u/MoistCaterpillar8063

Наскладав грошей для інвестицій, думав купити трохи овдп, але тут Інжур підкотив нову тему з інвестуваннямв 25-29%, що як мінімум в 10% вище хмм 🤔

I started buying when it was 100k, now it's barely above 60k and my cat ate one of my aquarium fishes, I was shocked. It has to have reached the bottom already or not yet? I don't know how much longer I'll be able to hold if this continues.

A few days ago I've created a post explaining why I view demons in Frieren as alien species that allow to explore the themes in an intricate way. It understandably caused many hot discussions and I came across a lot of valuable ideas. Which is why I decided to go through the most common counter points that are usually presented by people, so I can structure my thoughts and see if those views still hold up under the scrutiny. Spoiler: I revised some of my original understanding, but it still feels coherent with the world-building setup and the initial premise.

Disclaimer: I do not intend to declare that Frieren demons are perfectly written with no issues or conveniences whatsoever. Ultimately, you can find flaws in any long-running story if you look at it at a certain angle for long enough and given the nature of the "Frieren's" writing, where we do not usually get the unholy amounts of time explaining the world-building concepts, some things are always left vague / up to interpretation, that it becomes quite easy to come up with arguments on both sides. I do believe there's a consistency of how demons look during Flamme times (monster-like - Basalt, Qual, Demon King) and during modern Frieren times (much more often human-like - seven sages, Lugner, Linie, all young demons), which supports the gradual evolution theory. However, it's difficult to explain how exactly that would work scientifically. In the same way, I cannot reliably explain how demons are able to master the human language without having any support system, a future-sight demon, how and why they were created or how exactly they reproduce. There're some speculations at this point, but nothing more concrete than that and it may never be explicitly confirmed as it's not the focus of the story and the writing does prioritize thematic resonance over hard rules - I accepted it and if someone does not that's also fair. If you have any explanations for some of the more vague points feel free to let me know.

That said, Frieren's popularity and acclaim attracts a lot of detractors, so every negative perspective should also be scrutinized in the same way, and this is the subject that can be easily distorted by bias. I believe that despite some missing pieces nothing that came out after the first two arcs contradicts the initial idea, but rather explores it in more depth, which could make them one of the best fictional species in the medium - depending on whether it sticks the landing. I also admit there are more than one way to look at things, so I don't claim that my perspective is the only correct one, but that's the one that makes sense to me personally, which is why I'm going to go through it in detail, and challenge my own understanding, so I can arrive at a robust conclusion. Your are welcome to share any feedback and lets' begin!

The argument: "Frieren says demons only use words to deceive humans, but right in the next scene we see demons can clearly communicate even when there're no humans in sight".

My response:
If we take those words at face value there are 2 options here (realistically more, but let's start simple):

1. Frieren is wrong. She is biased here and because of her traumatic past she'll never give demons any credit, she just doesn't want to - even if she's confronted with the opposite facts, and even if there're some outliers that's still not enough to convince her that the different view makes more sense rather than something that was ingrained in her for ages at this point. That's a combination of confirmation bias + cognitive dissonance. When Frieren sees a demon doing something awful she's always like "well of course, that's a demon for you, what else you expect lol", which only reinforces her view without even providing a real or strong evidence, she's already made up her mind. But in an "objective reality" demons actually have their own agenda and some inner world that is independent of humans.
2. Frieren is right. In this case, demons are still primarily deceptive, but their deception has evolved in a more sophisticated way. Demons are playing the losing game for some time now, their numbers shrink, the Demon king is defeated, so they are forced to adapt to the new rules, cooperate more often than before, become "smarter" in their strategy. While during Flamme's era they could more easily brute force the results, now they have to be more adaptable, but the core mechanism of their psyche stays the same. Even when they communicate they do it first and foremost with the goal of hunting humans in mind - not to bond or form a genuine connection with each other. So their communication is real, but it's based on the same predatory instincts as Frieren describes. They still need to communicate between each other, because they are not telepathic, and using the human language for it allows to kill two birds with one stone, which is why it had the evolutionary advantage rather than creating their own system (probably based on mana) that caters more to their intrinsic values. Even their inner monologue has the same purpose - to optimize the efficiency of their actions.

