that it makes a lot more sense with slimes or plants, organisms that clearly substantially lack mental faculties that humans have that mean there is apparently a hard mechanistic limit on how they could potentially be “rehabilitated.” Even wolves are intelligent enough that even if you still need to take safety precautions, you can kind of work with them (hence us having dogs now). Intelligent organisms have, as a basic element of how they operate, an extreme capacity for behavioral variance depending on individual differences and personal history. Even the demons could be said to demonstrate this in the way they have varied approaches to accomplishing what is ultimately basically the same goal, but nonetheless it is contrary to the idea of something having intelligence and the ability to learn that it cannot be rehabilitated, even in the absence of having empathy and/or in the presence of emotional reactions that interfere with rehabilitation (as can be seen in real people with, for example, ASPD, who are rehabilitated from what are sometimes very bad states).
“They are a race of creature that shares countless behavioral traits with humans but has an unfalsifiable malevolence underneath that can never be removed and that means it’s good to kill them” is just not a good thing to write and it doesn’t even really make sense, it’s just a fig leaf for fantasies about “moral” pogromism.
They display emotions repeatedly to each other in private, in their internal monologues, and when there is clearly no further gambit because they are about to die and what they are saying clearly won’t save them.
Because that’s what they do, they mimic emotions. They don’t turn it off when in private because they aren’t scheming people, they are monsters that mindlessly mimic human behaviors. They act like people when they’re in private and when surrounded by others of their kind because all they know how to do is act like people. The same way a mimic acts like a treasure chest when there are no people around. It’s not a person who decided to act like a treasure chest, it evolved to act like a treasure chest because that’s what allowed it to eat people.
Part of the issue is that it makes a lot more sense with slimes or plants, organisms that clearly substantially lack mental faculties that humans have that mean there is apparently a hard mechanistic limit on how they could potentially be “rehabilitated.”
But you can’t believe that it would be possible for a creature to exist which similarly lacks those mental faculties but appears to have them?
This is all addressed in the story. There are monsters everywhere on the spectrum from something like a slime that doesn’t appear to have any complex thought to a demon that could convince you it has just as complex an inner world as a human. There are monsters out there which aren’t convincingly human but have mastered speech to lure people into their clutches. There are more primitive forms of those who can make noises that kind of sound like speech, or form only a few words. Demons are just the most evolved form of an ecological niche whereby human empathy is exploited to hunt them. They are literally no more internally complex than slimes, they’re just good at convincing you otherwise.
Because that’s what they do, they mimic emotions. They don’t turn it off when in private because they aren’t scheming people, they are monsters that mindlessly mimic human behaviors. They act like people when they’re in private and when surrounded by others of their kind because all they know how to do is act like people. The same way a mimic acts like a treasure chest when there are no people around. It’s not a person who decided to act like a treasure chest, it evolved to act like a treasure chest because that’s what allowed it to eat people.
There is no reason for a demon to think to himself “I despise geniuses”, because there is no circumstance where it should be able to fool anyone, and before you say “telelpathy,” if you’re already doing telepathy on them, you would probably be able to see the lack of emotion, as evidenced by the Macht backstory where the magic item didn’t detect any malice from him. Speaking of Macht, he clearly displays emotions, albeit evidently not malice or guilt, because his, uh, termination of contract is clearly highly oriented by affect and not some plan. He clearly has a meaningful inner world, or he would have pursued a solution that didn’t put a huge target on his back and ultimately trap him in the city.
And again, the demons are extremely intelligent creatures, around the same level as humans, and exhibit vastly different behaviors, this isn’t merely an insect being strung around by a series of reflexes. They literally are capable of reflection and make choices based on desires that are counter to what they know is their better survival strategy.
But you can’t believe that it would be possible for a creature to exist which similarly lacks those mental faculties but appears to have them?
I think that you need to establish a motive, since these are intelligent beings who are shown to deceive with intention, lying according to a prepared story, even if they have some natural proclivity to just sort of ingratiate themselves unconsciously anyway (Macht’s backstory), because they display emotions in circumstances where it’s just a waste of energy to perform or where there are clearly much greater concerns for their ruse than how they feel (like the specific nature of their conspiracies).
The only conclusion that you can draw here is that it’s just word of god because the story does not support this interpretation aside from when it says “we used magic to look into your brain and here’s what it said”. P-Zombie predators are a garbage concept, is what I’m saying, because if you are keeping up a ruse even when it’s actually counter to your survival and you know it, it’s a shitty survival strategy, and inconsistent with the fact that they do also sometimes drop the ruse when they find it expedient. But there’s no line to demarcate between making one choice or the other, so it’s just whenever the author says so and we’re instructed to just pretend it makes sense because the magic bracelet (i.e. the author again) also said so.
