Full Metal Alchemist General

Yup. His first kill in the manga is an MP.

Yeah. I remember one scene toward the end of the manga/Brotherhood where Ed and Scar are working together and Ed goes in disguise into a government building (and ends up beating the crap out of the soldiers hunting him when they make a reference to his height). It stood out to me because outside of the usual humor about Ed's height, at this point in the story, Scar actually avoids killing soldiers who are just guards and (humorously) winces at Ed's violence.

Which is a change from how Scar used to just kill guards who were in his way. To be honest, what with Amestris being a stand in for Nazis, I don't really have a problem with Scar killing any and all Amestrian soldiers he encountered. But a the same time, it definitely shows some character development that he eventually takes pains to subdue guards in a nonlethal way.

I figured Amestris was less nazis and more manipulated people. I mean the soldiers are still just normal people who are living their lives as they see fit.

Hell even people within Amestris and its government hold sympathies to the Ishvalans and what happened.

I don't think that badly of Scar compared to the characters, though he clearly has an arc to go through. I actually think his killing of Nina is basically justified as we still don't know if there was any way to get Nina back and to him the Elric brothers had just dodged the responsibility. At the same time, his purge of alchemists is not just affecting war criminals (which plenty in the Amestrian army are, including Mustang) but he's also going after people who cannot have been guilty, like Ed and Al, purely because of religious extremism.

Religion is just a front to his lust for revenge. Even he thinks he has no right to his God-given name. Scar only returns to religion after he gives up his murder spree.

edited 30th Dec '17 6:12:44 PM by RAlexa21th

And again those MPs and regular joe Soldiers.

We can only really count them as at worst, patriotic soldiers who believed that the fighting was for the good of Amestris (in a certain perspective it was).

At best, they are just average joes stuck in the military structures who are following orders.

Now the high command and those with Father, those illuminati shits? Those we could probably compare to the Nazis.

And as for the perspective I mentioned earlier, if you think Father considers himself to BE Amestris, then from his perspective the massacre was totally justified. It gets him closer to godhood.

Father is a shit.

edited 30th Dec '17 9:58:31 PM by EchoingSilence

Sorry but you are making shit up. Father never says and thinks those things so stop putting your words in his mouth and trying to project them on us. It is fine to do this stuff if you are writing fanfiction because that is the whole point, you are writing it yourself, but when when someone tries to make up something that never happened in the story that becomes a problem. Stick to the facts of the canon.

Father is a pretty bare-bones villain. Amestris is not based off of Nazi Germany either. End of story.

I wasn't saying Amestris was. I was arguing that the nazi comparison doesn't really work.

I was also saying that Father at best would see the massacre as good for his plan since it gets closer to completion, and I was insinuating that since he forged the country and runs it, he could technically be seen as Amestris, especially with the ending where he takes everyone's souls, before they get returned.

Father is pretty bare bones, I think this chat has discussed that at length as to why.

Though I probably didn't make that clear earlier, probably should've made sure.

edited 30th Dec '17 10:06:11 PM by EchoingSilence

I mean, I'll agree it's not solely inspired by Nazi Germany, but they do call their leader the Fuhrer, and are a militaristic nation that have at least one genocide (that I can recall, at least) under their belt - it certainly seems to take certain cues from Nazi Germany. If nothing else , the comparisons are inevitable.

edited 30th Dec '17 10:58:45 PM by KarkatTheDalek

There's no way Amestris isn't based off Nazi Germany. First of all, they're a heavily German inspired country from the get-go with quite a few German names. Secondly, they're massively fascistic and militaristic. Thirdly, they go around committing genocide on a religious and ethnic minority.

Even if it wasn't originally the author's intention there's absolutely no way to avoid all these massive comparisons.

Then there's the part where Mustang attempts what pretty much is Operation Valkyrie.

And if you want to look at FMA, since this isn't the mangahood thread: Amestris is literally an alternate universe's counterpart of actual goddamn Germany during the Nazi's rise to power.

No, it's Britain.

