>>1379
You forgot half of my statement, it's a doubled-edge strength. Not having any empathy make you weaker but over-empathizing make you prone to being manipulated.
Frieren is an old hag, she learned a long time ago what demons truly are so they should never trusted. The other characters are mostly 'young' humans who don't have a thousand years of demonnigger fatigue to know the extent of their perfidiousness. It's in the nature of a human to show empathy to their own and thus by extent to human-looking demons. Most of them probably never saw demons before so they never knew, but it has been shown that not all humans get tricked because they been taught properly about demons. Some learn the hard way and might not fully accept the fact demons are that way because they anthropomorphize the demons believing that not all demons are the same, which while technically true, is not the case for the point of human-demon relations.
I feel the true moral in this is not the danger of over-empathizing but rather of excess anthropomorphism. Because without the latter, people wouldn't apply empathy to animals and other non-humans to the same degree. As an exemple of my point take a horse that broke its legs during a race: sure the horse is in pain because it broke its leg, but it's not sad that he lost the race.
Too much empathy on non-humans get you stuff like anti-natalists vegans who prefer animals to humans aka mental il