If I had to choose, initially I'd lean towards the second option, since we had enough evidence of it as of that point in time, especially since demons also kind of comically confirm her assessment out loud. However, after some careful thought it appears to be more complex, since there're clearly some example of unique demons that don't follow Frieren's "live to lie and hunt humans" idea of them, the ramifications of that I'll explore later. Additionally, it can be viewed as a meta setup from the author to plant the seeds of doubt in readers minds by pairing those scenes next to each other. There's a layer of uncertainty there for sure.

The argument: "Some of the demons clearly state they don't know what "father" means, and at the same we see demons that want to learn the meaning of it. Why would they even use words they supposedly don't even understand?".

My response:
Demons are not identical copies of each other. This shows they also can have different personalities, and that is quite a low standard even for animal kingdom, so for the species that are way more advanced that would be a bare minimum expectation. The only question here is whether the differences in their behavior can still be explained in a consistent way and work within their established limitations, and I'll address this here and in the future points.

When Lugner says "Who knows?" the subtext is "I don't care, I just use it as a magic word / a shortcut or a glitch in the system to achieve my goal, I know it works 6 times out of 10 and that's good enough for me". The word doesn't describe anything meaningful in their biology, so naturally many demons would not be interested in exploring it further. Sure, a single curious demon can spend their time and learn when exactly the word "mother"/"father" means intellectually, understand the importance behind it, and why most people would fall for it. That would certainly make them more proficient in manipulation. Similarly like nowadays you can ask ChatGTP to build an application and call it a day, or you can dive deep into a programming language and understand the core reasons of why it works the way it does. You'll then need to spend way more time to master it, but is it worth the effort for the marginal gain? Everyone can decide for themselves. Same principle applies to demons - it's not a contradiction, but a diversity of minds. This point alone already indicates that there's more to demons than just being physical mimics or predators.

The argument: "Why do demons keep irrationally hunting humans when they don't even need to eat them, which additionally puts their survival in danger and doesn't hold any tangible benefits. The evolution doesn't work that way - once you're dead you can't reproduce anymore".

My response:
The idea that "it's dangerous to hunt humans" is only true in the current era of the story. This was explained during Zoltraak's history lesson from Frieren - for thousands of years, demons were the biggest predators. Human magic was primitive, and demons like Qual had an overwhelming power, they were also dominant in the air. The danger to their survival is mostly a recent development (lets say roughly the last 50-80 years, which in evolutionary terms is very little), that's also caused by humans reverse-engineering demon magic and rapidly increasing their progress. Since they are long-living beings (we all know that 10 years for Frieren is like a weekend, so the same applies to demons as well), most demons are still behaving according to a biological blueprint that worked for the previous 1000+ years, and they are understandably struggling to adapt to a sudden and rapid change in the environment.

My current understanding is that evolution optimizes for gene propagation, not species survival, which is why individuals often evolve self-interested traits that benefit their own reproduction even at the group's expense. Demons are mana based creatures, and humans are not just meat, but also a source of magical knowledge in mana-rich environments. In-universe, hunting and exploiting humans appears to be fundamental to how demons define themselves and their purpose. A demon that fully abandoned this predatory relationship would no longer function as a "demon" in the way their species understands itself, that drive is baked into their psychology and evolutionary role since the very beginning, so changing it on a whim is impossible like asking a spider to suddenly stop spinning webs because changed environment now puts them in danger. It goes against their fundamental nature. But don't get me wrong - if they DON'T adapt to the changes, they eventually WILL go extinct. That already happened to countless species that once lived on our planet.

The argument: "Demons are often described as prideful, but at the same time solitary and anti-social - this is a contradiction. Why do they even have the need to feel pride, when pride is a social emotion?".

