For the first time ever the hype didn’t disappoint. Honestly a breath of fresh air for anime, my only complaint is I wish it was longer.
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My complaint is I wish they spent less time fighting monsters and more chilling in random villages to learn a spell that bakes bread.
Yeah the demons are the least fun part of the story, aren’t they? Typical dark anime psychopath creatures.
my problem with demons is their lore. It’s the only thing that makes me uncomfortable in Frieren. They are intelligent beings but unlike other races like humans, dwarfes and elves, they are born evil. And in this anime, if you doubt that all demons are monsters that should be purged, you will be punished by rules of this world. I don’t like it. This is imaginary world, you can set it up how you want but for some reason the creators of manga/anime decided to create a world where some beings are just simply evil by nature and must be eliminated. I would like if in Frieren world, demons would be something that people become, like by solding their soul to dark forces or something. In that case i wouldn’t be having a problem with them. Also, to be fair, this problem isn’t unique to Frieren, a lot of fantasy stories has the same problem. But i was hoping that there wouldn’t be such thing in Frieren :(
I’m not entirely against the concept of a race born evil (it’s certainly not a new concept, and born evil races are what most people are accustomed to), but for myself I’m concerned with their depiction as being beyond the ability to reason with and that they use their speech just to trick and kill you, which sounds familiar to racist views of minorities.
It makes no sense to consider anyone as born with any morality (let alone set with one), since morality isn’t really part of the world as such. But the demons inexplicably have basically an ideology to kill humans stuck in their brain that can’t be changed and that’s reactionary as fuck to write, nothing good comes of it. They had a softball among softballs with the infant demon to demonstrate that it’s like a cultural divide that devolved into racism, but nope, demon orphan killed the humans who raised her. The only way that it could possibly be redeemed is if later on this was shown to be some kind of elaborate trick by a party invested in keeping the conflict going.
They had a softball among softballs with the infant demon to demonstrate that it’s like a cultural divide that devolved into racism, but nope, demon orphan killed the humans who raised her.
I can guarantee you weren’t paying attention during this. The demon didn’t do this out of some malice stemming from her demonhood, she literally did this in an attempt to make amends to the other villager. She killed the child of one of the villagers before she was adopted so she got another child as an offering.
Demons aren’t malicious or evil in this setting, their thinking patterns are just fundamentally alien and that leads to conflict. Demons and humans cannot understand each other, that is the conflict in this setting. Demons aren’t born with some sort of natural hatred of mankind.
This is like saying the fucking Cthuhlhu is problematic it’s a sentient lifeform too.
spoiler
I liked the first demon fight, because it gave a big chunk of backstory and world building. This thing being a reminant of a prior era that was horrible back then but trivially defeated now was a clever way of iterating on the idea of “progress” within a fantasy setting.
I was less thrilled with the second demon, simply because “my pot of mana is bigger than yours” is a lame way to resolve conflict.
But the fight with the diplomats gave us another big chunk of plot, in so far as it established why the idea of a demon was so horrible. A monster in a man’s form that preys on compassion is a good set piece for future drama.
At some point, the focus of the story is around the mystery of what occurred in the prior age. And demons are necessarily a big part of that. So introducing them as minor antagonists in order to unspool the story works well.
The pace of the conflicts does drag though. The only thing worse than a Naruto-esque low stakes fight scene is one that feels like filler.
I think for me the interesting part isn’t just “progress”. The interesting thing that this show has going for it is specifically training.
What I mean by that is that battling monsters is not how the characters in this show get stronger. Yes some battle experience plays a part in confidence building and making less practical mistakes… But the main message being driven home here is that it is generational education that makes each generation progressively stronger than the last.
Fern is unbelievably powerful, having trained under Frieren. She has not been in that many battles but she has been trained relentlessly from childhood by Frieren and she has the skill to demonstrate this. She also has the battle-personality of the person that trained her, she has a poker-face unlike any other and she is exceptional at hiding just how strong she really is.
The same goes for other characters in the show. The whole thing is about how people are trained. Who their educators were. What knowledge was passed to them by those educators.
When something new appears that nobody knows how to beat there is a collective effort to paradigm-shift all methods and find a solution. This paradigm-shift then becomes just totally normal and is educated into the next generation.
I highlight this because the traditional fantasy anime is all about defeating enemies to become stronger. But this is not. These people are all strong because they have been trained well. Their strengths are not from collecting EXP points over time by defeating mobs but by their educational backgrounds.
