'Pure Evil' fantasy races

DokiDokiTsuna 2025-11-19 01:09:40 UTC #1

Before I say anything else: let’s just try our best to be civil here. ^^;

So, the title is referring to a fairly common argument that usually gets brought up in discussions of DnD and other traditional fantasy media…and more recently, in discussions of the Frieren anime. The idea is that you CAN create a fantasy race of sentient beings whose only in-universe purpose is to be evil, and whose only narrative purpose is to serve as antagonists who can be exterminated without moral consequences or dilemmas. And then, of course, there’s the counter-argument that you can’t, you shouldn’t, and/or attempting to do so is morally reprehensible.

I’ve been watching this discourse from afar, for the most part…because it seems like a lot of people approach it in bad faith, or from a ridiculously surface-level perspective. T_T I can’t tell you how many YT thumbnails I’ve seen about the demons in Frieren where the title is basically “THEY’RE NOT HUMAN, YOU MORONS”...ignoring the fact that, yeah, the counter-arguers already know that. ._.
If you’re already calling people stupid when you’ve only peeled back the first layer of the argument (without even actually arguing against it yet– like, why are they not considered human? Because the author said so?? Do we not…get to have different opinions on what constitutes humanity…?) then I don’t think I care to hear the rest of what you have to say.

And then a lot of counter-arguers go with the first-route argument of “that’s the same thing genocidal dictators say about their targets, y’know” which is like…yes, that’s absolutely true, and I’ve yet to see any of the arguers address that factoid (which is a little concerning). But…do you know why they do that?? Do you not have anything to add?? Or are you just going to call people Hitler and leave…? This is honestly just as facepalm-worthy…

Fortunately, I have higher expectations for the community on this forum, and I hope to hear some opinions that have some actual thought put into them. ^^; So to start, here are mine:

I don’t think it’s inherently problematic to make evil fantasy races...but I do think it becomes more problematic the more you humanize them.

For example, the Grimm in RWBY are actually a pretty good example of an ‘evil race’ that serves its purpose correctly. They’re portrayed as more animal-like than human-like, and even then they’re separate from normal animals in their general lack of emotion or self-preservation– they feel less like ‘creatures’ and more like a force of nature given form. Especially when we see them spawning in on the spot from their Grimm-liquid…they’re very far-removed from any life-forms that exist IRL, so when the characters tell us these things are manifestations of darkness that they have to kill on sight, I can understand and accept that.

But if you start making these Grimm into people who clearly have thoughts and feelings in addition to that darkness (something the writers actually attempt to address by fusing Grimm WITH humans in the later seasons)...it gets harder to accept and understand. And I think it’s supposed to.
People seeing humanity in characters and creatures that appear human isn’t some kind of defect or a sign of ignorance; it’s literally the way our brains are wired. We are supposed to do that, so that we have as much motivation as possible to connect with other members of our species and care for each other before being scared off by our differences. So, if you’re gonna ask people to ignore that instinct…you need to have a damn good reason.

You also need to recognize that, historically, the reason people usually have in mind is ‘to get away with murdering people en masse’. Like…probably since the dawn of language itself, very cruel people have called other people inhuman, or the spawn of the devil, or mentally incapable of coexistence, or all of the above, simply to justify getting rid of them. So when you use that language to describe your fictional races, a large chunk of your audience is naturally going to recognize that. When they start saying you sound like a fascist, even in bad faith, it’s because you kinda do. =/ Your job as a writer/reviewer is to convince the audience that you aren’t through the fictional context, not to start screaming and crying and throwing up as if it’s a frightening and unfathomable assumption.

Like, it must be nice to be privileged and sheltered enough that the IRL parallels don’t immediately start flashing into your mind upon hearing the “they’re not real humans” logic, but most people don’t have that luxury. It’s a fact of life; you can’t “it’s not that deep” your way out of the reality you live in. o_O
And if we can give the (well-deserved) side-eye to JKR for writing a fictional race of slaves that love being slaves, despite it being thoroughly explained and justified in her narrative, then this kind of stuff can get the side-eye too. It’s the same thing. T_T

So like I said, you need to give the audience a reason to believe you. Either that, or just let it exist as a moral dilemma that may not have a definite right or wrong answer; something your protagonists have different perspectives on due to their experiences and upbringing.

I just think, in general, accepting moral grayness makes more sense than insisting that it MUST be completely OK to kill [insert race] because of [insert argument], since…I mean, call me crazy, but I wasn’t aware that it was completely OK to kill anyone. ‘_’ Pretty sure most people consider the death of an enemy to be a last resort, something that is done when all other options have been exhausted, or would lead to even more unfavorable outcomes. That is a moral tradeoff you accept with a certain amount of seriousness (and continually try to avoid), not a free pass to go to murder-town without ever looking back.

Like…there’s a reason it’s now considered wrong to waltz outside and start slaughtering apex predators left and right, just because they’re dangerous, violent, and don’t care about human life. Because they don’t; a grizzly bear will feel no remorse about slaughtering you just because it felt like you might be a problem that day. Heck, orcas will kill you just for funzies. But that doesn’t automatically mean it’s OK to wipe them off the face of the earth??? o_O

We try to coexist with wild animals as much as we can, because we’ve decided that’s the right thing to do. Even if they are literally incapable of understanding, appreciating, or reciprocating that concern…it’s our moral standard. And it’s something I’ve never seen anyone bring up in these arguments…like, so what if they’re “not human”? Nonhumans deserve consideration too; have you forgotten about that…?

