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My white boy collection
I find Frieren's demons fascinating because what's being posited here is that demons are objectively always evil because they evolved from mimics, a creature that exists to trick and eat humans. The obvious difference being that a mimic is a non-sentient animal, while the series' demons very clearly are sentient people. We're supposed to take the series at its word when it states that the demons simply have no internality, no capacity to even desire to do good that doesn't ultimately lead to suffering and pain in the long run. But we see that they have individual personalities, preferences, and desires. They're clearly capable of independent thought, they can even feel fear and sorrow. They will just always invariably choose to hurt people. It's contradictory. Arbitrary. It's working backwards. A desire to justify Tolkien's objectively evil orcs, unironically, in current year. We're supposed to believe that they're more animal than person, while consistently being shown that they're people. It just doesn't make sense. It's circular logic. An equation that just returns the wrong answer.
So Demons are people that evolved from an asocial species. Interacting with people that evolved from hypersocial species.
So I remember there's a storyline with a Demon that tries to understand the whole friendship thing. I believe he winds up betraying the human friend in the end, but when the fight is decided, he goes over to die next to that friend (noting, he doesn't quite know why he's doing that), rather than anything else.
And even when they try, they're not wired to understand the underlying dynamics/values/relationships, so they fuck up in really fucked up ways from our point of view.
The conflict is basically, they have no aversion to violence, don't have pack/herd/tribe instincts, and that often leads to tragedy even when everyone is doing their best to make things work. (I'm reminded of Darker than Black)
Theoretically could Demons and Humans live in peace with one another? Yes. Most Demons don't care enough about doing so to put in the effort of learning how to do so, and the level of oversight and magic necessary to keep everyone safe is not easy to put together. Especially without a payout that everyone believes is possible.
And there's a lot of trauma from people who've lost loved ones, or witnessed some really blatantly horrifying deaths, and have no trust left. There's a flashback scene where a Himmel spares a Demon Child who is adopted by a human family and raised with love and care. Demon Child kills the family, save their daughter, who she gives to the family whose daughter she killed to make up for it.
Like from a species that isn't social, and doesn't have family relationships, I can see the logic. As a member of a hypersocial species that does, it's horrifying. And that's a really interesting conflict to explore.
See that's interesting, the problem is that the mayority of the famdom just goes "Lol no demons are evil, it's not that deep bro" and thats really fucking frustrating.
They're an asocial species, yes, but they're also an asocial species that EATS HUMANS.-
(Well, actually, multiple species that eat humans, the in universe definition of 'Demon' is 'ANY monster that can mimic human speech', we see a few 'Demons' that aren't the common 'horned human' type, like Quall, or that one four armed snake guy, there are multiple species of 'Demon', and, technically, a giant man eating parrot that can mimic human words would count as one too.)
I'm not saying this as a moral value judgement, because a cat eating a mouse isn't evil, it's just eating.
Honestly, people who say the demons in Frieren are evil have no media literacy, because "Evil" actually has a meaning, and it requires "A profound Malice"
Demons in Frieren explicitly don't feel malice towards Humans, that has absolutely nothing to do with why they kill Humans at all. The idea that a Demon would feel malice towards a human is treated like a joke at some point, something only someone who knows nothing about Demons would think.
Demons kill Humans for the same reason Foxes kill chickens, Humans are food and Demons kill them basically by reflex, basically without much thinking about it.
Some make a game of it, and play with their food, like cats, but it's just something they do effectively on autopilot.
Demon's and Humans CANNOT coexist as things are now, because Demon's have such a strong impulse to kill humans and no reason to even try fighting it, because, like. Humans are food, you can't just... Not eat. And Humans will absolutely NOT accept being prey if they don't have to, and with the current magical renaissance, they don't have to anymore and they aren't.
Frieren even brings up that the Demon Kings plan to coexist with humans could have hypothetically worked- it's just that humans would go extinct long before he got close to succeeding at the rate he was going, and if she has to choose between Humans going extinct and Demons going extinct, her choice is obvious.
The actual fundamental underpinning isn't 'tolkiens orcs', it's "Deer have developed a highly effective way to kill Wolves, and now the Wolves are dying so fast they don't have time to evolve to not piss off the Deer before they go extinct."
The Demons aren't stupid, they can tell that thing's have gone wrong, that their previous status quo isn't working anymore, but they can't change fast enough and Humans won't let themselves be killed for the hundreds of thousands of years it would take for evolution to spit out Demons that have lost their "see human, kill human" instincts.
Probably doesn't help that their first few attempts to 'adjust' was to double down on what's making humans kill them, instead of trying to ween off Humans as prey, they started grouping up more to try and use numbers to counter humans numbers, but Humans are far better at the numbers and teamwork game as the Demons are, so that was a losing strategy too.
People giving Frieren shit for how she responds to Demons also seem to forget that like, 99% of why Elves are going extinct, and probably already effectively are, is because Demons ran an extermination campaign on them, which I don't think they've stopped, thinking on it.
The Demons in Frieren are fascinating, because their hunting camo is so good it's fooled a good chunk of the people reading the manga, even when it spells things out, blatantly.
