It quite literally does the exact opposite, repeatedly and emphatically devaluing everything Fascists value and making its villains just do literally every Fascist thing. Its only misstep is in making a species of ontologically-fascist demons who just can’t help but do fascist things. If Frieren were fascist it would be oriented around fascist ideals instead of just stumbling into a problematic analogue to one facet of real-world fascist propaganda by making its might-makes-right, anti-empathic, elitist, warrior-cult, racial-supremacist villains innately fascist by dint of being magical predators, instead of making them simply indoctrinated into that ethos or the like.
This is even more tiring than the Dandadan struggle sessions.
The worst part of the dandadan struggle sessions is that I had to learn about the klanklklan controversy (how a bunch of racists tried to ruin the show for non white people) on youtube, I would’ve expected it to come up here
Anime is a visual medium. You are correct about the writing. You still have the visuals of a bunch of Germans who like doing genocide to undermench coded women ans children.
Every demon in the show is not only a soldier, but an officer commanding troops as part of an actual, tangible military force that is doing genocide. Like they’re not even settler colonialists bringing and settling civilians alongside them, they’re the actual formal military of an invading genocidal empire, who are uniformed and engaging in atrocities in uniform. They’re also explicitly elite forces, with even the weakest of them being akin to elite human warriors or mages. The only “child” demon is a small one that some humans tried to raise as a pet.
Which is not communicated visually. So, while the writing about it may be well done there vibes require context to interpret that seems to get lost often enough that there is a flaw somewhere
![[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}
It quite literally does the exact opposite, repeatedly and emphatically devaluing everything Fascists value and making its villains just do literally every Fascist thing. Its only misstep is in making a species of ontologically-fascist demons who just can’t help but do fascist things. If Frieren were fascist it would be oriented around fascist ideals instead of just stumbling into a problematic analogue to one facet of real-world fascist propaganda by making its might-makes-right, anti-empathic, elitist, warrior-cult, racial-supremacist villains innately fascist by dint of being magical predators, instead of making them simply indoctrinated into that ethos or the like.
This is even more tiring than the Dandadan struggle sessions.
At this point I’m half expecting the “Frieren is fascist” gang to start going off about how nazis need to be humanized in any WWII media lol
But the German barbarians are not ontologically evil. They are evil, because their material conditions determine their consciousness.
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The worst part of the dandadan struggle sessions is that I had to learn about the klanklklan controversy (how a bunch of racists tried to ruin the show for non white people) on youtube, I would’ve expected it to come up here
Anime is a visual medium. You are correct about the writing. You still have the visuals of a bunch of Germans who like doing genocide to undermench coded women ans children.
Every demon in the show is not only a soldier, but an officer commanding troops as part of an actual, tangible military force that is doing genocide. Like they’re not even settler colonialists bringing and settling civilians alongside them, they’re the actual formal military of an invading genocidal empire, who are uniformed and engaging in atrocities in uniform. They’re also explicitly elite forces, with even the weakest of them being akin to elite human warriors or mages. The only “child” demon is a small one that some humans tried to raise as a pet.
Which is not communicated visually. So, while the writing about it may be well done there vibes require context to interpret that seems to get lost often enough that there is a flaw somewhere