In conclusion: I think this need to find a form of genocide they can justify unequivocally is something people get hung up on when they really don’t have to (which is why I tend to err on the side of distrusting the ‘arguers’...).
After all, to this day we still enjoy stories where protagonists remorselessly slaughter 100% real human beings for whatever deeply-important motivation they’re working towards– the difference between those stories and these is that they don’t need to bend reality to justify it. They don’t ask the audience for a pass; they don’t demand that we be okay with it and never question it because the people the protagonist hates and kills were literally only born to be hated and killed. They just give us the reasons why the protagonist feels they need to kill these people, and they let that sit with the gravity it deserves.

And with that in mind, I think making evil races that you can kill without consequence is inherently an unserious decision; it’s usually done just to facilitate interesting high-stakes fights on a regular basis in battle-oriented series. If you look at it that way, it feels fitting for series like RWBY and Frieren…and, again, all the furor over defending it feels overblown and unnecessary.

Like, the author literally made a choice just to give the characters something to do, usually to provide a framework for a separate moral dilemma (in RWBY that’s the whole child-soldier thing; in Frieren I think it’s more about politics?); you’re roleplaying fascists and eugenicists for no real reason. ⚆_⚆; Like, if it actually is “not that deep”, I think it’s from the opposite direction…rather than trying to prove that it’s stupid to care about [insert race] (and by extension, any one or thing IRL that resembles [insert race]...), you'll gain more by examining the role [insert race] is serving in the FICTIONAL narrative through their actions and deaths, and trying to prove that it’s worthwhile for the overall message.

theyrebothakilogram 2025-11-19 03:01:32 UTC #2

To be honest, that part of Frieren didn't really sit right with me. I'm sure it's not a super big deal, but the rhetoric of "You shouldn't feel bad about killing people begging for their lives because they're just manipulating you" just feels icky. I know that's different in context because it is in a fantasy setting. But I feel like it boils down to something that I don't really enjoy seeing in media.

LunarScyphozoa 2025-11-19 03:57:54 UTC #3

I do feel like the explanation of “they’re monsters made of magic who is simply learned how to appear and speak like humans to hunt better” could work amazingly.. were the first example of demon behavior meant to prove this beyond a doubt a small child who figured out that humans won’t kill her if she calls out for her mother, then peacefully lived with a human girl for a few months (she did kill her father, but that was during an attempt to make the parents of a girl she ate feel better by providing them a new child to replace her). I might just be soft, but that was.. not the scenario I would go with if I wanted to emphasize that demons are not people or animals but monsters. At the very least I wouldn’t have used a little girl appearing around seven or eight as the demon in this example. Manipulative and not even understanding why humans spare her when she asks for her mama to save her? She was. But also, a child trying not to get murdered? She sure was. It’s the only iffy part of an otherwise superb show, but it is such a large problem it somewhat tarnishes all the stuff I like about the show.

ButterflyEmpress 2025-11-19 07:04:58 UTC #4

I think having the evil species being a magical manifestation of a negative concepts(wrath, greed, causing harm, etc.) is the best way of going about it. Then it turns into combatting the flaws of humanity rather than unfairly deciding what species should be allowed to exist. Maybe a society that has sexism and racism tied to their culture or a society where the rich rulers enslave their citizens are more likely to become overrun with demons/monsters.

kyupol 2025-11-19 08:53:24 UTC #5

I always preferred the idea where there's no team total good or team total evil. Especially if it's about factions of humans fighting each other. There's the good and the evil embedded in all factions.

DokiDokiTsuna 2025-11-19 12:35:41 UTC #6

See, this is the kind of stuff that made me want to start this topic...I haven't actually watched Frieren, but everything I hear about the demons sounds painfully sympathetic...like, to the point where I think you could legitimately argue that the author made a mistake in the writing process. You don't characterize people/things like that and expect the audience NOT to sympathize. o_O And as a member of the audience seeing other members sympathize with things like that, the LAST thing I would expect is for them to go ballistic and act like that's an abnormal, unreasonable reaction, as opposed to just going with how the author tells you to feel. But they do, and it doesn't make sense to me.

A scene like that doesn't work without the sympathetic element; the whole reason we're expected to be extra horrified by "evil monster disguised as cute baby child" is BECAUSE of the "cute baby child" part...and then we're immediately asked to ignore it??? I'm sorry, but as a writer, if you don't want the audience to think about something, Step 1 is to not put it in your story...because once it's there, it's fair game. A narrative is not an instruction manual, it's a world, and if that world has no room for any opinion outside of the one the protagonist holds, it's not a well-made world. I'm surprised more people aren't put off by this...

Like, things like this CAN work:

But there's a way to write it that makes it feel like something truly malicious and manipulative, rather than a survival instinct (which is morally neutral), or something sincere, even if it's expressed abnormally...which is, like, a reflection of how many IRL people just are??
For me personally, ^that's the aspect of it that icks me out...many of the (again, unnecessary) arguments defending this creative decision seem to be implying that people IRL who don't have empathy, or just don't have a full understanding of the harm they cause for whatever reason, should just be put to death. No attempts should be made to simply protect people from them, or find some way to mitigate the harm they cause; just kill them because why not. Which is an insane thing to say with your whole chest.