It's not "the evil race of evil beings must die because they're evil", it's "a type of human hunting predator convergently evolved sapience to prey on sapients, the sapients developed the ability kill their predator in job lots, so now there are two categories of sapients, and they flat out cannot and will not stand for how things are."
Demons collectively cannot tolerate prey that won't be meekly be preyed upon, and Humans (and Elves and Dwarves) wont tolerate being preyed on now that they don't have to, so either the Demons break the humans back down into scattered, helpless prey, or the Humans kill the Demons until they stop preying on them (so, when they're all dead).
Humans in real life have done this EXACT thing almost everywhere we went, we just did it tens of thousands of years ago. The only difference is that the Demons in Frieren can talk and are smart enough to roughly understand what's happening, but not enough to see or collectively act on any way to stop it.
It's more of an environmental allegory than a racial one. We literally meet a Demon anthropologist who talked about convergent evolution and her attempts to try and understand what's happening.
We had an entire arc with Macht that showed that Demons can just barely scratch the surface level of human thought if they devote centuries of life to doing it, they're sapient beings, they CAN work it out- But the number of humans that have to die for even one Demon to do that is just... It's not worth it.
Frieren never says it's impossible, it says it's just not worth the cost.
Humans want to reach out, and sometimes other things reach back, but some things won't, in the world of Frieren, it worked out fine with Elves and Dwarves, because they're similar enough even if they're not the SAME, but it didn't with Demons.
Honestly, the biggest issue I see is that a lot of people seem to just... Refuse, out of hand, to accept even the idea that a sapient species could exist and not be exactly the same as Humans, or that you can write a story with different species without it being an allegory or subtext for race.
Frieren herself isn't Human, and trying to reconcile and understand the differences between herself and the Humans she knows and cares for is part of the core of the story. It's just that Elves don't eat Humans, so her attempts to understand Humans have a significantly less fatal consequence when she fails or makes a mistake.
Thinking on it, part of Frieren's core story is different species trying to reach out and understand each other, and their failures, struggles and successes at it. Elves feel and process emotions and time differently from Humans, and Demons are different from both of them, too, we see Frieren and Serie's attempts with understanding Humans, so to do Macht and Solitar try to understand Humans in their own ways- It's just that their ways involve killing thousands of Humans. Though Solitar probably ate more of the Humans she killed than Macht did.
Trying to claim that Frieren just says they're evil is just not reading Frieren, the story DOES go in depth into how Demons think, how they feel, how much they understand about what's happening to them and their species. The Demon King, it turns out, actually DID understand the problem and figure out the solution that would solve things if he could get it to work (Change Demon Culture and Instinctual drives so they stop killing Humans, so they can coexist without either needing to win and wipe out the other (because as things stood, Humans were going to be the winners of that game if it continued, not Demons)- He just couldn't do it.
The Demon general who can see the future apparently saw a future where Demons don't get entirely wiped out (or at least, not in the next millennia) and probably has his own post mortem plan running to that end, and we'll probably see that eventually, which will likely continue the core story beat of different species trying to understand each other.
Thinking on it, the current arc with the Shadow Warriors has made clear they're being directed by someone who can see the future... Could it be they're proxies for Schlact? Bringing an End to Magic WOULD even the playing field enough to take the pressure off of Demons for a decent while, the core cause of their current routing is Humans collectively surpassing them at magic, after all.
Given how utterly central magical power is to Demon culture, if ANYTHING could force a massive cultural realignment, it'd be losing it. Of course, I DESPISE "The Magic Goes Away" as a story concept, so...
The first rule of cable management is "out of sight, out of mind"
The second rule of cable management is that all true art is provocative. If zero people want to kill you over it, it's not good art.
S'ghetti Closet
unfortunately this is not the worst i’ve seen…
An upsetting amount of people have been accusing my friends of being scammers. It fills me with so much sadness that beyond the constant physical threat of bombs and bullets, people internationally threaten their ability to even call out for help by attempting to label them as liars.
Mohammed, his daughter Mona, and their whole family, have been trapped in Gaza for the entirety of the two year onslaught.
The UN has only recently declared it a genocide due to the ground invasion currently happening in Gaza.
I can provide you no more definitive proof of the validity of their identity, and their status, than Mona holding up my name in front of their tent.
Betrayal
Sam and Dean driving to the next small town after straight up murdering people
Do you know anything i can donate to for palestine that's not the gofundmes because the idea of having to choose who needs my money more is just. scary to me they all need it 3: maybe there's a thing that splits/distributes money evenly???? idk but help would be appreciated
Gazafunds actually deals with this anxiety and makes a decision for you if you want. Their home page has a spotlighted fundraiser and the code consider things like how close the gfm is to finishing, when the most recent donation is, etc. So it's randomized to help as many people as possible.
There's also @helpgazachildren which if you donate, you can help multiple people at once since it's a whole mutual aid fund, or at least close to it. Hussam distributes money to people who need it when he's asked.
hurt people hurt people. hurt people! HURT PEOPLE!!! NOW NOW NOW GO GO GO
