Not a lot of energy to type up a detailed rant especially since I have a lot of other things I need to write, but…
Interesting phenomenon I’ve picked up recently (although this has always been an issue) is readers treating characters and fictional worlds as real and using that as an argument against someone who critiques the writers of the series behind those characters/worlds.
Specifically, the reason it’s bothering me enough now to write this out is because I saw it a day ago when I saw a tweet criticizing Frieren (is that how you spell it?) as coming across as fascist because the bad guys in it are a demon horde completely incapable of empathy or goodness whatsoever. The OP specifically asked, “Why did the author write it like that? Doesn’t that sound like fascist messaging?”
Which okay, perhaps the way they worded it was obnoxious, because “fascist” is a word that gets thrown around sometimes to the point it can lose its meaning and people forget how bad it really is…
But fans of Frieren were defending it by saying, “Well, the bad guys aren’t capable of goodness ever so that’s why they have to be completely wiped out in the series!” One artist even qrt-ed it with a comic showing that someone trying to be nice to a demon will be killed, captioning it as “this literally happens in the series” and they got a shit-ton of likes—even though it completely misses the point of OP’s argument??
OP didn’t say Frieren the character is a fascist or that she as a character should try to extend sympathy to fictional demons that we know in her world are incapable of being better.
The question lies in why the author chose to write the world like this. In truth, you can’t easily glean an author’s morality from the fiction they write (Neil Gaiman is perhaps, most recently, a horrific and unfortunate example of this), because humans are too complex for that…
But when it comes to prejudice, it can seep into one’s work in uncomfortable ways.
For example, when people accused the Attack on Titan writer of including things in their work that felt supportive of Imperial Japan, or when Asian writers are criticized for the preference for pale skin in their work, or when Han Chinese danmei authors stereotype non-Han ethnicities in works set in ancient times.
So when OP asks why the Frieren author was comfortable with writing the antagonist as an entire species of evil beings, that’s fair to ask from a writing standpoint. It doesn’t matter that diegetically within the lore, the demons will never ever be good and that you wanting a demon to be good could get you killed—because those demons aren’t real. They are a product of the writer’s imagination…so why did the writer imagine them as an evil mass horde that deserves to be slaughtered?
And no, most people don’t have a problem with a villain who is genuinely evil. The reason Frieren gets special attention here is because it’s about an entire species—the main question is simply why, how come, and what the significance of that is, along with how it may demonstrate or even perpetuate a certain ideology, which in this case, can be seen as dangerous.
Now with that being said, I’m not a fan of Frieren or even someone who has tried it for myself, so I can’t properly critique it, nor would I make actual assumptions on the writer’s views. I’m simply saying that OP asked a question from a writing perspective, but rather than consider the nuances behind the writing choice OP was questioning, Frieren defenders defended it as if the demons were a real thing you needed to worry about where “you can’t question it because if you do and try to be nice to them, they’ll kill you!”
Again, OP did not ask why Frieren as a character doesn’t look for more good demons. OP asked why the author of Frieren the series wrote the theme this way.
Now for another example, The Legend of Korra, which has recently seen an uptick in discourse due to a new Avatar series that says being the Avatar is now a bad thing, which many Korra haters blame on Korra the character.
What I noticed is someone pointing out that the writers behind The Legend of Korra as a show constantly put her in punishing situations where she was violated and thrown around like a ragdoll much more than Aang was, and they said they felt like it was internalized misogyny by the writers.
People responded that Korra was always meant to be a darker show and, most frustrating of all—just as they did with Frieren—they spoke about the character as if she was real, because “well she was just way more headstrong than Aang so she got herself in all kinds of fucked up situations!”
Which, okay, yes, we can glean that an obvious flaw of Korra’s is her temper and stubbornness, but again, that wasn’t OP’s point. OP specifically wondered why the writers made Korra like this.
Like why make the female character so impetuous that she seems deserving of punishment through violation?
It doesn’t matter that Aang and Korra have fundamentally different personalities and approaches to battle in this particular discussion because the main point OP brought up comes back to writing choices. This invites us to consider the series critically from a writing perspective.
No matter how mad Korra makes you as a character, she’s still just a character—she’s just words on a page.
Her “choices” aren’t her choices at all because they were choices made by the writing staff, and it’s fair for some people to wonder why a writing staff would write her the way they did. Especially since they could still write her as headstrong and stubborn without making it so that everything always somehow seems like her fault to viewers, to the point no one is satisfied (because ATLA fans think she was too full of herself and thus ruined everything even as they think she deserves the punishment the series gives her, while Korra fans dislike that the writers put her through so much hell).
So with all that being said, I basically wish sometimes people would treat stories as actual stories. I know it’s easy to get emotionally attached to a fictional story or to emotionally respond to a character, whether they’re super amazing or super annoying, but at the end of the day fiction is still fiction and characters are still characters. Even if “normies” can’t look at things from a writing perspective, I wish they could look at a series as just that—a fictional series.
I’m not a fan of or even someone particularly well-versed in The Legend of Korra or anything, but I can still tell how silly it is when someone questions the writers and writing choices of a show and fans of the series as a whole respond that “actually it’s fine because it’s meant to be darker and Korra is flawed so she’s the one who makes a mess of things.” That doesn’t engage with anything in any critical or thoughtful manner.
Like yeah, we get it—the character of Korra is super stubborn so she messed up a lot in the plot and it backfired on her, or the character of the demons in Frieren are indeed irredeemable and it’s pointless to discuss otherwise. But who’s the one making them so flawed in the first place? They don’t actually exist; their traits and what happens to them are all details assigned by the writer(s). So it isn’t pointless to question why a writer chose to write these things the way they did.
Of course, you should not speculate either, and calling Frieren the series “fascist,” even in terms of its messaging, may be going too far, but thinking more critically about the different series you consume is usually a good thing.
If nothing else, it exercises your brain, which I’m starting to get worried that people refuse to use.
Remember: no matter how much a fictional character pisses you off, they’re still merely a fictional character who is a tool within the narrative. Some characters, like Boruto or Damian Wayne, are meant to be spoiled brats who go through character development, and other characters or themes or plot developments may be worthy of criticism even if they “make sense” within the established lore.
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