No, it isn't. Out of any European country Britian may be the one Amestris least resembles.

Colonial Britannia? The British occupation of India?

No, Ed getsthrown into Britain after passing the gate, not Germany.

No nothing in FMA remotely resembles the Raj.

And that was the anime's decision to do that.

@Sigilbreaker

The setting FMA takes place in is based on Europe in the early 1900s. Does it take the title further from the Nazis? Yeah. Does that mean that Amestris is an 1:1 allegory of Nazi Germany? Hell no. The author has refuted that multiple times. Allegory is not Applicability. If FMA was an Allegory than what we would take away from it was that dictatorships are the best and most efficient type of government.

That is not what the author wanted to say and that is not what what we are supposed to take away from the story. It is a shounen and we are not supposed to take it completely seriously. Could we get off the Godwin's Law train please?

edited 31st Dec '17 8:41:06 AM by DocJamore

I don’t think anyone’s claiming that it was a 1:1 allegory - more that it took some inspiration from it, which I think it probably did as well. It also, from what I recall, took inspiration from the treatment of the Ainu when writing about Ishval.

Really, the way I see it, you don’t get to call the military dictator of your fictional country a “Furher” and be surprised when people make the connection to Nazi Germany.

And why would FMA being an allegory tell us that dictatorships were great?

edited 31st Dec '17 8:50:01 AM by KarkatTheDalek

Yeah, the plight of the Ishvalans was supposedly based on Japan's treatment of the Ainu, though a lot of people see the US's treatment of Middle Easterners in it as well.

Arakawa intended for Amestris to be Imperial Japan but as a European country.

@2940: Ed definitely winds up in Germany in ''Conqueror of Shamballa''. Not Britain.

edited 31st Dec '17 11:09:27 AM by TommyFresh

There's a difference between what an author meant the story to say and what it actually says. I'm not criticising the story in any way, and you're misusing Godwin's law anyhow (Godwin's Law refers to comparing the other people you're talking to or their viewpoint to the Nazis).

How the hell do you get that from it? Is it Mustang trying to settle stuff? Considering all the destruction that's occurred under Bradley I would think the story's message would be the exact opposite if it really cared about politics on a deep level. Sure, we're not shown the new order trying to install democratic institutions, but the story really isn't about politics. It would bog down the ending. All we need to know is Mustang's trying to fix stuff and Mustang has already said before that his rule would ideally end with the punishment of him and all the other war criminals of the Ishvalan genocide, so we can assume that some other sort of power will get in charge.

edited 31st Dec '17 11:17:13 AM by Sigilbreaker26

"There's a difference between what an author meant the story to say and what it actually says."

And what the story says is that there is no way Amestris isn't better off as a dictatorship and the public want it to stay that way. Nobody in the story is opposed to a dictatorship, they are just opposed to what the dictatorship is doing so they threw a coup without any sort of public support.

Bradley was widely popular with the public. So popular that the cast is afraid their dictatorship will be overthrown. At no point is democracy even discussed. Amestris has kicked the ass of all their neighboring countries around it as a dictatorship. It has put down rebellions as a dictatorship. Is is widely popular with the public as a dictatorship. Nobody in the story besides Mustang want there to be any sort of government reform besides a dictatorship. And with Grumman as dictator, it will be decades before any sort of reform could even happen. This is presented by the narrative as a happy ending.

Just except FMA is a story with Deliberate Values Dissonance and Moral Dissonance. This Shounen, a genre whose demographic is aimed at teenage boys. We are not supposed to take away anything about politics in this story for teenagers seriously. So stop taking it so seriously and change the topic already.

edited 31st Dec '17 11:49:09 AM by DocJamore

Ed ended up in Britain in the end of 2003 and moved to Germany in Shamballa.

I haven't seen the movie is there any reason given why Ed and Hohenheim would move from Britain to Germany? Seems like a unsafe decision.

edited 31st Dec '17 12:03:16 PM by DocJamore

No idea. To hang out with the Thule society so they can open the gate?