I would've thought Garron somehow knew "muscles don't lie" as an ex-musclebrain himself and just trained Tina to not lie even through her muscles.
A lot of that stuff's subconscious, I think. I doubt it could be trained out of Tina in a reasonable timeframe (and honestly, if it could, you'd think Mikage would've done long ago).
I've never thought about comparing the two ever. Is it just because Frieren's also fantasy?
IMO, there's definitely overlap between the two, and not just the fantasy aspect. A lot of times I describe the setup to this series to new readers as sort of "Reverse Frieren", specifically because of that. You've got a veteran of the Hero's battle with the Demon King, who is known and feared by their enemies, starting a new life decades later, and having to cope with having lost their old friends/allies from the war and such. It's just in this case, it's from the Demon side that lost, instead of the Hero side that won (and also, the Demons aren't inherently evil).
On side note, geez dude this Fist Lord name sounds like gigolo name.
I floated a few different ideas for his title to friends and teammates. A bit more literally would be something like "Holy Fist", but I didn't want to toss in too many implications that he was tied to some church that hasn't been shown to exist, or something, and this came off not
inherently dirty-sounding, easy to say, and a nice counterpoint to "Beast King".