AU in D Major

patch. 30s. any pronouns. a motley collection of fandoms, shitposts, and oc stuff. queued posts post on the half hour. current forecast: final fantasies 4, 7, 14, 15, and 16

[phantomrose96]

Honestly. Honestly Ed vs Scar in episode 5 is striking me fresh, right now. Like by this point we've obviously established we're in a battle shonen by now. We know Ed gets into fights. He's scuffled with Cornello. He's a boy who knows how to hold a sharp object and use it.

But I think FMA does also does an excellent job choosing when to not let Ed come out on top. We just had the Nina episode and now Ed is in the middle of processing his first "catastrophic failure to save someone" type of failure since attempting to bring his mom back. He's dealing with a low that's absolutely hampering his abilities and the tonal shift hits for me in the way that 1) he doesn't notice Scar's initial attack against him (Al has to pull him away) and 2) Ed absolutely freezes up just thinking "This is bad."

This is, perhaps, baby's first "someone is coming at you with the full, concentrated, explicit intention of killing you" and Ed is so genuinely out of his depth with it. He really does try. He gets immediately bested. He's staring at a situation where Al is directly in harm's way. And Ed just lies down to die like a dog...

He does better later. He learns from this, later. But he's so young in this. It just hits.

[liesmyth]

#this is scar's lowest point to me#he is attacking a panicking child#one who is visibly too young to have taken part in the genocide#he is pointlessly lashing out at the shadow of the war#and he feels FULLY justified. FULL 'soldier of god' mode#ed begs him to spare his brother and does this unbalance him?#does this remind him of his own brother?#it does not. he is unmoved.#he answers calmly that he has no quarrel with ed's brother#it is sooooooo clear that he SEES HIMSELF as perfectly calm and reasonable#when in fact he is being so completely insane.#he is about to slaughter a child on his knees#later in central when they face off again he'll be a lot more unbalanced#(having crossed paths with his master and all)#and it's part of why ed shielding winry from him WILL hit this time#my argument is also that ed begging for his brother to be spared doesn't hit for scar#because scar is in the mindset of 'why should i listen to your pleas when no one listened to mine'#(not that he even had the chance to beg)#ed shielding winry however#is making scar realize that Winry Is Him#except nobody was there to stop HIM pulling the trigger#and committing to lethal revenge#that is the crucial moment where he could have been saved#but no one was there to save him#from that moment on he spirals completely#and when he meets winry again he THINKS he's at his lowest point#calls himself human garbage and says he deserves to die#since she was able to remain dignified in the face of suffering and he was not#but that is not his lowest point. in fact the fact that he's clawing his way out of that pit is remarkable#(someone like wrath for instance never even tried)

@parkersgeorg

[tlirsgender]

"Maybe it's just stress/anxiety" is so crazy as a Dismissive Statement because even when it *is* anxiety it's such an understatement to be like "how about you just chill out idk" when your body is poisoning itself with its own stress hormones. Like okay sometimes it is anxiety. This is still physically happening to me

[tlirsgender]

"It's probably just stress" and it's like well documented that it can just kill people sometimes

[sei-un]

Kefkab

[romanceyourdemons]

watching game of thrones and this was considered a historically accurate portrayal of steppe nomads??? the faux leather strapless crops and faux leather yoga pants?????

[romanceyourdemons]

one thing this show clearly doesn’t get, which a lot of modern portrayals of premodern times don’t seem to get, is that in a preindustrial society where literally everything is handmade, people preferred (and prefer!) to take a little longer to make things beautiful. if you’re personally spinning and weaving and stitching every inch your new coat, you might as well take an extra afternoon to dye the fibers a really lovely yellow with some onion scraps, and spend a little longer to embroider on a nice pattern. if you’re personally carving every angle of every chair in your house, you may as well slow down and carve them with a beautiful and culturally significant design, especially if you know your great-grandchildren will be sitting in them. in a hyperconsumerist industrial society it’s expected that you just buy what you can afford and settle for however beautiful or ugly the thing happens to be, but it wasn’t always that way. the vast majority of people in the premodern world—men and women, rich and poor—were hobbyist artists, and they dressed in and sat on and slept under and smoked with and ate out of their and their ancestors’ canvases every day

[its-not-a-pen]

NO THIS LEGIT MADE ME SO MAD.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT REAL STEPPE NOMADS FUCKING WORE???

HERE'S THE FUCKING REFERENCES I CREATED FOR A XIONGNU-INSPIRED DND CHARACTER COMMISSION. AND THAT WAS SOMEHOW MORE RESEARCH THAN GRR MARTIN AND HBO COULD BE PISSED DOING.

vs

LOOK AT THE FUCKING ARTESTY. THE CRAFTSMANSHIP. THE EMBROIDERY.