Zhengo 2025-11-19 14:47:53 UTC #7

(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless flagged)

Zhengo 2025-11-19 16:12:09 UTC #8

Oh yes a chance for me to rant about Frieren and it's annoying stans. To start off, I feel like there wouldn't be NEARLY as many defenders for the demon writing if it weren't for the fact that the anime was well animated and well directed that it just came onto the scene automatically netting a giant fan base where people are unable to accept their favorite show might be gasp flawed.

Now for the main meat of this post - THE WRITING OF THE DEMONS IN FRIEREN IS BROKEN ON FUNDAMENTALLY EVERY LEVEL.

It has:
- problematic messaging when applied to reality (both on a surface level and deeper level)
- the worldbuilding use of "biological" reasoning fails at basic biology
- it's completely uninteresting as an antagonistic force
- its thematic function in relation to the protagonist is also unnecessary to apply to an entire race, and is in fact wasting potential to explore the protagonist's arc in other interesting ways
- it's also straight up BAD at actually convincing the audience it's impossible for demons and humans to co-exist, like actually in some ways it accidentally does the opposite

Problematic messaging
So let's work from the most surface level criticisms all the way to the deep end. Yes, the rhetoric of "these guys look and act like humans but are actually monsters manipulating you" is legit rhetoric used by real life fascists. Fascists dehumanize groups of people and the key part is the "look human but actually inhuman" sounds very much like something people can apply to marginalize groups of people.

Moving a little deeper, as you said, making the justification for their eradication a biological reason instead of some supernatural reason (like being a manifestation of greed or something) is also flawed in that now you are grappling with an actual intelligent sentient race of beings who didn't choose to be born needing to eat humans, and the story's solution is just a shallow "kill em all" approach, and ofc "xyz race is just biologically evil" is also a racist rhetoric used in reality.

Now the last thing that I feel like is not brought up enough in these criticisms. The rhetoric against the demons is not only racist but also ABLEIST. Throughout the story, it's constantly emphasized that demons and humans cannot co-exist because demons are unable to feel (emotional) empathy and so they're just destined to be in conflict and kill humans. This is completely ignoring the fact that little or not empathy is actually a condition humans in real life actually have! It is commonly associated with neurodivergence and other mental illnesses, but more importantly people who lack emotional empathy are not automatically evil murderers! Having emotional empathy does NOT automatically mean a person is moral, and vice versa. A person who lacks emotional empathy can still choose to be a good person through cognitive empathy, logical reasoning, etc. Frieren's messaging of "humans and demons will never understand each other, demons don't have empathy or love, so they will never coexist and demons should all deserve to die" sounds very much like saying anyone with ASPD (the "stereotypical no empathy disorder") should die. It doesn't bother to explore options of coexistence between demons and humans beyond "they can't understand each other so let's just give up".

Failed biology
So Frieren goes with the silly "biological" reasoning that demons are mimics that evolved to look and sound like humans so that humans can let their guard down around them and get eaten. Alright, let's entertain that we decide to see the demon-human conflict as biological and the result of "evolution". Are you saying there have been no demons that have "evolved" a genetic mutation that makes them not need a human diet? In all honesty, making your prey another intelligent species that can develop an attitude to hunt you down and eradicate you due to being your prey sounds very inconvenient for survival. You'd think there would at least be a subset of mutated demons that are just living the easy survival life living off of beef or something and having an easier time reproducing because they're not wasting time manipulating humans all day. If you're going to go the biological route, at least use more than elementary biology.

Uninteresting antagonistic force
This one will be short, but the demons only being an antagonistic group is just boring. We barely explore evil in other intelligent species (there's maybe one or two antagonists but they're never seen as pure evil), and having just one intelligent species as your monolith evil race gets old after a while.

Badly executed thematically
So one slightly compelling argument for the writing for the demons is that they're meant to be a foil to Frieren as a long lived race who love magic over humans. Okay cool...except why do we need the foil to be an entire species instead of just an individual? If anything an individual for a foil might be more interesting because at least you could keep them around longer and develop them into an interesting character in their own right.

Also considering Frieren's arc revolves around the world changing around her rapidly in contrast to her barely changing due to her lifespan, you'd think we could also explore some interesting dynamics such as her realizing too late that demons have already changed from the past and some can co-exist with humans now. And having to deal with that culture shock. Basically, we're leaving a lot of interesting exploration of the story's messaging on the table just to uphold the silly "evil race" thing.

The writing is just bad
Finally like...the story does a lot of TELLING instead of SHOWING that demons need to eat humans. Disclaimer as I watched the anime to episode 18 and only know of spoilers afterwards, so maybe they did show like some throwaway what would happen if demons didn't eat humans. But as far as I know, we don't know what would happen if a demon just stopped eating humans. Would they starve? I guess that's the implication, but like, what is unique about human diet that they can't replace with other meat diet? Since this show loves "biological explanations" so much, you'd think they'd go a little more into detail why they can only digest humans. From spoilers I've seen, there's a demon in the story that goes years without eating a human. He still seems perfectly fine. Even The Promised Neverland went into more detail for why their demons need to eat humans than this story.