Edit: Also I just hate p-zombies anyway for basically the same reasons, because they are question-begging not having internality when clearly there is a causal basis for being totally consistent with being human. This is most egregious of all with a line like:
They are literally no more internally complex than slimes, they’re just good at convincing you otherwise.
Because there is nothing you can tell me to say a p-zombie or a demon is incapable of complex thought based on an array of memories, inferences, and other factors, because whatever process takes the input and turns it into the output that is observationally identical to thought must itself also be a type of thought, even if it’s using punch cards rather than circuits or circuits rather than neurons or “magic” rather than any of it. It is still processing information with just the same level of complexity and diversity as a human (perhaps one with an on-and-off emotional disorder in the case of demons), and indeed exactly the same type of information (same caveat for demons again) and exactly the same output. It’s like solving a math equation with the same answer in two different ways (neither of which is random) but saying that only one is actually “doing math.”
This is loosely the basis of the Turing Test, and obviously we’ve developed since then, but it’s still just the same “ghost in the machine” mistake as Turing was addressing then.
How do you differentiate a demon faking emotions from a demon experiencing emotions?
I think faking them to sufficient complexity is actually feeling them. I am pretty sure that is how brains work.
The McGuffin of pseudo sentient creatures that can fake sentience is bad writing. No one but a terrible rascist type thinks such a thing is possible enough to think of it as a worthy artistic space to explore.
The point is, though, it’s not a child. It’s not a “bad group.” It doesn’t have emotions. It is a predator which exploits your empathy in order to kill you.
That may be true within the context of the fiction, but that fiction itself exists in a context in which fascists did and do give this exact justification for killing the children of minority groups. That real world is where the people engaging with the story exist and so that context is going to color their reading of the story.
My point that you missed entirely is that the scene is not simply “kill every member of bad group” because ironically that take is some real “Curtains are blue” type shit
First the claim is that the subtext is racist, and then when I point out the subtext is saying something different; as in Demons engage in Genocide, False Appreance, False Overtures of Peace, The Importance of Status, Arrogant Sense of Destiny…any of this ringing a bell in a colonial sense?
Are the Demons European and aristocratic coded on accident? Is their social obsession with status and conquest just irrelevant because it’s inconvenient to your claim the author is antisemitic and is making an allusion to Jews?
Apparently what matters is we take a scene in isolation, ignore the subtext and the context and then claim the series is saying the opposite of what it’s subtexually alluding to, because some chuds like it, like be for real
Saying every individual, even someone who to the best of your knowledge seems to be an innocent child, must be killed is not some nuanced anti-colonial narrative, and honestly an insult to anti-colonial theory and writing
Except that is the nuance when you don’t ignore the rest of the serie’s subtext and the context of the scene itself
The child is a stand in for the initial innocence and peaceful oveetures that arrive during the beginning of a colonial process, you may not like the presentation, but that is the subtext expanded on later in the series
Colonialists don’t just jump immediately to genocide, far from my take being an “insult” to anti-colonial theory, I’m pointing out the subtext is illuminating a uncomfortable but well known element that many Japanese people (despite their own colonial history) understand culturally through the history of the west “opening up Japan” and is something even most westerners can understand through the narratives surrounding Thanksgiving; sitting together at a table enjoying a meal, next thing you know your village is burning and demons rule over the land, hmmm almost like that’s the scene verbatim, except I acknowledge the subtext
Having gripes about the mechanism of delivering that subtext (a kid eating it) is fine, but the scene is not saying “kill kids of group you hate” it would if the scene was a short story totally in isolation from the rest of Frierens narrative concerning the nature of Demons
But it’s not, so you and the chuds don’t have a leg to stand on, despite your gripes about how the narrative is presented
My point that you missed entirely is that the scene is not simply “kill every member of bad group” because ironically that take is some real “Curtains are blue” type shit
No. Frieren is explicitly a “kill demons on sight” enjoyer and is clearly explaining why demons need to be killed on sight whenever possible.
Are the Demons European and aristocratic coded on accident?
Everything is European-coded, the entire setting is deutscheaboo as fuck and wears that on its sleeve! It’s not like this is a Japanese setting and then in pop these Germans, everyone is German!
Is their social obsession with status and conquest just irrelevant because it’s inconvenient to your claim the author is antisemitic and is making an allusion to Jews?
My central claim is not that it’s antisemitic and I am explicit that I’m mainly using antisemitism as an example, though I note at the end that it’s possible that it’s antisemitic given there’s some antisemitism in other big deutscheaboo series.
