|
Showing Stark break the cool warrior facade but then immediately showing him serious about the axe training was good. They also just had Fern in a (relatively) silly moment running from the dragon putting them at the same general level. He needs to be more lively anyway to contrast the stoic Fern. Frieran isn't prone to slapstick but it's also not really some grim or solemn story either. 5 eps in I think I can say with confidence that the show gets the tone absolutely right
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2023 18:25
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 09:50 |
|
|
Both of those are A+
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2023 05:57
|
|
|
GateOfD posted:its like oh no, the dragon killed a bunch of adventurers. They didn't say it explicitly but if dragons are attracted to magical items to make nests, presumably it showed up to take things like grimoires from the town. And yeah they seem to be more like just a big tough animal. Frieran doesn't seem the type to blow up a talking creature just for a random spell book... probably
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2023 09:19
|
|
|
If you knew everyone you ever met was basically a mayfly I can see not forming strong bonds with them. Especially if you're not really a gregarious sort to begin with. The same goes for the mayflies toward the (seemingly) unchanging immortal
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2023 21:13
|
|
|
Southern Cassowary posted:up to now the show (and i presume the manga, haven't read it) put a lot of thought into how the journey of the hero's party affected the world and the party's legacy and history. even if you ignore the real-life implications around having innately bad fantasy races (which i'm honestly not equipped to go in-depth on meaningfully), writing the demons as straightforwardly evil is a bizarre writing choice for this show when going almost any other direction would both be more interesting and fit the existing themes of the show better. Like Sindai said, (anime spoiler) "actually demons are just humans with horns stuck on" is basically the norm now, so having them not be that is fine. The big twist in this case would seem to be that the pretty magic demons are actually monsters. Got a strong feeling no one would blink at Frieren blastin' if they all looked like the petrified one earlier. Also in the fictional world so far presented: dragons are large bears that destroy your village for nesting supplies, magic monsters create realistic phantasms of loved ones and then kill you, and demons are mimics that eat your baby. All of them are bad, none of them are evil. Obviously it's troubling to accept that when they look pretty and can chat with you about the weather, but as Frieren is at pains to point out, that's why they do it. Forest ghost monster is actually great as an intermediate step of monster, as it clearly had no idea what the phantasms were saying, but it works (usually). Basically the show is young, let's let it cook GloomMouse fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Oct 21, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2023 22:03
|
|
|
Also the opinion is offered by Frieren the Dense that couldn't pick up on Himmel's obvious feelings. So there's a uh lot of room to grow lol. Just don't see why an author setting up the baseline universe is so terrible in a world where we've all seen the full spectrum of "monster = 110% evil" AND "monsters are people, racism is bad."
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2023 22:52
|
|
|
I'm imagining the episode exactly the same except the demon guy with amazing hair looked like a beholder and it's suddenly way easier to think about it. Like, that shouldn't matter but it still does. I also think it helps that Frieran gave her reasoning right away, and that it wasn't on moral grounds, denouncing them as actually Evil. Trying to make it clear that they are more like the forest phantom than we'd assume. irt interesting, introducing demons feels like a '"there's nothing new under the sun'" problem. Bad, Good, Misunderstood, we've done it all. Maoyuu Maou Yuusha even has a DQ Yuusha doing it lol. So to me it's more about what you do with your demons moving forward
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2023 02:37
|
|
|
if they looked like big floofy dogs and let me touch their toe beans? sure i'd give peace a chance
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2023 04:36
|
|
|
yeah sci-fi deals with this concept more often than fantasy in my experience. still while it's not totally nuts to consider there might be some kind of future peace or non-aggression pact between Frieren-type demons and humans, it's not going to be as easy as the "humans with horns" or "humans are the bad guys, actually" fantasy variants.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2023 04:59
|
|
|
Just thinking that the relatively short lives and therefore memory of humans isn't the huge negative it's usually portrayed as in stuff like this. Usually humans forgetting is the reason for conflict and the failure of peace, but here they're going to keep forgetting how bad demons are and
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2023 05:45
|
|
|
I feel like the story of a very long lived magic elf learning to recognize and connect with others while musing on how things change, journeying to the end the world where "heaven" is, which is also the site (or near?) of the demon king's castle apparently, might get into this sort of thing at some point. Also, demons have to be shown initially at least as pretty bad otherwise Himmel and Co are kinda jerks. VVV EDIT: lmao I used beholders instead of mindflayers now that BG3 exists GloomMouse fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Oct 21, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2023 18:45
|
|
|
Tabletops posted:the fact that frieren could get out of jail or avoid going to jail if she simply invoked her name (or stark or fern did), but doesn't, kind of undercuts the whole thing to me. it'd be fine if this was the first time i guess, but this literally happened in the last episode as well. In this case I think it's because she knows things are going to go sideways in the town (plus still being her unrushed self) and it's not like she can't just leave whenever she wants anyway. We aren't supposed to be like "oh no she's in jail, what will our heroine do?"
