FMA thinkyness (spoilers under tag)

[permetaform]

One of the only good things about having screaming I-cannot-move-kill-me-now cramps is that I get to catch up on media; also, it increases my tolerance for Teh Creepy and Pain.

Incidentally I marathoned the last 23 episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist in one go.

If I smoke, I'd be reaching for a cigarette. 'Cause, DUDE.

Also, SQUEE. THANK YOU THANK YOU cmshaw for the disc! Vid will come! Possibly in time for VVC!

And, just to get this out of the way:

THAT WAS SO COOL. OMG THAT WAS SO COOL. EVERY EPISODE I WAS LIKE ::points at screen and gawks::. Just well done, seriously, bravo.



Random Squee:
- Izumi's baby! and the missing her stomach thing! o.0 wah!

- and sorry to be random but Greed's puking! dude! that some of the best puking sounds I've ever seen/heard!

- MARTEL! DUDE, what a way to go...::cringe::

- the Furher! NEVER SAW THAT COMING. o.0

- falling bird! hee!

- Scar! EEE! with Al and Lust and his brother's ARM, his ARM OF COURSE IT WAS HIS ARM

- AND WRATH. wah. it was all naked and cringing and I was like, aww, and then OMG WTF THAT'S ED'S ARM AND THEN THEY CONFIRMED IT AND OMGWTF HIS ARM. (dude, have people been taunting fullmetalbean with "I would give an arm and a leg to..." type-comments? XD)

- Philosopher's Stone is people! ::VINDICATED::

- OMG CITY-WIDE ALCHEMY CIRCLE

- OMG CITY-UNDERGROUND

- OMGWTF DANTE/ROSE.

- the Rose w/ baby intro is the BEST treatment of that situation I've ever seen, honestly!



A huge part of the glee for me was surprisingly not at all in the pairings, but in the nature of the world. It just pleased me to no end when they revealed that equivalent trade ALSO meant the power supply needed for the recombination, not only for the initial products. 'Cause YAY LOGIC.

Well, that an just the fact that so much of it jives so well with my current thoughts and classes and studies that I was just gawking at the screen 'cause it kept going where I wanted it to or that just felt logical to me that it was like fanservice in the *best* way.

[I'll be mentioning several of the theories below and *not* that I think that FMA is based off of these theories or anything, but I just find it facinating the way these theories read off of FMA.

Just to be clear: I'm *not* saying that other, simpler, readings of these scenes are invalid. I think they're perfectly valid, but for the moment I'm playing with FMA canon against class readings just to play with the ideas so to speak.]

I LOVED the way it played around with the lines of humanity and identity, loved that it integrated the idea of death into it's idea of transformation and not only that, but it tied its concepts of alchemy into its world. Not only did the story play by the laws of alchemy in the act of alchemy itself, but in the ways that personalities played out.

FMA feels more like a study on the alchemy of people rather than objects, or it's a study of *people* transformation via the narrative device of the physical ability to transform *objects*. (::sunbeam and sparkles:: the Gate which is in all of us, we have the Power! XD)

There's this theory (by either Chodorow or Freud) that males to form their identity must be constantly separating themselves from their original object of identification which is the mother, which I find facinating in light of Ed's reaction to Sloth when he kills her (forgot the ep) and of Envy's subsequent use of her face.

And how lovely is those parallels eh? Ed and Envy are brothers in that awkward way, both 'cast off' by their father...

(and man, abandonment issues out the WAZOO in this anime. o.0)

And hey, didn't Ed dye his hair GREEN in that one ep? =D

And of course Wrath, which ::shiver::, dayum, makes me wonder if those eyes beyond the gate are souls-in-transition. From the way they were depicted in the Gate scenes they looked like babies. Future souls of their children (any children)? All the lives that they ended?

And the fact that the Gate is in everyone, which makes so much sense because it makes the Philosopher's Stone make so much sense. I'd guessed it in the first 25 eps that Scar was the Philosophers Stone and was all YAY and WHOA when I was proved simultaneously right and yet so so differently than how I expected it to be which is AWESOME.

(and makes me hanker for Scar/Al wherein Scar's all stroking the inside of Al all inadvertantly, 'cause Martel proved for a *fact* that Al has sensation INSIDE. _{and omg Scar rubbing Al inside is so cliche!fic-line XD} And I just get this image where Scar and maybe Ed somehow has to hide and they somehow manage to fit inside Al and it's Sex-In-The-Closet!fic except the closet is squirming and okay I'll just stop now heh.)

...where was I?

Ah yes, identity formation. Funny thing about the process of that 'cause *then* FMA suddenly crosses with my class in regards to female melodrama and family narratives because it's the funny thing about the role of Mother is that your job is to make yourself obsolete and that in the views of patriarchy it's impossible to be both a Mother and a Woman.

And what if Sloth *was* at least a partially successful resurrection? That she was only a *part* his Mother, but the rest was the woman that she was before she had children? Especially her words in that ep where she dies where to prove that she's a separate person she tries to kill Ed and Al. And its neat to note this in relation to her costume change from mom-wear to secretary-wear to dressy-ballgown (the more she's dressed as a Woman, the more she comes under attack by Ed).

And so homonculi are shells with no souls (is the human soul the Gate? is that why everybody but Wrath can't do alchemy? If so then is Ed's soul also in his arms and legs? o.0), does that define them as fake?

Where are the lines of fake v. real?
Al v. Ed?
Al v. Martel? (snake chimera)
Al v. criminals in the empty suits of armor?
Al v. Envy?
Envy v. Ed?
Honheim v. Envy v. Ed?
Ed-with-human-limbs v. Ed-with-mecha-limbs?

It's damn near totally blurred in FMA and that's not even adding in the problem of memory.

