Responding to Counter Arguments
As much as I’d like to say otherwise, I am not the first person who’s made these points about the 2003 version of FMA. Naturally, 2003 fans have tried to come up with counter arguments so I feel like it’s only fitting that I respond to their response. The best counterarguments to this came from TVTropes.org:
Counter Argument # 1
“Telling the audience that Mustang was responsible for killing innocent people, but having all of those innocent people be nameless characters only briefly, if at all glimpsed, makes his crimes seem far more abstract. By making Mustang responsible for the deaths of the family of a major, sympathetic character, the audience HAS to deal with what he's done, on an emotional level. It's a much more poignant and appropriately disturbing way to communicate the discomforting truth that otherwise decent people may be forced to do atrocious things during wartime, and it also sets up anime!Roy as a much more psychologically complex character than his manga and Brotherhood counterpart.”
Me: I find it subtly condescending to assume that the reader / viewer can’t grasp the horror of genocide simply because it didn’t happen to a named character. No fan of Brotherhood / the manga thinks of Roy’s crimes as “abstract”. We all know that what he did was wrong. Nobody harbors any illusion that he’s not a war criminal. Neither Brotherhood nor the manga whitewash what he did in Ishval either. The gravity of his crimes is made abundantly clear.
Second, I also disagree that making Roy kill Winry’s parents makes his crimes “more poignant and appropriately disturbing”. I’ve yet to see an FMA fan mention how shocked / horrified they were at the deaths of Winry’s parents. Her parents don’t have that much focus outside of their deaths, so it’s not like either fandom gets emotionally attached to them as characters. In both versions of the story, their deaths are there to serve the narrative of a major character. This counter argument would have had more weight if we the audience got to know them more as people first. As it stands, the deaths of the Rockbells feels thematically redundant in the 2003 version.
Usually the hard-hitting moments are Nina Tucker’s chimerification, the death of Maes Hughes, or the deaths of Envy / Greedling / Hoheinheim in Brotherhood. I’ve lurked a lot of different forums online, and I haven’t seen a 2003 fan bring this event up as one that made them cry, or had some kind of impact on them.
One particular point that’s worthy of being addressed here is this: “It's a much more poignant and appropriately disturbing way to communicate the discomforting truth that otherwise decent people may be forced to do atrocious things during wartime,”
This point had already been responded to on that TVTropes page, so I’ll copy / paste it here: “It bothered me for different reasons: namely that it seemed so pointless. Roy already had the deaths of thousands of innocent Ishvalan civilians on his conscience in both versions, which meant the point about good people committing war crimes had already been made. “
(Notice how this individual calls Roy’s actions “war crimes”? That reinforces my point that the horror of Roy’s crimes in Ishval was already effectively communicated in Mangahood. Plenty of FMA fans already got the point without needing Roy to kill the family member of a sympathetic character)
I would also like to add that the point of “decent people may be forced to do atrocious things during wartime” was further made in Mangahood by Scar. Think about it: Scar killed Winry’s parents when he was under extreme duress, pain, and trauma. I would also argue that Scar’s reasons for killing the Rockbells are more sympathetic than Roy being a soldier who was just following orders. Reinforcing this point through Scar’s character leaves a powerful impression on the viewer and adds an extra dimension to this moral. So even if we take the 2003 FMA fan’s words at face value, Mangahood already did that and it didn’t need to make that point at the expense of any of the characters.
I would also like to add that the person in TVTropes who argued in favor of the 2003 version of FMA is also reinforcing my point that Roy’s crimes in Ishval aren’t heinous enough, so we have to have him kill Winry’s parents or else the audience won’t understand the gravity of his crimes. That’s pretty telling, and it reinforces my point too.
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Counter Argument # 2
“At the time of the Anime`s writing the manga's identity of the Rockbells' murderer hadn't been revealed. All they had to go by was "Doctors killed", and "Doctors helped those on the other side of the conflict". The writers had been given the task of wrapping up a loose plot line, and since that was what all they could go by they did the best they could.”
Me: Okay so they shouldn’t have tried to make an adaptation of the manga before the manga was complete. One opinion I have about adaptations is that you should only adapt stories that are finished. There are SO many problems that come about whenever an adaptation starts before a manga’s complete. Any fan of Game of Thrones should be able to tell you what happens to an adaptation’s quality when the adaptation catches up to its source material. The 2003 FMA is no exception to this rule. It’s the showrunners fault for even attempting to adapt the manga long before its completion.