That said, are you not familiar with what the Nazis said about Jews? Because the demons being obsessed with status and especially conquest is not actually a counter-argument. It’s a huge part of their narrative that Jews want to control the world and thereby are inclined to use whatever political and financial means they can get their hands on to accomplish that goal. I’m not interested in trying to argue that the demons definitely are Jews, but this attempt at a slick own is a failure.
I consider this a complete aside, but it’s also mentioned that status among demons is decided almost entirely by the magical power one personally possesses rather than any other factor, and this is contrasted with the way that humans need to signal status with things like clothes. I think it is therefore an inevitable conclusion that the one coterie of demons dressing as aristocrats are doing that to impress the humans, since we certainly see other demons (including Qual, who was an extremely accomplished mage in the Demon Lord’s army) not dressed that way at all. I don’t think this is very important, but I thought you might find it interesting to consider.
as in Demons engage in Genocide, False Appreance, False Overtures of Peace, The Importance of Status, Arrogant Sense of Destiny…any of this ringing a bell in a colonial sense?
Also things said about Jews by Nazis, though again I’m not arguing that that’s specifically what the author is going for. Part of the issue is that the rhetoric of fascism itself often heavily involves a sort of false anti-colonialism, both with the idea of resisting the colonization of one’s own land by foreign capitalists and pretending to be a liberator of other colonized nations (see Imperial Japan in Southeast Asia).
Another helpful reference point is accusation-in-mirror, the argument that “X group is trying to genocide us, so we must genocide them.” Even if X group as a political force are genocidal, that does not mean the correct answer is to commit genocide against X group, and the series sure would have a much easier time claiming to be anti-genocide if it actually analyzed demons as a political force rather than a racial group.
Apparently what matters is we take a scene in isolation, ignore the subtext and the context and then claim the series is saying the opposite of what it’s subtexually alluding to, because some chuds like it, like be for real
I don’t care what chuds think and never referenced anything they’ve said about it, so you’re just putting this on me without evidence. I’ve watched the whole anime that’s out so far multiple times and read most of the manga (I didn’t bother to keep up with it actively) and these are my opinions from the actual content of the show. The child example is the most egregious, but the mini-arc that it’s being used in does not contradict what I’m saying. The broad strokes of the arc (not the child sequence, but the rest of it) do not contradict what you’re saying either, but there are details that clearly do, like the repetition of the claim “Demons only learned to speak in order to lie.” They are clearly stated over and over to be ontologically sub-human and evil, which is why you have people elsewhere in this thread saying they’re actually like zombies or sharks or something.
The child is a stand in for the initial innocence and peaceful oveetures that arrive during the beginning of a colonial process
The child is also a child, and Frieren’s explicit ideology that she and the demons beat you over the head with is “demons learned to speak to lie, they are only interested in killing people”.
but that is the subtext expanded on later in the series
I await your explanation.
hmmm almost like
I know that I’m annoying, but I’ve been trying to rein it in in terms of completely useless affectations of smarmy gloating. I would appreciate if you did too (and feel free to point out where I have failed, of course).
Having gripes about the mechanism of delivering that subtext (a kid eating it) is fine, but the scene is not saying “kill kids of group you hate” it would if the scene was a short story totally in isolation from the rest of Frierens narrative concerning the nature of Demons
But it’s not, so you and the chuds don’t have a leg to stand on, despite your gripes about how the narrative is presented
It feels like you’re so interested in your interpretation of the scene that you don’t see what’s in front of you, most of all that demons are a species. There is no need to make colonizers an ontologically evil species. It is still literally the case that if Frieren encounters a demon child, she will kill the demon child and advocates that everyone do the same, and there is no such thing as a good demon, a good member of this species, not by nature and not by nurture.
A lot of my argument can be summarized that fascists have a history of claiming to be victims of colonization and portray their enemies in what is sometimes a very similar way, which logically causes a little bit of an issue with distinguishing the validity of your account and mine (hence my mention before of ways your reading is not contradicted). Perhaps in the last dozen chapters of the manga that I haven’t read there’s a smoking gun for your interpretation that you haven’t seen fit to show me, but so far I can confidently say that the closest thing to a smoking gun is in my favor, which again is that the demons are a species rather than a political faction, and there is no segment or even member of the demons who sincerely sympathizes with people and fights the other demons. This is exacerbated by the fact that some of the demons (the members of the demon lord’s army) are in a political faction, but explicitly many are not and generally don’t have a “society” as such, but live independently and all nonetheless possess the same basic malevolence that they can never be disabused of.
Your argument is therefore forced to claim that “This fantasy race of creature isn’t actually a fantasy race, it’s a political orientation and when the protagonist looks at the camera and says ‘kill every member of this race, even crying, helpless children,’ it’s a metaphor for rejecting the diplomacy of those political factions.” As for why no demon can ever be rehabilitated? I guess the claim is “colonizers are tricky, so it’s a metaphor for how the colonizers will always trick you.”
