FMA meta rec
Jul. 29th, 2010 00:05For those of you who love Fullmetal Alchemist (which should be all of you, it's so good, you guys!), I have to recommend ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kaigou's post on arakawa's reversal of the usual:
You will see me in the comments. I really ought to find and post those notes I took on historical echoes in FMA the year that I lived in Japan and read every volume published until that point (19 or 20 by the time I left, I think)--I don't want to reduce FMA to just an allegory or whatever, because Arakawa explicitly disavows that and because Tom Lamarre points out that reading manga only for what it says rather than how it does its thing is its own kind of reductionism, but you do get a richer reading out of it if you bring some awareness of historical context to the reading.
To a point, of course. I would never have thought to connect the Amestran invasion of Ishval to the American invasion of Iraq/Gulf War II, ascoffeeandink did in her awesome post on the series, which is a failure of imagination on my part--I'm sure the idea occurred to other readers globally, and those interpretations are another way out of the "manga is Japanese" feedback loop Lamarre decries. Anyway, go read.
kaigou's post on arakawa's reversal of the usual:That is: Arakawa does not do the fuck-for-virginity war-for-peace routine of so many others in the animanga world. She does ask, seems to me, whether a science (such as that of war) can be neutral in and of itself, and evil or good dependent on intentions, but she doesn't play the game of having some power-hungry madman claim god's light and altruism blah blah blah with the goal of achieving peace. No, her madmen are most definitely using the people's sacrifice as tools, and nothing more.
You will see me in the comments. I really ought to find and post those notes I took on historical echoes in FMA the year that I lived in Japan and read every volume published until that point (19 or 20 by the time I left, I think)--I don't want to reduce FMA to just an allegory or whatever, because Arakawa explicitly disavows that and because Tom Lamarre points out that reading manga only for what it says rather than how it does its thing is its own kind of reductionism, but you do get a richer reading out of it if you bring some awareness of historical context to the reading.
To a point, of course. I would never have thought to connect the Amestran invasion of Ishval to the American invasion of Iraq/Gulf War II, as
coffeeandink did in her awesome post on the series, which is a failure of imagination on my part--I'm sure the idea occurred to other readers globally, and those interpretations are another way out of the "manga is Japanese" feedback loop Lamarre decries. Anyway, go read. 