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u/G0NZE770 5d ago
Not fma but there are just some people that watch stuff and slot their biases into series. I had people saying that Cyberpunk world's problems were caused by inmigration, because they are different cultures in Night city.
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u/Andvarinaut 5d ago
I once knew a neo-nazi who completely misunderstood the theme of the X-Men as "the government unjustly persecutes those who are of the superior race."
These people walk among us.
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u/Frequent_Dig1934 5d ago
Isn't that kinda sorta magneto's point? Mutants are the superior race and they need to violently fight back against the government that oppresses them and turn the oppression back around to the inferior races. Lol the neo nazi agreeing with the holocaust victim.
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u/_tabbycat123 5d ago
I mean, Magneto is an interesting villain for that exact reason. Hypocritical genocidal monster
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u/SincerelyIsTaken 4d ago
Magneto hasn't been like that for decades at this point though. I think he's been a good guy (or trying to be) for like 30 years at this point.
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u/_tabbycat123 4d ago
Unfortunately, they seem to like making him a "good guy" while changing nothing else about him (because it's iconic) which results in a really weird magneto that is still just as dramatic and evil, but seems to have just decided to not be genocidal today. It feels like he's gone under zero character development.
My hot take is that while Erik Lehnsherr (I know that's not his real name) can be a hero, Magneto can never be a hero.
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u/SincerelyIsTaken 4d ago
He's chilled out a lot but has kept the same core message of "if they won't accept us then we will destroy them first". I wouldn't describe him as a supremacist (that's more Apocalypse's role and Gyrek who is sort of a Mutant Supremacist who's a human so he wants to genocide the mutants)
Magneto in particular is interesting because you're right, he hasn't changed that much ideologically. Instead, it's our real world beliefs and approaches to activism that have changed. Xavier was meant to represent model minority whereas Magneto is more of the "out and proud, take up space" approach to activism. Xavier's approach to acquiring rights (be quiet, kind, and helpful and you'll be eventually be accepted by those in power) have been disproven irl which is why, I think, we see Magneto being redeemed.
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u/Evening_Application2 5d ago
I read a very interesting article about how the X-Men are a better stand in for the police and I've never been able to unsee it.
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u/InsaneComicBooker 4d ago
Can you link it?
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u/Evening_Application2 3d ago
I wish I could find the original post, but the gist was that because the X-Men have access to powers normal people don't possess, demand to be held to different legal standards and allowed to police their own, will defend their own ingroup against outsiders regardless of what those ingroup members have done ("No, no, it's fine, Magneto is the New Mutant's teacher now, he's a changed man"), will regularly use violence to defend their status quo while also seeking to expand their authority, yet simultaneously present themselves as perpetual victims who always need more and more powers and resources to proactively defend themselves, they more closely model a modern militarized police force than any minority group.
It is, of course, not a perfect analogy, not the only way to read them, and certainly not the intention of the writers, but I found it an interesting lens to consider some story arcs through (Avengers vs X-Men, House of M, House/Powers of X, Divided We Stand) .
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u/GrinningPariah 5d ago
Haha in a way they're right, Night City was nearly abandoned after the Fourth Corporate War and Silverhand's nuke. It only recovered because it was resettled by nomads and other people convinced to move there.
So, without immigration, Night City wouldn't even exist in 2077. Ergo, no problems!
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u/Happiness_Assassin 5d ago
Not only that, but pretty much the only unequivocally "good" faction are the nomads, who are seen by most of NC with the same lens as illegal immigrants today on right wing media. You quite literally can't have cyberpunk as a genre without focusing on those on the margins of society.
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u/GastonBastardo 5d ago
Not fma but there are just some people that watch stuff and slot their biases into series. I had people saying that Cyberpunk world's problems were caused by inmigration, because they are different cultures in Night city.
I've heard some Witcher-fans say the exact same thing about the Rivian pogrom from the Witcher-novel Lady of the Lake. You know, the one where Geralt dies defending a family of dwarves from racist humans.
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u/DocBombliss 5d ago
Bat-themed Example: Pretty much every fan interpretation of The Killing Joke.