I just think it’s the sort of attempt at interpretation that goes too far in picking out details to make an interpretive narrative while ignoring the actual events of the story. If this is supposed to be a metaphor for colonialism, it’s the most catastrophically poorly-written one that I’ve ever seen because there was literally no reason to make the colonizers racially essential. It would be so easy to make them an actual political faction and not a 2000 IQ allegory for how this child is really a personable diplomat who must die, so let’s kill the kid (especially since I don’t think the kid is even an agent of the Demon Lord, just a kid left behind by some other band of demons that was wiped out already). What does them being a species add? Because I can only see downsides if you’re hypothetically correct. There are so many things the author could do to destroy this narrative in one speech bubble, but they don’t (pending the subsequent elaboration that you alluded to but haven’t shared yet)
clearly explaining why demons need to be killed on sight whenever possible
Yeah because they’re hell bent on genocide, conquest and their mana farming obsession prevents them from seeing humans as equals, sound familiar? The Demons are the bourgeois, not minorities
Everything is European-coded, the entire setting is deutscheaboo as fuck and wears that on its sleeve! It’s not like this is a Japanese setting and then in pop these Germans, everyone is German!
German AND aristocratic, German and genocidal, German and obessed with status, German and convinced of their manifest destiny. The German-ness of the Demons isn’t their only attributes and I never claim it was and you know I never claimed that. You’re simply cherry picking my words and ignoring anything I say that contradicts your claim
My central claim is not that it’s antisemitic and I am explicit that I’m mainly using antisemitism as an example
You claim it’s not antisemitic, then you send three paragraphs outlining how it Actually is antisemitic (while butchering and ignoring the actual narrative of Frieren)???
You’re waffling and you can’t have it both ways, saying “yes this is exemplary” of antisemitsm while at the same it isn’t really antisemitic, is just an untenable and contradictory position
Either the Demons of Frieren are an allusions to Jewish people or some other marginalized group or they’re not, it’s not a claim you get to waffle on, make up your mind
Is Frieren antisemitic or not?
If its not then you wasted your time on those paragraphs and you need to substantiate what’s actaully wrong with the series without ignoring the subtext and narrative
I just think it’s the sort of attempt at interpretation that goes too far in picking out details to make an interpretive narrative while ignoring the actual events of the story.
Yeah I’m the weird one for paying attention to details, subtext and how they connect to the narrative, meanwhile my take is repeated and comprehended wholesale even by libs on the massive Frieren subreddit, while everywhere else people (chuds and pop leftists alike) who are claiming Frieren Demons = Jews, are ruthlessly made fun of
Even libs understand the Demons = The rich
It would be so easy to make them an actual political faction and not a 2000 IQ allegory for how this child is really a personable diplomat who must die, so let’s kill the kid
But that wouldn’t capture the totalizing nature of colonialism and the brutal realism that manifested as a result of those conquests though deception, again you may not like the presentation of specific scenes. But calling Frieren nazi propaganda is such a radical violation of the “Be Normal” and “Touch Grass” clause most leftists understand is important to our appeal and worst of all its not supported by the narrative or the subtext that the narrative explicitly outlines while it’s explaining the nature of Demons;
“they’re descended from monsters who cried help”
“they don’t give dignity to those with little mana”
"They’re individualists who form the barest connections necessary to fight humanity
Hello, that’s how the narrative outlines the subtext, this isn’t nazi dogwhistles, this is a fictional partially essentialized version of the capitalist class tearing its way thru a feudal world
COOL
I guess the claim is “colonizers are tricky, so it’s a metaphor for how the colonizers will always trick you.”
Yeah colonizers never engaged in tricky shit, never used deception, never broke treaties, never made false overtures of peace, never engaged in Genocide
No the only people who were accused of doing deception in world history were the Jews, so obviously anytime someone writes about a species of man-eating monsters they must be talking about Jewish people, great take
While I’d certainly humor an argument about antisemitism, I don’t think there’s that much reason to render such an accusation except for the deutscheaboo thing, which I think is not enough reason. My specific point in using it as an example is that I’m pretty familiar with it and hope that I can either use it as a common reference point or at least that you can pretty easily find what I’m talking about. My general point in using it as an example is that it functions as a counterexample to your inferences, that x set of traits precludes them being about y subject (some scorned race), so here’s an example of an ethnic group about which all of these things were said, demonstrating that your inference is inadequate, and also that your claim that it’s not about Jews is so far inadequate (which is not proof of the antithesis, just a disproof of your proof).
