Uncut Frieren Ep 8

I know this was mostly discussed last episode, but the topic of demons in Frieren is very interesting, specially by how different people react to them. I haven't really been able to collect my thoughts on them, so I would just list some ideas I have, hopefully you can make sense of them. 1. I feel like the general plot of the show is kept intentionally simple so that it can focus on what it does best: illustrate the passage of time and the importance of all of these little interactions between the characters. So, when Frieren said that demons are just enemies to be killed, I took it at face value. More precisely, I took it as the author stating that these are really just monsters, rather than an allegory of racism, intolerance and tension between different groups of people. It could have been taken that way and maybe there is more to demons than what we have been shown so far. If that is the case then I will change my point of view, but for the moment they just seem to be enemies to be defeated, similar to the Uruk-Hai in Lord of the Rings. 2. Wittgenstein used to say that "if a lion could speak we couldn't understand them" because the conscious experience of a lion is so different from being a human that we couldn't make sense of it. I wonder if this is kind of the point with the demons in Frieren? They speak the same language as humans, yet their conscious experience, values and goals are so different that communication becomes impossible. If "meaning is use" and they use words in such a different way, then there could not be a way for us to communicate with them I guess. 3. Yet communication does seem possible. After the demon girl killed the village chief, she clearly explained her motives and reasoning. She also seemed to be Ok with living in the village for the rest of her life, so It could have been done if the villagers had been willing to explain the "rules of conduct" to her clearly and realize that she is not a human so she can't be expected to ever behave or feel like one. Yet neither Himmel, nor the villagers seemed interested in this at all. I understand it on the part of the villagers, they wanted revenge and didn't want to live around someone so dangerous, but I still feel like Himmel should not have been so rash in passing judgment here. 4. Communication with demon-kind as a whole does seem impossible since it doesn't seem like humanity has anything that could satisfy the demons in a negotiation, considering what we know about them. So we are back to demons just being enemies to be killed, but I kind of feel that the backstory with the little demon girl was swept under the rug too quickly.

Krul