Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Frieren's Demon Problem
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AspiringShoulder
 Posts: 12 |
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I mentioned this before on Twitter, but it would be very funny to me if Frieren does turn out to be the elf equivalent of a teenager. The only implication here is Kraft looking older than Frieren and living for much longer, but I really hope it's true.
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malvarez1
Posts: 2115 |
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I simultaneously think this is a very well-written article, and that this demon debate has taken up too much bandwidth at this point.
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Seif
 Posts: 458 |
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I just don't think Frieren has given a strong enough case that Demon's deserve genocide.
Yeah, the invading murdering force needs to be wiped out, but that's a far cry from the narrative framing murdering children on sight as morally correct. We've established that they lack empathy, sure, but is that enough to handwave genocide? They clearly are sentient and rational beings. They have social structures and can organize into an army and have industry developed enough to cloth and supply it. They show sincere fear, pride, playfulness, and desire for revenge. The show even made a point to state that they don't need to prey on humans. In the real-world diplomacy isn't conducted through empathy and emotional bonds but through mutually shared self-interest. Plenty of stories have evil demons/monsters/gobbos whathaveyou that the characters kill without much scrutiny, but to draw such direct attention to the morality of it and then establish the race to have greater humanity and sentience then even a lot of sci-fi stories about AI... It's just a weird feeling.
I mean, the show opened up this line of discussion. If they had handwaved and said "Demons eat people and are evil" then no one would have really batted an eye. But it decided to have an arc centered around the idea that trusting and sparing demons is wrong and their lives have no value. It's natural to discuss it, especially if the show seems to do a poor job of justifying it to a lot of viewers. Last edited by Seif on Tue Dec 05, 2023 12:14 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4640 |
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I could see that being the case. It stuck out to me that Stark referred to him as "old man" in a similar way that he did with the city noble. I know it's a common trope in anime for characters to refer to an adult as "old," but for the noble, he was visibly more middle-aged, so I'm thinking that Kraft might have looked noticeably older by elf standards. |
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juaifan
Posts: 149 |
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I mean, I've seen 24 year old characters be classified as over the hill, so... yeah. |
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fathomlessblue
 Posts: 385 Location: Manchester, UK |
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Whether meant to be taken as literal or not, I genuinely like the idea of the Demon mimicking language primarily as a means of consumption, rather than a tool for interpersonal connections. It’s almost like what you’d imagine would happen if a praying mantis or venus fly trap became sentient. They have the same tools as humanity, but their perception of them is completely alien to our own. Theirs is a world of fixed processes & observable systems, with the ambiguous communications & emotional responses of humanity bizarre quirks to be sussed out & exploited.
Maybe they’ll never fully be able to understand why people are unwilling or unable to express what they mean, but they can follow patterns to conclusions. In that sense I appreciate the contrast with Frieren; someone who struggles to understand the importance of her bonds in the short term, & is subsequently striving to get a better sense of humanity. It makes for an enticing clash of values. Although, like your mention of the demon child, there’s a sense (or rather hope) that the story might ultimately try & say something more sympathetic about two very different outlooks being able to, if not comprehend, at least work around each other. It’s just a shame all of that lies embedded within the obviously parallels of monster races as allegories for the threat & inferiority of foreigners within fantasy (western & Japanese), whether them being marauding gangs intent on pillaging & assault, or the ‘good ol’ colonial ‘savage group in need of being brought in & civilized by enlightened potato-kun’s ideals’. I still recall watching the episode of Reincarnated as a Slime S1 when Rimuru adopts a group of Ogres into his community, literally turning them more humanoid as a result, the same day I checked out the 1940’s World-War 2 propaganda animated film, Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors. In the film there’s a scene about the army doing an outreach program for a bunch clear stand-ins for a Pacific island indigenous community, & I couldn’t believe some of the parallels I was seeing, some 70 years apart. The more things change… Is Frieren attempting to say something couched in the same traditions? Honestly it’s hard to say, but given how certain social attitudes are nested within the fantasy genre (whether the audience or viewer is aware of them or not), it’s easy to imagine certain things bleeding into any story that recycles such tropes. Right now, Frieren has done a lot to gain my trust to make me hope there’s no malicious intent going on within the story, but for every FFXIV devs changing the name of ‘Beast Tribes’ to ‘Tribal Quests’, you get the Ranking of Kings guy using fictional races to pedal Japanese Imperialism apologia. I don’t think we’re seeing anything like that, but after getting burned enough times, it’s hard not to side-eye similar examples out of habit. |
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Minos_Kurumada
Posts: 1186 |
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Now that the article mentions Orcs and Tolkien:
Orcs are not humans with more stuff on them, they are corrupted elves turned into Orcs by Melkor, they are pure evil and irremediable, they are so full of evil that, until Saruman upgrade them, they couldn't even walk under the Sun, the light was too much for them to resist. It's also, kinda hinted, that Aragorn genocided them when he got into power. As funny as it sounds, Frieren actually has better look on Demons that LotR on Orcs, because Frieren treats Demons as monsters who just evolved the ability to mimic humans in order to eat, they are not different than a tiger who evolved lines to hide, you can perfectly consider them not evil, since they have no malice, just hunger. TLotR's Orcs? They are pure evil and must die, period. |
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Gnarth
Posts: 175 |
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The fact we still haven't moved on from this discourse proves it was handled amazingly. Those who keep pushing against it are like the village mayor, the easiest hypothetical victims if those demons were real. It's precisely this unconditional empathy that they exploit the most.
