For the first time ever the hype didn't disappoint. Honestly a breath of fresh air for anime, my only complaint is I wish it was longer.
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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My complaint is I wish they spent less time fighting monsters and more chilling in random villages to learn a spell that bakes bread.
Yeah the demons are the least fun part of the story, aren't they? Typical dark anime psychopath creatures.
my problem with demons is their lore. It's the only thing that makes me uncomfortable in Frieren. They are intelligent beings but unlike other races like humans, dwarfes and elves, they are born evil. And in this anime, if you doubt that all demons are monsters that should be purged, you will be punished by rules of this world. I don't like it. This is imaginary world, you can set it up how you want but for some reason the creators of manga/anime decided to create a world where some beings are just simply evil by nature and must be eliminated. I would like if in Frieren world, demons would be something that people become, like by solding their soul to dark forces or something. In that case i wouldn't be having a problem with them. Also, to be fair, this problem isn't unique to Frieren, a lot of fantasy stories has the same problem. But i was hoping that there wouldn't be such thing in Frieren :(
Yeah, I have the same problem with the demons. I'd rather they just make them straight up ontologically evil by being evil spirit's literally summoned from hell or something, rather than a race that "evolved" to prey on humans. At least the Demon King being Literally Satan would neatly sidestep all this skin-crawling Evo-Psych stuff
I'm not entirely against the concept of a race born evil (it's certainly not a new concept, and born evil races are what most people are accustomed to), but for myself I'm concerned with their depiction as being beyond the ability to reason with and that they use their speech just to trick and kill you, which sounds familiar to racist views of minorities.
It makes no sense to consider anyone as born with any morality (let alone set with one), since morality isn't really part of the world as such. But the demons inexplicably have basically an ideology to kill humans stuck in their brain that can't be changed and that's reactionary as fuck to write, nothing good comes of it. They had a softball among softballs with the infant demon to demonstrate that it's like a cultural divide that devolved into racism, but nope, demon orphan killed the humans who raised her. The only way that it could possibly be redeemed is if later on this was shown to be some kind of elaborate trick by a party invested in keeping the conflict going.
I can guarantee you weren't paying attention during this. The demon didn't do this out of some malice stemming from her demonhood, she literally did this in an attempt to make amends to the other villager. She killed the child of one of the villagers before she was adopted so she got another child as an offering.
Demons aren't malicious or evil in this setting, their thinking patterns are just fundamentally alien and that leads to conflict. Demons and humans cannot understand each other, that is the conflict in this setting. Demons aren't born with some sort of natural hatred of mankind.
This is like saying the fucking Cthuhlhu is problematic it's a sentient lifeform too.
The demon had some weird justification, but ultimately there is at least as much evidence to say it was just fucking with people (or simply hadn't figured out humans enough yet to devise a better excuse), and even if it was genuine ignorance, that still would not answer why the demon kid had to be killed rather than merely driven out.
Remember that the demons themselves say that they only learned to speak in order to lie, they delight in human suffering, exhibit stereotypical arrogance, feel fear of dying and joy at their tricks working. Most importantly: Humans and demons very obviously can understand each other because demons are excellent at manipulating humans! At the very least, they can understand humans, which undermines your thesis about the kid (though it is plausible that the kid is too young for this to apply) and further cements the demons being just that evil. Everything about all of the interactions we see with the more adult demons suggests that they know exactly what they are doing, morally speaking, from the perspective of humans.
btw, I do not recommend citing HP Lovecraft for "obviously unproblematic" counterexamples, his whole thing was comparing inhuman abominations to minorities. The Deep Ones are literally an allegory for his discovering having Welsh heritage.
A creature who murders entire families because it doesn't understand human society is still dangerous even if driven out. Letting it go live in the woods to hunt humans isn't the solution you think it is. If a bear was known to seek out and hunt humans, it should be put down.
You take what they say at face value when it benefits your point but when it comes to the child explaining their reasoning you dismiss it. You're cherry picking here.
There is literally an entire arc that revolves around demons and humans not being able to understand each other. The anime hasn't reached it yet but the entire impetus is a demon not understanding human emotions and trying to do so. Their understanding of human behavior is "If I claim to have a son who I love, they are more likely to spare me." It is a cold-calculated decision, they do not understand why humans are this way. You are objectively wrong on this.
Ah shit I forgot that since Lovecraft influenced cosmic horror I'm not allowed to use any example from Cosmic horror to prove a point. If Cthulhu is problematic because Lovecraft was, then the Sousou No Frieren is not problematic because the author hasn't been. But using the author as the only metric for determining a media's message is reductive to high hell.
I'm beginning to think you just buy into the logic of punitive bullshit. The kid seemed to not have any magic or anything like that, why not put it in prison? It wouldn't have the ability to hurt people and again is a fucking child, and perhaps then you could educate it. There are real humans with psychopathy who could conceivably make such a mistake, and we shouldn't euthanize them either.
I'm weighing something a child demon said versus what an adult demon with some authority as well as what Frieren, with her wealth of experience dealing with demons, said. It's said often enough that it's like a fucking slogan. I'm not cherrypicking, I'm considering what interpretation produces the most consistent answer, and that demons are extremely deceitful is basically the most established fact other than that they prey on humans. Maybe that shit is 4D chess by the author and there's a revelation that this is all just bigotry and cultural differences or something, but the material as-presented in the anime so far is highly fash.
I wonder how this is reconciled with the elaborate deceptions already pulled off, where demons managed to nearly control a town despite the people therein bearing enough suspicion of the demons that they planned to ambush and kill them initially. I can't really comment on what I haven't seen, though.
Blatant sophistry ignoring what I already said. Lovecraft had an ideological ax to grind (see the Deep Ones being Welsh) and your example wasn't "any example from Cosmic Horror" it was Lovecraft's boi. Of course, in Lovecraft's own writing, there is a similar effect as with Unseelie where he wasn't really looking for an answer to "Is this thing evil to the depths of its soul", his interests were "existential shock" at how it disrupts our understanding of nature and later on imperial conflict (see Mountains of Madness). Oh, and also how insidious it is that is has a multiracial cult of followers that are unconcerned with Lovecraft's white supremacist ideology and therefore d*generate, but I guess we're pretending Cthulhu is apolitical.
This trend in writing that I have mentioned, to answer critical thought about how we could all get along one day with "Nope, actually this race simply cannot be persuaded by any means to interact in a way that is compatible with human flourishing" is the most reactionary trend in fantasy writing and should be regarded as such instead of being excused on a completely bullshit basis.