#calangkoh

[wingsofescape]

oooo for fma03 🧡💔

🧡: What is a popular (serious) theory you disagree with?

I wouldn't really say I have any, tbh! Most of the 03 analysis I've read comes from @daylighteclipsed and @calangkoh and I agree or at least find their takes super interesting, so there's nothing I properly disagree with.

If I had to name one (not popular though) theory I've seen floating around is that Alfons is actually Winry's CoS counterpart, which, while interesting, I don't vibe with.

💔: If you had to remove one major character from the series, who would you choose?

This is going to get me SO MUCH flack, but faced with the choice... I would remove Al. There's so many angsty implications whether he dies during the transmutation or while they're trying to get their bodies back that could be explored. I actually have an idea for a canon-divergent AU where Ed doesn't revive Al at the end of 03, and how he copes with it. But that's a story for another time...

Thank you for the ask, hope you like the answers!

[inthearmsof]

the absolutely gorgeous plant-based alchemy animation in Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)

[alwrath]

Loved your post about Al's soul! It's actually something I believed when I first watched the series, though it soon flew out of mind and now I just remembered it upon seeing your post. Though personally I'd take it a step further and say maybe CoS Al isn't even the original Al but instead a "perfect humonculi" so to speak, sort of a better Pride. These asks are too short to ramble further, so pardon my random ask but I love your fma posts!

Thank you so much!! A tumblr friend of mine actually is on a similar track of thinking with the nature of Al in CoS. I was going to link her post but I saw you just reblogged it as well. (for anyone who wants to see some theorizing of CoS!Al as a perfect homonculus, cool post here)

I am a serial 03-rewatcher, I just couldn’t get the thought out of my head since 2011ish (for reasons mentioned in the post), and for that reason I was actually scared to post it because I didn’t want to explain my reasoning badly and have no one consider it. I’m really really glad that people have liked it and been able to following my reasoning!

I have my own theories concerning CoS/souls/ect but I’m still trying to figure out how to word everything. Glad to know there’s other people on-board the 03 theory train with me!!

[scarwasright]

@calangkoh pls forgive my formatting bc mobile! I am almost positive that I am the only person on here who semi regularly farts things out for this ship (budgebuttons is my art blog), so on the rare occasion that someone goes through my tags or their Likes or something there'll be a mini influx of it lmao. Tbh it's my #1 ship, but giving a fuck about these characters is often like screaming into a void so I don't draw things or write anything of remote substance super often.

[dying-suffering-french-stalkers]

lame that i still have like 5½ hours of work left and can't go rewatch fma Right Now

[relatablepicsofedwardelric]

That post about 03 Ed looking like OP could beat him up? He'd look pretty that way too. Hell, beat-up Ed is arguably the best Ed...

Some pulls from the top of the pile…

Referencing this post by @calangkoh   Your thoughts, Jill?

[afgunst]

Want to experience the pain of FMA 2003 but don’t have the time to sit and watch a 51-episode show plus movie? No problem! Just spend 5 minutes in the 03 fandom for the exact same results!

[jeminy3]

ooogh ty so much for all your nice tags on my art!!! ;-;

and im glad its obvious i’ve been improving!! i try to, when i have energy for it lol..

[astronomiaas]

so after binging Capra and going through @calangkoh‘s wonderful fma 03 appreciation blog, may I suggest: au where 03 Edward ends up in brotherhood at the semi-start of their journey and becomes the third idiot Elric brother

[wingsofescape]

Well well well if it isn't the consequences of my own actions...(screenshots from my FMA Twitter, which you can follow here!

(Also I wrote calangoh as the user whose meta I follow religiously, it's calangkoh)

I jokingly posted on Twitter that I could write an entire essay about how the Barry the Chopper episode fundamentally changes Ed’s relationship to intimacy and thus Winry… little did I know people would want the essay so guess who’s outlining now

Let me know if you want the essay on tumblr too I guess?

[calangkoh]

So you know I’m alive and 03 always reenters my brain, here’s a preview of a one-shot I’m working on because I was gonna make a post about the unfortunate fact that Ed was stuck with Hohenheim in the other world anyway

[envythepalmtree]

fma blogs to follow?

Ooh I've actually been planning on making this post for a while too!

Art blogs that ID their own posts that you should follow

@morningsaidthemoon - does ids in alt text! I really love their pieces - they're kinda soft in like. color and lines? and tender if that makes sense. Multifandom, they tag fandoms.

@mildly-artsy - @mildly-nerdy's new art blog! also does them in alt text. Her lines are so clean and I love how people look in her style. Mostly FMA.