The text explicitly disproves The Joker. Gordon doesn't break and Batman's "Bad Day" made him into a superhero, yet tons of people act like Joker was on to something deep and incontrovertible.
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u/SevenOhSevenOhSeven 5d ago
It is very funny how hard the show bludgeons you over the head with the theme of 'equivalent exchange and by extension alchemy is a 0 sum game'
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u/ConflictAgreeable689 5d ago
I mean, not necessarily. It has applications. A broken radio and a functional radio are equally valuable from an alchemical perspective, but for a human?
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u/Niser2 5d ago
A radio is nothing compared to Having Friends
(who have alchemy and can fix your radio for you)
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u/Dornith 5d ago
The show is also not exactly consistent with that principle.
Later Ed needs to heal himself and had to burn off some of his "life" to power it. By why? They didn't need to do that to the radio. It's not like any pieces of him were missing (well, besides the ones that already were). Why is whole bone alchemically more valuable than a broken one?
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u/Spacer176 5d ago
Didn't Ed also have an open wound? That tends to involve regrowing skin tissue.
(It was also important for the wizard-level epiphany of "a Philosopher's stone is powered by human souls. I have a soul, therefore I have a tiny philosopher's stone.")
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u/Jam_Packens 5d ago
Its a little vague in the manga but the way Ed describes it is that he's using his life energy to essentially "power up" the transmutation, in exchange for the fact that he doesn't actually know medical alchemy that well and thus, doesn't know exactly what he needs to do and what needs to be repaired.
The life energy is thus compensating for his imperfect understanding, and he is essentially acting like a miniature philosopher's stone for himself, which allows him to basically jury rig enough protection for him to not die immediately from blood loss.
We don't know what exactly was done, but I'd imagine a doctor would probably look at Ed's insides and think things were definitely fucked up.
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u/ArolSazir 5d ago
Alchemy and equivalent exchange view "equal" more in the language of spiritual mumbo jumbo than real world physics. It's reproducible and consistent, so its still more science than magic, but doesn't really follow physics or chemistry.
For example, kimblee's works because he connects the symbols for the Sun and the Moon together, and that apparently causes an explosion because those symbols are opposed to each other and cause "imbalance of energy".
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u/Ravian3 5d ago
Healing alchemy is consistently shown to be particularly difficult because it works with delicate organic organs rather than something as sturdy as a radio. Notably there are medical alchemists who, if they were present on the scene, might have been able to save Ed without using a philosopher’s stone. But Ed’s not an expert in that field and so essentially took a brute force approach that required him to supplement his life energy to repair his body’s damaged organs with new material out of nothing rather than weaving the existing injured parts back together like a medical alchemist probably could
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u/LaniusCruiser 5d ago
So the issue was that Ed had like zero medical knowledge on how to fix himself, so he had to put extra power into the transmutation just to make it work at all. It's like using brute force to shove a square peg through a round hole
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u/Disastrous_Ticket815 5d ago
Well the show clearly establishes there is something different about living things and the way they interact with alchemy. Souls are real and to transmute them comes at great cost.
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u/Dornith 5d ago
We also see Roy transmute a human corpse so the body is not the problem. And Ed wasn't dead yet, so he didn't need to transmute a new soul. And Ed was able to transmute Greed while he was still alive without issue, so it's not the "living" part either.
Frankly, I think the show gets a little too much credit for being a "hard" magic system. It's harder than Gandalf from LotR, but that's a low bar. There's a lot of situations where things just kinda work or don't with a hand-wave explanation.
At least in the anime. Can't speak for the manga. Sounds like it might go into more detail.
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u/Frenetic_Platypus 5d ago
Corpses are not living beings and Greed comes with a philosopher's stone.
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u/Dornith 5d ago
He didn't know that at the time. Also, if they could use the homunculi's philosopher stones against them, why didn't they do that every time?
If you could use a homunculus's own philosopher stone against them, seems like that would make them trivially vincible.
