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Few TV shows illustrate the heart of the culture war like “Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End,” a Japanese anime whose hit second season just wrapped up. Centered on the adventures of elven-mage Frieren and her traveling companions over several lifetimes, the show has garnered immense popularity in America since landing on Netflix in March 2025. Frieren’s singular focus is slaying demons, and as she performs this duty from one century to the next, the human friends she makes must learn what Frieren has come to know with time, and it’s very controversial: Demons are irredeemably bad.
I cover the intersection of philosophy and culture on the GeekyStoics YouTube channel, and our predominantly Christian-Catholic audience wouldn’t stop recommending “Frieren” in the comments. So I caved. Upon looking into the show, I found analysis after analysis claiming this show was racist, genocidal, and fascist, which is a signal that fringe weirdos don’t approve and, therefore, it might be worth watching.
Meanwhile, in right-wing pockets of X, “Frieren” litters feeds with conservative and MAGA-themed memes depicting the elf and her companions as ICE officers, Crusaders, stained-glass iconography, and quasi-missionaries wielding Bibles.
“Frieren” is polarizing because the show’s central claim is that man-eating demons cannot coexist with other species. It violates the most sacred dogma of progressives raised on moral and cultural relativism, the belief that no one idea or set of values can be proven superior to another.
It’s Frieren’s mentor, Flamme, who tells her of demons: “They are nothing more than monsters capable of speech.” It’s a black-and-white view, and depending on the viewer’s biases, it’ll come across as either a statement demanding evidence or an obvious truth. One of Frieren’s idealistic companions, Himmel, needs evidence.
In a pivotal moment from the first season, Frieren recalls arriving with Himmel at a town where a demon, presenting as a child, has eaten a young girl. Despite the grief and rage of the victim’s family, Himmel can’t slay the demon once it calls for its “mommy.” When the village chief offers to take the demon under his roof and raise it alongside his children, Himmel accepts this plan, hoping the creature can be reformed.
Frieren knows better but allows events to unfold — and is proven right when, eventually, the demon child brutally kills the man who adopted it and burns the house to the ground.
Frieren intervenes and uses her magic to kill the demon, and just before dying, the demon calls out again for its mother. Frieren points out that demons aren’t raised by parents and asks why it would use such a word. The demon answers: “It stops you from killing us, doesn’t it? It’s a wonderful, almost magical word.”
Language is neither natural nor necessary to demons. They use it only for the purpose of deception, knowing that human empathy can reach almost suicidal proportions. It’s also a reminder to viewers that, in the context of “Frieren,” demons might not even be “evil” in the way Westerners understand it.
These demons do not perceive good and evil and then consciously choose evil. They’re not trying to lead you to ruin like C.S. Lewis’s Wormwood and Screwtape; moral order is unknown to them. In that sense, they are less like rebels and more like predators.
A wolf is not evil for killing cattle — or even devouring a human child. It acts according to its nature. The human task is different. Because we are endowed with moral reason, we are responsible for recognizing what wolves do, restraining them, and, when necessary, killing them.
“Frieren” provokes backlash by being clear-eyed and confident about a threat to human life (demons), much like “K-Pop Demon Hunters” drew consternation from writers who wondered whether it was “problematic” to celebrate the genocidal killing of demons.
They say these stories embolden “fascists” in the real world who might seek to characterize illegal immigrants, Muslims, and “trans” people as somehow less than human. This is mainstream liberalism’s fatal conceit: the slogan “diversity is our strength,” hinging on the belief that all cultures yearn for freedom, universal rights, and coexistence.
Any violence that breaks out between groups isn’t seen as evidence of incompatibility between certain cultures, but as evidence of bigotry, intolerance, or some other academic nonsense meant to shame and weaken the majority group’s confidence in defending its own existence.
So, to the credit of “Frieren’s” left-wing haters, the uncomfortable truth is that the show’s clarity does provoke some real-world questions.
For instance, America has incurred at least four Islamist terror attacks since the start of its war with Iran by individuals originally from Turkey, Lebanon, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. Progressives will sloganeer and say “hate has no home here,” but they don’t seem to believe that hateful ideologies can be imported. They reject any responsibility to screen for views that might be incompatible with American life or threaten the safety of our people in the event of, say, hostilities with an Islamic terror state such as Iran.
Being confident in your knowledge that there are two biological sexes, male and female, necessitates boundaries between men’s and women’s spaces; “transgender” identity doesn’t trump reality. Borders exist, as does immigration law, which means you should either enforce those laws or simply abolish them.
Clarity and boundaries are what progressives find most threatening, so it’s natural that “Frieren’s” simplicity in handling demons rubs some the wrong way and excites conservative anime fans (yes, we do exist). And for conservatives who aren’t usually into anime, “Frieren” might just change their minds.
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Stephen Kent is the co-creator of GeekyStoics on YouTube, a conservative columnist, and author of How The Force Can Fix The World. Follow him on X @StephenKentX.
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