Also as mentioned, the scene they show to "prove" why demons should be eradicated using the child... straight up DOESN'T PROVE ANYTHING. The most it proves is that demons are not born with the same emotional priorities as humans, they don't automatically understand it's bad to kill and you can't just replace someone's daughter with another girl. The demon child was just using logic that made sense to her but not to humans. "Oh. I don't want this lady to kill me for being angry about her dead child, so I will fix that by giving her a new child. That will surely stop making her angry." None of her intentions in those actions were out of malice, she wasn't even trying to eat anyone. As stated above in the problematic messaging segment, not being born with a brain wired the "normal" way DOESN'T automatically mean they should be eradicated. If anything, this scene, while shocking, ironically also seems to say actually it is possible for demons to co-exist. Demons use logic! Sure if not taught well their logic may not factor off of the emotional factor for humans, but this means hypothetically a demon could co-exist with humans peacefully if said demon logically decides it's more advantageous to their survival to just not piss them off.

Yes, I am aware of the one demon in the story that attempted this as illustrated by the spoilers I mentioned above, except that attempt was shut down again because said demon was more interested in this coexistence as a science experiment instead of a legit attempt to survive and the story used the asinine "demons and humans can't understand each other" argument again.

Conclusions
Like, the way the demons are written are just bad and people who defend this are honestly delusional in my most harsh words. You cannot tell me an entire race where every individual we've seen will always be evil antagonists because "muh biology" is not offensive or boring.

For a better example, take a look at the mindflayers in baldur's gate 3 for "morally questionable species who must eat human (brains) for survival". Even though most mind flayers we encounter in the game are antagonistic, THERE ARE mind flayers that can become your allies. In fact, there is a mindflayer that is actively researching a way to become independent from the need to eat brains! Sure, they still need to kill other people to eat their brains, but the non antagonistic ones tend to follow a "code" of who can be eaten. Some only eat criminals, etc. This is all interesting ideas that spawn discussion.

In Frieren, you just get "haha I'm a demon I love eating humans" for like 99% of the time. None of them follow a code, (almost) none of them have any opinions on their forced dependence of consuming a dangerous prey. When they do have an opinion the narrative still dismissed their opinion as futile. It's all so BORING.

In all honesty, I think the writer just wanted an easy antagonist group that their OP protagonists can look cool blasting and defeating without the audience feeling morally conflicted about it. Honestly, that's all cool and good, I'm down for shallow good v evil content sometimes too. But said writer repeatedly shoots themselves in the foot trying to be "deep" and trying to bait the audience into sympathizing into a moral quandary, only to say their sympathy is unwarranted, there actually is no moral quandary, and we should just enjoy the protags blasting em. They want the shallow good vs evil, but also are too insecure and want to be "deep and complex" about their shallow good vs evil conflict.

Like, you could've avoided all this trouble and just went with some generic backstory like demons are just manifestation of human evil or some shit. Don't try to be deep with "biology" if you were never interested in exploring anything deeply in the first place.

Oriflamme 2025-11-19 16:17:53 UTC #9

Part of the issue of ‘evil races’ is that the very concept by nature brings real world baggage into it. In a complete vacuum, it could work, but real life there is no such thing. As soon as you use race as a concept, your creation becomes loaded with the implication of the word. I would argue that the most successful version of the trope works when you can’t describe them as ‘races’. Zombies are the most well known version of it (Although I don’t personally like it because even then, I find it too engrained in the notion of “civilised men” vs. “mindless savages.”). Evil A.I. is another great example, since they are a singular entity sending out roombas with guns attached to them, race never comes into the picture. Sidenote, everyone go watch 86, it has a really good take on the evil AI (it also technically features zombies, and deals heavily with the issue of “race” ).

A good example of inherently evil demons is in warhammer 40k because from the outset they are presented as emotions coalesced in physical form not as a race like Orks or eldars. They suck because humans sucks and millions of years of war created this inescapable vicious circle of violence and suffering. Also warhammer does get away with actual inherit evil races because everyone is evil, the galaxy is fucked and you get to watch the spectacle of idiots fighting out who will have the honor of being the one who will turn off the lights at the end.

ButterflyEmpress 2025-11-20 01:52:09 UTC #10

Demons are never shown eating humans in the anime. I almost forgot that's what they wanted to do. They also establish that demons aren't raised by their birth parents which is why they don't know what "fathers" are and don't feel sad when their own kind dies. You'd think demons would form familiar units so they'd have stronger bonds to overtake humanity or stick around to make sure their kids grow up. They already know to work in groups.

DokiDokiTsuna 2025-11-20 02:00:18 UTC #11

Severely underrated statement. Honestly, it makes me want to write something deconstructing the 'can't understand human emotion = dangerous and probably shouldn't even exist' trope that so many sci-fi/fantasy writers love to play with...because to be perfectly honest, I would much rather have to deal with an enemy who wants to harm me and doesn't understand why that's bad, than an enemy who wants to harm me despite already understanding why it's bad, choosing to ignore their precious neurotypicality on purpose just to make me suffer (a.k.a. the majority of perpetrators of violence IRL). At least the former might be logically convinced to stop...

I do agree with this (and as a scientist, it gets very tiring to watch writers continually using real-life science as an excuse to enforce stupid non-real-life rules...like, either make up your own paradigms, or learn the actual complexity of the fields you're "referencing" )
But to be frank, I think this is beneath even elementary biology; the concept of alternate food sources is something even a preschool child can grasp. I guarantee if you presented this 'dilemma' to a roomful of 5-year-olds, at least one of them would suggest convincing the demons to eat chicken nuggets instead of people. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Like...this scenario isn't just ignoring biology; it's using biology as a smokescreen to convince you to ignore basic survival logic. Because the idea of mimics :･ﾟ✧evolving:･ﾟ✧ to resemble humans so they can target them is just so freakin' cool, I guess you're supposed to be so impressed you immediately stop thinking about it after you hear it. :T

And on that note:

Admittedly, this is a cool idea. And I think it could have worked in the series almost exactly the same way without causing all this discourse. They'd just need to make one tiny change, and that is to let the demons behave more like traditional villains and WANT to hurt people.

