Frieren is such a good show with an amazing premise, but also has a fucking horrible pro-eugenics narrative.
Not as bad as your average Disney film about the inherently dangerous people being accepted by the innately good people, but still messed up.
The demons in the show are white colonizers
Seriously i thought that was the obvious part. The demons are an an allegory for fascists if we were to say they represented any people at all.
When your allegory for fascists is a core pillar of fascist ideology (the ontologically evil race that can be righteously exterminated), your message is going to get muddled.
Having not watched it & after noping out of the internet for several hours after reading some of the responses in the linked thread, what is it about the show that lets some people interpret the demons as white colonizers while others see them as various marginalized groups?
There’s a scene where a guy takes pity on a baby demon and decides to raise it in a human village but then the baby demon goes on to kill a bunch of people because it is an inherently evil creature and so not killing the baby demon was sentimental foolishness.
This is such a common fascist idea that, as seen in the tweet, they have a term for it - “suicidal empathy.”
The Bolsheviks killed the Tsars children, so the monarchy couldn’t be restored. The demons are often nobility coded, and are evil just like the Whites, I think the same arguments apply. Maybe killing children/baby was excessive, but there’s reasonable justifications for it.
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Only Alexei was a kid when they got owned.
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Alexei’s hemophilia was bad enough that he almost died one time because the royal carriage he was on had a slightly bumpier than usual ride. Like, he didn’t even bump his head. The mere vibrations were good enough to induce internal bleeding that almost killed him. People with his hemophilia don’t usually make it past 10, and the only reason he made it to 13 was because he was the heir apparent of an empire on top of being incredibly lucky due to many close calls like the aforementioned bumpy royal carriage ride that almost killed him. If the Bolsheviks haven’t killed him, he probably would’ve jerked himself to death because he gripped his dick too hard. Alexei had a good run.
Can we not drag disabled people while we’re talking shit about the Romanovs please? People with hemophilia got their own genocide in the 80s.
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Fucking Frieren again, of course.
I know there’s an idea of “contest every space, fight for what’s ours, don’t let the nazis have anything fun” but we should just let them have Frieren and not try to salvage anything from that story. This is so disgusting.
Yeah Frieren traffics in so many fascist tropes that I don’t think there’s any point in trying to reclaim it.
“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
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
I mean, that’s one reason among other very problematic ones that I didn’t watch goblin slayer.
![[CW: Racism] I was a much happier person before I'd heard of Frieren](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/4f3895d3-ba9b-4da6-b745-d43ddc2847c6.png){kind=link}