I just saw your recent post, and I have to disagree. Riza Hawkeye was manipulative and toxic with her suicidal tendencies and ptsd, meanwhile Roy handled his well without threatening suicide when the other flew off the handle. And objectively, Riza had no reason to be as scarred as she seemed. Roy did.
holy fucking shit. I feel as if you actually want me to shit fury upon you and everything you stand for, but I’m going to respond to this seriously, since I already wrote a thesis worth of commentary in a fit of rage.
no cut, because frankly i hope everyone who follows this blog reads this. 1.) Riza did not ‘threaten’ suicide. She looked Roy in the face and reminded him that if she was forced to kill him, she would be throwing away everything she worked towards. Riza was a hurt person. She honestly believed she had nothing left, and that by joining the military, she committed a great sin. She killed people and took part in genocide, and she knows and accepts that and regrets it. She hates herself for it. But Riza refused to let herself wallow in self pity, and she pressed on with a goal in mind. That goal was to fix what she had done, and redeem herself by fixing the regimen that forced her to kill in the first place. And do that, she needed Roy. Roy was everything she wasn’t, charismatic, outspoken, powerful, high rank, but just like she couldn’t fix the country herself, neither could he. If Roy died, the base of her redemption would be dead. Riza probably honestly believed that would be it for her; her one chance at fixing her wrongs would be gone. If she had been forced to put a bullet through Roy’s head in that moment, she would have felt nothing but numb and tired and ready to die. and can you blame her?And need I remind you she would be killing her superior? An act punishable by death, according to the current government? If Roy was dead, the rebellion against the Fuhrer would ultimately fail, and if she wasn’t killed for being an outright traitor, she would most likely be executed for killing her assigned officer, the one she was supposed to protect.
2.) Roy handled it ‘well?’ ?? Alcoholism, in the 2003 canon? Yelling at, verbally abusing, and physically grabbing a traumatized 11 year old boy, who had just made the worst decision of his life at the cost of his limbs and his brother’s body? Roy’s insane rage when someone touched Riza? You call Riza overly-dependent? Roy was ready to scorch everything in his path, just so he could have his revenge for Maes Hughes and Riza. Roy was only brought out of it because Riza told him she was unafraid to die along with him if he let his rage consume him.
And don’t even start with the ‘co-dependence’ argument. Riza and Roy are battered war veterans, and you expect them to be perfect? You cannot take a bond like theirs and expect them not to rely on each other. Was their relationship slightly unhealthy at times? Yes. But you cannot look two survivors of war in the eye and tell them that they cannot cling to one another in the aftermath. It’s not reasonable. People need people to survive, and Roy and Riza were doing their best with what they had.
3.) No reason to be scarred? Riza went to war too, you nitwit.
And need I remind everyone that Riza couldn’t just snap her fingers and kill 100 people in an explosion. She had to pull the trigger for every. single. person. she. killed. She had to watch them die. She had to see their faces. She couldn’t snap her fingers and turn her eyes away from the carnage. The bodies did not disappear in a blowout of fire and flame.
Does that make Roy’s experience any less valid? No. They both had to do awful things, but if you want to point fingers and act ‘objective’, you have to look at the facts. And the fact is that Riza was more likely to come out of that experience troubled.
And just for the sake of reminding everyone; Riza’s father was most likely abusive. The hints and facts are there. Her father neglected her for the sake of his research and obsessed over flame alchemy to the point of madness. Then he proceeded to brand his only daughter as proof of his prowess.
Do you honestly think a young Riza was completely willing to undergo painful tattooing with (most likely) un-sterilized, primitive materials, just for fun? If she wasn’t forced into it physically, she was certainly manipulated into it mentally and emotionally. Then, after this is all said and done, she was meant to carry this research, research with the power to maim, kill, and destroy, like a neat tattoo?
She was instructed to show her back to no-one that wasn’t worthy, and when her efforts to give the research to someone she trusted backfired and resulted in countless deaths, she asked Roy to PERMANENTLY DISFIGURE her to resolve her of SOME of her guilt. She asked Roy to make sure no-one could ever be hurt by her father’s alchemy every again, and she asked him to do it with the very thing that hurt those Ishvalan people.
How much do you want to bet that she chose that method just so she could feel the pain, experience what those people felt because of her? Riza considered bringing flame alchemy to war a personal sin. She wanted to hurt, and she wanted to suffer, and she wanted to die because of it. On top of everything else, that was most likely core of her regrets.
Last point: How dare you. How dare you defend Roy and his troubling tendencies, and then slap a woman in the face for experiencing the same thing. How dare you call a woman toxic for being suicidal and mentally ill. How dare you take away an important, valid example of a powerful mentally ill woman, just because you don’t want to justify her mental illness by looking at the facts. How fucking dare you. Twenty goddamn dollars says you just don’t think she’s good enough to ship with Roy.
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