One thing I don't see discussed enough about game of thrones is the blatant orientialism. hey quick question, why are the real cultures you were "inspired by" portrayed as basically human-orcs? 1) why are nomadic societies automatically portrayed as being incapable of valuing or producing sophisticated clothes, and why is that costuming directly linked to their "bloodthirsty" and "warlike" natures? did you know their IRL counterparts the xiongnu/jurchens/mongols/hu people LOVED the fancy silks produced by the han chinese. not only was this a key part of diplomacy between the two nations. (surprise! they were not constantly at war, because steppe nomads were not bloodthristy monsters who loved death, but real people engaged in resource competition and territory control). it was also part of the internal politics of steppe culture, e.g., who was favoured by the leader and how valuable gifts were distributed among the nobility. but noooo that would mean thinking of them as real people motivated by complicated things like politics, status and culture within their tribes! and who would watch a show about people doing that? -_- 2) why do their societies revolve around killing and conquest, and have no love for intellectual or artistic pursuits? historically, genghis khan, kublai khan, ect, valued scholars and did everything they could to patronise/kidnap/poach huge numbers of them, and this was key to their tactical success! han chinese engineers were captured, and used to build siege engines to take down the great wall! that portrait of kublai khan you see up there was drawn by the nepalese artist araniko, a child prodigy who was part of the khan's court. does khal drogo have a flock of artists following him around, propagandising his greatness to the world, so everyone knows that he is a man of culture and his rule has legitimacy? no, he burns down villages for fun? cool. cool cool.

3) why are the dothraki portrayed as lawless brigands who are incapable of governing their captured territory, when the mongol-led yuan dynasty managed to conquer and rule over china, and genghis khan was responsible for expanding the silk road, and enforcing such effective law and order over it that it resulted in the pax mongolica, and increased trade between the east and west? is it because they "don't wanna?"' why? are they a monolith? why would they throw away the advantages of all that trade control? are they just "intrinsically incapable of it?" would you care to expand on that?

picture references:

clothing of a Xiongnu chief, 2nd century BCE-1st century CE. Reconstruction by archaeologist A.N. Podushkin, in the Central State Museum of Kazakhstan.[77][78]

Noin-Ula carpet, animal style. 1st century CE.[236]

Xiongnu Leather Robe, Han period, Henan Provincial Museum, Zhengzhou

Belt buckle with animal combat scene, 2nd-1st century BCE, made in North China for the Xiongnu.[267][157]

portrait of Kublai Khan by artist Araniko, drawn shortly after Kublai's death in 1294

[windvexer]

IDK who needs to hear this but if there's something in your life that makes you feel better, but you never stick to it,

it's still actually perfectly fine to do it

and you shouldn't stop yourself from starting just because it won't be a permanent change.

Like if starting a new daily planner gives you an amazing afternoon of planning and four days where you feel in charge of your life,

why not do it?

It doesn't matter that it won't be a permanent change - 4 good days is still worth it.

If you ever catch yourself thinking, "I wish I could pray/stretch/prep/plan/do the thing, but I always get started on that and it never lasts more than a couple of days,"

what this really means is, "hey, I can feel better for a couple of days."

if this post is making you think of things in your own life that you wish you could stick to because of how good they make you feel,

just be aware:

you're not thinking of a list of ways you've failed to commit

you're thinking of a list of things that make you happy, and you should give yourself permission to start doing them as often as you want to

[spacemancharisma]

do y’all remember usernames??? from back when every fuckin website didn’t need your email phone number home address social security number just to join/sign up for something?? when you could make website-specific accounts that weren’t linked to literally anything else??? they tried to boil us like a frog slowly switching to “username/email” and then just asking for your email. but I remember. I remember usernames.

[huh-enheim]

The real antagonist of Fullmetal Alchemist is the nameless Xerxian alchemist who bought a teenage boy to sweep his floors and then was like "hey, I'm going to take your blood to try to play god, you can't legally say no because I own you. If this, say, backfires horrifically in 20 years time, then I guess it's you and your descendants' problem since it's your blood lmao"

[huh-enheim]

a tag left by @paragonrobits on this post ages ago is still the most insightful comment on FMA's plot I've ever read

[nyxelestia]

