Fullmetal Alchemist (Chapters 51-61)

[cahn]

...I promise I'll post something next time that's not about FMA. Really.


Chapter 51: A Portal in the Darkness
-"One who calls another 'idiot' is an idiot." WHY SO AWESOME, LING
-Okay, what is awesome is Ed and Ling making sure they are actually each other basically by Ling insulting Ed. Both times. HEE.
-...Where are all the other people who were swallowed by Gluttony? Why aren't they there? Unless... they got crushed by all the other stuff Gluttony swallowed. *shudders*
-Ed deciding he is going to become telepathic to connect with Al is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking.
-"His face is scary, but he really is a nice person!" "No..." Hee.
-"I am a person without a name. Call me whatever you like." ANGST! MANPAIN! "Ummm, how about Mr. X?" "...that's no good either." HEEEEEE.
-"I'm abandoning you! For real here! I'm really going on my own!" OH ED. It took me a while to warm to him, but I'm absolutely into him now.
-"The Man Who Fed Shoes to the Emperor" -- hee!
-When the guy who survived enough assassination attempts as a kid that he can dodge homunculi tells you that you didn't have much of a childhood, that's when you know you really didn't have much of a childhood...
-I sort of understood this before, but... the entire Ishval war... it was just for this humongous transmutation circle... OUCH.

Chapter 52: Lord of the Demon's Lair
-I was spoiled for Hawkeye being transferred personal assistant to the Fuhrer (I don't know what comes after that, though), but it is different seeing it in context... wow. Oh man, Hawkeye!
-"I'm sorry, Colonel Mustang." That... is quite possibly the least sincere "I'm sorry" in the history of the world!
-"Ogre! Demon! Loincloth!" Ha. I... also kinda wonder why he wears that loincloth. It's kind of silly!

Chapter 53: The Soul's Guide
-I... actually feel... just the slightest tiny little bit bad for Bradley. Which I had not thought was possible!
-Rebound. OH ED. (Also, LOVE Ed and Ling together!)
-I think I would have clued in to how momentous a moment this a little earlier was if I had remembered Xerxes at all. (I suck at remembering this sort of thing!) Wow. IT IS EVEN BIGGER THAN ONE GIANT COUNTRY TRANSMUTATION CIRCLE. But... what... is he going to do after the entire world is Philosopher Stones?
-Ling, you're terrible!
-I take that back. YOU ARE AWESOME.
-Also, when I said I loved Ed and Ling together? Multiply that by, like, a hundred.
-OH ED.
-Actually, Al does not, in fact, worry too much. Just saying.

Chapter 54: The Fool's Struggle
-I just realized we haven't seen Team Mustang for, like, forever, and I haven't actually noticed. I, uh, am really into Ed and Ling and Al these days... Also, they have really well calculated what I want...
-Wait... so "Father" thinks that Hohenheim can reproduce... SO CONFUSED! Clearly Hohenheim is some sort of alchemical clone (clone-homunculus?) (HA, I got the spelling right on the first try!) of "Father," but... what? How?
-Ha, every time I think Edward is getting a little more mature, he goes into a snit and proves me wrong.
-Envy and Edward are both, like, six. Hilarious!
-We're only halfway through?
-I... Ling? LING??

Chapter 55: The Avarice of Two
-Wow, it's interesting how differently Ling!Greed is drawn from Ling. Much more menacing.
-Mei Chang's fantasies of Edward are always totally hilarious.
-AL. I'm telling you, Al is so mature! None of this super-vendetta thing.
-Yeah, see, I knew Ling was still in there, because Ling is totally too awesome not to be.

