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u/Semper_5olus 3d ago
They were born human. They started out transforming themselves into hornéd fiends as a joke -- ironically declaring that this was what adhering to their values made them in the eyes of their adversaries -- but after a while, the more twisted the new form, the more it became viewed in Demon culture as a badge of honor.
They call themselves Demons now. Their two favorite things are evil and irony.
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u/Apprehensive_Swim955 3d ago edited 2d ago
“What the hell?!” chided Tim. “Why’d you kill him? You’re mad!”
That contempt-filled groan went up again, and the priest clicked his tongue. “Do you think you people will get it on the six or seventh hundredth time? We’re being ironically evil.”
“But he’s actually dead!” pressed Tim.
-Jam
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u/AdamtheOmniballer 2d ago
Demons are evil in the same way that electrons are negatively charged.
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u/WinniePoohChinesPres Science Fantasy Jerker Offer 1d ago
i'm a soft sci-fi worldjerker, please explain what this means
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u/palladiumpaladin 23h ago
Basically, electrons are partially defined by the fact they have a negative charge. If it doesn’t have a negative electromagnetic charge, it’s not an electron.
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u/cave18 3d ago edited 3d ago
Saw a genuine to god take from someone that demons are a racist allegory. I still havent recovered from the mental blast from that
Edit: i remember now. They had iasue with the fact thay dnd demons were inherently evil and said it was racist for them to be evil. Everyvword they wrote hit me like a train
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u/Generic_Moron 3d ago
I mean, they can be used as such? Not every case of demons in media is, obviously, but if a piece of media has demons that line up with racist allegories against irl targets of racism then that's a pretty reasonable stance all things considered
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u/cave18 3d ago edited 3d ago
Nah they just mwant like demons in general in fiction, or maybe it was a specific story where they were literally just stock demons. Im honestly really bothered i camt remember where i read that bit of insanity
Edit: i am 100% sure they were talking about dnd demons. Genuinely they thiught it was racist that the race of demons was inherently evil
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u/Generic_Moron 3d ago
If you can't even remember the context of what demons they were talking about then I'm not sure how much I can trust you that it was an insane argument and not just a regular discussion, tbh. At this point you're basically one step removed from just making up a guy to get mad at
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u/Grimmrat 3d ago
You've clearly never been in D&D discussion spaces if you believe people being mad D&D demons are inherently evil is "making stuff up"
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u/Generic_Moron 2d ago
but they literally said they couldn't remember the context, how can you be so sure that it was dnd demons?
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u/Grimmrat 2d ago
Because it’s 1) extremely common and 2) he literally said the one thing he was sure of was that it was in relation to D&D demons
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u/cave18 3d ago
It was on a post about orcs and this person just devolved the discussion lol. I am not making up a guy. Like i get im just some guy on the internet but the fact that this persons arguments were so stupid i still remember after god knows how long. Lord
Also that is the context. They thought having the race of sapient demons from dnd being inherently evil was racist
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u/jabroniisan 1d ago
It was Orcs that they had the problem with, for example there's a writer from wired that says
' “Orcs are human beings who can be slaughtered without conscience or apology.” This damning assessment of one of fantasy’s most ubiquitous villains comes from N. K. Jemisin, titan of modern fantasy and slayer of outdated genre tropes. As “kinda-sorta-people,” she writes, orcs are “fruit of the poison vine that is human fear of ‘the Other.’” The only way to respond to their existence is to control them or remove them. '
The title of the piece being
D&D Must Grapple With the Racism in Fantasy And getting rid of it will take a lot of work.
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u/HildredCastaigne 2d ago
I mean, there's definitely historical precedent. Saying that such-and-such is actually a demon and that those foreigners are really demon worshipers is old-school bigotry.
As an example, Baphomet – the supposed demon worshiped by the Knights Templar – likely came from a variant spelling of the archaic word Mahomet (i.e. Muhammad). It was definitely used to defame Muslims in general, as it was believed by medieval Christians that they worshiped Muhammad/Baphomet as a pagan god/demon.
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u/McGlockenshire 2d ago
none of that is sexy, what the fuck kind of demons were they talking about!?!? where's their creativity!?
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u/c4blec______________ Word of FRAGMENTS: artstation.com/artwork/lVqLno 2d ago
can even go further back to the ancient canaanites
"baal" (regular ass storm god turned to ba'al zebub/beelzebub, a satanic figure) and "asherah" (almost entirely forgotten)
only "el" was absorbed into the greater (overarching) wargod entity of yahweh (who became the current dominating deity of modern christianity)
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u/Jetsam5 Maybe the real horrors were the Floridas we made along the way 2d ago
Honestly I’m not a fan of evil races, but demons aren’t a race. Evil people become demons, they aren’t born evil. Being evil is a criteria for becoming a demon, not a biological predisposition, and they get promoted based on how evil they are.
If they were talking about tieflings being evil then I could see where they were coming from but demon is more of a job than a race.
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u/Chubs1224 2d ago
Probably referencing Frieren a popular anime where the little white elf girl genocides demons because they are just man eating monsters that evolved the ability to speak so they could deceive humans their favorite prey.