Other blogs that write IDs and/or look through the notes for IDs (that you should follow and reblog the IDed version of posts)

@liathgray - they're the author of Blackwell Springs, an extremely popular fic I have not read yet, and the A Hop, Skip, and a Jump series that I'm very much obsessed with. Multifandom, they tag fandoms.

@nerdywriiterchild - bro I love their xerxes fics so much 😔 Multifandom.

@xingeseprince - IDs almost everything. Good descriptions! Sideblog, all FMA.

@princess-of-purple-prose - the meme ID person! (They're one of the people who started a huge doc of ID templates for memes to save people spoons, which is cool.) Multifandom, tags fandoms, mostly not FMA.

Other art blogs I love

I wish I could tag like. every one of my art mutuals but alas I'd be making color of the sky 2.0 😔 So sorry if I didn't tag you, I'm kinda just scrolling through my following list and picking urls at random here, all of you guys are amazing!

@chewytran - their royai college au!! is so cute!! All their royai stuff is just. chef's kiss. Art sideblog, mostly FMA. Other fandoms are tagged.

@wawayu - their use of light and colors man!! Art sideblog, majority FMA. (Also. check their notes when rbing their art because I rb and ID like. everything they post lol)

@neorei - their homunculi art!! Wish I had art-critic-training (is that a thing) so I could properly express the emotions that their art invokes. but. ahh it's so melancholy and kinda abstract, the kind of art that you could find different meanings in. Sideblog, all FMA.

@fmamangacaps - Photoshop counts as art. Their cleaning up of manga panels and tagging system is a godsend.

@humming-fly - you probably already follow them but their team greed comics are just so funny!! I always have at least one of their pieces in my drafts that I'm procrastinating on IDing lol. Multifandom.

@pumi-envy - just. lots of art of Envy. Sometimes I'm looking through the Envy tag and the majority of it is me and this artist. I love that for us. Their style's super cute. All FMA. (again. check the notes on their art 'cause I reblog and ID everything they put on my dash)

One of those Royai writers whom posts from me and my positivity blog mutuals always seem to make it to

Don't ask me why this is a category, it's just funny to me when my positivity blog posts or posts from my positivity moots make it to Royai tumblr.

@firewoodfigs - Xingese squad!! Her prose is beautiful. So poetic and meaningful. And her poetry?? is gorgeous. Ownvoices Xingese Roy content 💚 Mostly FMA.

@lantur - wrote delicate. Go read it right now if you haven't (but also tw for parental abuse and older military officers taking advantage of mentally ill young women while they commit genocide together) Multifandom, fandoms are tagged.

@hanamuri / @royriza - literally the sweetest person and runs like 4 blogs which is iconic. Her psychoanalysis of FMA characters is super interesting. All FMA.

Other writers I love

I have a habit of reserving way too many books from the library meaning that I haven't gotten around to reading most fanfics yet, oops. That's on me.

@ta1k-less - I adore her writing style!! Fun fact, one of her atla fics was probably the first multichap fic I had finished in roughly five years. She's very funny. Love how she fleshes out Ishvalan culture. Also draws sometimes and has started IDing her own art. Mostly FMA, multifandoms, tags fandoms.

@edisacornball - boomer he knows Edward very well, if that makes sense. Like, reading his fics I can tell that he understands Edward as a character very well. His Edwin fics are great. Has been in the FMA fandom for 15 years or something, which is crazy to me. Multifandom, mostly FMA.

@calangkoh - metas count as writing. So not a fic writer, but their 03 metas are wonderful. Obvious spoilers for 03 if you haven't seen it yet. Sideblog, all FMA.

Well fuck, now I'm realizing that I haven't gotten around to reading any fics from the vast majority of the writers I follow. Y'all are such lovely people sorry I still need to read your fics!! I gotta update this list once I get my act together and clean up my AO3 marked for later list, lol.

[alwrath]

FMA 2003 THEORY: Alphonse Elric’s Soul is Artificially Created

Details that are often discounted as plotholes have fascinated me in FMA 2003. This is primarily due to viewing some of Sho Aikawa’s (head writer on 03) other works. His stories tend to be multilayered and symbolically complex, but often suffer from a lack of time to tell them. This leads to intended subtle of ideas going completely under-the-radar for the sake of the narrative completing in the allotted time. 

Through interpreting commonly labeled “plotholes” as intentional, interesting readings of the narrative can emerge. 

LITERAL SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRETY OF FMA 2003 AHEAD.

Could Barry’s claims on the nature of Al’s soul have had a grain of truth? If the homonculi are artificially created souls, is it entirely out-of-the-question for Alphonse to be one as well? 

(please take note I am working from the mechanics/logic of 03 solely in this post, not taking bh into account for the sake of clarity.)