Chapter 56: The Lion of the Round Table
-I KNEW Bradley being all solicitous of Winry was going nowhere good!
-Ahahaha, Bradley may be fooled by Mustang being all "I'm just staying here for my own ambition!" but WE ARE NOT. We know it's all about Hawkeye! (and, okay, the rest of Team Mustang, and, okay, the whole country)
-Uh. Bradley. MEI??
-Uh? (okay, it was kind of hilarious when Al was like "Is there something wrong?" even though I'm totally as confused as Bradley confused face)
-Oh, ha, she's small :)
-LING. LING.
-Hee, Bradley's shocked face is HILARIOUS
-MARCOH?? Wait, how did he get free? Wasn't Envy guarding him? Oh... okay, I guess maybe they all kinda ran away and he was left by himself? (I can't keep track of where all the characters are!) [ETA: Oh, I guess he's not free, he's still caged up there.]

Chapter 57: Scars of Ishval
-"Like I care about the affairs of your country!" KNOX. <3333333333333
-awwwww Al!
-AWWWW KNOX (but wait why did he tell Lan Fan that they were dead?? I am super confused!!)
-MARCOH MARCOH
-...wow, Ed still has Hawkeye's gun? Man.

Chapter 58: Footsteps of Ruin
-I... am totally confused by Hawkeye Sr.'s death. What just happened? Did he decide to die right then? He just finished saying he had been dead for a long time? Am I supposed to be confused? (Feel free to tell me, yes, I am supposed to be confused. That is not a spoiler :) )
-HAYATE. Hee!
-Ed, you gave Riza's gun back with blood all over it? That is RUDE!
-Awwww, Ed is such a kid. Of course I don't LIKE like her!
-I kinda love that Roy won't tell Ed anything about Ishval. It's so... protective and big-brother-ish.
-Along those same lines, I love the pictures of all the people who were in Ishval on the same page.

Chapter 59: The Corrupted Alchemist
-MARCOH
-KNOX
-MARCOH
-maybe some ROY and RIZA in there too
-but mostly KNOX MARCOH

Chapter 60: In the Absence of God
I... I think I might have preferred it if Roy had killed Maria Ross, to this.

Chapter 61:
...
...

And that was when I went out (or, well, you know, to amazon) and bought the whole bloody thing.

Comments

[genarti]

Yeah, he's chronically/terminally/something ill; it's not really explained in detail. And that may also be a dramatic statement about his feelings? I'd honestly forgotten that line, but anyway I can tell you that there won't be more about Hawkeye Sr.'s life and death later. I mean, not directly about him; obviously the relevant Hawkeye-and-Mustang backstory continues relevant. (And I don't remember exactly what is in volume 61, but I'm trying to figure out how to ask if a certain scene happens then or in 62 without being spoilery for what it is. I guess I could ask what you know about Hawkeye's back.)

And yeah, exactly! I read Arakawa's little author's note at one point about how much she was inspired by stories of soldiers and how "war stories" in the movies don't feel realistic at all to several veterans she talked to or read about, and you hit that section and you UNDERSTAND WHAT SHE REALLY MEANS BY THIS. It's just a gutpunch of sudden actual seriousness under all the hijinks. The hijinks matter too, thematically as well as because I like the characters, but -- yeah. Gutpunch.

[cahn]

Ah, okay! Thanks very much for the clarification on Hawkeye Sr.; I won't look for more, then. And yes, I have read 62 now, and in at least one of them (I can't acutally remember now which one, I think it was 61) Hawkeye's back is a Thing. (AUGH. ALLLLL the Hawkeye-and-Mustang in the WORLD.)

The thing that gets me so so much about the Ishval arc is that by this time we've come to love and admire and empathize with these characters, a lot. And then they're part of this... THING. They do horrible, brutal, terrible things, and we never stop empathizing with them or loving them, even though what they have done is unforgivable. And it... I've never read anything, fiction or nonfiction, that really drove home quite so much what war is, and the process of good people doing horrible things, and what that makes of people.

AHHHHHH. (Um. Thank you for listening to me rant!)

[genarti]

YYYYYEAH, THEN. I think that's the last of the specifically Hawkeye-household-related backstory! (Although, character realization that I had much later: if you want to make yourself hurt, think about this backstory in relation to the whole Nina Tucker plot and reactions there.)

