Ah yes, famously conservative media like One Piece, Ghost in the Shell, Gundam, Princess Mononoke, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and Cowboy Bebop
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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What the fuck is conservative about a show about an elf who outlives her friends and kinda has a midlife crisis about that before going on an adventure to get to know them and other people better
There's an episode where she attacks a demon on sight under the assumption that all members of the demon race are evil, and instead of it being a learning moment it's all like: "yeah, demons are all evil." And she's vindicated in her desire to kill all demons.
I get that some people ascribe fascist undertones to this show, but imo it can just as easily be read as "the demons are the fascists".
For instance it's established early on that one of their goals is to genocide the elves.
Yeah except this is what Nazis think black people want to do to them. I’ve never heard of this show but that checks out if it has a Nazi framework
I mean the demons in this show make it clear that they're literally incapable of co-existing with anyone else and will kill other races whenever given the opportunity. It's not a matter of what anyone "thinks", they're willingly admitting to it. You know, kinda like fascists.
You’re talking about the diegetic reality of the show, I’m talking about the interpretations people would have as someone outside of that diegetic reality, and also how similar that diegetic reality is to delusional fascist perceptions of reality
I'm unconvinced that the average fascist wouldn't root for the demons though. The way they are written as arrogant, devoid of empathy, obsessed with hierarchy and so on, would at the very least appeal to the chan-brained fash contingent.
For all we know that could be exactly why this guy included it in his weird-ass list.
Look at Goblin Slayer for a similar seeming situation. Sure, the goblins in that story have far more in common with fascists IRL than they do with any real minority, but it’s a fascist story the entire way through- It just looks like it isn’t because that’s how delusional fascists are. The fact it’s a biologically essentialist thing in both cases is the tip off to me. The difference between us and Nazis, besides the obvious communism stuff, I mean, is the fact that we despise people for what they believe and do, while fascists despise people for what they are and what they’re born as, all of the evil goblins do in Goblin Slayer or all the made up stories about evil things minorities do are just cope to justify their unhinged hatred of someone’s inherent self. I’ve never seen that show, so it could be more in line with an ideological thing than a biological one with the demons, but it sure sounds essentialist just with what people said here.
I suck at media crit and am just generally not very good with words, but I'm gonna take one last stab at this.
The point I'm trying to make is that reading fascist intent into things like people are doing with Frieren could be just massively overthinking things.
Look at it this way: While it's true that, say, stories about zombies and alien invasions were originally based on a reactionary fear of "the other", I sincerely doubt that the vast majority of people who write these sort of stories in our current time sit down and make a conscious decision of using them as allegories for immigration or anti-colonialism or whatever. They just grew up with these tropes and want to build an interesting world around them that has nothing at all to do with what connotations they may have had like a century or more ago. The phrase "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" comes to mind.
So fascists and socialists could both be wrong in reading these stories as supporting fascism.
Does that make sense?
Oh yeah i had a big dumb moment and didn’t notice this part,
From a political perspective, there is no such thing. Yes, the chance of the writer being an actual Nazi is low, but when someone makes something “non-political” it is really just their baseline assumptions about what is or isn’t political.
Best case scenario it’s just a menacing fantasy antagonist species for an exciting and fun adventure, and that’s ok. But if they do mean anything more real with it, it’s probably that fascism is good, just going off the track record of anime/manga writers.
Ah yes, lets just assume that every japanese creator is a fascist.
I'm sure that's gonna go great, oh 5 day old account you.
I know there’s plenty of good manga/anime writers politically, it’s just also kind of a conservative country (and don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s especially conservative compared to any Western country, American writers have a bad track record too, we just block it out). I was trying to make a semi-joking point about how common nostalgia for Imperial Japan or stuff like what happened with Attack on Titan is.
Yeah, but fascists aren't born that way. Its an ideology. The demons as presented are inherently evil, it's not because of their social conditions.
Ok, and? If in this world demons are inherently evil, then so what?
Because they look and talk like humans? You don't see anything problematic about a group humanoid people being inherently evil? This isn't some new critique of fanatasy. Having inherently evil races is race science 101.
The only good demon being a dead demon is sus.