|
|
#
¿
Oct 22, 2023 00:17
|
|
|
Demons = Aliens seems to be more useful than the ChatGPT angle for sure. The sustenance thing might not be true based on the flashback, but that still leaves issues of territory encroachment. If most demons are relatively weak(?) like the childlike one from the flashback, that seems pretty easy to figure out. If the majority are like the guy that just flicked a finger and beheaded a dude, could be tough.Fangz posted:Peace treaties have been drawn up between sides that completely hate each other and have lasted for a long time. You don't need empathy, you just need a logical recognition that war sucks. Demons don't wanna die and they don't need to kill humans, humans seem really scary in this setting (see how quick they adapted to and surpassed that killing spell) and hold a grudge, so why are they dumb? Sure you can burn one town, but what does that gain you? It's basic cause and effect. The fact that there was a new thing called a demon king leading an army shows that at least some of them are starting to get the idea that the lone wolf thing isn't always the best policy, yes. Worth remembering that the demon crew here are remnants from that new fangled 'army' thing, so they are atypical. You also just automatically looked at it from the perspective of rival civilizations despite the demons seeming not to even have one. Do demons have historians working to piece this stuff together, and if you were a lone wolf would you listen? Humans have never spoken to, much less brokered a peace treaty with, an alien mind. We have however written a lot of stories about interacting with comprehensible but distinctly non-human minds, but it's really hard to do well because... we're humans and we want to see and write humans. It's just weird to see it while following around a DQ adventurer group rather than a starship. Peace of a sort seems possible, but not by treating them as humans with horns on.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2023 03:30
|
|
|
While I don't disagree in the abstract (and love my cat dearly), in the interest of practicality it's probably best to keep the made up term/concept of sapience in play irt the comic despite being an arbitrary (and hilariously ill-defined) line in the sand.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2023 04:38
|
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:I think there's a fair argument to be made that the series is taking this assumption into account though and is hoping the viewer will want to sympathize with the demons as a metaphor to better drive home the lesson about how deceitful and inhuman they truly are, but I'm not sure how well it succeeds at that so far based on what we've seen. I mean it certainly seems to be succeeding wildly on that front to me, given the number of people itt that instantly fell for it despite the show going out of it's way to set up way you shouldn't. If someone's stance is "authors are not allowed to have intelligent monsters be anything than exactly the same as people (and good people at that), anything else is endorsing irl racism" then it will fail for sure, but I'm not sure the fault lies with the author. GloomMouse fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Oct 23, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2023 18:41
|
|
|
Demons haven't been shown to be brilliant and given that demons are coming at this stuff from the outside, one having an incomplete or imperfect mental model of humans and human society seems like a given. It'd be hard enough to work it all out if you were explicitly taught, going to be real tough just going on what you can glean from stealthy observation and the occasional uh "volunteer".
