Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E4: “The Ishvalan War of Extermination”

Last episode ended with Scar telling Dr. Marcoh to talk. It looks like this is going to be at least largely a flashback episode, and that we might get some clues about the specifics of Father's plans and why they require so much human-on-human conflict within Amestris' already claimed territory. Wonder how many colors Ishval will have at this particular time of year.


You know, "Golden Time Lover" would actually be as good as "Again" if the vocalist were just less nasally. The imagery might be more subdued and less representative of the show itself, but it really captures the horror elements that have taken center stage, and it conveys the theme of seeking redemption amid unrelenting awfulness. It took some searching around on youtube, but when I found a Japanese cover of the song by a vocalist who doesn't sound like he has a clothespin clamped around his nose I discovered that it actually IS good. So yeah, this intro would rank just slightly below "Again" for me, were it just not for that one defect.

Also, since I'm already devoting this much wordcount to the intro, I strongly suspect that Amestris will be going to war with the northern country of Drachma in the near future in order to bite off that one little chunk of mountains and complete Father's megaglyph. The fact that this hasn't happened yet suggests that Father knows Amestris wouldn't be able to hold that territory for long, so he wants to have everything else in order before doing this and perform the ritual during the brief window that Amestris is circular before the Drachmans ruin it. So yeah, that's probably why we'll be going to that fortified, snowy border in the next dozen episodes; Mustang, Edward, and co are going to try and prevent that last step of the plot from happening.

Anyway, the episode itself does open with a flashback, but not from Dr. Marcoh's POV. Rather, newly minted state alchemist Roy Mustang is visiting the sickly old alchemist who trained him, and who is only slightly happier with what his student is getting up to than Izumi was with hers.

Mustang tells him that with Amestris suddenly facing so many external threats, it's only right and proper for Amestrian alchemists to defend the society that supports them. His sensei isn't having any of it, though, and seems to almost give in to despair when Mustang tries to get him to enlist as well. It's not fair, Mustang says, that an alchemist as skilled and inventive as him would live in such poverty, and joining the military will change that as well as let him continue his pyromantic research.

There's an external shot of the house, showing it to be large and imposing, but also sadly dilapidated. It tells its own story pretty clearly. It ISN'T right that a talented alchemist should live like this, and not too long ago he wouldn't have. Sadly, Mustang doesn't seem to realize that the modern state alchemist system is the cause of this situation rather than a solution. That does fit with his later character arc, when he's forced to acknowledge that a social order itself can be right or wrong rather than it all just being a matter of individual actors and circumstances.

The mention of his master having taught him his flame alchemy also explains why we don't see other people using those hydrogen flares. Mustang wheedled that spell out of the anti-military guy who invented it, and his apprenticeship was cut short when his master learned that he was planning to enlist.

The master snipes that alchemists must always seek the truth (capital T? Possible!), and that an alchemist dies when they stop thinking. What he's implying about Mustang is fairly obvious. He then says that he, himself, died a long time ago, which I'm taking to mean that he was mindlessly stupid to have accepted Mustang as an apprentice however many years ago.

The master has a sudden coughing fit, and Mustang tries to help him, in the process naming him as...huh.

I guess Roy and Riza might have known each other from before either of them joined the army, via this relative of hers.

Also, "Hawkeye" is her actual family name apparently. Is her being a sniper just total coincidence? Or maybe she took her surname as a challenge to live up to. Either way, kind of lol.

Before losing consciousness and possibly dying, Old Hawkeye tells Mustang to look after his daughter, who has all of his research notes in her possession. Okay, this is Riza's father than. I wonder why she didn't learn any alchemy herself, if her dad was an alchemical researcher who didn't keep her away from his findings? Maybe just no aptitude or inclination toward it.

It...hmm. It may also have to do with her gender, come to think of it. Out of the many Amestrian alchemists we've met so far, only one was female. If alchemy has strongly gendered traditions in Amestris, and Daddy Hawkeye was a conservative type as he seems to be, that could also explain it.

The title card drops, and then young Mustang and young Riza are standing before her father's freshly covered grave. She thanks him for helping her father as best he could, which he replies was simply a matter of duty for him as an apprentice. On a related note, as per the late Daddy Hawkeye's wishes, Mustang offers his daughter some contact information she can use to reach him in the military if she needs help with anything. He asks her if she, too, is going to distance herself from him for becoming a soldier, despite his idealistic reasons for doing so. She indicates the contrary.

Riza Hawkeye is a rare case of someone who grew her hair out after joining the army.​

She muses about whether or not people like Mustang might actually be the best way to bring about her father's dream of a world where "we" can live happily. It's not clear if that "we" is referring to Amestrians, humanity at large, or just their immediate family and friends. Or...maybe just her and Roy? Is it implying that they were a thing?

Then the title card appears, pointedly reminding us what Mustang actually ended up doing as a soldier.

Next scene opens on Edward in the shower...wait a minute, that's not Edward! I just saw the long blonde hair and recalled the previous episode's shower scene and made that connection, but nope. It's Riza with her later, longer hair, and it turns out that when her father told Mustang he had left his research notes with her what he actually meant was...

You know. After Shao Tucker, Father, Hohenheim, and what's been sort of hinted about Mustang's childhood, I'm forced to say that Hawkeye's dad is still one of the better parents in this story.