And yes, yes, exactly. We love them and admire them and empathize with them, and then it turns out that they've done these horrible unforgivable things -- and neither the narration nor they themselves let them off the hook for it, ever. This isn't angsty backstory they can redeem themselves from with an arc about Learning To Be A Good Person or saving the world to make up for it or whatever. They can't make up for it, and they can't redeem themselves from being the person who did that, but they still have to do their best to atone for it. Ed even tries to let Hawkeye and Mustang off the hook -- you were under orders, you were being manipulated by homunculi -- and she shuts that down with "Sure, but we still did these things, so we're still responsible."

And that's so, so rare to see in fiction. I'm trying to think of what else I've read that's so compassionate (to both sides!) and yet so scrupulously inexorable about unflinching examination of this.

(As you can tell, I am JUST FINE with listening to you rant about this.)

[cahn]

Umm. I think I might have to ask you to unpack that a bit? About how alchemist fathers use their daughters, although Hawkeye's way of doing it wasn't as... extreme... as Tucker's? (An interesting contrast is Hohenheim, as it is starting to appear that he loved his sons more than, oh, Tucker loved his daughter, although that was a misdirect at the beginning.)

and neither the narration nor they themselves let them off the hook for it, ever.

Yes yeeeees. I mean, they go on with life, because they have to, and they have fun and laugh and have meaningful relationships... but this is always behind it.

And yes, I love what you say about how they can't redeem themselves. All they can do is try to make the world a better place... which isn't making up for it, they can't, it's just... doing what they can.

*nods* I don't think I've ever read anything like this in fiction, or if so, I can't think of it.

[genarti]

Yes -- it's not that Hawkeye Sr is morally the same as Tucker, to be certain. Tucker did a whole hell of a lot worse. And we don't actually know a great deal about the relationship between the Hawkeyes when Riza was young; there's some you can maybe extrapolate from his personality and hers, and from how she reacts after his death, but that's kind of limited. But yes, alchemist fathers using their daughters, and regarding their work as their legacy and all-consuming obsession rather than the children they're theoretically primary caregivers for.

So I do wonder how Mustang and Hawkeye were both reacting internally to the whole Nina Tucker thing -- obviously it's a horrible thing no matter what, but I wonder whether there's some additional level of complicated guilt reaction given backstory. What we actually see onscreen is very restrained and locked-down from both of them, especially in contrast to Ed and Al's devastated shock, but at the point that happens, we don't actually know either of them all that well yet. For the record, this isn't a major plot point to keep watch for or anything; I just find it interesting as a parallel that isn't a major recurring plot point, and thus that I didn't notice until I rewatched that episode of the anime and went "...Waaaaiiit oh ouch."

And Hohenheim, yes. Whom I don't want to give spoilers about, but who certainly has both parallels and strong contrasts here.

And yes, about trying to make the world a better place, and how that isn't actually making up for anything, except that it's what they can do and it's better than not doing that. I can't wait for you to finish the series, because then I can list off some other characters whose arcs are also doing really interesting things with this whole theme, and I can't remember how much of those characters and those arcs you've seen yet.

[cahn]

*nods* I now want to go back and reread for things like this.

HOHENHEIM. My writing up posts lags my reading , and I just got to the part where his backstory is given. I DID NOT PREDICT THAT AT ALL.

[genarti]

I KNOW RIGHT. I think when I got to that part I spent the entire time flailing incoherently at skygiants.

...I spent a whole lot of this canon flailing incoherently at skygiants. Especially when we got to the parts that were new to both of us. We were watching the Brotherhood anime as it came out, and then going back to read the manga up to the point the show had just covered, so there were a whole lot of week-long cliffhangers.

[cahn]

Yeeeeeah. I am starting to see what you mean about this being tightly plotted. And I'm glad you said that, because it means I trust all these different plot threads to be going somewhere, you know? That's the kind of thing I really like knowing about something I'm consuming.

I just got to Volume 22, the start of the windup to the Promised (?) Day. *FLAILS INCOHERENTLY*

[genarti]

Eeeeheeheehee. I look forward to more reactions as you read further! :D