My response:
This point is sounds correct on the surface, pride in humans is indeed almost always heavily social as it's tangled up with reputation, status in others eyes, external approval. But there's a more basic version, you can look at it as the felt experience of one's own efficacy, power and superiority - even independent of anyone witnessing it. A solitary predator that successfully takes down prey larger than itself isn't getting social validation, but something functionally pride-like is very likely still happening, this could just be an internal signal that says "I am capable, I can dominate this niche". Same sensation also happens when you hit a PR in a gym that no one will ever even know. Pride at root is a self-assessment emotion and the social uses we put it to are derived from it. And demons specifically seem to have the self-assessment version without the social-validation version.

Additionally, demons are organized around individual power and dominance. So it's easy to imagine that for a species like that pride acts as navigation tool and tells the demon where it stands in the hierarchy, when they can challenge upward, when to dominate downward, when to flee etc. That's useful even with zero social bonding. It's basically the same function pride serves in solitary territorial animals - an internal readout of "how strong am I, relative to what I'm facing". You don't need friends to need that information.

Let's check which other "social" emotions demons explicitly don't have. They don't have malice and guilt (more on that later). They don't have loyalty or gratitude - the one example that can challenge this is Revolte thanking a young demon for their sacrifice, which is still far from real gratitude that people would feel towards those who help them, and "loyalty" is built on the hierarchy that forces most of them to be compliant. But what they clearly do have are emotions that still work fine in isolation - anger, curiosity, fear, satisfaction. Same pattern all the time: keep the self-referential emotions, lose the other-referential ones. Pride survives this because at its core it's can also be about the self.

The argument: "Demons are described as anti-social species, and a bunch of anti-social individuals cannot form a meaningful society, dominate or even survive, as least not for long".

My response:
Part of the reason why anti-social society cannot survive is that we have to care for and teach the babies for at least first 6-7 years of their life. So if the story explicitly stated that demons are reproduced and raised exactly they same way humans do and all of them STILL remain anti-social then it would be a logical problem. But they are not, there're not many details on this so far, but what we do know is that demons are magical creatures born from mana, and they evaporate into mana particles when they die. This already tells you their biology is incomparable to humans. They may as well spawn into the world with some knowledge and experience that allows individual to survive on their own or at least being able take care of themselves in the most basic way. You cannot argue "this doesn't apply to human-specific rules, which means it's wrong" when the framework that was established from the start is completely different. I agree, this part of the world building is rather light as of this point, but light and contradictory are not the same things. Everything we do see from them is still consistent.

We can go even further, because the fragility of their structure is also exactly what the story already depicts. Once Demon King died - demon "civilization" is in ruins. There's no successor structure, no institutions, no continuity. Aura is doing her own thing in the south, Macht is doing his thing. Solitar is off wandering around the world. There are some small groups here and there, but they're not a coordinated faction, just scattered powerful individuals, each running their own dominance bubble, none of them able to rebuild what the Demon King provided because the thing he provided was personal coercion. This already implicitly answers the objection.

The argument: "Demons have been around for ages, but there are many people that still fall for their deception and think they can be redeemed / used for their goals".

My response:
There's an argument about why this knowledge doesn't stick. Let's tart with how knowledge actually propagates in a pre-modern world. Frieren's setting has no mass literacy, no centralized education, no google, no reliable historical record beyond what mainly mages bother to preserve. Demons in your typical villages are also rare - most people may never see one in living memory. So the knowledge that "demons deceive" is the kind of fact that exists in scattered texts, in the heads of specialists or long-living beings like Frieren. It's far from being a common knowledge in the way "fire burns" is. A village three hundred kilometers from the last demon attack might know demons exist the way we know about cult leaders - only abstractly. When the actual situation arrives, the abstract knowledge usually doesn't hold. Additionally, regular people who know about the danger first-hand often die and cannot pass their knowledge. This is important to remember, but not the main point.