1. The Nature of Memory and Created Souls in FMA 2003

Here, Barry claims that Alphonse never existed. After considering this possibly of being solely a creation of Ed, Al falls into an existential depression. He believes his brother his lying to him and that perhaps “Alphonse” didn’t exist in the first place. 

Soon after, there is assurance that Ed did ‘invent’ Alphonse (to Ed’s own knowledge, at least). The conflict is ultimately resolved by Al finding purpose and meaning in helping the Ishvalans refugees. The FMA narrative never explicitly resolves this concern as whole, it simply assures us that a character called “Alphonse Elric” existed before the transmutation of their mother.

However Sloth’s death scene caused me to entertain the possibility of Al being an artificial soul once again. She describes the homonculi’s experience of having only memories implanted by their creator: thus, her only memories of herself prior to transmutation are as a mother to the Elrics.

Interesting enough Al’s first doubts of selfhood come previous to his confrontation with Barry, when he couldn’t remember a former neighbor of his in episode 17. 

Furthermor a look at multiple flashbacks in the reveals that we never see Alphonse recount memories separate from Ed. 

The one instance where a flashback is focused solely on Alphonse features him running off to sit by the riverbank. Using this memory, Ed is able to locate the current Alphonse exhibiting this same behavior. Al is surprised that his brother knew he would be there.

Although it becomes clear that if Alphonse were not a genuine soul, Ed is not aware of it... could Barry have been hinting at some aspect of the truth in hinting that Alphonse’s memories could have been created from those of Ed? Perhaps armor!Al is a living memory of the original Alphonse, through the eyes of 11-year-old Ed.

This point would not be so relevant if Ed was evidenced as the first-person narrator in the Elric’s portion of their story. However that is shown to be Alphonse, who begins telling their story to Rose at the end of episode 2, and recurring at the beginning of every episode until the 40s I believe.

While the last few episodes are replaced by Ed’s narration in dub, the original continues with a new script, but continues with Alphonse as narrator. This implies Al as a kind of narrator even as the events occur. Therefore every flashback (unless told by Ed) in the Elrics portion of the story are implied to be Alphonse’s memories.  These never feature Alphonse as a solitary figure, or even the central figure in nearly every case. 

One might now say that the difference between Alphonse and the homonculi is  that their soul wasn’t present in the transmutation, wheras Ed retrieved Alphonse’s soul from the gate immediately.

Other characters whose souls were never ‘missing’ were the Lab 5 guards (Barry, Slicer brothers), whose souls were attached to pieces of armor. When we meet these characters in episode 19, their flat fixation on their murderer identities and pasts via villain monologue doesn’t appear to be out-of-the-ordinary, especially for a shounen action series. (which, by the Lab 5 episodes, the show hasn’t really departed from).

But after hearing the narratives of the homonculi I always come back to the question: Why are they so fixated on their identities as murderers? Could it be because those who attached them to armor only knew of their history as criminals?

Consistent with artificial souls and “artificially created” figures in FMA 2003 (chimeras, soul transfers, homonculi ect.) is a drive towards death. It works with the narrative’s focus on themes of man vs “god”, balance, ect. and ends up winning even over the drive to “become human” for most characters. 

It is also interesting to reflect on Alphonse’s realization at the end of the show, especially in relation to the speeches of other “artificial” beings. He comes to a new realization of how he should have died long ago. Could Sloth’s death have confirmed the true nature of the feeling he had beginning in episode 17?

A counter to this could be that Alphonse has an artificial body. After all, a clear rule of FMA03 is that those with artificial souls cannot perform alchemy. Al can perform alchemy, thus his soul must be genuine.

The presence of Wrath counters this, as he is able to perform alchemy with Ed’s arm and leg. If alchemic ability were purely based on a “genuine” soul, we’d have to assume that Ed’s soul is somehow contained in his limbs that Wrath now has? As FMA speaks to a division between mind, body, and soul this is doubtful.

It is never confirmed if Wrath can perform alchemy once losing his “human” limbs. (He only fights physically in CoS.) Furthermore, Shou Tucker is able to bring Nina back to “life” at some level using the stone but it is doubtful she can even speak. Are there different levels of skill in transmuting souls?

Nevertheless, there is clearly a dialogue beyond genuine soul  ->  alchemic ability. 

(Could this apparent lack of alchemic ability in fake souls be engineered by Dante herself as a means of control? That’s a post for another day.)

2. Equivalent Exchange and Human Transmutation

The finale of the show is important to discuss when approaching this topic. It serves to deconstruct the rule of “equivalent exchange” touted (yet challenged) by the series up until this point. It is ultimately countered by the presence of a philosophers stone, which essentially vetos personal responsibility in order to commit alchemic taboos (in exchange for thousands of human lives.)

