What makes me insane about royai is that Roy and Riza worked well even before their backstory was revealed.
Two soldiers who fought together in a war, who protect each other, and who are devoted to each other and to a common cause. That works, right? That was enough.
Then it turns out that they actually knew each other long before Ishval. They knew each other when Hawkeye was just Riza and Roy just her father's apprentice. It turns out that they are not only bound by their job or their cause or the mutual esteem and respect, nor even just by the shared trauma of war. It turns out that Riza is literally the person who put the flame alchemy in Roy's hands. That the alchemical circles on his gloves are tattooed on her skin. That it was Riza who gave him that power and for that she feels just as responsible for every person he has killed with his flames as she does for those she has shot with her rifle. And the reason she did it is because she trusted him and she trusted his naive dreams. And when the war is over he is well aware that he has broken her trust and that is the reason why he agrees to burn her back and trusting her his own back in return, thus explicitly giving her the power to stab him in the back.
And yet she decides to stand by him, despite the fact that he has already disappointed her once, because she has not stopped believing in those dreams he confided in her when they were still two naive kids untouched by the sins of war.
And while it is true that she stays by his side because she, too, wants to seek some sort of atonement and seek justice for the horrors they both committed, it is also true that, by her own admission, the reason she still wears a uniform and is ready to pull the trigger is that she wants to protect him.
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