A more uncomfortable point that the story deliberately highlights - even people who know demons deceive will keep trying to negotiate with them, because the alternative somehow feels even worse. Your typical predator like a polar bear or a deadly ladybug doesn't come to you and talks about peace. When something looks like a human and talks like a human that's a completely different experience. The same thing that makes humans repeatedly trust con artists, abusive partners or charismatic authoritarians. Hope is a vulnerability that doesn't simply go away when you learn about it. Like that chief of the village was still willing to give the demon a opportunity for redemption even after knowing she ate a child and not just some abstract demon he heard about in tales.

It also seems likely that their strategy is slowly changing. While in the past they have been more reliant on strength in general, now they are willing to use words more often which triggers those responses from oblivious humans. Ironically, in a callous demon-like society the demons tricks would works far less successfully than in empathetic one, which shows that even though understanding is usually considered a good thing, everything should work within its reasonable limits.

Having said all that, this is one of the points where I can concede the implementation is not the cleanest. For me it's more of a plot convenience than an egregious mistake, which happens, while at the same time it still serves its goal, and is necessary because without this vulnerability the tragedy about hope doesn't work.

The argument: "The entirety of Macht's arc proves the exact thing that the story has already been telling us from the start, which makes it shallow and pretty much pointless".

My response:
The golden land arc transforms the story from a simplistic extermination exercise to a philosophical exploration. The writing of the arc is highly regarded because by giving depth and more relatable qualities to a demon we no longer see them as alien as before, while at the same time they still maintain their original nature. Yes, the result is technically the same, but our experience is now different. Previous demons were one-dimensional and too arrogant for their own good, it was easy for the readers to root against them. Macht flips the script, people actually can relate and empathize with him, every one of us had that one experience when they couldn't achieve what they truly want. Like you can spend your entire life in gym training hard every day and optimizing every detail, but if you don't have genetics of Arnold - even with gear you can only get so far based on your hard limits, and it can be very far from your desired result. Was Macht able to comprehend something at the end? Most likely not, since that would go against everything we know about the demons at this point. Though I can't help but hope that there was at least some peace of mind and he finally grasped the connection that he initially treated as just means to an end, which was more important than what he wanted at first.

The argument: "Macht once called Qual a friend and Qual wanted to avenge the Demon King, this suggests they do have some social bonding. Maybe given enough time they can actually learn and integrate into the human society".

My response:
While family doesn't exist in demon biology, so "mother" and "father" are meaningless from the get go, they do still form hierarchical connections, but solely based on power, not love, mutual respect or understanding. For Macht, the word "friend" would be more like a classification. The Qual is a friend because he is one of the few beings with a lifespan and power level comparable to his own, but he still wouldn't care less if Qual died tomorrow. When we call someone "a friend" there's a certain level of respect and warmth that we would put into the word - but even then for humans the same word can mean different things based on their experiences. It doesn't necessarily mean the usage of the word is wrong, but there's definitely a gap between communication and the actual connection, plus in some cases there could be a language barrier that doesn't translate super cleanly between different cultures (English - Japanese).

There's also an ironic moment when Macht was so incredibly good at tracking human connections that he could spot them before even humans could - when he said there's something between Denken / Lekture, and Glück immediately dismissed it. He can see the shape of love, the structure of loyalty and bonding, and how it evolves - almost like a math example. This is a good illustration of how extreme intelligence can perfectly emulate empathy without ever acquiring it in practice.

Several demons also expressed their admiration towards Demon King and when Qual says he'll avenge Demon King, it's the idea of "the Demon King". We know that he represented the ultimate pinnacle and the rightful (in their eyes) order where demons are the dominant species of the world. In this case "avenging" the Demon King is not related to the deceased person, he's about to rectify the error that allowed a lesser species to kill the "greatest" one. Once again, he isn't fighting for a fallen comrade. He doesn't look even remotely heart-broken or sad for a second when he learns about DK's death. It's just their typical - "this happened, so I have to do this" reaction, no personal connection.