After all, mimics are supposed to trick you; that's their whole thing-- so the obvious personality to give an anthropomorphized mimic would be that of a trickster character. Someone who delights in luring humans to their deaths, who has fun playing with their food.

Frieren can still be dead-set on murdering these demons, you can still write them as irredeemable antagonists, and if you insist on making it weird, you can even imply that they have a psychological tendency to act like this because of their evolutionary origin as mimics. But by making it a conscious choice (i.e. something they don't NEED to do), you are allowing the audience to read these actions as 'evil', and not 'but...you're basically saying they don't know any better'.
It feels a lot more necessary to punish needless cruelty than inadvertent cruelty. And associating societal attitudes with fictional races is a lot less problematic...people usually don't have an issue with arrogant elves or industrious dwarves, for example.

The reason I think the author didn't do this is because...well, it doesn't feel as edgy as a race war. ^^; Again, if you're really into the specific uncanny feel of the 'can't understand human emotion = dangerous' trope, this idea wouldn't allow you to have that. The sadistic theatrics of the demons would probably overshadow it...to play devil's advocate for a half-second, the canon interpretation is more unique.

But more unique doesn't necessarily mean better. T_T I'd much rather challenge myself to put a fresh spin on a slightly-more-common idea than parrot offensive and genuinely harmful talking points with a slightly-less-common idea.
You would lose so little by revising this concept to allow for the mere possibility of demons who just want to live their lives; allowing the protagonists to fight against evil rather than fight against a species...I can't see any good reason to go with the canon version instead.

jwabeasley 2025-11-20 02:03:24 UTC #12

No promises! Somehow these threads often devolve...

I'm one of those who found Frieren's take to be quite refreshing. I find the idea that there are entities who exclusively predate on humans, and while they appear to be intelligent, have no emotions except overconfident hunger and abject fear, and must be destroyed without hesitation. It also aligns well with lore about many kinds of demons in folklore - it doesn't matter if you want to comfort the devil, it is dangerous, smarter than you, wishes for your utter destruction, any response other than fight or flight can only harm you.

It also serves a valuable role in a story as a contrast to the protagonists who are all about empathy and care of the smallest things.

It's also a refreshing take in a world where I'm constantly bombarded with male demons being common romantasy love interests. He may be a demon king who rules multiple circles of hell, but he's hot and has never felt this way about Mary Sue before...

We'd feel a lot different about it as a society if the predators were a regular and frequent danger to us and our families!

Absolutely. When we had that "Man or bear" kerfuffle, I kept thinking about Timothy Treadwell...

This from a guy whose comic is a demon vs an angel! But I agree with you.

I think Aura and her demon minions were a much better illustration of standard demons in that setting than that one backstory bit was. But it might be the case that a demon /could/ be genuinely good. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a demon that could be good more or less is the origin for the beings we know as elves in that setting.

Frieren could also be slightly wrong, maybe demons could be salvageable, it's just so dangerous and challenging that doing it is not feasible, and extermination is the only option. While Frieren is generally an excellent show, I think this is one point where Goblin Slayer has the edge. There's no redeeming those gobbos.

Let's leave that one, HP is a great lesson on how a compelling story can get by with vibe worldbuilding that makes no sense, as long as it nails those vibes.

I think having an evil race, like the classic LOTR orcs, can be a great device for storytelling. If the villains are the blackest evil at all times, you can use that like Tolkien does to show us many different facets of heroism and explore the human response to evil. I actually favor the "where there's a whip, there's a way" orcs where they're not necessarily bad, it's just that they are slaves living in a wholly evil tyrannical culture that punishes the slightest hint of virtue, and there's just nothing that any of our heroes can do about that.

And look, not that I condone fascism or anything ridiculous like that, but there are people who need a sterner response sometimes. Whether it's ISIS, Putin and his generals, or others like that, they may be humans with souls that are equal before God, but it's still our responsibility to fight back. Or at least, it's mine, as an IRL soldier. By the time a war is unambiguously just, you've already lost. Even in a nonmilitary setting, there are people who are just evil and we cannot let ourselves be taken advantage of by them just because we're drunk on mercy or looking to develop a martyr complex. Evil people can be saved ("Amazing Grace" was written by a former slaver), but often times that's just not my job.

Speaking as a reader of fiction in the current year, I have read many fantasy tales about evil races who are actually redeemable or reasonable. I, at least, am not experiencing a drought of stories where the evil monsters are all justified and all have tragic backstories and so forth. I'm happy to let a story say "that's not something we're going to deal with right now," just like I'll give stories a pass if the thing they're handwaving is "economics," "logistics," or "proper police procedure," or any other aspect of the real world.

...And this from a guy whose 3 year D&D campaign has a good-aligned beholder, hag, multiple dragons, illithids, and dark elves, and the villains are mostly Aasimar. And whose recent comic chapter included a negotiation with a very reasonable man eating giant spider.

Empathy in unlikely places can be a great story, but sometimes you just need some mook villains to contrast against.

