Another neat moment of the flashbacks making Himmel more interesting.
I wonder if Himmel's obsession with getting statues of them made is also fueled by the fact that his kneejerk reaction towards Frieren wanting those book forgeries was to act a bit dismissive about it, like, yeah he wants to do it because it is (or will be) important to Frieren, but I wonder if he has the kind of personality where after instantly realising a mistake, he feels really strongly about wanting to do something to make up for it, even when no one else seemed to care about it.
And it's similar, with the issue of the demon girl. People can make mistakes by being uncaring, but also when having good intentions. What about the legendary hero Himmel, how would he react in either case? "he is not a fairy tale hero, he is people too after all" is, I think, part of the point.
I like how this episode also not only touches on how it's important to remember the good things with the statues, but then adds to that idea with the way demons keep tricking people (thou at first the two might seem like unrelated plot points):
The statues embody that it's important to find ways to solidify memories, so they can stay clearer through time, and so that the good things, and people, aren't forgotten. But the rest of the episode expands on the importance of memory and goes for a "learn from history or be doomed to repeat it"-type lesson, that has the added perspective of Frieren being able to see in real time how multiple generations of humans seem to make the same mistakes with the demons again and again...
And then, bringing this episode's threads full circle, Frieren mentions that it was Flamme who first defined demons! Would demons' nature be widespread knowledge if the world wasn't full of forgeries obscuring Flamme's true words? if she were less of a fairy tale? If the memory of her hadn't diluted so much?
Kinda makes me want to see Frieren (or Fern or Stark) reach a point where they specifically worry about passing their knowledge on in some tangible form.
A bit of an aside, but I find monsters that imitate humans kind of upsetting! I guess I find psychological manipulation awful and these feel like a particularly extreme kind where the thing doing the manipulation is entirely incapable of feeling the kind of feelings it's manipulating (it feels a special kind of unfair and tragic). Anyways, just to add a bit of real world dread to this, the ideas of emotionless human imitators that people insist on assigning emotions (or "reasoning") to, and the idea of widespread fake information obscuring real and properly authored information (maybe even in a deadly way) reminded me a lot of the issues with how text/image generators are perceived and used :')