On the other note, Schlaht had to threaten Macht to make him do what he wanted. Schlaht himself is an interesting case, because unlike practically any other demon we know he actually cares about their survival as species, which I believe is still yet to be explored in the future. It's worth flagging that he could also be a potential problem for me personally (in terms of writing), his motivation looks dangerously close to a social / altruistic drive, but that's too early to say with very little information that we possess so far.

I do admit that this is one of the areas where the story intentionally pushes very close to the ambiguity, maybe even to its detriment, so while this interpretation is plausible, it could still sound like an over-rationalization from my side.

The question if some demons could eventually become "good" after some time is always interesting, and to be fair to Frieren she was willing to do the experiment when Himmel asked about it. However, it has failed no matter what was the reason. After this they have 2 choices - either kill them preemptively, even if demons have the potential to adapt, or accept that the casualties are inevitable while demons are still learning and how long that would even realistically take? Frieren (the character) clearly approaches it in a more pragmatic way. Whether that's morally acceptable is the actual debate people can have, but once again it's quite consistent with the established narrative.

The argument: "Demons are intelligent beings capable of reasoning. Even if Macht is not capable of empathy, he can just intellectually learn the definition of the word coexistence - "you live among humans and you don't kill them", that's all he needs and the problem is solved".

My response:
There a few interesting points to address here about demons and Macht in particular. First off, intelligence and reasoning capacity are necessary but not sufficient for cooperative society. You also need either internal emotional commitments that bias you toward cooperation against your short-term interest, or external enforcement mechanisms strong enough to make defection costly. A philosophical claim here is that demons have neither, and even pure rationality without those frameworks produces non-cooperation as the result. In essence, to make a deal with you, I need to believe you're the kind of entity whose future self will honor what your present self agreed to. But what the story suggests is that demons don't have the cognitive ability of treating other minds as durable contractual partners.

Then at some point it does give us Macht as one of the exceptions, this is where it actually attempts the proposed solution. Macht is the one demon who seems to genuinely apply long-running rational reasoning to the cooperation problem. Now the question is - why didn't it stabilize, couldn't scale, persist, and couldn't become a durable peace?

I'm not a psychologist, so what I'm describing now are just the things that I found through the research and there are always conflicting studies on this. But even then, the comparsion to human sociopaths is not as clean as people think it might be. A human sociopath is still a human, they need the same things to survive: shelter, a functioning economy, internet connection, and a legal system that keeps other people from killing or hurting them. For them the rules they have to follow are a shield, they follow the law because they want to enjoy the benefits of civilization. For demons the same rules would be a cage, as if they intentionally put themselves into jail. They don't need a supermarket or a bank, their primary need is to consume mana and exert dominance.

Macht is the closest we get to a "civilized sociopath" so far. He did integrate, lived among humans, and even protected the city. But he didn't do it because it was rational for his survival, it was just a dark experiment. The experiment failed because the intellectual goal (coexistence) could never provide the emotional satisfaction that was looking for. From the start he was ready to sacrifice everything for it by even wearing a potentially deadly bracelet, it's not that he is suicidal, but rather he didn't value safety as much as his main objective. So basically, Macht was unsuccessful because the goal of coexisting was contradictory to his other goal of achieving those emotions and most of the other demon do not gain anything that they value from cooperation for them to even attempt it in the first place.

On the "simply don't kill" point - the core of the problem is that Macht doesn't see non-violence as a rule, but as a symptom.
The human logic: coexistence = don't kill. You just follow this rule (and a few others) to achieve the state.
Macht's logic: feel malice/guilt (like humans) => so I remove the thing that divides us and we can coexist.
When Frieren says "You want coexistence but you keep killing", Macht is confused because, in his mind, the killing is the experiment required to find the empathy. To him it's the same as if Frieren would say - "You want to learn to swim, but you keep getting in the water".

The argument: "Why does the author decide to create an entire race of "individuals" that "need to be exterminated" by the protagonists and pretty much the in-universe logic, especially when some people can use this metaphor and deploy it into harmful real-world narratives?".

