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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It's got an extremely fascist attitude towards the demons. Like, arguably worse than Goblin Slayer. In the way that GS has "fantasy savages", Frieren basically has "fantasy Jews" who must be killed even when they are infants because they "only learn language so they can lie", etc.
Not every fantasy enemy has to be morally nuanced, and intractably evil groups aren't necessarily fascist or racist allegories.
Their world has an abundance of creatures that prey exclusively on humans, and a lot of them do so through mimicry. The demons are predator animals that feed exclusively on people, with the ability to work together to some degree, and very rudimentary abilities to pretend to be human in pursuit of that main goal. Creatures like them are prominent parts of nearly every cultures mythology, and just like the Fae, or vampires or anything similar, they don't need moral agency to work as antagonists.
It's always the go-to refuge to take a conversation of "should" and change it to "can". The creator can do whatever they want, what I am saying is that they shouldn't.
Intractably evil races most definitely are racial and will always be perceived as such to racist societies like America and Japan.
I'm already rolling my eyes. Are you the sad apologist for reactionary treats? I thought it was someone else.
We've already played the game a thousand fucking times of "oh, but this species needs human blood" and Promised Neverland is a perfectly fine example of solving it even when it is posed in a very dire manner, though this fictional problem has also been solved in fiction for much longer without the answer being killing literal orphans begging for mercy. Fucking jackass.
blah blah blaah it's just verbal diarhea because this conversation is old and you're just grasping at whatever you can.
Guess what? Vampires were based on bigoted views of Jews too! You actually aren't helping your case!
And "Fae" simply aren't comparable, they are intelligent life who can be interacted with and generally aren't ontologically malicious. You're 0 for 2 on examples of something in "nearly ever culture's mythology". Please, keep trying, and see if you can pick something that isn't The Poisonous Mushroom this time.
Bram Stoker didn't invent vampires, and the creatures and mythology associated vastly pre-date the antisemitic culture surround his novels.
They're perfectly comparable. They are not ontologically malicious, but in the majority of their incarnations, they are completely divorced from human mortality or ways of thinking. Creatures that look like people, but do not think like us or share a remotely similar moral framework. (Plenty of mythological fairies are ontologically evil on top of that).
I hadn't realised your name was supposed to be representative of the quality of your discourse.
Don't bullshit me that you're talking about the Vrykolakas or whatever when you said "vampire". Beyond that, "vampires" represent a solved problem, even shitty books like Twilight deign to have the nuance to have vampires who refuse to harm people!
Then it's not comparable. The demons generally understand people pretty well and abuse that fact. There are mischievious "Fae" that tend to play tricks, but they are usually not evil, and certainly not justifying literal fucking genocide by saying that even an orphan begging for mercy is just another pest to be exterminated.
Some are evil, but by the very nature of most of the folklore and the alien nature of the fairies, that they have been encountered as evil is not enough to establish that they are ontologically evil. We have no reason to believe that a Redcap, for instance, could not be reformed in just the same way as a sapient vampire could. Sometimes groups have a long history of being in violent conflict, that does not mean it could not be any other way and you usually do not find in folklore an insistance on such a conclusion (usually they stay more in the domain of pragmatic advice or the morality of a more immediate situation).
Even worse than a simple narrowness of thought, this need to make superficial tropes immovable pillars of the core of a creature's being is a manifestation of reaction, a measure literally only conceived of to oppose critical thought such as "What if we talked to the Redcap? What do they really think and feel?" because that'd be too pro-social to the fuckers in fantasy who just want everything to be a Crusader fantasy about cutting down hordes of subhumans.
Which incidentally might be connected to interesting fact that the more insidious a creature is portrayed as being, the more likely it is going to end up being a direct and deliberate racial allegory (see were-hyenas, for instance) rather than, well, a more deniable racial allegory.
The closest you can get in fairy folklore to the message in Frieren is with Changelings, which is incidentally reactionary as fuck and in some cases appears to be an articulation of the superstitious slaughtering of infants with birth defects and other abnormalities, such as an en caul birth.
Because the question is not "Is this person on the internet forbidding [something already written] from being written?" or "Have people written this before? Long enough ago that we can just call it culture with no further interrogation?" Socialism is the rutheless criticism of all that exists and the question is "Is this trope reactionary in nature?" To which the answer is "Yes!" and you have not done a thing to push the needle away from that conclusion.