German words/names and "traditional" aesthetic+demons being pure evil in humanoid form just to trick you into feeling bad about exterminating them=fucking duh, I wouldn't even call it "co-opting" it's just perfect for them
I predicted it from the moment I first heard the show's premise.
If they could latch onto K-On I'm sure Frieren being a similar level of cozy along with the demons being ontologically evil is catnip for them.
Unironically should be pointed out and laughed at that they saw a species that wants to kill humanity and their first thought is “they are exactly why we should minecraft people IRL!”
The irony that fascists would quite literally be the frieren demons: might makes right, they lie all the time, their bloodlust is the only thing that matters.
True true, but it is a lot more accurate (and a lot funnier) to call CHUDs the minions: incomprehensible language, annoying, and seem less interested in principle and more interested in simply serving the biggest villain they can find, other fascists.
Currently I subscribe to the argument that the demons are nazis and that killing nazis wholesale is good and that makes the entire debate moot. It's just wolfenstein. The demons understanding morality but still being evil is just nazism.
Nazis are evil because they are a product of material relations that rewards evil behavior. Nazis may be only be permanently destroyed by the elimination of these material relations. Nazis are not born Nazis.
Frieren's demons are evil because of inherent physical/racial traits. The only solution for our German heros is to kill every demon they see. Even demon children are valid targets for elimination. The demons are clearly an insidious, everpresent threat as Frieren has been on a crusade against them for multiple human lifetimes.
I was going to make a (mostly frivolous) comment about how Frieren is Christian propaganda and that rather than being read as an analogy the demons should be read as literal Abrahamic demons. But I like this better.
if you look at the map of frieren's world it really feels like the demons come from canada to attack the human empire of mexico-perú but people aren't ready for this conversation
They don't know that Perú es clave.
I haven't seen it, but I've heard the premise involves inherently evil demons who use human's empathy against them, so you've got ontological evil + "empathy is a weakness" themes, which chuds love.
If the show is more nuanced than that (which I assume it is), don't expect them to pick up on that. If there's an obvious character / story ark that changes the whole outlook of the series, don't expect them to grasp that either.
That said, I'd like to take a moment to laugh at the kind of dorks who seriously act like their worldview is validated by a fucking anime. "This cartoon means I have a point, because a fictional race in a fictional series is specifically written to be the way I think black people and mexicans are!"
Most of the show's premise is a sleepy elf mom raising her autistic goth adopted daughter while traveling around to places she'd visited some 70-80 years earlier as part of a broader poignant reflection on time inexorably tearing away everything and how ultimately what matters the most are those fleeting human connections that happen along the way.
It's just there's also ontologically fascist demons who are some sort of fey predator species that preys on humans and other humanoid species. They're not handled in a very deep way which undermines the concept a bit, but everything they do is just stuff that actual fascists actually do and the demons' entire psychology is just literally what fascists actually believe and how fascists actually think about the world.
Pretty much. It can be coopted because fascists love extrrninationist ideologies, but it's closer to a world where a Venus flytrap or other predator that uses guile to entrap prey evolved beyond humans. I haven't seen anything in the lore to suggest otherwise. They aren't ontologically evil they are literally "evil" like a tiger in the jungle.
What about the demon kid that kills his family because he's a demon?
they're magical predators who by coincidence are humanoid and every interaction they have with humans and each other is only for the purpose of eating humans
That makes plenty of sense in the whole "they are some sort of fey predator with completely alien morality" angle: the "adopted" demon knows that another family is angry because it killed their child during the battle; it understands this as having destroyed a possession of theirs, and views the situation as a threatening community figure having a grudge over property destruction which could endanger the demon; it attempts to smooth this conflict over by replacing the child with another, not understanding the social ties involved, and kills that child's parents to stop them from seeking revenge for this.
It's an alien, might-makes-right sort of morality where the demon, finding itself in a subordinate role, tries to placate threats because its entire social framework revolves around dealing out casual violence when possible and trying to avoid suffering the same.
Yeah it's like adopting a fucking chimp (not even a true predator that) and being surprised it killed you. Or grizzly man. I think it basically supports the thesis.
a lot of school shooters are fash.
Nah, the demons are just people in every way except for the ontological evil, and our main hero is on a crusade against them that has gone on for her while life
If the show is more nuanced than that (which I assume it is), don't expect them to pick up on that. If there's an obvious character / story ark that changes the whole outlook of the series, don't expect them to grasp that either.