My response:
This is not really an inconsistency, but a critique of a potentially problematic approach, which is valid. To me the answer is clear, in literature (Lord of the Rings as a famous example) you often define a concept by showing what it isn't. By creating the demons as a static and unfeeling foil, it also highlights the beauty of human traits that we often take for granted. It makes a point to emphasize that empathy is a specific and fragile trait that we must value because it isn't universal. Demons are a species rather than an individual because only at the species level can the show ask its real questions, such as what empathy is, what coexistence requires, and what Frieren's thousand-year perspective is for, none of which work if the empathy-less entity is just one guy you can kill and forget.

In a more typical story, a hero grows and usually learns to see the humanity in their enemies. Frieren’s journey is the opposite, we see that since the very beginning of the story - she is an immortal being who already knows everything about her enemies. Her growth is learning to value the short and emotional lives of her ex- and new allies. If the demons were redeemable, the focus of the story would have to inevitably shift toward "fixing" the demons - which is fine for any other story in its own right, but this is clearly not what the author goes here for.

I have to admit, even with these justifications the writing still remains provocative. You could argue that by creating a perfectly evil species, it provides a space for the reader to indulge in the fantasy of an enemy that doesn't require moral consideration. For me, that ultimately depends on the reader and what they are willing to take from the work. If a person wants to find it in a story - they will, and they will project their personal values onto it, that's the filter that every story has to pass through. If someone just doesn't like the core concept it's fine with me and I'm not going to argue against it.

The argument: "Demons existence and inability to change undermines the core themes of the series (power of friendship and connection)".

My response:
This is where I'll always disagree and will push back the most. And the more I think about the more I'm convinced of it. I understand not liking the concept, but for me demons actually strengthen the core messages and I'd argue they are essential to the story. Like I already stated above, the role of demons is vital to highlight the actual importance of the growth and connection. Demons can also display growth, like one of them might spend 500 years in a cave researching a spell, but it is still a solitary growth.

Here we also come to some of the most important revelations - guilt and malice. Why does the story cherry-picks those emotions? Because malice and guilt are the two of the most prominent emotions that require a theory of other minds. I've already dissected some of the other emotions demons display - pride, fear, anger, satisfaction, even curiosity - they are mostly self-contained. You can feel them without understanding that there are other beings have inner lives equal to your own. But malice (aka wanting to hurt someone because you understand they'll suffer) and guilt (aka recognizing you've wronged someone and their suffering matters) both require the demon to model another being as a real subject equal to them, not just another object in their environment. Guilt is how you learn you hurt someone, malice is like a proof you at least see them.

So the choice isn't random at all - the exact combination of not having those two leads to the apparent illusion, where Frieren describes demons as predictable monsters that only use words to deceive, while in reality their interface is mimicry, but their core is authentic, and that's the line the story uses to separate beings you can connect with from beings you cannot.

They are like a dark mirror to everything that the story holds important. Beyond that, it creates for a cool conflict between two diametrically opposed ideas. What is your purpose and what becomes of you when you cannot connect with others? Power, strength and just infinite time to perfect your craft? Is there anything beyond that? Lets see. There can still be characters that reject the same idea willingly, like Serie, which makes it for a really powerful and well-rounded exploration of the underlying themes and such.

Now when we reexamine previously established demons through the new lens, the consistency of writing becomes very tight:

