brotherhood!roy is about two things: becoming fuhrer, and avenging hughes. it is very characteristic of brotherhood for him to be able to be reduced to those two goals. since brotherhood is a very idealistic black-and-white type series (The Homunculi Are Evil And They're Pulling All The Strings!) this is not really surprising, nor is it essentially bad
but. i think there is so much strength in the multifaceted ambiguity that roy had in 2003. he was many, many things, but the points that will always stick with me the strongest are his ptsd, his grief, and his commitment to Never Forget. in brotherhood, we see flashbacks to ishval but we don't see him doing what he did, we don't see the effects of what he did on the people who he is literally killing (the exception to this is yet another man's battlefield, which tackled this particular aspect very directly and intentionally)
but fma 2003 was all about roy trying to recover. some of our most striking moments are flashbacks of roy explicitly coming very close to suicide (i'm talking about him pressing the gun to his neck after he kills the rockbells, and when hughes comes and visits him and he admits "i had it in my mouth, maes, and i couldn't pull the trigger"). compounded with that was his implied-but-obvious alcoholism (when he drops the bottle in the rockbells flashback, the general disheveledness in the hughes flashback, hell even the fucking intro theme had him holding a glass in his hands), and THEN we have, for example, the moment in fullmetal vs flame when he has a very visceral flashback to a moment of trauma in which he killed the kid with the gun. all that together is textbook ptsd, and that was always at the core of his character in 2003.
this is actually a big irony in my opinion bc some people have trouble with the fact that roy's "turning point" in 2003 was when he was ordered to execute the rockbells; of course mass destruction of an entire people was OK, but the second he had to shoot two amestrians, that's when he loses his cool? BUT i think that that right there makes an excellent point. because of his conditioned inability to empathize with ishvalans due to institutionalized racism in the society in which he grew up (a military society, remember), it takes an order which goes directly against HIS people for him to wake up and realize what this military was really doing.
so while yeah, i appreciate brotherhood!roy, i like his anger and his levity and badassery and his more open concern for the people he loves, i also LOVED 2003!roy, reticent, suspicious, understated. his whole character was basically brotherhood!roy, except still reeling and recovering from what happened in ishval. ishval hit 2003!roy harder than brotherhood!roy, it feels like (which is another ironic thing, since brotherhood gives us insight into how hard it hit riza which 2003 never explored)
both characters have that ambition to be fuhrer, but in brotherhood it almost feels like an ambition for ambition's sake. in 2003 it is explicitly, EXPLICITLY, due to his experience in the war, i.e., by the river after he was chasing ed, when he admits to killing the rockbells and tells them that that day he decided he would never take a senseless order again - he would get to a position where he wouldn't have to. not only does that connect HELLA to his primary character trait (Ambition 4 Fuhrerhood), but it also complicates it, ESPECIALLY IN THE END OF THE SERIES !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the end, which is so good and so ambiguous. the ambiguity being that ed says: You Will Never Be Fuhrer If You Do This, Don't You Understand That?
to which roy just kind of smiles and says. well i could never live with myself if i didn't (and they take that opportunity to connect it all back to hughes, with subtlety and grace that envy's death in brotherhood did NOT have, hopy shit).
the crux, i think, of how well it all connects together, is that single statement: i could never live with myself if i didn't. we remember him pressing a gun to his throat; we remember the half-smile on his face, tired and Giving Up, as he tells his best friend how little he cares about himself anymore. this is his only choice. the ambition to become fuhrer has never been about becoming fuhrer, it has been about finding redemption, about finding peace with himself, about trying to fix everything that he did. i said this same thign when i watched the episode:
but the WHOLe ..,.,. time.„.,.,. the end goal has not been fuhrer-hood. it has been Redemption. holy shit. i just realized this. Holy Shit. Wtf. I have been watching this series wrong for like seven years. Holy Shit
i like brotherhood. it's a good, fun, badass series. but i've said before that brotherhood is macro, and 2003 is micro; brotherhood is plot-based, and 2003 is character-based. 2003 had a lot more room to explore individual characters, their needs, desires, and motivations, so everything became far more complex than the Good Guys and the Bad Guys in brotherhood (by the way, to this day i take points away from brotherhood, AND the manga, i hold arakawa accountble for this too lmfao, for fucking letting scar get away with everything oh my god. i understand where the desire to let him survive in the Happy Ending comes from, but that is totally reducing his narrative into a Good Guy even tho he has done all these Bad Guy things???? like son i had SO MUCH EMPATHY for 2003!scar, he was one of my favs. in comparison, brotherhood!scar falls pretty flat)
but ye that's my philosophical musings on the narrative differences between two versions of the same anime for the night lmfao