If you claim that P -> Q, me arguing that P does not imply Q does not say anything about whether or not Q is actually the case, just whether your inference is false. One way to disprove it would be to establish that Q is not the case even though P is, but that’s just one way and I don’t think there’s really adequate evidence for making that argument. If you want my feeling about Frieren’s demon depiction, it’s that it isn’t about any particular race/ethnicity, but is evidently informed by some underlying element of chauvinism because it’s still a pogrom fantasy even if it doesn’t correspond to any race and isn’t meant to either.
I’m sure we can agree that this conversation is a poor use of time, so we can stop here, I just wanted to explain that one point because you asked.
They aren’t people though. They are literally hyper evolved monsters. If a zombie child comes after you you don’t think twice. Same goes for the demons. They are simply apex predators. It would be like a shark that could say “hey hang out with me” so it could eat you (and yes I know sharks don’t actually kill humans frequently)
Zombie children tend to not cry and beg for mercy, and if our conclusion about sharks (ignoring what your parenthetical) is that we need to kill all of them, that’d be kind of fucked up, and that’s in our world where we don’t have magic as nearly a blank check for solving problems.
Also, again this is a “curtains are blue” sort of argument, because you could say just the same thing about the writing in Goblin Slayer (“they’re just monsters, bro”), but that doesn’t mean all that much for looking at the message compared to how they are written. Like yeah, it’s a fantastical excuse for a moral obligation to commit infanticide, that’s exactly what I’m calling it too. Goblin Slayer has SV and, while I think it makes the work itself much more despicable because of the exploitative way that it’s handled, in-universe it’s not hugely morally different from Frieren demons, it just is written in such a way where it’s evidently easier for people to recognize that it’s a fucked up thing to write.
Like, doesn’t the board talk every now and then about The Iron Dream? It’s literally just another one of those, but as a side plot for what is otherwise an incomparably better story.
Sharks don’t engage in colonialism, sharks don’t engage in Genocide just because the “Shark King” ordered them to, sharks (and the Goblins of Goblin Slayer) don’t have a sociopolitical system that conditions them to “only give dignity to those with high mana”
Again missing that crucial bit of subtext and narrative context that blows up your whole take
Tell me more about how the demons are presented as having conditioned traits rather than essential ones. As I said in the other comment, your claims about them being a political faction that is not racialized is undermined by the fact that they are a race and their most salient features in terms of their villainy are presented as essential to their race.
The first thing I learned about Frieren was this scene and my immediate reaction was “Oh, another Goblin Slayer. About what I expected, Japan is mired in fash shit just like the rest of the West.”
I dunno, I don’t like the way the demons were portrayed as intrinsically predatory and evil beings despite being sapient/sentient entities.
I’m not saying they do a good job of representing it but I think they’re meant to be mimicking the traits of sentient/sapient beings while not themselves being sentient/sapient. Like AI or the aliens in Blindsight.
deleted by creator
mimicking the traits of sentient/sapient beings while not themselves being sentient/sapient.
This is too close to the “excuse” for white suprememcy for the vast majority of who would even ask that question not reproduce its answers. Think of the concept of capitalist realism.
People even on hexbear refusing to read beyond one layer of textual interpretation, very common
Removed by mod
Sorry that you can’t deal with critique beyond the surface level - or the idea that chauvinism and colonialist ideas can be woven through a piece of fiction without the author even acknowledging it. Not really my problem though
No your problems clearly lie elsewhere.
deleted by creator
But they clearly have emotions, even if they’re negative expressions of them - they have inquisitive minds if only in selfish ways. It’s not really consistent with mindless automata. Frieren really wants to stick with “they’re not people tho” but…they are lol. They’re all portrayed as evil but they’re clearly sentient beings - and I just find ontologically evil yet sentient thinking beings really weird unless you go to a lot of effort to justify it
Isn’t there an entire storyline that illustrates those are mimicked emotions solely for the purposes of baiting humans into believing they are sapient beings ?
They’re supposed to be like the perfect predator for humanity, a predator that a significant amount of humanity will hesitate to kill because they would prefer not to.
But even when they’re not baiting humans they exhibit emotion & inner thought, it’s not consistent with the given explanation. Which could be cool! Maybe they are all predators but in-universe, it is justified by saying “they don’t think, they’re not people” and it isn’t 100% interrogated. They could still be adversaries - I just think the “they’re not real people” is a weird…idk charged? thing to throw at the demons when you can easily say they’re otherwordly predators that exist to hunt humans, but ones that clearly do think and feel to at least some extent
I don’t see how something having inner thought is an issue. The thought is not the problem, the complete and total inability for it to empathise or care for humans is the issue.
The closest analog is psychopathy, but even then I don’t think it fits wholly because the demons in Frieren are not just self serving psychopaths but actively prey on humanity, whereas a self serving psychopath is not necessarily driven to harm others but will do so while self-serving.
