102
Frieren is so good when you don't have some racist prick in your ear screaming about how demons are libs and minorities
(hexbear.net)
Japanese Frieren fans ask themselves what Himmel would do.
American Frieren fans ask themselves what Himler would do
"This story with a multiracial central cast that's principally about valuing human connections and placing mundane good deeds above any sort of martial accomplishment, which is held in contempt as something cruel and tragic, with antagonists that are a comparatively small faction of elite racial supremacist fascists doing colonialism, is exactly the same as the paranoid fever dreams of white supremacists that imagined the subjugated masses rising up against them and needing to be subjugated again by paramilitary dragoons" is deeply unserious in a way that undermines every other claim.
Not that "elite racial supremacist proto-fascists doing colonialism have accused their victims of doing the things they themselves were, in fact, doing to said victims, therefore any story which portrays elite conquering supremacists as doing the sorts of things that they actually do or acting like fascists actually do is secretly propaganda taking the side of elite racial supremacist fascists since they like to project all their crimes onto their victims" needs much undermining to fall apart. Like yes, no shit, fascists project all of their crimes and behaviors onto their victims, so anything portraying fascists and proto-fascist settler colonialists is necessarily going to have some similarities and the differences and context are needed to understand whether "the villains are doing fascist things" is projection by or criticism of fascists.
Like let's break it down piece by piece: fascists exalt martial glory and supremacy above all other things - Frieren repeatedly and emphatically rejects martial glory on principle; fascists hold up purity of the ingroup and call for patriarchal nuclear families - Frieren is centered on a multi-racial adopted family with only a mother figure; fascists portray their victims as a teeming mass of vicious beasts or as perfidious schemers in their own ranks - Frieren portrays its villains as elitist individualists who can barely rein in their contempt for other races for long enough to attempt perfidy in the same fashion that the US army committed perfidy against indigenous peoples; etc.
Like fascism being an intrinsic trait for a sapient species is a weird and uncomfortable aspect of the show, but everything else is such a firm rejection of every fascist value that it just doesn't scan to attach it to historic fascist and proto-fascist propaganda.