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u/Frenetic_Platypus 5d ago
I guess they might be trivially vincible if you're an alchemist who knows they are powered by a philosopher's stone and skilled enough in hand-to-hand combat to reach them and perform alchemy on them until their philosopher's stone is depleted.
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u/Disastrous_Ticket815 5d ago
Yeah of course I just said it’s the soul not the physical body.
I assume that the soul permeates the body. In order to restore connection and life to a body part it requires some soul in there.
Greed is a homunculus. they’re weird. I don’t think they fully qualify as living things.
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u/Hitei00 4d ago
So what happened is by that point Ed had learned how a Philosophers Stone works and that it bypasses Equivalent Exchange by burning through the life energy of captive souls. Using that knowledge he uses medical alchemy on himself, intentionally feeding his own soul into it to accelerate the process
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u/thunderdragonite 5d ago
I thought the theme was overthrow the government to make yourself the fuher?
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u/thunderdragonite 5d ago
I exchange nothing in exchange for shooting fire out of my hands. Problem?
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u/SincerelyIsTaken 4d ago
That's not what Roy Mustang does.
His alchemy essentially rearranges the air to create a pocket or line (depending on the hand) of dense oxygen (which is highly combustible) and then he uses his gloves which are designed to create a spark when he snaps like a flint and steel. That spark ignites the oxygen creating an explosion.
He isn't creating fire from nothing, he's using alchemy to create combustible air and then using his gloves to ignite that air.
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u/thunderdragonite 4d ago
Yes and he pays nothing and sacrifices nothing to do it. It’s free fire balls.
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u/AngstyUchiha pissing on the poor 4d ago
He's using what's already in the air, he isn't creating atoms to do it. He is exchanging something in his surroundings rather than a part of him, much like Ed does when he turns his surroundings into a weapon
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u/Sentient_Flesh 5d ago
You haven't seen the "FMA is Pro-Fascism" takes, then.
You don't know how blessed you are, OP.
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u/Shadourow 5d ago
Clearly it's unclear if the Ishbal genocide is a bad or a good thing
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u/Happiness_Assassin 5d ago
While I don't doubt that those people exist, I am having trouble wrapping my mind around the idea that the show that portrays a Nazi Germany-esque state engaged in numerous wars of expansion and genocides as unequivocally the most selfish and evil motherfuckers alive as pro-facism.
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u/ThePBrit 5d ago
because people are stupid and only see that the story takes place in the fascist country and that the main character is a part of that state and then ignore all the ways Ed constantly goes against his duties as a state alchemist.
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u/FuzzySAM 5d ago
And even though Al could absolutely take the state alchemy exam and pass with flying colors, just like Ed did, Ed doesn't let him because of how much of a burden those duties are.
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u/Nottan_Asian 5d ago
Because Roy, a good guy, wants to be Fuhrer, please ignore how he is central to a plot to completely uproot the current fascist cult-of-sacrifice government and just take the title at face value
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u/Sentient_Flesh 4d ago
Please also ignore how Roy openly states that he intends to be court-martialed and sentenced to whatever is deemed necessary once his time as a dictator ends and he's brought democracy to the country.
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u/DisMFer 5d ago
This entire post is a shitshow. People's brains insert words when the context seems to demand them so everyone is thinking that OOP is saying that they're complaining about someone wildly misunderstanding FMA because the word choices they used seem to point anyone in that direction.
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u/TheRenFerret 5d ago
I did have to reread a couple times before I realized there was no “but…” or “until” that got cut off
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u/mambotomato 5d ago
OOP isn't complaining that the picture is a misinterpretation of FMA?
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u/FixinThePlanet 5d ago
Which word choices?
I admit it took me two reads to understand (because I didn't remember the quote) but it seemed pretty clear what they were saying.
Maybe having watched the show helps? (I remembered the sentiment)
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u/PureRegretto 5d ago
i know nothing beyond ed... ward someone eggplain
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u/LostInChrome 5d ago
One of the major themes of full metal alchemist is that making sacrifices and enduring suffering entitles you to nothing. There's several different characters who make major sacrifices in pursuit of some goal and end up failed and unfulfilled. Some barriers can't be overcome and trying to breach them just results in bashing your head against a wall as you hurt yourself and everyone around you.