I mean idk if you need a thesis for that when it's literally the thesis of the show. Turning resources into people is nothing but evil, and using people as resources is literally the point of the show. A victim of it - the first victim of it, Van Hoenheim - also partakes in it, because that is also the only resource he has after he has be robbed of literally everything, including his own identity (he doesn't even have a name; he only had a number first, and then the name granted by the entity that commodified his entire culture). Meanwhile, the military industrial complex also to "humanize" resources. It does this both at the most abstract version of a military - in which bodies are thrown at and to commit violence to serve the agenda of the state - but also literally, when they tried to use alchemy to create a mindless, obedient army. Instead, they got an "army" of crazed, soulless cannibals that did nothing but consume EVERYTHING in their path, even the people they were supposed to be serving. Seems like an oddly apt metaphor given all the rising concerns about data harvesting and AI creeping up on society, right now. The Sins are also an intersection of humanity and resources, and they are the tragedies of what *could* have been people, but were not. As demonstrated by Pride's final form, had they been raised, all of them could have been people. Instead, these "fake people" were treated as a resource since their inception and creation, and only found existence in their purpose - and most of them where destroyed (either externally or internally) when they no longer served said purpose. IDK about all ya'll, but to me that sounds like a metaphor for "unwanted children" born to teenage or unwed mothers, orphans with no extended family to take them in, etc. - and in the U.S., this is basically what happens to many foster care kids and is also descriptive of the school-to-prison pipeline. People who were denied of a family and deprived of an adequate support structure and instead shunted through "systems" in their life that only ever commodified them into resources (oh hello prison industrial complex!) or abandoned them to a world that did not individually care about them, and so they have no reason to care about the world.

[cherryblossomshadow]

#that really is arakawa's thesis isn't it #a society that uses a certain class of people as blood resources deserves the destruction of self it will cause (tags courtesy of OP)

.

#using human beings as supplies/labor/props/means to an end #is always the most evil thing a character can do #in fma #from the ancient alchemist who bought/used hoenheim #to the ppl making philosopher stones and chimeras #to the way the gov uses soldiers (tags courtesy of @whystuck)

.

probably one of the reasons why i have only grown to love this series even more over time, in stark contrast to several other anime i got into around the same age. i think i could even use it as a springboard to justify why it's kind of good that Father is a kind of flat and generic villain. it allows him to be much more of a "force" or "catalyst" to highlight the evils and modalities of the political system, rather than a scapegoat as their engineer (comment courtesy of @marquis-lizbian)

.

Absolutely!!! 

We see again and again in FMA that people being used as resources, as disposable, as objects create the worst situations. This one, obviously, but others as well. 

The Ishvalan war is another big one - the senseless slaughter of so many civilians, and the impact on the army characters who are being forced to kill. 

Also all of the war veterans we see, who have a raw deal from the government after the war’s over.

The state alchemists, being forced to do research to kill and harm others. We later learn that they’re just there to be more potential food for the homunculi/the Promised Day.

Even in the first story arc with Father Cornello - all of those worshippers are being used and manipulated.

FMA wants us to treat people well, to think critically, to respect others, and to be anti-war. Also to drink more milk. (comment courtesy of @kailthia)

[crimson-sun]

A batch of badass ladies for the FFXIV playing card deck today. We're getting ever closer to finishing the project!

If you have just a couple of bucks a month to spare and would like to see this deck made, please consider joining us on Patreon. And if you happen to have a few more dollars than that, prints of completed cards are available on the $20 tier. Literally nothing I do is possible without the fine folks over there, so please consider helping out if you can.

Previously: FF playing cards | FFVII playing cards | FFXV Tarots | FFVII Tarots | FFXV Playing cards | FFVII Full Tarots | FF Hanafuda deck | FFVII Shinra photo book

Patreon | Bluesky

[yoildayday]

[spiribia]

i think it would’ve been cool if y’shtola had been a tank.. she’s such a fundamentally selfless person who has never hesitated to put herself between danger and the people she loves + (maybe to her own detriment) she tends toward bearing the brunt alone …every expansion shes like [dramatically sacrifices herself]

[ciphox]

[ai-no-kokuhaku]

studies interrupted

[spiderfeathers]

[polite spoiler warning]

[rederiswrites]

Me: casually standing on the back porch checking in my succulents.

This fucking robin: hey.

We're just... Chillin. She's just like three feet from me tops.

[rederiswrites]

Disturbed her bringing her some snacks, so,

[rederiswrites]

Blobs are here.

[rederiswrites]

Update: they have achieved Eldritch Mouth Bird status.

[rederiswrites]

They are SNUG.

[screamingvikings]

Shoutout to the that time alphinaud attended 3 memorial services for the fallen back to back to back and felt the need to lean over to the exact same total stranger at every single one to explain how the guy giving the speech was a little bitch.

[phleb0tomist]

it’s such a basic part of the reality of disabled people as a whole but it’s STILL so hard to get ppl to understand that some people will simply die without 24/7 care. their care is not for comfort, it’s not for fun, it’s literally a matter of life and death. “if their care was taken away i’m sure they’d learn to suck it up like the rest of us!” – something ive heard time and time again. no they wouldn’t, they would die. they HAVE died. they continue to die as cuts are made to welfare and health. why is this so impossible for people to grasp.

[michaelnordeman]

Mountain hare/Lepus timidus/skogshare. Värmland, Sweden (9 July 2021).