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2023 20:20
|
|
|
Fangz posted:Yes, if the latter is true, then the demons would be appropriate thematically. But that's why the notion that *actually, demons are incapable of understanding and realising they understand, and so it's not a choice they are making, they are just inherently and inescapably evil* actually undermines this thematic comparison. If the story until now is about how people are individuals and capable of change, now suddenly we get "except these guys, kill them on sight". You keep saying evil when that isn't applicable if they don't have empathy. The demons as presented neatly sidestep the problem of assigning them a built-in D&D alignment. It also allows them the potential to develop from clever lone hunter with rudimentary mimicry, to pack predator with the capacity to build mental models of prey (we seem to be here), and then maybe even further to human-like empathy. The pressure to do so would be that humans worked together to build fortress cities that you can't just crush, but can still leave to attack you whenever they want. We even have a POV character exploring how things change that is apparently long lived enough to see it happen. GloomMouse fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Oct 24, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2023 12:14
|
|
|
lunar detritus posted:3 pages later, lol It's just as much fun this time around and we should enjoy it 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2023 18:02
|
|
|
That was SkyNet testing the waters EDIT: I wonder how long there have been demons in a truly human form, assuming there is a progression of course . Qual had a rough humanoid form but also looked more like a traditional "monster", meanwhile Lugnar is just like a man but with horns. Thinking about demons as a species with mimicry, I'd imagine that Qual was (far?) older but still kicking around because his super rad magic kept him from getting picked off by anyone GloomMouse fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Oct 26, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2023 00:55
|
|
|
Maybe Mimic Chests are like those flowers that overspecialized to work with one insect. Doomed to fade away after Freiren because no one else is that gullible...
|
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2023 04:05
|
|
|
You'd think they'd pass around a sketch of Freiren at least, given how rare elves are. "Hey yeah I know we're all totally super powerful but uh if you see this one? You're probably screwed if you just proceed as usual"
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2023 18:44
|
|
|
Snowglobe of Doom posted:We saw this episode why that wouldn't work Yes but it's funny to think about
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2023 20:24
|
|
|
Squidster posted:Fern: apex predator of burgers and burghers 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2023 22:51
|
|
|
It certainly is nice to have a minor character like Graf not be a blithering idiot
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2023 19:37
|
|
|
Yeah it's weird they spent eight episodes showing Frieren as nothing but a stone cold killer endlessly blasting demons just like Doomguy, but that's just the way it goes sometimes
GloomMouse fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Oct 30, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2023 00:06
|
|
|
Frieren has already traveled to the demon king's castle and killed him with a group of hero people, so this isn't really new territory as an aspect of her character. Fortunately the show seems to know it too, and most of this city demon stuff has been from the POV of Fern, Stark, Graf, and the demons. This let's us see how they are coming along and see that Frieren isn't full of poo poo. Comparisons to Goblin Slayer of all things is more than a little ridiculous. If you just wanted exclusively chill wandering show then my condolences
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2023 00:56
|
|
|
Yeah, that story is great and I recommend it a lot lol. That Freiren has been a possible entry point for folks to explore good scifi like that and Blindsight is still kind of a trip
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2023 11:26
|
|
|
Yeah one of the perks of being a wizard is it being socially acceptable to wear pajamas at any/all times
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2023 20:08
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:I think the main thing the demons seem to lack, other than empathy, is curiosity. Lugner did a lot of talking about his dedication to magic, and every demon seems to put a lot of effort into their magical specialty, but I don't think it would ever have occurred to him to spend time pursuing mostly-useless magics the way Frieren does, even though she only likes magic "slightly". I think that's at least a part of why she does it, to be more than just hyper focused on magic for the purpose of killing with almost demon-like dedication to her craft. Otherwise she really would be just a specialized anti-demon weapon launched by a wizard lady 1000 years ago. Flamme certainly seemed to recognize that was basically what she was doing and had some regrets
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2023 11:53
|
|
|
"She helped kill the Demon King" "Oh that's nice. What else?" Kraft made his peace with the fact no remembers his jrpg adventure because it was the previous console generation. Elves having to pay a terrible price for their longevity: Certification Paperwork, is hilarious. Fern and Freiren eating burgs the size of their heads is also good
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2023 09:00
|
|
|
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2023 19:06
|
|
|
Some real magic this episode
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2023 20:35
|
|
|
I figured Himmel Heroman "failing the prophesy" was more to show that prophesies are bunk and you don't have to be some perfect soul to make positive changes in the world. Or the intended true test of the Hero was them continuing on anyway despite "failing" the test.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2024 00:03
|
|
|
Now that the whole Demon King thing is sorted out I'd expect a shift to less efficient but much cooler looking magic. You want to impress people while getting a prestigious rank.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2024 06:21
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 09:50 |
|
|
He can tank mad Fern blows so he's basically invincible. Still funny how wizards have to do exams but Stark gets taught by learned masters completely unprompted while hanging around town.
GloomMouse fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Apr 11, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2024 11:31
|
|