- Joined
- Jul 6, 2016
My hypothesis is this is one of those lost in translation things. When Nips started to adapt western demons they shoved them into eastern demon tropes; yeah they are evil and eat people but you can make deals with them and it's not as though they are antithetical to human life and their win condition is to damn your soul to eternal torment. If you're in a slant eye nip mindset where your mythology is a bunch of Buddhist, Taoist, Shintoist, and just generally animalistic forces duking it out and there's no Absolute Right and Absolute Wrong and if you fuck it up you're probably just going to die and be reincarnated as a duck for a while then UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES DO YOU FUCK THE DEMON is a hard sell.The Silmarillion has some incredible ones, but I get your point. I like how demons are actually treated as demonic in Frieren. It seems like since the DxD days most of "demonkind" has been made into fetish objects or tragic victims. Frieren shows you how evil demons can truly be, by manipulating human emotions with speech. How the demons think words have magic powers because they can make humans do what they want with them.
The western world has become pretty bad on this subject too, partially because Anime is more compelling than western stories over the last 50 years in general but also because the intellectual and creatives involved in the production and consumption of fantasy have become almost universally atheist and having relatable and sympathetic demons is somehow still defying expectations when 90% of media does it.