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Counter Argument # 3
This next counterargument is so long winded that in order to respond to it, I’ll have to summarize it into the following points:
Other Major Points to this Counterargument
2003 Scar’s arc is about coming to terms with being a victim of persecution by an overwhelmingly more powerful oppressor. Mustang gets manga Scar’s arc of revenge in order to make Mustang a better father figure for Ed.
It makes no sense for 2003 Scar to get his manga counterpart’s arc since it would dilute his arc of defending victims of oppression.
2003 FMA is more concerned with showing just how bad “Just Following Orders” is and it does this through Roy. This plot point makes Roy “a dog of the military” and has him show Ed what that means. “The experience of killing Winry's parents does inform Roy's character in 2003, and is a driving motivation for why he is able to teach Edward that Edward needs to look beyond his own dreams and his justifications for them… In sum, Roy killing Winry's parents isn't about being the straw that broke the camel's back; it's about making Roy's actions more personally relatable for Edward.”
Me: I’ll be the first to admit that there was more to the original argument, and if you want the full context, once again I will give you the link to these arguments for a second time:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Headscratchers/FullMetalAlchemistAnime
My Response: I disagree that 2003 FMA Scar has an arc. He never drops his quest for revenge. He never undergoes a change in his character or his personality. He’s nicer to the Elric brothers I guess, but that’s not enough to constitute as a character arc. So the entire argument about “diluting Scar’s arc” doesn’t work, because Scar doesn’t have a character arc to dilute in the 2003 FMA.
“The experience of killing Winry's parents does inform Roy's character in 2003, and is a driving motivation for why he is able to teach Edward…”
This blurb right here reinforces my earlier argument that making Roy the killer of the Rockbells is more about Roy than it is about Winry. Saying that it’s only there so that he can teach Ed a lesson doesn’t change the fact that the focus shifts from Winry to Roy (or Ed) and that by doing so, Winry and Scar’s characters get screwed over in the process.
In sum, Roy killing Winry's parents isn't about being the straw that broke the camel's back; it's about making Roy's actions more personally relatable for Edward.”
The first sentence in this argument is more about semantics than anything else. Whether it’s about “the straw that broke the camel’s back” or not, that still doesn’t change the fact that this is how the narrative presents these events. If that wasn’t the case, then that’s all the more shame on the show for presenting it in such a way that would lead someone to that conclusion. In a previous sentence this person admitted that it “informed Roy’s character”, which reinforces the point that the deaths of the Rockbells has nothing to do with Scar and Winry’s characters.
Second, making the deaths of Winry’s parents a lesson for Ed (or making Roy’s actions “relatable” to Ed) cheapens their deaths. By extension, that also cheapens the deaths of the Ishvalans. It reduces the horrors of war and genocide to an aesop for the main character about how awful it is to just follow orders. This argument does nothing but reinforce what I, and other FMA fans, have been trying to say.
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Final Counter Argument
Finally, it isn't really the case that the anime treats Roy's murder of Winry's parents as particularly more vile than the genocide of the Ishvalans. It's just that the murder of Winry's mother is more personally relevant to the main characters' development, so that murder is more centrally discussed in the plot. Roy's PTSD and regrets are in fact caused by everything he went through during the war. An example of this is the flashback he has of killing an Ishvalan child during the Fullmetal vs. Flame Alchemist fight.
Me: I call b.s. Roy only attempts to commit suicide after the Rockbells died. This would suggest that he found their deaths more upsetting than the deaths of the Ishvalans. There’s nothing to suggest that he would have still attempted suicide even if he hadn’t killed them. Plus, the fact that this person claims that “the murder of Winry's mother is more personally relevant to the main characters' development, so that murder is more centrally discussed in the plot” reinforces my earlier point that the narrative treats the deaths of the Rockbells as being more important than the genocide of the Ishvalans. Let’s also not forget that his motivation to become the Fuhrer was based on the deaths of the Rockbells, not the Ishvalans.
Yes, he gets PTSD from the Ishval War, but that’s not the same as wanting to commit suicide, or wanting to become Fuhrer. This person agrees with me that the deaths of the Rockbells are more important to Mustang’s character than the deaths of the Ishvalans.
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