Zhengo 2025-11-20 03:28:12 UTC #13

Yeah the fact the story basically never shows demons eating humans or demons NEEDING to eat humans is enough to wholly unconvince me of this conflict of "impossible co-existence". The most the story does is TELL us sometimes that demons are "predators". A predator means they have to eat their prey to survive which is the basis to why two intelligent species can't co-exist. But I see no need, and so this entire foundation falls apart. And people rate this anime higher than FMA:B when the writing makes these amateurish mistakes...

DokiDokiTsuna:

Admittedly, this is a cool idea. And I think it could have worked in the series almost exactly the same way without causing all this discourse. They'd just need to make one tiny change, and that is to let the demons behave more like traditional villains and WANT to hurt people.

After all, mimics are supposed to trick you; that's their whole thing-- so the obvious personality to give an anthropomorphized mimic would be that of a trickster character. Someone who delights in luring humans to their deaths, who has fun playing with their food.

Frieren can still be dead-set on murdering these demons, you can still write them as irredeemable antagonists, and if you insist on making it weird, you can even imply that they have a psychological tendency to act like this because of their evolutionary origin as mimics. But by making it a conscious choice (i.e. something they don't NEED to do), you are allowing the audience to read these actions as 'evil', and not 'but...you're basically saying they don't know any better'. It feels a lot more necessary to punish needless cruelty than inadvertent cruelty. And associating societal attitudes with fictional races is a lot less problematic...people usually don't have an issue with arrogant elves or industrious dwarves, for example.

See the idea could have potential, I'm not even opposed to the conflict having a biological justification, Frieren just uses the biological justification REALLY BADLY. Exploring a monster race evolving to mimic humans to prey on them, actually has some cool ideas to play around. There's another statement said in the show (told not shown -_-) that demons only use the spoken word to lure humans, and words actually mean nothing to them. Of course with this writer's amateur skill, this get blatantly contradicted when we see demons talk to each other with human speech, and express opinions to themselves in human speech. Obviously the human speech actually does have meaning to them. If the statement were actually the case, why couldn't we have unique demon forms of communication when not needing to lure humans?

Related to the ideas you mentioned, do these evolved mimics just have a higher compulsion to engage in trickery due to their nature as mimics? Would this be due to some unique hormones they possess? Would mimic social interactions involve trying to trick each other? Would pranking each other be a common form of socialization? Of course, using a biological reason means that it would be harder to believe an ENTIRE SPECIES can just be "evil" when naturally species can be diverse in its biology, personality, etc, and there will always at least be individuals that may stray far from regular specie tendencies.

The anime is just wholly uninterested in actually exploring its own fantasy setting that deeply, yet for some reason this show get a lot of high praise for being "great fantasy" Yet ignore other anime like Dungeon Meshi that actually puts effort into trying to create its own fantasy science on its monster species.

See I've recently seen two anime (Takopi's Original Sin and The Summer Hikaru Died) where a non-human species is unable to fully understand humans and as a result of their lack of understanding create dangerous situations for the humans around them, and they explore the idea MUCH better and actually engages the viewer to try to think about the problem and try to work it out. The difference between those two and Frieren? The two anime mentioned aren't busy trying to say that a lack of human understanding means that said creature will automatically commit evil acts.

In Takopi's Original Sin, the Happian aliens live in a society where everyone is generally nice to each other and that problems can be resolved by just having fun with some gadgets. When Takopi the Happian comes to earth, he's unable to understand certain human behaviors such as abuse and psychological issues such as trauma. He doesn't even understand the concept of physical assault. He has no vocabulary for "hitting", whenever he's hit, he just says "touch roughly".

Because of his lack of understanding, he keeps thinking that there are easy ways to resolve the suffering that the characters go through and inadvertently makes their situation worse through his "solutions", even at some points accidentally causing the death of others.

Even at the end of the show, he still has a hard time understanding the pain the characters are going through and how to help them through it, but he still tries his hardest to help them to the very end, and starts to realize that not every human problem has an easy solution. Happians can't understand humans, but as shown clearly Happians aren't evil, if anything if we were being VERY simplistic, the anime shows that humans are the more "evil" of the two.

In The Summer Hikaru Died, the monster who mimics Hikaru expresses it's "his first time being human" and is shown to be wholly new at the human experience. Because of this, he doesn't always understand human mentalities. We see the monster's reaction to someone finding out his identity is to kill them (unless he took a liking to them). And we learn later that the monster actually didn't see anything morally wrong with the act of killing, because the monster can see the souls of people after they died. So from the monster's POV, the person who is killed is not "gone", just "changed state", and so he doesn't understand why people become upset when others die.

However, towards the end of this anime season, he starts to understand that to a human, the loss of a life is devastating. He starts to realize the impact he's having acting as a doppelganger to a dead person and starts to feel guilt. However just understanding this aspect of humanity doesn't mean that the monster is becoming human. Actually, there is emphasis in this anime that the monster shouldn't be forcing themselves to be human, but to just be as themselves, the "monster", and there are multiple moments where the monster describes feelings that can't be attributed directly to a human emotion.

So from these examples, "can't understand human emotion = dangerous" CAN be interesting to explore without it being offensive, Frieren is just too busy being pretentious and trying to use this conflict of understanding between humans and nonhumans as some kind of moral judgement that these nonhumans don't deserve to live without nuance.

DokiDokiTsuna 2025-11-20 03:44:59 UTC #14

That is...surprisingly upsetting to hear. Like, I think I experienced 0.0001 seconds of incandescent rage upon reading that sentence. ಠ_ಠ
Imagine causing all this conflict in your fanbase over a concept that you're not even using?? Excuse me???? The big bad awful original sin of all demonkind that makes their extermination mandatory isn't even shown onscreen??????
As much as I dislike it, I hope they do show it in Season 2 or the manga or wherever. Because that's ludicrous...

