Who is Granted Personhood? Frieren’s demons and the trouble with the “inherently evil race” trope - Anime Feminist
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This story about immortality, grief, and the importance of emotional connections is interrupted by the presence of blunt, strawman villains who exist not as characters but as plot devices to show the “humanity” of the protagonists.
  • LvxferreEnglish
    2•8 months ago

    I could go some extra length to say everything wrong with this text, and a bit more, but I’ll TL;DR. The text fails to take into account that

    1. different audiences forge different associations with the tropes contained within a work;
    2. people from “random” countries (such as the author, or me) are not the target audience of those Japanese works.
    3. there are a thousand themes to explore within fantasy. Social commentary is only one of them, and by no means obligatory.
    4. every theme that you insert into a work dilutes the value of the other themes within it.

    Once you do take those things into account, most of the text crumbles.