I also think its the artist’s intention to have us argue about this and create ambiguity. This causes the entire audience to argue over the topic just as the people who would ultimately be harmed in the setting.
That’s a different argument though - they can be described as psychopathic and lacking empathy, sure, but there are humans who lack empathy, and they’re still people. The demons clearly have logical thought processes but have very different goals & priorities that are orthogonal to humans’. It all seems very “handwavy” and inconsistent to me, and if that’s the creator’s 5d chess maneuvers to create a discussion then I suppose I’m not on their level lol.
I’m just weary and wary of this “fantasy race you can just kill without feeling bad about” trope
This reminded me of the parasites in the anime parasite, they are predators and sociopathic, but still clearly people, and the ones who were raised by humans are cool.
Goldfish have emotions. Ants have intelligence. Cats are curious. ChatGPT can fool tons of people into thinking it’s sentient, sapient, intelligent, and emotional when it’s none of those things. How are you defining sentience here, which combination of traits in which proportion?
I think it’s fair to say the author goes out of their way to specify that they aren’t sentient so it’s not unreasonable to take them at their word. I’m not going to argue with the creator of a fictional thing about its nature. I think there’s merit to saying it’s poorly justified and represented, but I think the intent is clear.
I’m gonna argue with the author however much I want lol. I’m interrogating what the author says versus what they show - if you don’t want to engage with the text in this fashion then that’s your choice, but I think it’s valid to critique.
I’m saying it very much resembles the justification for horrid atrocities committed against various groups throughout history, and I’m not a big fan of the author saying “nah just because they show all the traits of sentient beings, internal monologues, questioning their own existence, ennui, jealousy, etc, they can’t actually feel anything and aren’t people”. What is your definition of a person, I have to ask?
Never get between online leftists and their treats. Scratch a lib and a fascist bleeds; scratch a online leftist’s favorite media and a lib bleeds.
This fictional concept of a “ontological evil” species is obviously not supported by any real-world “ontological” basis. The application of “evil” as an exonym to appellate against external cultures or races has had monstrous historical and present-day consequences. The unfalsifiable idea that a certain race or culture is merely pretending to be civilized and sentient “while in reality, as we all know wink wink they are actually evil and un-persons” has such an abundance of parallels to historical racial discourse, genocide and prejudice that it’s comical and unsettling in equal measure that people would use it as apologia for their fictional media.
I said this years ago in a discussion about Tolkien (a racist POS) and his characterization of the orcs:
It’s very interesting that fantasy, starting with Tolkien in the mid 20th century, rather than casting off the racist tradition of racial caricaturization (that authors could no longer get away with applying to real world peoples, as an outdated and monstrous way of perceiving “other” peoples), simply continued it within the confines of “fictionalized” races (which conveniently have a massive spoonful of real world racial coding embedded, as Tolkien admitted).
It fucking seems like it! You’re allowed to like your elf show goddamn, I’m trying to explain why people have issue with it! I love some slop that has easy to recognize problematic shit, I’m just tired of this particular trope - whether or not the author of Frieren is all in on xenophobic othering or not is immaterial to me. Or at least, it is secondary.
The demons just being an entire species that’s just intrinsically Fascist is a bit weird, instead of it being the result of ideology or something men choose to become out of self-interest, but conflating “this group of powerful and heavily armed imperial colonialists is intrinsically wrapped up in a hyper-elitist, racial supremacist warrior cult ethos that says that might makes right and who gleefully prey upon those weaker than themselves” with real world imperial settler colonialist narratives about how subjugated peoples were actually inherently inferior and immoral and needed to be chastised and controlled is a stretch.
If anything the demons are “what if American/Anglo soldiers and leaders were some kind of magical fey creature who could just sprout guns and bombs from their bodies at will and that they just did colonialism because they suck?” which is still weird and fails to really engage with why imperialists are like that, but lines up way more with jokes about Anglos being ontologically evil than with any historic racist logic; it is the oppressed looking at their violent oppressor and declaring that they are evil for what they are doing, only failing in that this is made to be some intrinsic trait rather than the result of a cruel and supremacist ideology and material self-interest.
Is it really? I don’t think so.
This seems like “what if ‘Birth of a Nation’ could be narratively reclaimed somehow as a film celebrating black liberation and condemning white supremacy” territory of discourse. I’m not interested in it because it’s plainly not how the majority of people would reasonably see it and that’s the only thing that matters in a consequentialist media analysis. The author’s intention, whether they somehow actually intended this to be a 500 IQ veiled critique against the bourgeoisie, are irrelevant. Most people see the “demons” in the same uncritical and unambiguous light as they see every DnD “ontologically evil,” which DnD itself lifted from Tolkien.
