For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Exactly - I think there's a lot of fuel for what, I think, would be interesting fiction.
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"?
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.
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)
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.
'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 