...I assume you're joking, but on the off-chance that you aren't: I repeat, let's try our best to be civil. ^^; If this thread does devolve into name-calling and ad hominem it's just gonna get closed down; no one is going to benefit from that.

Bold of you to assume that
A) This framework will somehow stop fans from shipping Frieren with the demons
B) Without this framework, the author would feel compelled to canonically ship Frieren with the demons. IIRC, Frieren already kinda has a love interest in Himmel, and this doesn't seem like the type of anime that would derail itself for an enemies-to-lovers subplot...

We...did... ._.
The word 'now' in my sentence was there for a reason; I recognize that wildlife conservation is a relatively new concept. And the two developments are connected-- as human society became more disconnected and protected from the 'monsters in the woods' we used to worry about, we gained the freedom to extend compassion to those predators instead of hunting them down. Gaining the technological and infrastructural development to make mercy possible de-incentivized mass murder...and as a human living in the modern age, it makes sense to want to work towards that development when faced with a similar challenge, rather than settling on murder.

TL;DR it no longer looks honorable to modern audiences to slay all the scary monsters without considering an alternative. So you can either make it clear that there is no reasonable alternative (which many people think wasn't done correctly or at all in this case), or accept that you're gonna get weird looks.

Please, please do not misunderstand what I said; that's not what I meant at all. I was just explaining an often-overlooked fact of ecology-- that wild animals still deserve our respect even if they're not our friends.

The 'man or bear' thing was NEVER about genuinely thinking bears are our friends, and tbph I fail to see how you could misunderstand that discourse unless you weren't paying any attention to what was actually being said (despite feeling the need to reference it...).

And if anyone else reading this doesn't get what that was about, I'll explain it: the point was to illustrate how people dismiss violence towards women when the perpetrator is a societally-protected class-- i.e. men.
If a bear randomly attacks a woman, it could easily make national news, and everyone will ask how the bear got into a place it shouldn't have been, how the authorities could have let it happen, how they need to prevent it from happening again, and whether the bear is still a danger and if something needs to be done with it.

If a man randomly attacks a woman-- odds are good that no one will notice or care. If they do, they may easily decide not to speak up or do anything to help, even if it happens right in front of them. People will generally ask why the woman didn't do X, Y, or Z to prevent herself from being victimized, up to and including just not existing wherever she happened to be at that time, because violence from men is just inevitable so it's her responsibility to be prepared. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

The difference between those reactions-- societal support, concern, and demand for accountability vs. obvious victim-blaming -- is the reason why many women "choose the bear".
That, and the fact that bears are statistically less likely to attack and kill you. Like...it's just a fact. Femicide is a leading cause of death for women in many countries; wild bear attacks are not. If you do the math instead of clowning, the logic checks out.

...And by the way, I figured this out from reading maybe three Twitter posts when the discourse got popular. Most people who weren't being purposefully obtuse (or unapologetically misogynistic) seemed to grasp the analogy easily. So...not a good look to be mocking it in the year of our lord 2025.

...I find this to be a weird response every time it comes up. Not common, thankfully, but very weird.

Simply put, no one is advocating for pacifism; we're just advocating for 'NOT GENOCIDE'. Believe it or not, there's a difference.
Of course, I'm saying that as a civilian who's never been paid to kill people; maybe when you're a soldier you're taught that there isn't a difference (in my experience, most soldiers find that notion to be an offensive stereotype...but idk I guess).

If nothing else, for the sake of this argument, those ARE two different things, and by conflating them you're basically strawmanning the issue. Like, we're making a metacommentary argument about the problems with insinuating that a race of people need to be exterminated because "there's no other way" and they deserve it for the way they were born, and you're talking about

...Ignoring the metacommentary, and buying into the author's "there's no other way" argument without examining it. In the world of the story, yes, that's probably the logic. But we're asking why the author chose to build a world and story that actively incentivizes that logic, as opposed to the real-world situations you described where we tend to accept it in the name of self-preservation (which is still thoroughly examined and debated) and go no further.

Zhengo 2025-11-20 03:50:51 UTC #15

I wouldn't have a problem with this, if it weren't for the fact that the demons in Frieren don't have a supernatural/spiritual foundation for their evilness but a "scientific" one. Like I said, the anime could've went with a number of generic supernatural or spiritual origins about why this whole race is just evil mooks you should root against. Say they're manifestations of corruption, they're humans who have been corrupted, they're just tests of temptation placed by a higher being, etc. etc. I'm pretty sure the demons in folklore are meant to be your spiritual adversaries, not a physical humanoid specie adversary. By going with something spiritual/supernatural, you don't ever have to repeatedly bend over backwards looking for (flawed) reasons to justify its eradication like this anime does. You mention Tolkien, and he himself expressed regret over how he wrote the orcs and later explored their origin in other ways such as being corrupted elves or men. These are not biological origins.