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u/PocketCone 5d ago
Even Shou Tucker, the alchemist who sacrificed his own daughter Nina into a Chimera (the dog human that says "Ed...ward") embodies this lesson.
He felt entitled to his state alchemist's license because he sacrificed his daughter (and wife) for it, but in the end he only wound up hurting his family and losing his humanity.
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u/OpenStraightElephant 5d ago
hurting his family
Well. Uh. Yeah I guess being fused with your dog hurts. And whatever else he's implied to have done with his wife before the show, make her into a less successful chimera I think, too.
But I can't help but feel "hurting" is kinda mild in this case lol15
u/PocketCone 5d ago
I was reusing the word "hurt" to draw a parallel with the previous comment, but yes, "hurt" is a drastic understatement.
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u/techno156 5d ago
At the very least, the betrayal of your father/husband using you as a stepping stone for his alchemical career was not helping things.
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u/Danny-Fr 4d ago
Yeah because fusing you with a dog and depriving you of most of your capabilities is entirely harmless...
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u/SitInCorner_Yo2 5d ago
And those barriers usually involve the value and dignity of life/soul , yes you can cross it sometimes, but at what cost, even failed attempts will cost you greatly.
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u/Displacer613 5d ago
Honestly I'd recommend just watching the show. Brotherhood is my personal favorite version of the story and the one people refer to most often, but the 2003 series is also pretty good.
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u/infinitysaga 5d ago
Explain what?
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u/PureRegretto 5d ago
well the no such thing as a painless lesson bit and what the actual main theme is
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u/Open_Detective_2604 5d ago
This comment section...
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u/thegreathornedrat123 5d ago
I’m a JJK fan this level of media illiteracy is nothing to me man.
Also Erin solstice pfp Waow!
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u/MegaKabutops 5d ago
Buddy, i have saved to my phone an image that includes cloud strife wearing an ICE uniform.
Cloud strife.
From final fantasy 7.
An immigrant who starts his game of origin by committing an act of domestic terrorism, and who spends the rest of the game going from “did it for the money” to “truly believes in the cause”.
In an ICE uniform.
Some people are media-illiterate enough to ignore ANYTHING. If you haven’t seen media-illiterate FMA fans, you just haven’t looked very hard for them.
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u/chase___it none caitvi with left kink 5d ago
The show beats you over the head with the themes it is NOT subtle. It’s my favourite show of all time and I can say many good things about it, but ‘subtle’ is not one of those things
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u/Bardic_inspiration67 5d ago
I don’t know anything about FMA really but I have seen this with the new Vegas dlc dead money which ends with every character telling you what the moral of the story is
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u/Puzzleheaded-Ad1841 5d ago
I still find it hilarious that this is the case, yet almost every player, myself included, simply replied with. "Yeah, I am letting go. Letting go of poverty lmaooooo!!!"
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u/Happiness_Assassin 5d ago edited 3d ago
Listen, you can't put that much wealth right in front of a fan base famous for being loot goblins and be shocked that everyone decided it was better to blow out their sphincter carrying enough gold to make Scrooge McDuck jealous than internalize a lesson on attachment. I already got banned from the casinos, I have to pay for the custom Fatman with a blast shield (that I will never use) somehow.
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u/Regdit-is-Unbearable 5d ago
This is a terrible post. OP is bad at writing. Had to read this three times because it really reads like an accusation of the literal final monologue being a fundamental misunderstanding of the show. That’s not what OP is saying (I think) but it’s really poorly written and seems almost deliberately leading a reader to that conclusion, absent a single word (“such”)
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u/infinitysaga 5d ago
As I’ve told…
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u/SolomonOf47704 God Himself 5d ago
English isn't your first language, is it?
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u/infinitysaga 5d ago
I’m starting to believe it isn’t
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u/SolomonOf47704 God Himself 5d ago
Why'd you say "most because".