At this point, Al himself has become the philosopher’s stone. When Ed is killed, he uses the power of the stone to bring him back. During that exchange we see something interesting.

As so much of Al’s character in FMA focuses on the dissonance between his form and his soul, why would Alphonse appear in the gate in this form? (Envy appears right Alphonse, but in his preferred form(s)). The Ed he brings back is presumed to be the “original”, including his original body parts. We are able to see his “complete” (two arm, two leg, non-stabbed form) here.

But when Ed brings Al back, we meet a very different Alphonse — one with only the memories of his fully human life, before transmuting their mother.

Unlike in BH, he hasn’t aged nor is there any mention of recovering from his time in the gate. We first see him healthy and playing with Den, standing a few inches taller than his pre-transmutation self.

Could the Al that Ed brings back in episode 51 not be the Alphonse we knew during the majority of the show? I personally have understood that the young Alphonse we see in episode 51 is pre-mother transmutation Alphonse, with no relation to the armor!Alphonse we met in the show.

CoS constantly mentions his inability to “remember” those days, but I wonder if those memories belonged to this him in the first place.

It seems to be that the power of the stone is what allowed a “perfect” transmutation to occur, in the cases of Ed and Al in 51. One may wonder why Shou Tucker’s stone of Nina transmutation failed in comparison.

Well, he doesn’t have a great rep for doing things correctly. Furthermore, 03 operates on a more symbolic plane which likely contributed to Tucker vs the Elric’s results. Will expand on this in future post.

What’s very interesting to me is the stark shift in personality, especially exhibited in CoS. He is more of a risk-taker, and much less cautious. This may be purely circumstantial — to someone whose identity is so closely dependent on his brother, waking up in a world without him would certainly have an effect.

But sans any effects that the lack of his brother brought on him, could this show hints of parts of Al’s personality that were subconsciously omitted or toned by Ed when he attached him to the armor?

3. Al’s Soul and Character Depth Within the Narrative

Hopefully it has become clear that I am not arguing for Barry’s stance (”Alphonse Elric never existed in the first place”) but rather an idea that armor!Alphonse, like the homonculi, was created from the memories of the one who created him.

In a character-driven series, where even the most minor characters seem to have a level of depth and agency, why does Alphonse often seem so “supporting”? It seems he should have many more layers, especially acting as the central main character following Ed.

But for his narrative prominence, he seems reduced to a set of character traits that (while not stereotypical or flat) are much less dynamic and developed than many characters that are far less prominent. 

I don’t doubt that the Elric’s relationship was codependent before the transmutation (and such is evidenced in how Al turns out come CoS). However if Ed (inadvertently) created Al’s soul, the strongest ideas of Al in relation to Ed (as our  memories of anyone other than us are). This may explain the odd discrepancy between supposed main character armor!Alphonse as a fully-rounded character and the plethora of dynamic side characters.

4. But what about the other Conqueror of Shamballa details?

A good question! The Alphonse that appears in CoS is able to transfer his soul to other bodies. And in the end he regains his memories and ages.

These facts could stand in opposition to this theory, but in order to fully explain my perspective (which is highly entangled in this theory as well) I would have to go into an even longer post on my interpretation of CoS in general. lmk if anyone wants that!

(tl;dr i guess?) by interpreting the ‘plot holes’ as intentional, one may come to the conclusion that armor!alphonse has an artificial soul and the alphonse brought back in ep 51/cos is the original Alphonse that died in their transmutation of their mother.

[cosalphonse]

for the record, you also always get it, OP. I love your posts <3 —calangkoh

🥺🥺🥺 thank you so much !! i always love yours as well, your fma blog is one of my absolute faves and i love reading what you have to say !!!!

[golddragon387]

tagged by @calangkoh

Three ships: Steven Universe x Connie Maheswaran, Byleth x Edelgard, Blake Belladonna x Yang Xiao Long

Last song: Dreams by Fleetwood Mac

Last movie: I ain’t done a movie in a while, so I’m gonna count when my flatmate sat me down and we binged all of The Legend of Vox Machina

Currently craving: The mince pie I’ve got in the oven with about 10 minutes left on it.

Currently reading: Madeline Miller’s translation of The Song of Achilles

Let’s tag @h-a-d-i-t-h-i, @loveluckylost, and @resplendent-chungus.

[ruinsofxerxes]

while we're on the topic dO you have any 03/mangahood mashup fic recs?? calangkoh's liveblog has got me rewatching 03 and i need it..... if not maybe just some straight up '03 verse recs? though i think youve made that post before sghdhdjf... thank🙏

LOL YEAH they made me wanna rewatch it too!! Anyway, if you haven’t read Capra you aren’t living your best life. What Lies Behind Us is really good too but it’s abandoned :’(