I suck at media crit and am just generally not very good with words, but I’m gonna take one last stab at this.

The point I’m trying to make is that reading fascist intent into things like people are doing with Frieren could be just massively overthinking things.

Look at it this way: While it’s true that, say, stories about zombies and alien invasions were originally based on a reactionary fear of “the other”, I sincerely doubt that the vast majority of people who write these sort of stories in our current time sit down and make a conscious decision of using them as allegories for immigration or anti-colonialism or whatever. They just grew up with these tropes and want to build an interesting world around them that has nothing at all to do with what connotations they may have had like a century or more ago. The phrase “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” comes to mind.

So fascists and socialists could both be wrong in reading these stories as supporting fascism.

Does that make sense?