This confusion seems to appear because people hardly ever actually take a look at the rhetorical structure of that kind of racial and intercultural discourse. There’s two levels. There’s the level at ontology, which is that “this external group is weak and inferior and deserves to be taken advantage of by us.” Then there’s the level at epistemology, which that “this external group is a bunch of bloodthirsty savages because they only know violence and are the actual aggressors.” This is actually the definition of fascism as laid out by Umberto Eco, which is that “the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” In real terms, they are weak (which justifies attacking them on a material basis), but in cognitive terms, they are strong (which justifies attacking them on a ideological basis, as it would be an act of bravery and heroism).
Take a look at the American Declaration of Independence. It doesn’t say “the ‘Indians’ are weak and therefore their inferiority justifies our conquest of their lands,” it frames the case against them in the exact precise terms you’ve laid out, where all the characteristics and qualities of the aggressor are projected upon their victim: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
They are fictional creatures in a magical world. The author has a whole arc about this and how they’re not sentient. Are you going to start arguing that Frieren isn’t an elf? That dragons aren’t actually real? I’m not making any claims about potential allegory or parallels to the real world. I was simply saying that the author made it pretty clear that they intend those fictional made up creatures to be non-sentient. Feel as gross or put-off about it as you like, I genuinely could not care any less.
“The curtains are blue” ass mf
“The elf anime that makes the villians non sentient so you dont have to feel bad about the protagonist lighting them up with her super strong magics is actually colonalist and white supremacist” ass mf
Where’s UlyssesT when you need him?
I’m not going to argue with the creator of a fictional thing about its nature.
I never thought I’d hear thousand year old vampire wifu excuses trotted out for something like this but I guess thats the most easy form of
for something like this. 
I’m not going to argue with the creator of a fictional thing about its nature.
Why not? They made the thing from thin air, it’s their fault if it’s lame.
Americans and not applying their internalized protestant worldview onto other cultures challenge: impossible.
This is specifically in context to applying Christian guilt-projection-scapegoat mythological monster that is known as the “demon” onto the Korean yo-gwae (more familiarly known to westerners by the Chinese word Yao-guai or the Japanese wore Yokai)
idk, I’ve seen a lot of media that doesn’t take the stance that Yokai need to be eradicated, and the movie itself kind of seems to be moving in the direction of empathizing with the Yo-gwae and that the whole “zeal to eradicate these hideous monsters” thing is a bit troublesome (is that not the point of Rumi discarding “Takedown”?), but then swerves back when this apparently only applies to exactly one of them, while the entire remainder of the Yo-gwae horde needs to be purged with violence. And it doesn’t apply to Rumi herself of course, but she’s mixed and the cosmological meaning of that isn’t clear to me.
Like, if it’s all just on Gwi-Ma and a lot of his minions are really victims, then having the hunters burn through a living wave of them like a transition effect while making Buffy quips and never really presenting the audience with the significance of that is a creative choice that I have trouble understanding.
breaking out of this loop is literally what one of the touhou official manga is about
Which one? I haven’t kept up for… a decade or so now.
forbidden scrollery. the human village’s kosuzu mootori who runs a book rental and can read youkai books slowly becomes more interested in youkai over time.
I really don’t get the confusion. The Frieren demons are as close to ontological evil as you can get while still having some of them be characters.
Of course you can always go a step more post-modernist and threat all characterizations of evil as war propaganda internal to the fiction. But I don’t really get the vibe.
I really don’t get the confusion. The Frieren demons are as close to ontological evil as you can get while still having some of them be characters.
You just noted that being “ontologically evil” is contradictory to being a person and you are still confused? Why are you shocked that racists are running away with a setting were genocide and racism is “justified”?
Yes it is a justified-speciecide story in its text. Explicitly. As in the author is aware that the question would come up and answered it.
The Frieren demons are as close to ontological evil as you can get while still having some of them be characters.
You understand that that’s also a pretty good description of the way colonial powers depicted indigenous people, right? Like it’s the real world way that people were convinced to commit atrocities against actual minority groups.
As I’ve said, it’s possible to read this as war propaganda internal to the story. I don’t think that’s the authorial intent at least with where the story has gone so far.
Of course critiques can go beyond authorial intent.
I will say if the story remains the same and the demons are forever tolkienesque static “Orcs Are Evil” creatures, it will be very uninteresting and boring.
However, some people believe there is potential for the narrative to challenge the “unintelligent evil creature” device, as has been kind of done with some demon characters not yet introduced in the anime. Which would be interesting, since most people seem to either take the “ontological evil race” at face value, or see it as bad writing.
