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fullmetal-scar-simping · 3 months ago

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Nowadays I find Mustang and co’s whole thing to be faux-deep. Like it’s supposed to be a compelling story about guilt and how we’re all messy and terrible, and anyone who hates this just can’t handle protagonists being flawed people.

But in practice it’s about how PoC’s brutalization and misery, often at the direct hands of white people, is ultimately meant to be the backdrop behind the white character’s growth and maturity so they can better understand the world now. And if they keep stumbling then PoC have to patiently, passively accept their continued brutalization for the sake of the white character making the right choice for THEIR agency and development.

It’s demeaning as hell, it’s like their victims don’t actually exist other than to be perfect victims without feelings or thoughts who are just punching bags for the white character to feel sad over and maybe wonder about the perspective of, but the narrative itself doesn’t actually wonder.

As an addendum to my ask; I hate how the brutalization of their entire lives and culture is just the price that PoC have to pay for the self actualization and development of a few white characters. Jeez it’s cool that Mustang found a new purpose and meaning in life, too bad his peace of mind came at the cost of so many innocents who deserved that more than him! Like why is Mustang’s growth prioritized over Ishvalan lives, how many had to burn just so he could get the hint?

Very well said. The characters of colour are backdrops both literally and figuratively. The white characters won't worry about the suffering or personhood of the (in this case) Ishvalans. At best they (and the narrative) will project whatever is most useful for the betterment of the white/light skin characters onto the Ishvalans. All while dearly protecting the pro-military-under-correct-leadership message of the manga/show.

This is going to be a side tangent, but bear with me here:

No doubt you've noticed the phenomenon of tumblrinas flocking to defend USAmerican soldiers and other military personnel the moment anyone (rightfully) disparages the armed sector of the American empire. They'll cry "You don't understand! These non-billionaire young Americans join the military because they were preyed upon by recruiters! They're poor and they were promised an education and a career in exchange for their recruitment! Our education system is bad and never taught them about the military industrial complex! They had no idea what they were getting themselves into!"

Which is all such bold-faced horseshit for one too many reasons.

1) The USA is a military state. It's infamously exorbitant funding towards its various military branches and projects eclipse the GDPs of entire nations. Even the most ignorant American ever knows their military is a big deal.

2) Their entire entertainment industry, particularly the mainstream movie industry, is bankrolled by the American military. All anyone is fed is either at-home copaganda (police) or abroad copaganda (military). It valorizes itself, yes, but it's not hiding that you're going to commit violence on others in order to police the world.

3) American culture is deeply, deeply, DEEPLY nationalist. It exults its own military forces as their true protectors, and the protectors of "freedom" the world over. ('Freedom' is America's fave euphemism for its global dictatorship.) You ever hear a diehard military bootlicker/active duty pig/veteran talk about their time as a professional murderer? Most are pretty stoked to do what they obviously signed up for. I'm not remotely convinced that your average USAmerican teen/young adult has never once encountered this form of jingoism. Many themselves are just are pro-invasion, pro-war as their elders.

4) They train you in combat and the use of drones, firearms, armoured vehicles, etc. Put two and two together. You don't need to be an aged academic to grasp what the fuck the weapons are for. You're signing up to kill people, even if its coated in a paint of "protecting your own people". Generations grown on shit like CoD aren't left scratching their heads about what they might potentially do to people when they sign up.

And the most important, glaring point that every single apologist just can't seem to grasp: why in the goddamn should anyone outside of the USA and the West give a flying rat's fuck about whether an American youth can afford college or not based on whether they take up arms against the Global South and SWANA? They think their lives, their nation, their lifestyles trump the lives of the rest of the fucking globe.

To them, everyone else should be ok with having their resources, their land, their people, their labour, and their lives ruthlessly extracted and mass slaughtered because it helps ignorant American cunts afford to be better capitalists/workers (go to school and have a career)! Your average American is convinced they're more oppressed (and naturally more important) than the people in the countries they sign up to subjugate! Slandering the very cogs who sign up to be cogs, who are key to allowing the war machine to continue churning black, brown, and Oceanic lives into mulch for USAmerican prosperity hits American psyches too hard.