- Qual: he didn't invent Zoltraak because he hated humans, he was a specialized researcher (no malice, but curiosity / pride).
- Aura: all her emotions are ego-centric, the scale of obedience is a literal manifestation of demon society - just a mathematical comparison of mana (no malice / but pride and self-preservation).
- Lugner: expressed disgust when he learned Fern hides her mana - that's a frustration of a master craftsman seeing someone cheat the rules of the game as he understands them, aka mana = status. Demons are magical mana-based creatures, mana is the only objective reality and the only honest thing about them. So in this case he is not socially insulted like a human that's personally offended by a con artist, it's the integrity of magic itself that has been insulted - fundamental physics of his universe (no malice / but dignity and detached offense).
- Linie: memorized Eisen’s movements. First it shows the exceptional learning speed and capabilities, which is why they may be able to master the language so fast, but also the fact demons can feel admiration for talent or strength - not an admiration for Eisen personally, rather a cold and utilitarian admiration for his skill (no social attachment, but observation and imitation).
- The little demon-girl from episode 7 flashback: the problem - "humans are angry and want to kill me because I ate a child", the solution - "replace the child". She just wants the threat to her life to stop and she sees humans the way we might see a pile of bricks - if one brick breaks, you just grab a new one from the pile. Another example of the total inability to recognize the internal world or unique value of someone else, highlighted even more because it's a child. And as a young demon she is understandably fairly simplistic in her imitation (no guilt/malice, but imitation and self-preservation).

TL;DR: Demons possess emotions, but they are entirely self-oriented and devoid of empathy. Their feelings are intact predatory instincts, shaped by an evolutionary logic that humanity is beginning to fully uncover. Their language and emotions are not tools for social connection, but a pragmatic biological mimicry optimized for predatory survival. Not a single demon has ever cried or has been genuinely upset when their partner died. The most we ever get from them is something along the lines "damn, he's dead, what do I do next" type of thing. The initial concept that was introduced to us still survives when we got to demons that have been explored in more depth, while demons that were explored in more depth still conform to the premise of the story and do not contradict it.

Important note: circling back to the first argument since it wasn't fully fleshed out without the further context - Frieren herself talks about demons in a way that sounds more absolute than the actual evidence the story provides. When she calls them "wild beasts who only imitate human speech" or says they cannot be communicated with, she puts it more strongly than what presented data supports. The actual structural claim is that demons lack malice and guilt, which prevents genuine connection and stable cooperation. This isn't a contradiction in the writing, it's a character speaking in character. Frieren is a thousand-year-old elf who watched demons commit genocide against her people, and has personally killed more of them than anyone alive. The actual textual evidence supports the weaker claim (demons cannot stably coexist with humans because of specific cognitive absences), while Frieren's rhetoric reflects the stronger experiential claim (demons are beasts, full stop). Both can be true at their respective levels. Macht did indeed fail, but he had his unique circumstances and motivations, that doesn't mean that every single demon will forever fail as well. If a demon comes to a conclusion that coexistence is instrumentally useful and just follows the rule they may be able to do it successfully while still maintaining the same shortcomings. Essentially, it's showing how someone like Frieren would naturally talk about demons after a thousand years, and not telling us her words are the final verdict on what they are. Hopefully, that connects the dots.

And the meta one: "This subject has already been discussed N times, what you are trying to achieve?"

My response:
... Well, maybe to share my thoughts on the topic...? Everyone is free to discuss it, and I tried to create my own consistent framework that aligns with the evidence we've gotten so far. Whether people would like to honestly engage with it is out of my hands now.

There were a few more points I wanted to address - like why the outliers like Macht do not happen more often, Revolte and his gang (especially the young demon Yun), the role of the bracelet, some demons after the golden land etc, but it'd get just ridiculously too long and I'm already not satisfied with the length that this took. I'd be glad to hear what other points is worth going through or whether you disagree with some of the highlighted thoughts, and I'll go through them once I have the opportunity. I did put some effort into this, so thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed it!

Most people understand the "they use words to trick us" part, but if you take a look at the Macht and Soliätr chapters, the writing goes way deeper than just biological camouflage. The actual value of the demons is that they are written as purely intellectual beings without a subconscious.

We have cognitive dissonance, gut feelings, and "hearts" that make us act against our own best interests. Demons in Frieren are the opposite - they are 100% rational, but their logic is built on a void. Lets' start with Solitär. She’s probably the most "human-like" demon because she's genuinely curious. But her curiosity is purely academic. To her, human emotions are like a complex API she's trying to reverse-engineer. She's not evil in the sense of wanting to cause pain, she's just wants to see how the code works. So when she kills she's like running an experiment to see what happens to the human data when the physical shell is broken. It has the same level of detachment.

