this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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"This story about a diverse, female-led cast of characters with themes of valuing human connections, leaving a positive impact on others, and generally abhorring and devaluing violence is secretly fascist, because its villains are the remnants of an empire of ontologically fascist conquering monsters which is presented in a way that lines up with fantasy literature cliches."
Didn't we literally just have one of these threads about Frieren a few weeks ago? How is "someone has a bad take about Frieren" now just a regular struggle session?
Because people keep jumping down the throats of anyone who points out that Frieren does traffic so heavily in fascist tropes that some of us actually felt too uncomfortable with it to bother consuming more of it. Better to ask, "why do people keep starting struggle sessions with people for being bothered by bioessentislist ontological evil as a fantasy trope?"
I am less interested in fantasy as a genre nowadays because this shit was getting old 20 years ago.
It's fantasy.
Not every villain needs to have a complex backstory for why they're sympathetic and actually human. Great example: the Disney Cruella remake. The character is more fun as a literal human demon who wants to make a dog skin coat. She doesn't need to be a humanized person.
Obviously when tropes combine (looking at JKR and the goblin bankers) that's a different thing. But the fact that many of the Demons are ATTRACTIVE is part of why we should recognize them as (if anything) analogs to fascists.
To think through this: is it "problematic" that certain creatures in nature use aesthetically pleasing colors to trap prey? Is this somehow something we should "humanize" rather than recognize the cold calculation of nature at work (and perhaps, as communists/marxists, work to fight against the logic of nature and fascism's evil cooption of it. After all, don't we believe that men make history, but not as they please, and thus are beyond mere "nature").
The key difference between the fash cooption and the reality of the story is that the demons are not human. They're angler fish/carnivorous plants that use language. This idiot's take (the OP image) obviously assumes the inhumanity of his subjects and that's all you have to do to undermine every Frieren bad take. Simply put, the real "analogy" is if you went to go make friends with a starving tiger in the wild. It doesn't see its actions as good or bad - it's "beyond" good and evil not because they're niezschean ubermensch but because they're simply nonhuman. Now, this doesn't mean we should kill every nonhuman entity in the world (though cattle ranchers would do so with wolves, evil fucks). We can recognize ecosystems and our role in it. But it's a fantasy story, and should be taken on its own terms until it gives reason not to (and again, if every demon started looking like a JKR goblin or something, then I would immediately reverse my position).
Always evil races, or armies of questionally sapient drones that act as convenient meat waves for the protagonists to cut down are worth scrutinizing and critiquing even if their narrative purpose (being convenient meat waves for combat set pieces) is obvious enough.
However, in those examples, orcs, goblins, bugs, darkspawn, what have you, the protagonists generally aren't in the situation of being presented with their child forms and having to kill them. Again, because their purpose is threatening armies. They're often even born as adults for this purpose.
Frieren is the one that looks directly into the camera and says No, you Must kill the child. Sympathizing or showing mercy is the wrong choice, you Must snuff them out wherever you find them, because they will grow up to be dangerous and subversive No Matter What because that is their nature
and I don't think they had to do that. and yeah that's much closer to fascist propaganda than it is Tolkien orcs
I mean, that's one reason among other very problematic ones that I didn't watch goblin slayer.
"It's not ~~pedophilia~~ genocide because the child is actually a 1000 year old demon"
That is the dialectic. The story as presented is actually alien to us because demons are not real. So we interpret it through the lens of extant reality and while it is intresting it doesn't actually fit in our frameworks and falls appart.
It's fantasy. Ontologically evil creatures can exist.
It would be like if the utility monster were real. Does that mean we should accept it under human ethics? It's a sentient being, so we need to accept it's claim to our unhappiness?
Putting it another way, maybe we shouldn't try to use absurd thought experiments with morality.
Nobody is disputing that it's possible to create a fictional work in which ontologically evil creatures exist. I'm saying that putting such creatures in a work inherently aligns it with fascist ideology because the idea is a core pillar of fascism. You want to stop at "it's fantasy" without considering the question of "but what is the fantasy?" What is the answer in this case if not "to be able to commit genocide without feeling bad about it"?
Other possible answers:
Still the issue is that this is all interpretive! There's no necessity for a narrative where a particular group is annihilated must be fascist.
I should note here that the annihilation of a class (in real life) need not be deadly (separating killing from violence). But would not the fantasy of exterminating capital owners (those with high magical power) slot in equally well? Again to be fully clear - in our little metaphor there's no need to kill the child (the Chinese proved this). But, to torture the metaphor, if a former child of a billionaire backslid on their reeducation, wouldn't more forceful measures be necessary?