Some people also theorize that the demons being ontologically evil was a choice eventually regretted by the author because of how limiting it can be as a story device. But the author’s intentions remain to be seen, as the story is still releasing.
However, I do wonder if the damage has already been done and the way it will be written (if this nuance theory turns out to be true) will ultimately be unsatisfying.
It is kind of weird that other, much lower quality series manage it better. Like the openly slop isekai A Wild Last Boss Appeared! whose author has openly said something to the effect of “yeah it’s dumb and full of plot holes because I forget lots of stuff while writing it, but let’s just imagine it’s the result of an unreliable narrator so it seems smart lol” handles its ontologically evil devils better, both making them literally magic constructs driven by what is functionally an AI program, like if a fireball spell was given the intelligence to organize an arson plot to better accomplish its purpose, and even they have existential crises and try to find a way to break away from their doomed purpose as attack spells when they realize this.
Even SAO managed it better in the second half of Alicization, with the “ontologically evil” races of its artificial world trying to reject the role the simulations shitbag creators foisted upon them and pursue a peace settlement to end the eternal war they’ve been forced to take part in, before the actually ontologically evil characters (American PMCs) show up, murder the leaders pursuing peace, and force the rank and file into a doomed war for nothing. And just in case anyone’s thinking “wait, that’s from SAO? That actually sounds like a pretty good story which is not what I expect to hear about SAO” well, yeah Alicization was actually sort of good in terms of story and themes, it’s just, well, it’s still SAO and still full of weird gross bullshit, more so than any earlier season in fact. It’s the most “ok, the author admittedly does have some good ideas and has gotten experienced enough to execute them decently, but he still just cannot be normal and avoid filling the story with the other kind of SA” SAO has ever been.
‘Bad race’ narrative reinforces other ‘bad race’ narratives?
Oh no, chuds twisted a non-real scenario to justify their real bigotries? I’m hearing this for the first time.
Chud interpretations of media are noise, they do not contain value. If there were no caricatures, they would simply invent them. Doing anything with their reactions in mind is a waste of time.
Deleted screed about how demons are sapient, as valid in their sapience as humans are in theirs, a mildly interesting experiment in removing the incompatibility that predatory animals have from the notion of “good and evil”, and do not exist. Blindsight does it better, but Frieren isn’t focused on confrontation with the abyssal equal!My hot take of the day: The absolute conviction some people display in their attempts to prove that a manga and/or anime is fascist/racist/whatever will at times veer off into betraying its own form of racism.
“I need this manga/anime to be fascist in order to justify my belief that all Japanese people are genetically predisposed to fascism dammit! Debate me!”
Have at it, folks
Of course Japan is predisposed to fascism, it’s a US colony.
Everyone cares if the demons are ontologically evil or not, but nobody even asks if the dragon Starrk killed was ontologically evil or not 😔
I mean, the dragon Stark killed tried to burn down a town full of people. Even if it’s a complex individual capable of moral decisions, there’s still a fairly justifiable reason to kill it.
In an upsetting plot twist, that was the dragon equivalent of John Brown
I will never understand people having strong opinions about slop that they won’t even care about in 10 years. Slop is ultimately disposable content to consume. I’m not above consuming slop, but I’m not going to pretend it’s anything more than the equivalent of shoving potato chips into my mouth. Just because I shove my face with potato chips doesn’t mean I’m going to care about my shoving-potato-chips experience a decade from now, and if I won’t care about it a decade later, it puts a damper towards caring it now.
oh man el dorado is the weakest frieren arc and im really glad it didn’t get adapted in the first run. it kinda pissed me off, and led to me keeping frieren reading on a 10 ft pole despite how amazing its opening few volumes was.
Can you give a tldr of what happens in it?
i do not remember the exact specifics, please forgive me if i get anything wrong i read this a year ago.
there exists a town called el dorado which has been turned into gold by a demon named macht. a barrier exists to keep him inside the town, because he was presumably the one who turned the town gold.
macht had integrated himself into the town as a right hand man to the king(?), and eventually used his power to turn the town into gold to test if he would feel something at its passing(?).
frieren shows up. something about the barrier destabilizing due to a nameless demon, frieren spends a few months in the area with her crew and denken to analyze the “curse diagolze” which turns things to gold in order to restore the town. macht breaks free, attempts to kill the crew with the help of the previously unnamed demon solitär, who are both incredibly curious and interested in humans. frieren does her usual schtick of kill all demons and fights solitär while denken fights his former master, macht. eventually frieren is diagolze’d, but finished analyzing the spell after being turned to gold and undoes it. this breaks macht, who is then killed in a sneak attack from denken and spends his last moments sharing a smoke with the guy he was allegedly loyal to.
I love my autistic extremely racist grandma