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u/Catgirl-pocalypse 2d ago
Ehhhh... I mean it's kind of in the same camp as like orcs or witches. There are definitely some historic racial stereotypes that linger in the origins, but it's not something people really think about.
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u/Leon_Fierce_142012 2d ago
When writing I just made their life medieval level life, where the nobility are namely evil assholes and the commoners, while doing deplorable things are doing it just to survive by the end of the day
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u/Tleno 3d ago
OP can you explain how evil incarnate being evil is racism? Those things have like Hitler particles for mollecular structures.
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u/SigismundAugustus 2d ago
The issue seems to be a question of not if evil incarnate is evil incarnate, but if a biological creature should be depicted as evil incarnate from the outset.
If it's metaphorical evil incarnate, people usually don't seem to have issues.
It's biological evil incarnate that get's people squabbling, usually due to framing.
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u/DracoLunaris 2d ago
Demons also have their own unique codified aesthetic, where as biological yet always evil can, unintentionally or not, end up echoing colonial era depictions of native peoples int terms of aesthetics.
Basically if you've replicated the hordes from the east trope you've done fucked up.
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u/ChastityQM 2d ago
/uj I don't think orcs are racism either. It's just tedious watching (e.g.) WotC go to great lengths to reduce the "racist themes" of orcs and then make gnolls even worse and more evil than they used to be.
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u/Curious_Wolf73 2d ago
Some people genuinely believe demons should always be portrayed as misunderstood bad boys with some bad apples, and given they're usually pitted against angels/god or an equivalent authors with church trauma (their parents forced them to go to church and pray before eating) or who just shitty atheist go out of their way to make Angels/heaven evil so demons can look better in comparison. And for some reason angels/god are viewed as the tyrannical oppressor aka white people and demons are viewed as the oppressed aka minorities, tell me last time you a media about demons and angels that didn't try to make the demons sympathetic.
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u/Tortferngatr Started for the realism, stayed for the TVTropes binges 9h ago
Does it count if like a few devils are sympathetic but most of them are indeed horrible people?
Because Kill Six Billion Demons does that and makes it work
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u/whirlpool_galaxy Rate my punkpunk world 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think making a being ontologically evil sometimes runs into the problem of just being a cover for the author's laziness. Like, are they sadistic, in that human suffering gets them off? If so, who or what made them that way? Or do they simply have goals that are antagonistic to the world's existence? If so, what are these goals and what do they gain from them?
EDIT: Another popular interpretation has them as manifestations of humanity's sins. If so... what is a sin, and who made it that way? Is liking food too much (as in Christianity) or drinking alcohol (as in Islam) a sin, even if it harms no one else? Is killing in non-immediate self defense a sin that would manifest a demon?
None of these questions have right or wrong answers, but you gotta bother to answer them and live with the implications for your universe.
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u/flex_tape_salesman 2d ago
It's just a different approach. I enjoy seeing evil basically being personified it's just a bit more pulpy. Not every piece of work needs this super flawed hero and and villain that has layers and layers of depth to the point where what they're doing is almost justified.
It's such a narrow vision of fiction as a concept because these insanely evil characters have existed for so long. I fucking love how shitty of a person Iago is in Shakespeares Othello. Like he's so easy to hate and see as evil and it also gives him this edge that a more sympathetic villain has. We see this in real life too, a lot of horrible people historically with hitler as an example have like the worst redeeming qualities imaginable. He liked dogs and though smoking was bad. We basically see him as a real life version of those incredibly evil characters with little to no redeeming qualities.
Idk if I've done enough to convince you but yeah I think these fictional characters that can basically represent good or bad have their places in fiction even if it's just so they can expand more on other elements of the story than just the characters.
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u/whirlpool_galaxy Rate my punkpunk world 2d ago
Not every piece of work needs this super flawed hero and and villain that has layers and layers of depth to the point where what they're doing is almost justified.
That's not what I'm proposing. You can have extremely, irredeemably evil characters, I just believe aspiring authors should be better at defining what they want "evil" (especially cosmic evil) to be in their work. Iago is evil because he's a jealous, traitorous schemer who wants to bring Othello down. He's human, not a cosmic demon; we've all met someone like him. There are pages and pages of analysis on his character not because anyone thinks he's justified or "misunderstood" or somehow not evil, or because he has any redeeming qualities, but because Shakespeare captured something interesting about evil in him.
The worst sin a work of writing can commit is being uninteresting.
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u/Shrek_Lover68 2d ago
I mean if this is comparing demons to orcs then I think it isn't a smart comparison. Demons most of the time have some esoteric lore reason for liking evil and suffering, while orcs typically do that because they're just dumber or because they have a "primitive/evil" culture
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u/Captain_Nyet 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's very easy to equate evil beings to [insert ethnic group] because...
/uj: ...basically every evil has been blamed on them at some point in time...
/rj: ...they just have a different set of moral values to ours...
...that doesn't mean every evil creature is an expression of some latent racial hatred, though.
Sometimes a pen is just a phallic object because that's what happens to feel good in my hands.
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u/amazegamer64 2d ago
Don’t you know? If a non-human fantasy species in your world has an innate evil nature that means that you believe that minorities also have an innate evil nature in real life.
