Please feel free to ignore this if you don’t want to go into it hahaha, but as an FMA agnostic I saw that comment and had to ask: what’s your take on the series?? Have a great day!
I read it twice, once when I was in middle school, and then rather recently! My take is that while I understand why it is popular it's an overrated series that suffers from serious issues.
As a kid? I loved it. I've always been into science and fantasy worldbuilding and old timey stories with fights, so it was my shit. I had just discovered manga and was obsessed and even tried to copy the art style. I was especially fond of the parts about the ishbalan civilization as well as the chimeras, probably early signs of my still ongoing interests in ancient west asian archeology and uncanny valley furries. It's a story that importantly, while having a target audience of teenagers and catering to that, doesn't take its audience for idiots and offers, compared to other stories, more emotional punch due to that, with topics of life and death, and a story with a lot of traumatized characters.
Rewatching it as an adult, I'm just...not into magic anime battles anymore. I also am not keen on the art style nowadays, I get the charm but the chibi stuff is unbearable to me and a lot of characters are too samey for my liking, especially women. My one good surprise was learning about the gender neutrality of Envy as a character, a design I always liked as a child - but when I originally read the series I had known nothing of it because the character had been translated to male.
The huge elephant in the room however, is how it deals with its sensitive topics. A lot of what I will say are criticism you could forward to many popular series, yes, I know, but FMA is constantly hailed in "progressive" fandom spheres for diversity which upon reread shocked me. Politically, FMA talks about topics with serious IRL ties and does not have a stance I like on them. Most of the plot revolves around a cast of military who went to war before the story and exterminated a people there, who are fantasy-styled west asian and make up the majority of brown characters you see in the series. While the manga isn't afraid to say genocide bad or show the consequences it also makes you sympathize for the soldiers who carried it out because...they feel bad? Which is just not something I can agree with. In the modern times of the series it leads to uncomfortable discussions of fantasyworld racism that aren't my place to talk about. When the plot ends, it's a good ending for those soldiers, the only change is that you learn some anime evil was behind it all, and the "bad evil man for killing the actors in genocide of his people" gets redeemed quick but not in a way I agree with either. There's also the theme of disability which the series does touch on in a way that I cannot say much negative about, but on the other hand (no pun intended) do not feel is worth hailing as much as I have seen by fans. Last thing I see people hail it for is female characters and while yes, the series is not plagued by the usual misogynistic (if not pedophile) type of fan service anime usually has, that bar is underground... The main characters remain all male with the exception of one girl who's not really there and ends up a love interest. There's some cool female side characters but they remain just that. It's scraps & I am happy to find better elsewhere.
TLDR: Tumblr regularly rightfully tears a new one to avatar the last Airbender for how it handled colonialism, genocide and portraying fantasy cultures heavily based on real world ones, so why has FMA constantly slipped through that net, with a fanbase who is incapable of handling criticism?
TLDR 2: Honenheim's character and backstory remain to this day my favorite thing about FMA can we take this guy to a better manga
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If my mom sees a significant amount of blood she gets lightheaded, and has fainted on some occasions. Once it happened when we were kids, I wasn't there to witness it but I heard the story from my dad. Basically my brothers, around 7 or 8 at the time, were playing outside while my mom was making their lunch, and she accidentally cut her finger. It wasn't anything serious, but it drew a fair bit of blood and she passed out. My dad saw this and rushed over, but he didn't really know what to do so he just sort of started slapping her to wake her up (not recommended, but he had no idea and panicked)
At that exact moment my brothers both came in from playing, and all they saw was our mom unconscious on the floor and our dad slapping her. So, like, without even saying a word to each other they both just INSTANTLY start whaling on him, like, full blown attack mode to defend our mom. Which obviously didn't help the situation, but she did wake up and everything was fine.
Now our dad says that he's actually really glad they attacked him over what they thought was going on, because it means he raised good boys. And I still think that's true, they're very good boys.
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People here are hating on finnster so I guess I'm gonna remind y'all that gender expression is a massive pile of horseshit and people who treat it like a game are pretty cool, regardless of how they identify
Also
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AU where Mr. D claiming to be Percy’s dad accidentally counts as Claiming according to Greek god law or whatever and now all the other gods legitimacy believe Percy is his son, but if Mr. D corrects it, he has to explain to Zeus why he pretended he was Percy’s dad so now he’s like “YEP ol’ Perry Johansson is MY child wowie just look at the little fry, you have your mother’s eyes. Please stop standing next to water or you will blow my cover”
Meanwhile Poseidon is just standing off to the side like “how on earth did I dodge THAT bullet”
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i miss the bad guys. like they really took the only good thing about zootopia (furries) and made it infinitely better by Not being copaganda
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reduction linocut design :3
available for preorder, very limited run with all profits to trans mutual aid
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[image description: the bugs bunny in a tuxedo "I wish all a very pleasant evening" meme edited to say "I wish all of my Jewish followers a very pleasant passover". Next to bugs is a photo of a small stack of matzo and the cup of Elijah. ]
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