The author could've just said "demons are evil and dumb" and call it a day, and most of the detractors would've accepted it; instead they opted for a thought-provoking and challenging concept. Racism is obviously wrong in real life, but what if there was a mostly sentient species able to mimic us really well that also wants to kill us? We're naturally inclined to try diplomacy, to reason, to find outliers because if they were human, eventually one attempt would be guaranteed to work. But what if this species that looks similar to us on so many aspects is still different enough to have an innate desire to destroy us, that nothing is ever going to erase? Then, genocide is the only option, and it's morally justifiable. We don't want that. We don't want to ever justify such thing. But this is where fiction shines the most: when it presents us a different world with different rules where we'd need to reshape even our strongest beliefs. All of that without actually influencing anything in the well distinct real world. |
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fathomlessblue
Posts: 385 Location: Manchester, UK |
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If this turns out to be true, it's be hilarious if Frieren turns out to be the Elf equivalent of 13/14, while Kraft is like 19 & simply going through an angsty existential phase
Really? I feel it's one of the most interesting topics the show has introduced, alongside all the core impertinence of time, & processing of bonds & experiences stuff. Sure, given the baggage it's potentially attached to, it might make for a somewhat uncomfortable discussion, but that's all the more reason not to brush past or ignore it imo. Unlike much of the story, which has this hazy sense of being half-trapped within a memory, the Demon arc is fixed firmly in the present. It's the one part of the story so far where Frieren fully focuses on what's going on immediately around her & has strong & fixed opinions on it. That seems worthy of comment if you ask me |
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2312 Location: Online Terminal |
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I doubt this is true, but considering we're living in 2023 (at time of writing) I wonder if this part is accidentally a story about AI and Large Language Models. It looks like there's way too much going on for this to be the case, but it's something to think about. |
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NeverConvex
 Subscriber Posts: 2537 |
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I feel similarly to malvarez1 here; not because the topic is uninteresting, but because I don't feel like Frieren has given us enough to work with to go very far with its perspective. Right now, it seems provocative and like a kind of weird outlier in the show; Frieren's perspective seems unreliable but the show also goes quite out of its way to support her position, which mostly leaves me unsure what to believe. Frieren tells us demons evolved from imitative behaviors in simpler, earlier demons, and then fairly rapidly and absolutely concludes that demons are just psychopathic ChatGPTs, but what we see of their behavior seems too layered and nuanced for this. I'll be curious to see what happens when the show revisits demons in the future, but I'm not sure what more there is to say here that isn't rehash. |
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fathomlessblue
Posts: 385 Location: Manchester, UK |
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Man, I wish that was true. I really like that take. Of course, given that I've just watched Hbomberguy's 4 hour plagiarism video, I'm now imagining the demons as grand metaphors for lazy youtubers & influencers that mimic the words of real people in order to steal the life/money of their victims/fans. Kanehito Yamada is a prophet. |
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Hopeless Weeb
Posts: 42 |
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I find the discussion about the nature of demons to be an odd one, especially when later in the story there's spoiler[ a demon who actually forged a genuine human connection ]. . . I feel like the author kinda shot themselves in the foot with that if Frieren's genocidal fanaticism is supposed to be the right answer. And also, it's not like humans in the real world didn't encounter a wholly different species in real life who were even less similar to us than these demons and yet our ancestors still danced under the sheets with them. . . .
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2537 |
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Mm, kind of skeptical that you could say any of the various humanoid species in our history were more different from us than demons are from the other species in the show. What specifically are you thinking of when you say that? |
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Seif
Posts: 458 |
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"Genocide is the only option and it's morally justifiable" is a hell of a sentence. See, I don't buy that. We don't wipe out animal species that are innately dangerous and aggressive to humans on sight, much less sentient ones. |
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