Americans are real people, complex and pitiable, noble but exploited. Everyone else are cold hearted barbarians who could never ~understand~ The States (nevermind that the entire world can't go 5 seconds without encountering American marketing, products, news, entertainment media, aggression, etc etc etc, but I digress).

I bring up this real world example not to equivocate fiction with the very real, deep horrors of unending American atrocities (let us not lose perspective). But rather to illustrate the threads of imperial and military propaganda so imbedded in the mass consciousness of imperial citizens. The logic of existing societal structures informs the stories that get produced by workers, embraced by audiences, and then reinforced by fandom and merchandising. Mangahood fans are very precious about maintaining the illusion of criticality against militarism and genocide because it offers them comfort in being cogs in these real world systems too. (There's blood on the hands of everyone in the West. When it comes to tech, the blood of mining and factories is on the hands of the entire world.)

It's tooootally fine that mangahood dwells only on the humanity of Amestrian pigs for the price of painting a lousy caricature of the Ishvalans on thin paper that backdrops this lousy attempt at an "anti-imperialist" narrative. Because soldiers are people too! And yes, they are. So why are they exempt from from the direct culpability of their actions, their patriotic dogma, their ignorance that "allowed" them to carry out the extreme violence bought them security in their fascist nation's hierarchy? Why should we swallow what fma wants, that the Ishvalans ought to "know their place" and accept that their extermination will better their exterminators? Why should Ishvalans, especially Scar (and whatever other radical/anti-Amestrian Ishvalans that are implied to be around but never seen), be ok with that? Mustang, Riza, Hughes, etc needed to commit ethnic cleansing in order to feel like maybe Ishvalans are people too? That this shit is unethical? That they should have never signed themselves to become professional murderers simply because they "didn't know it would come to this"? Because they were too idealistic and self-serving?

Obviously we want flawed characters. We want narrative tension. We want to explore stories about imperialism. We don't want to pathologize war criminals in such a way that its abdicates the citizen class from their key role in agreeing to commit these acts, or back imperialism more broadly. And I'll never be the sort to champion the wretched notion that "certain topics must never be written about or depicted". But we sure as hell can point out when something that's passed off as anti-racist is in fact the total fucking opposite, especially in the ways it defends dominant racial/national/ethnic groups against the groups they thrive off of oppressing. We need to see through the sleight of hand excuses baked into media, and the ways that fans regurgitate the logic of racist systems as a way to comfortably enjoy said media without grappling with hard truths.

Many want to convince us that the hard truth in mangahood is that fascists and war criminals are human. That your ideals can lead you to do tremendous harm (it does such a lopsided job of this). These stories fail this goal when they strip the humanity of people of colour. And the fans who can't handle critique of mangahood avoid the hard meta-critique that gets made in regards to mangahood's execution of such a story. It wants to present challenging themes but flubs the execution because it always opts for the framing that grants the most grace to the people within institutions that commit genocide.

The truly difficult truth for most fans is everything you wrote so well, anon. Racialized people exist to be the dominant race's personal development. That mangahood plays this trope straight, with greater criticism against the agency and actualization of racialized, oppressed classes. Ishvalan deaths are not a tragedy for Ishvalans, but a tragedy for the Good Real People who carried it out. Killing those teary-eyed Real People in retaliation is a more grave act than killing anyone who refuses to be amalgamated into the nation. (The fear of violent resistance against an imperial nation is core to mangahood.)

Mangahood does everything it can, as a story, to conjure these rote defenses of its primary military figures. Their mass slaughter led to guilt which led to resistance against Bradley, the council, and Father. So why should the Ishvalans be seen in any other light besides a glib plot point? They'll be made anew by their killers soon anyway. Because their killers have grown, as People.

#now if this reply is a little heavy on the real world politics well #you can thank the unending parade of usamericans filling the airwaves and the internet with their More Important Concerns #while continuing to slaughter Palestinians and maintain American and Western hegemony #airing out my pet peeve about the automatic defense forces who appear out of thin air the second #american soldiers are brought up (doesn't matter the context)#ANYWAY i could have easily posted this ask without saying much else on my part bc anon hit said it all perfectly #what more is there to say (except my vast propensity for word vomit and tangents)#ask #vent #meta #fma #fmab #will edit this a bit later but i wanted to get this out there today #long post

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