However again, this is all kind of moot - the fantasy of annihilating the powerful doesn't necessarily have to be fascist, classist, or anything in particular. We can leverage interpretations however we wish. What's important is that we take up the fight against just saying "yeah it's fash" without the author either coming out as fash or more complete proof (especially since there's plenty of good shit in the story that aligns with left politics). Why cede the ground so easily when the leap the fascists make (e.g. it works because my opponents aren't human) is one that even the most libbed up idiot would disagree with. Simply pointing out the demons are closer to the aliens from independence day goes a long way to diffusing the fash critique. This doesn't mean it's perfect but it's like, again, make them show that they really don't see their enemies as human. Revealing the fascist as a fascist against the text seems way more useful than writing the text off. They aren't worth capitulating too (they like starship troopers for the wrong reasons after all)
It quite literally does the exact opposite, repeatedly and emphatically devaluing everything Fascists value and making its villains just do literally every Fascist thing. Its only misstep is in making a species of ontologically-fascist demons who just can't help but do fascist things. If Frieren were fascist it would be oriented around fascist ideals instead of just stumbling into a problematic analogue to one facet of real-world fascist propaganda by making its might-makes-right, anti-empathic, elitist, warrior-cult, racial-supremacist villains innately fascist by dint of being magical predators, instead of making them simply indoctrinated into that ethos or the like.
This is even more tiring than the Dandadan struggle sessions.
At this point I'm half expecting the "Frieren is fascist" gang to start going off about how nazis need to be humanized in any WWII media lol
But the German barbarians are not ontologically evil. They are evil, because their material conditions determine their consciousness.
Anime is a visual medium. You are correct about the writing. You still have the visuals of a bunch of Germans who like doing genocide to undermench coded women ans children.
Every demon in the show is not only a soldier, but an officer commanding troops as part of an actual, tangible military force that is doing genocide. Like they're not even settler colonialists bringing and settling civilians alongside them, they're the actual formal military of an invading genocidal empire, who are uniformed and engaging in atrocities in uniform. They're also explicitly elite forces, with even the weakest of them being akin to elite human warriors or mages. The only "child" demon is a small one that some humans tried to raise as a pet.
Which is not communicated visually. So, while the writing about it may be well done there vibes require context to interpret that seems to get lost often enough that there is a flaw somewhere
The worst part of the dandadan struggle sessions is that I had to learn about the klanklklan controversy (how a bunch of racists tried to ruin the show for non white people) on youtube, I would've expected it to come up here
Chuds: "The demons are minorities and this is BASED!!!"
Leftists: "The demons are minorities and this is PROBLEMATIC!!!"
Normal people: "idk maybe the demons are just demons and like...a thematic foil to Frieren."
If you're going to reply to my comment, respond to what I actually said. I didn't say it's secretly fascist, I said it traffics in fascist tropes. Fascist tropes such as, for instance:
[CW: racism, antisemitism, transphobia]
"Certain races are born evil. Even the children think only of your own race's destruction, and that is why you must commit defensive genocide against them to protect your own race.".
"Certain races are inherently untrustworthy."
.
"Empathy for the other is naive and stupid. They may look human, but they're actually just monsters in human guise. Empathy for them is a suicidal mistake that will only get your own people killed."
Is "these magical predatory animals are basically born in SS uniforms and are naturally inclined to do fascist things and orchestrate a fascist society" a flawed and problematic premise? Sure, it could have been done better, but ultimately the demons are bad because they are fascists, because they act like fascists and do typical fascist things. The conceit behind them is "what if a predatory magical animal species that's basically a walking weapon of mass destruction became sapient" rather than equating the elitist, extremely stratified, racial supremacist warrior empire to powerless real-world marginalized groups that elitist, extremely stratified, racial supremacist warrior empires claim are sneaky infiltrators trying to destroy everything from within.
The demons also notably exist as a discrete power bloc, and the only examples of them being sneaky are one attempt at perfidy - something the US and its allies frequently do - and one case of a captured demon demonstrating a confused and alien sort of morality when humans try treating her like a pet.
I think yes, because they are sapient - meaning they're created (by the authors) in the image of humans and this naturally (because they're a race in the narrative) makes them read as an allegory for human "races", hence the appeal for chuds. I understand that probably wasn't the intent of the writers, but if not, it seems like it was poor execution on their part.
It's never going to be a good idea to have a "race" in fiction that is actually evil by nature, I think.
That's all I wanted.
Look, I don't think liking Frieren automatically makes someone a fascist or that it was intentionally created as a work of fascist propaganda or that there's nothing about it that points to a reading of demons as aristocrats/capitalists/what-have-you. I have no patience for bona fide fascists and if I thought all Frieren fans were just fascists I wouldn't have bothered with that effortpost.
Everyone likes problematic media, myself included. But I don't hesitate to acknowledge the reactionary undercurrents in media I like, nor to I blame anyone who finds those undercurrents repellent to the point of not wanting to engage with that media, and that's a courtesy that should be extended to everyone.
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