Thus far, there has not been a single demon that has shown regret, or compassion to their victims. There is some "material" analysis of demonic society, and that because they value might makes right (who has the biggest and most powerful mana and magic) they have not learned to collaborate and engage together. They only lie to humans and not each other. I think there's an indication that Demons saw Frieren hide her power level during a s1 episode, which means future demons might discover hiding their powerlevel, and thus have to engage in trust and collaboration.
Honestly, the series is not really about good vs. evil and fighting demons. But about love, mortality, doing good, and its consequences through the ages.
I haven't watched it but my understanding is that the demons in Frieren are evil by virtue of their very nature - incapable of being good. This manifests as even their children being valid targets. That idea is extremely core to fascism - some people are just inherently evil, by virtue of ancestry, and the fascists must do the "hard thing" and wipe them out.
I'm not saying they're not ignoring plenty of stuff to get to their reading but it's hardly surprising, surely.
I'm not saying they're not ignoring plenty of stuff to get to their reading but it's hardly surprising, surely.
ignoring half the text is my favorite literary analysis tool
I mean I'm kind of a dumbass when it comes to media literacy, so unironically this
Has it been? What does that even mean?
This anime was always fascist slop wrapped in twee coloring-book level "art"
Nah it's more an example of fascists not getting the message and just liking killing
Another day another Frieren struggle session
Freiren got 'coopted' in the same way 
got 'coopted'.
Fash will ignore text, subtext and theme if it allows them to identify themselves with the physically attractive characters who are presented as the protagonist(s).
The characters then by virtue of being the protagonist are 'correct' and the correct reading of the show. Then, the 'antagonist' is de facto whoever the enemy of fascism is, in this case non-white people and immigrants.
It's all well and good that we read that the demons are are actually the aristocratic forces of the invading West, or the forces of repression, and it's all well and good that we have in-text citations where Flamme tells Frieren explicitly so, laying out the demons' societal structure.
But fash don't care. The players in their conflict are pre-defined and mapped onto their popular media. Player 456 is a rebel taking on the cabalistic forces of judeocommunism.
the most fascist thing about frieren is that it doesn't make any fucking sense that all these people are living in the northern plateau to begin with, there's so many villages and towns but it's made clear that it's a hellhole where even basic transit is frequently impossible, so it's like- why the fuck are all these people here
There are like, millions of people that live in places just like that here in real world too
In the real world, people were forced into the worse areas due to power struggles over the more arable land. Meanwhile, in Frieren, there are vast tracts of completely empty land south of the plateau (I want to say it was one day from the village that got massacred by the snake demon) that are presented as being part of the same state/country/polity/whatever. There is no lore reason presented in the show explaining why people live in the plateau, other than vague shit like "this is our home :(". It's just because it's cool.
Imo this comes down to the fact that Frieren is set in the type of fantasy setting based on D&D, where the population density and location of settlements are based not off of any actual medieval research, or thought-through material analsysi, but rather off of vibes largely inspired by the american wild west. Those vibes are then integrated into many fantasy works without any interrogation of what they would mean for the setting (or indeed how fundamentally racist they are), which leads to unsatisfying answers to obvious questions.
the type of fantasy setting based on D&D, where the population density and location of settlements are based not off of any actual medieval research, or thought-through material analsysi, but rather off of vibes largely inspired by the american wild west. Those vibes are then integrated into many fantasy works without any interrogation of what they would mean for the setting
It really only works for post-post-apocalyptic settings imo. You can get a depopulated setting full of lost knowledge and eldritch horrors, a land scarred by calamity, fortified survivor enclaves only slowly reestablishing new population centers as the land becomes viable again, etc without all the weirdness of D&D style "wait, why is every town basically just an exurb that's surrounded by a monster-land theme park?" fantasy worlds.
As controversial as Mushoku Tensei is, it does deserve a lot of credit for trying to rework the cliched fantasy land framework into something coherent and semi-realistic: there are people absolutely everywhere, even when they're not human they're still fundamentally people, and the places that are sparsely populated are basically full of magical radiation that makes normal plant and animal life almost impossible as it causes rampant mutations that monsterize them which makes those places very dangerous. It also did the Dungeon Meshi thing of dungeons being a sort of magical being that grows over time, except it did it earlier and better despite this basically just being a footnote to the rest of the story.
Yeah but not with random monsters that can individually destroy the entire town everywhere and that's not including the demons
It's like you have to have the entire world's most superhuman people just to have little pocket villages of 30-50 people but they're all like normal dudes so if one of the super humans isn't around then it's just like....... why be there
wholesome elf girl attack on titan
These are the same idiots who thought homelander was a giga-based rolemodel. I wouldn't read too much into it.
Because it's anime.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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