Frieren just falls flat on its face trying to be cool and unique using "biology". Like I said, once you introduce biology, you better be ready to actually tackle biology in its full complexity and diversity. None of this silly, "all creatures are just born wicked" shit. For gods sake even the Promised Neverland (manga), which uses a similar biological conflict for its own demons, knew this and actually did try to explore a diversity of livelihoods and personalities for the demons, even if not in the best execution. Oh yeah, more importantly it actually shows the demons eating humans and we learn why they NEED to eat humans. Frieren barely has anything. Honestly the fact that even a very flawed story like TPN knows the need to show this should be telling on the writing skill of the Frieren mangaka

remiquise 2025-11-20 04:05:18 UTC #16

Nitpicking: iirc orcas have only killed people "for the fun of the game" while in captivity, maybe one death has occurred to a wild orca, but yeah. Wild ones very rarely even act threatening to humans. So I say that's less orcas wanting to kill for funzies and more... "Keeping a large ocean mammal in captivity might not be great for its mental state and behaviours"...

Anyways, topic at hand...
Like most things, I think blanket evil races can be done right, but can be done offensively wrong as well. Love being a fence sitter, hah. I don't particularly like them most of the time, frankly it reads as lazy to me, but I can at least conger up ways it makes sense-- at least in my little horror writer mind.

I haven't seen any of your examples, so I cannot speak to them directly. The idea of demons preying on people's empathy and taking human likeness to do so is definitely an interesting concept, if that's what Frieren's demons are like-- but I guess it depends on how much show vs tell in in the show, if they possess any emotions that are "real", and just how they handle them as a whole, ya know? I'd love to see a fantasy horror/thriller that plays with the uncanny valley of it all, the idea that something wearing our skin is stalking and hunting us is creepy and interesting... But from what little I know/have seen in gifs and what not of Frieren... I feel that isn't the direction they went with it. And a lot of anime I find falls into the "tell don't show" pit, which could just come off as a show saying "dw, we're allowed to kill them" whilst lacking the tangible, visible reassurance that makes it feel justified. Or they show so brief/inconsequentially is just feels tacked on. Again, I haven't seen the show, that's just the vibes I get from the odd twitter thread I see about it.

Now I feel like I've defended a trope I don't care for too much, though. That rant aside, there are cases of predator animals protecting prey animals in the wild. So any fantasy race that is capable of thought and feeling and having a personality should probably be able to do so also, even if only in fringe cases because they're literally animals or something. this point stands more if they're "human-like". It's just insulting to tell me something with (usually/about) human-like intellect would 100% be evil and deserving of death without some out of this world explanation. (demons, parasites-- like a zombie outbreak, ect...) And if you expect me to totally discard my empathy and emotions you better show me why really well. Because yeah, slaughtering droves of a race isn't a good look. Like it or not, lots of people are gonna read it as a metaphor. "Race" already being involved makes it easy to make that connection before any other. Of course, you cannot control how the audience is going to understand your work... But some thought on the writer's part is better than none, imo.

I do, however, like the idea of evil fantasy cultures. Not everyone is gonna be totally invested or in support, you can't get away with basically genocide of a whole race because "Well they're born evil", there are more complex emotions and stakes, and it can make for some great character stories. People fall into evil ideologies, and do evil things in the name of deities, and so on in real life too. Its easier to attach critique onto social ills instead of "it's just their nature". Yeah, of course it can be done wrong still. Everything can be. It's just a smidge more creative and nuanced while still letting a writer make a big evil faction the heros can go up against. It makes the creator have to think more about the "why" than not. "Evil" still needs a character to be interesting and engaging in anything besides hack and slash gore slop.

I just like "gray" not "black and white", I guess. I like to think about things and "they're just evil because they were born that way" is not thought involving. That said, all I said were personal opinions. Folks are free to write what they want, I don't want to discourage anyone. Works, and their tropes, should be judged on their own merits. Everything can be done well, not so well, and just kind of in the middle.

Zhengo 2025-11-20 04:19:42 UTC #17

Refer to my previous post about a manga spoiler. As far as I know from a future manga arc (manga readers can correct me on this), there's a demon character later that goes at least several years without eating a single human I'm not sure if we even see him eat a human on screen because he transmuted humans into gold. So with this, apparently demons can either last at least some years without eating a human or maybe they can go on a human free diet indefinitely. What exactly was the point of ever writing in this "demons eating humans" plot if in the worst case they seem to have turbo reptile slow metabolism for digesting humans...

jwabeasley 2025-11-20 05:29:20 UTC #18

I was joking, relax. I, at least, will not be uncivil or impolite.

At least I haven't had to see much of that sort of thing. I should count my blessings, actually, that I haven't so far. But all I meant was that I see a dull and frequently repeated trope a lot, and therefore value things that are different from the standard for their uniqueness.

Well, agreed. If Frieren had done it more effectively, there wouldn't have been as much of a furor around it. It is a dark spot on an otherwise excellent apple. I'm willing to overlook it but don't like to be called names for doing so. I'm not pro-genocide or anything like that just because I'm willing to accept that the creators mean to infer no moral dilemma when their characters kill a class of beings.

I think if some unforseen event happened that made carnivores real societal threats again, our opinions would change back. But I am very pro-conservation, there's no need for extermination if the threat can be otherwise mitigated.

...let's not debate the bears. I just wanted to reference an infamous bear victim in a vaguely humorous way. Since my modest attempts at humor aren't landing properly, I'll try and refrain from them.

As to the rest, it occurs to me that I might just be living in a very different cultural context than you are. I was thinking more about moralizing around "always chaotic evil" fantasy races in current D&D or refashioning former heartless villains into misunderstood victims of societal forces with tragic backstories, along with some other things that I suppose I should've left out of this conversation. So I apologize for bringing that up.