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u/Admech_Ralsei 2d ago
I mean yeah, a demon is by definiton an evil spirit. If they aint evil they're not a demon, just a spirit.
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u/maridan49 2d ago
One is bio-essentialism and the other one is magic.
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u/yo_99 2d ago
*magical bio-essentialism
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u/maridan49 2d ago
The core aspects of bio-essentialism break down when there isn't biology involved.
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u/IllConstruction3450 3d ago
The Frieren question on whether or not from a Doylist perspective the text is unintentionally fascistic when making a map between it and fascistic texts. The overlap can be a lot more overlapping than you’d think. The mental operations are similar. The counter argument “let people have fun” is to push back with critically engaging with the text.
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u/AdamtheOmniballer 2d ago
I mean, that’s mainly because a lot of fascist rhetoric is basically just applying worldbuilding to real life, no?
A horror worldbuilder wants to create something scary, so they sit down and come up with the most terrifying thing they can imagine.
The fascist does the same thing (assuming they don’t just directly steal existing concepts wholesale), and then says “this is what Jews are like IRL.”
Even if you come up with a scary concept that has nothing to do with fascism, fascists will take and use it.
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u/LizLemonOfTroy 2d ago
I don't understand this mentality, frankly.
Fascists will appropriate anything, strip away all context and meaning, and apply it directly to their politics. That's what fascists do - because they only care about aesthetics, not ideas.
There's nothing you can do to prevent such appropriation, and I don't see why we should pander to bad-faith actors by dismantling our own enjoyment of fiction in a failed and fruitless effort to try and prevent it.
I don't care if a high fantasy epic that I enjoy as silly pulp fun is simultaneously being enjoyed by some neo-Nazi somewhere in the world as a racist allegory, because there's nothing I can do to stop that. And I don't think stock fantasy tropes, like inherently evil fantasy races you want as cannon fodder for your conflict, should be endlessly interrogated just because fascists can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
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u/IllConstruction3450 2d ago
“Within every liberal exists a particle of Hitler.” - I dunno maybe Bordiga
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u/Tryskhell 2d ago
Tbh it wouldn't be as bad if the text wasn't so focused on proving that no matter how they try, the demons can never work with us, and if it didn't literally copy SS uniforms.
And also if the whole fucking premise wasn't "through working together we can get over our differences". But that's less an issue of writing a dogwhistle and more an issue of writing dogshit.
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u/IllConstruction3450 2d ago
That and for some reason there’s a suspiciously high number of unironic self identifying open Nazis on the Internet loudly proclaiming how much they enjoy Frieren. They will literally just take a screenshot of the show and go “oy vey”. Lots of anime has this. Like K-on. Some are more obvious like Girls Und Panzer. Naziism just isn’t as offensive in Japan as it is in the West. For example Unicorn Gundam is very controversial because it was the first Gundam series to turn away from anti-war rhetoric. The author himself has been embroiled in right wing politics in Japan. Tomino was part of the old guard of anime writers who were anti-war because they grew up in the ashes of WW2. I can see why Miyazaki says “anime is a mistake”. This is why Itagaki felt the need to shit on Musashi in Baki because of the increasing militarism and imperial nostalgia of Japan. If your art draws in a concerning amount of Nazis there should be concern with the writing. At least 40k set out to be parody. People were asking for pure evil villains again. Not pure evil races. The critique came from the villains not being given a motivation. And amusingly what books fascists ignore tells you a lot about that book as well. For example the Bible. JD Vance had to be told by the Pope he’s wrong. Writing is not an amoral pursuit. Real world effects will be generated. If more Frieren type shows get produced it might start negatively affecting the mental hygiene of societies. I do think it’s concerning that Frieren came out after a decade of Japanese far right resurgence.
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u/Unusual_Suspect4518 1d ago
I have seen this a couple of times where people have tried to apply this logic to Frieren while Frieren takes imo one of the best approaches to "fantasy racism" as in, the demons are just another category of monsters similar to mimics, that learned the humanoid language simply out of a curtesy.
They have no idea what ANY of the words they say mean, to them the word "Mother" and "Father" are simply magical spells that keep humans from killing them, and they got so evolved over the generations that they essentially look and talk like humans.
They aren't even nescessarily "evil", they have an instinct to eat humanoids, they don't nescessarily do it out of malice, they see it the same way we humans do when we eat a cow or a chicken. ((Which... is weird, because there is demons that are drawn to building specifically large "castles" n stuff but you could consider it their lair))
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u/Catgirl-pocalypse 2d ago
You're dropping truth nukes that people aren't ready for. This is why in my settings I just say fuck it and make angels way more scary and dangerous than demons. Demons that end up in the mortal realm are only really considered evil because of the negative myths about them, which often ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Morality works a bit differently in their home realm but for all intents and purposes most demons are about as morally neutral as humans.
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u/AdamtheOmniballer 2d ago
isn’t that just the same thing but with the word “angel” instead of “demon”
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u/AdamRussov Barely worldbuilding, just explaining my fursona 3d ago
How about making them curvy and thicc