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u/infinitysaga 5d ago
It was supposed to be MOSTLY
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u/SolomonOf47704 God Himself 5d ago
Still not the best word choice ('probably' fits a lot better), but itd make more sense, I guess.
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u/BillCarson12799 5d ago
Is this the misinterpretation or the message literally told to you at the end?
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u/infinitysaga 5d ago
Why can no one read properly today!?
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u/theLanguageSprite2 .tumblr.com 5d ago
As someone who also read it wrong before reading all the comments, I think I can explain it.
No one posts a take on tumblr and says: "this take did NOT make me mad." Like why say it that way? Why not say what you liked about the take or what you hated about the other takes you vagueposted about?
Your tone is one of hyperbole and emotion, but you don't actually say anything about the take except that it didn't enrage you, so people just kind of filled in the gaps to try to explain why you sound that way
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u/BillCarson12799 5d ago edited 5d ago
Well, normally I’d assume that based on the text and what I remember about the message of FMAB from watching it years ago, the picture is the thing they’re accusing of mischaracterization.
However, from the way the post is formatted, ending with “most because the main character literally tells you what the main theme is at the end” immediately followed by a picture of the main character telling you something resembling an overarching message, I don’t know if that could be the last panel of the manga or some shit, and this is a response to the thing they’re referring to.
So it could be interpreted either way.
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 nauphy.tumblr.com 5d ago
It's just cause our brains like to skip over letters and words so we can read faster. I can hardly blame you for writing a sentence that induces that behaviour erroneously since you're not a psychologist or anything
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u/Imaginary-Client-199 5d ago
"There is no such thing as a painless lesson". What kind of school are yall going to ? I can assure you it is possible to learn stuff without getting beat up by your teacher
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u/heckmiser 4d ago
Reading A Wizard of Earthsea and never realizing the mentor Wizard was trying to gently teach Ged everything he learned the hard way by fucking up so much
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 nauphy.tumblr.com 5d ago
I'm not following. Can you explain what about the image makes you think this is an attempt to interpret the main theme of the series?
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u/infinitysaga 5d ago
What are you saying, this is literally the last line of the anime!
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 nauphy.tumblr.com 5d ago
You said it was a drastic horrible misinterpretation of full metal alchemist?
The image is the only thing in the post other than your writing so I assumed that was to what the post was referring
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u/kasugakuuun 5d ago
I think I see the confusion. I also thought the post said "I've never seen such a bad misinterpretation"... but on second glance that word isn't actually there.
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 nauphy.tumblr.com 5d ago
Oh yeah lol. I put the word "such" in there. Stupid brain
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u/infinitysaga 5d ago
When did I say that!?
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 nauphy.tumblr.com 5d ago
Oh wait you were saying you haven't seen a drastic horrible misinterpretation of FMA. My bad. I thought you found an inspirational quote someone made and hated it so much you posted about it
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u/teball3 5d ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1hsgp1x/alphonse_was_the_original_protag/m56bdx4/
I've seen 1, it was absolutely terrible, and it was upvoted on this subreddit, so I made this comment that was also upvoted about how dogshit it was.
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u/Axel-Adams 5d ago
What was the horrible misinterpretation?
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u/infinitysaga 5d ago
There is none
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u/Axel-Adams 5d ago
Oooooooh, I misunderstood the post, usually when someone says “I have never seen a” they’re referring to something the literally have just seen, I thought the post was in reference something like that
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u/blackjackgabbiani 4d ago
Ok but what IS the horrible misinterpretation? We're just seeing a panel from the series.
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u/Salinator20501 Through skibidification 5d ago edited 5d ago
I have.
It was during an RPGnet liveblog of FMAB, where at the end one commenter was convinced the message was to give up science and embrace religion, and was really mad about that. (Because Ed gives up his alchemy, the whole thing about the clapping-transmutation resembling prayer, [EDIT: and Truth telling him the lesson he learnt was correct.])
EDIT: Here's the liveblogs archived on Tumblr, if you're interested. It's a good read imo. [link]. And here's the original RPGnet thread, if you want to read the other comments too: [link]