Then the story asks a question - can you learn what you don't possess? Macht wants to feel malice. But the writing is so smart because it shows that knowledge is not the same as experience. Macht spent centuries studying, working with humans. He knows the definition of malice and he knows the results of malice. But because he lacks the biological hardware aka emotions, he's like a person born blind trying to understand the concept of the color blue by reading a physics textbook about light wavelengths. He can talk about it all day, he can even simulate it, but he will never see it. It's like that he's a genius who is fundamentally broken by our standards. It's like trying to grow the third arm, no matter how deep your desire is it's just biologically impossible, and you will not / cannot teach a fish how to climb a tree.

While we as people usually think of language as a way to share our internal world, for demons language is simply the output to achieve their goals. When Lugner talks about dignity or pride, he isn't feeling those things. It's like an LMM that has become sentient but still lacks a soul. The story is essentially arguing that reason without emotion is predatory, by making the demons highly intelligent and even sometimes likable (like Macht is usually a fan-favorite), the author makes us confront the idea that intelligence alone doesn't make something human. Demons do not know what "mother" is, because it doesn't exist in their biology. A single curious demon can take their time and learn the mechanics behind it, but in most cases they use the word as a glitch in the system, which makes it easier to exploit humans, no matter what's the reason behind it. That means that their inner world is real, but it a predator's inner world. They mimic emotions, but at the same time not all their emotions are fake.

This is also why Frieren is usually the only one who can deal with them with no remorse. Fern has doubts even after seeing demons be deceitful time again and again, but Frieren one of the few who has lived just too long to have the loop ingrained in her, while also having suffered consequences of their actions directly and lived through it. To a typical human a demons plea for their life would feel like an emotional moment, planting thoughts "maybe there's something in there" or at least that's what many people would want to believe.

I'd argue the demons are actually vital to the themes of time and empathy to work. If the whole point of Frieren is an immortal being trying to know humans, the demons serve as a control group in that experiment. They are also immortals, but they represent the absolute failure of connection. Without them Frieren's journey towards humanity would feel like an inevitability. While demons spend centuries among us and learn nothing but how to exploit us, most of them don't even want to learn anything else, which additionally highlights Frieren's growth, and it becomes a conscious effort to value the meaningless short lives of others. They are the structural wall that gives the theme of human connection its shape, you only realize how precious a bridge is when you see a species that is physically incapable of building one.

Critics say "if demons have no other choice, but to be evil biologically (by our standards), then the experiment is actually pointless?". The point is, if the demons chose to be evil, the narrative would inevitably shift into a battle of ideologies. The heroes would have to prove the demons philosophy wrong along with all that comes from it. But Frieren isn't really about good versus evil, at least not at this point of time. First and foremost it's a story about legacy, memory, grief, and the fleeting nature of connection, so by making the demons biological anomalies rather than fallen/misunderstood species, they stop being villains in the traditional sense and become a force of nature. They are an environmental hazard, like a hurricane or a personification of time and entropy. You don't debate a hurricane, you just have to survive it. This way it keeps the narrative spotlight firmly anchored on the emotional bonds of the protagonists, rather than getting sidetracked by a villains ideological justifications.

Ultimately, they aren't "people" and cannot be compared to them. They are the absence of the things that make us people. By showing us a creature that has high intelligence but zero inner capacity, the story forces us to define what that actually is, and then everyone can decide for themselves. If they weren't in the story, "humanity" would just be a given, while with them humanity is a specific and fragile quality that requires more than just being smart or talking well. I believe there's still more to come from demons and their part in the story, but the established narrative has already done a lot for me to value their role and execution.

I'm seriously considering buying a new mac because of the limits. Will 64 gb be enough to replace claude code? From what I understand the speed is the same on both, the main difference is 128 allows to load more context. Has anyone tested it on both?

I mean I get that Chris was always unreliable, but even then it's a big choice, he still had a family and a little daughter, it kinda a felt a bit harsh.