'Cause if you add in memory, then isn't Al at the end of the series fake 'cause he's lost some of his (and has only some of his) like Sloth and Lust?

Along those same lines, where DID his body come from? 'Cause if you look at it, Al's and the homoculus' bodies where both 'made' by Philosopher's Stone. Al's because he gave his share of Philosopher's Stone (which is the sum of lives) to Ed for his arm and leg. Ed gave his arm and leg (which is tantamount to the sum of lives) for Al's body.

This is, of course, assuming that the Philosopher's Stone doesn't so much as negate the concept of Equivalent Trade as it is instead a solidified offering of so much Trade that it can match any alchemical request with effort to spare.

If so, then the fact that it took all of Al's body as Philosopher's Stone to change back Ed's arm and leg makes sense; Al's not only working past all the material needs of producing an arm and a leg, but also recompensing all the good that Ed has recieved from losing his arm and leg. This includes every advantage that Ed's recieved from mecha limbs, which has been made much of throughout the entire series, but every life lesson that Ed's learned because of it.

And Kristeva's theory of the abject! This is another theory regarding formation of a mature self, which is that one will have to let-go/release/expel/destroy/shed certain aspects of yourself to be part of society (verb: "to abject" from yourself). This include physical things like expelling feces and physical actions such as drooling or thumbsucking and finally one's mother; a return of these shed objects/habits/people are a cause of disgust and fear (ie. "abject horror") though it is necessary for these shed and repressed things to appear sometimes simply so that one can reconstruct one's self as separate from those things released.

This I find interesting in relation to the homonculus because are they abject (expelled objects) or are they the ones abjecting? They are unable to use alchemy, yet are singularly able to transform themselves...in a way, they could be seen as "un-mature" and "un-pro-active" because of their inability to transform, but how then does that reflect on the other characters who in contrast can't *physically* transform themselves? Are the other characters stagnant then, because they can't change themselves?

'Cause that doesn't feel right either, because transformation happens in many ways in FMA. And they don't always need a circle, even, though Ed did use one at the end, for Al.

But heck, Hughes didn't, for Roy.

Death and transformation and humanity and identity and life and eeee, brain-happy. ::wallows::


Umm, and I think there's more thoughts and squee, but I can't think of it right now 'cause I'm lolling in the shiny. Feel free to comment on any of the above or just to squee at me and I'll squee right back for whatever time I have tonight.

[edit] I was linked to more discussion by mikkeneko and this post by coffee_and_ink, during the course of which I came to several revelations about the possible natures of homonculi and the human soul in FMA supposing my previous theories in the above cut-tag are held.

To review, I'm assuming that the concept of transformation in general is key to the world-view of FMA (see above parts of post for rambly details), this includes both transformation as alchemy and transformation as change in people. This includes the concept of growth and death all tied up into one another; you cannot reform something unless you destroy it first.

Over and over in the series homonculi are said to be inhuman. Supposing this is an actual *fact* and not an arbitrary label, how are homonculi different from 'humans'?

mikkeneko states in this post that:

If they're alive, self-aware, have memories (here I speak of their post-revival memories, not pre-revival) and intelligence and emotions and personalities, what is it that prevents them from being human?

Well, their mass-changing powers is one; their ability to revive from the dead is a tricky issue and a clue, since for most humans, you die once and you're done; and they (with the exception of Wrath) can't do alchemy.

THEY CAN'T DIE. Which means they can't change, they can *temporarily* change their bodies, but it doesn't STICK. Their personalities seem for the most part stable, they can't age without difficulty, they can't grow, they can't perform alchemy (transformation). They suffer almost no consequences.

And if there's something I've learned in my Representations in Virtual Realities class it's this: without consequences, you aren't real. You don't live in a 'real' world.

If we take FMA's core concepts to be the idea of "One is All. All is One." then homonculi are NOT of the world, they are not part of the circle because they don't *flow* with it, they don't obey it's rules, they don't die. (incidentally, by the same rule-stick Dante and Honheim are both unhuman...or at least becoming more so with every 'transfer')

Furthermore, mikkeneko states in the last paragraph of that same post that:

As stated in my thesis above, the simplest and most logically consistant explanation is that they lack human souls.

Which didn't click until I read rachelmanija comment in coffee_and_ink's post here:

By the way, I was telling branna, who is a physicist, about FMA and what happens in the first five minutes of the first episode to explain to her why she had to watch it, and she immediately said (more-or-less), "[...snip...] That can't be a closed system, because the energy has to be coming from somewhere, so they must be tapping into some other system. So the reason human transmutation can't work must be because the energy required is infinite, so when they open a conduit to that other system, the resonance causes it to overload. So where's that energy coming from? Hmmm..."

My brain latched onto closed system.

It latched onto conduit.

And Oh My God. What if, in FMA, souls are human *potential*?

They way that electricity has *potential*?

The way that babies have *potential* (potential like Gates and electrical gates only NOT) and the most potential to grow and transform???

o.0

Does that even hold up to ANY water? Is it just 'cause I'm sleepy that this makes sense right now??

And does that mean that Ed's world is lacking technology because electricity is less effective in Ed's world and that more electricity is funneled into that other world on the other side of the gate??

DUDE. I'm just thinking about the closed-system Philosopher's Stone alchemy circle, closed looped system, and energy-exchange and...I'm going to stop right now before I hurt myself and go answer some more comments...::smacks forehead::

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Ai! I won't have time to read this carefully until tonight.

But my imaginary vid for FMA is a vid about definitions of humanity set to Radiohead's "The Gloaming".

[permetaform]

=D looking forward to it!

::ponders:: I haven't heard that yet...

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

*makes notes*

I'll just add that to the 57 other FMA vids in my brain. Which now that I have this drive thingy, may not have to remain in my brain!

*realizes too late has doomed self to imminent hard drive crash*