Too bad about that burnscar that she got right over the formulae for a universal panacea and the ritual of global human understanding and harmony. I think that little strip of it extending over her shoulderblade might have blotted out the anti-haemonculus megalaser spell too.

I hope she managed to have someone trace all that on paper before it happened.

She hears her corgi barking at the door, and hastily dresses and comes out to find...okay, Edward, it was embarrassing enough when Alexander managed to do that, but this is just getting ridiculous.

I guess he has a really weird dog allergy that makes his muscles all switch themselves off as soon as one comes near him.

Hawkeye brings him inside, and gives monosyllabic answers to his questions about her current status as Wrath's PA. Then, she offers him tea and a seat before starting the arduous process of cleaning all of Gluttony's stomach-hell-blood out of the handgun she lent him. She asks him if he ended up having to use it, and he said that he lost the nerve to and was unable to pull the trigger. Pathetic, huh?

I guess I can't blame Edward for not thinking about this rationally, after all he's just been through. He's really, really being ridiculously unfair to himself here, though. The only time he started to use that gun but then hesitated was when he pointed it at Envy. Who bullets are barely even an inconvenience for.

I wonder if maybe there's a missing scene from the last couple episodes' worth of manga, where Edward was faced with human opponents? This scene would make a lot more sense if so.

...

Now that I'm thinking along those lines, something that I think WOULD have fit here is if, rather than aiming the handgun at Envy in that scene, Edward had aimed it at Yao. Trying to kill him before Father could turn him into a new minion, but not being able to bring himself to shoot.

I don't know if that's what actually happened in the manga, but regardless it's something that this scene with Ed and Riza could have leaned on.

...

He also mentions the incident with Winry and Scar, when he prevented Winry from using the pistol as well. And...he seems to think that this was also a failure on his own part, despite him having learned since that Scar and his young companion could be invaluable allies. Edward really needs to unwind and get a chance to think the last few days through.

He says that he feels ashamed of not only lacking the nerve to kill, but also of getting in the way of Winry's revenge - which he had no business getting involved with - and he remembers her sobbing inconsolably afterward. Ah, right, he's only had that one very brief phone convo with Winry since then, hasn't he.

Hawkeye tells Edward that he might be suffering from survivor's guilt after what happened to Yao who he spent time trapped in Gluttony with, and that this may be effecting his perception of other things. That specific angle hadn't occurred to me, as opposed to Edward just being at his wits' end, traumatized, and likely sleep-deprived, but now that it's pointed out it makes sense.

Then she asks him if he loves Winry, and Edward's reaction is a reminder of how much normal teenaged socialization he never had a chance to get.

Poor doggo got a facefull of hot tea. ​:(

Hawkeye wisely changes the subject and apologizes that the gun proved to be such a heavy burden for him. He asks if she feels it as a heavy burden herself, and she answers - without hesitation - that she's killed so many people that she has no ability to tell how light or heavy any such burdens are anymore. And, unlike him, she wasn't even forced into those situations to begin with.

Ah. I think we're about to get the perspective of a normal, non-alchemist war criminal.

Edward cautiously asks her to tell him more about what actually happened in Ishval. We then cut to Scar demading the same from Dr. Marcoh. I was starting to wonder when we'd get back to Scar, given the episode title. However, when the flashback (NOW IN FULL COLOR!!!!oneone) begins, it's with Hawkeye's voiceover.

She explains that Ishval is a harsh land with only a few fertile bits nestled between the rocks and sands of the eastern desert's edge. As one might expect from such an environment, the local culture was a rigid, conservative one with very strongly entrenched traditions (and a full color palette this time! yay!). She claims that some Ishvalans appreciated the (unspecified) benefits of Amestrian annexation, but many did not (the circumstances of that annexation aren't talked about, but it's implied to have been bloodless at first). Civil unrest grew over the early years of Amestrian rule, with more and more troops being stationed in Ishvalan cities to keep the peace. Then Envy envy'd that kid, and the riots that resulted grew into an organized bid for independence. This led to a chain reaction, with various other parts of southeastern Amestris joining the revolt. This civil war continued for seven years all things told.

...

You know, this really puts a new perspective on "City of Heresy." I don't think we've been shown exactly where Liore is, but it was somewhere fairly remote in the eastern province. And, Letoism didn't seem like a religion that the Elrics were all that familiar with, implying that it's not the majority Amestrian faith. That was another conquered people who fought on the side of the rebellion, wasn't it?

No wonder they were so susceptible to Cornello's rhetoric about the junta planning to enslave them, when they just watched the ringleaders of the rebellion they fought in a mere few years ago get ethnic cleansed.

It also makes Edward's behavior in that episode look way, way worse in retrospect. That insecure /r/atheism rant was obnoxious enough on its own. Knowing that that was likely a soldier of the colonizers disparaging the beliefs of the colonized in their own homeland, in their own temple...yeah, not your brightest moment Ed.

...

In the final year of ever-escalating civil war, Wrath brought the full force of the Amestrian army down directly on the region that started the dissent, with orders to destroy every city in Ishval and kill everything that moves.

Oh shit that's why Ishval looked normal, the monochrome plague moved to Central at that time!​

I wonder how long Wrath had been on the throne, by this point. Did he take over earlier during the rebellion, or was he in command before the murder that started it all? I also wonder what Amestris' external enemies were doing to take advantage of this situation meanwhile.

Anyway, the state's combat alchemists, with their mostly demolition-focused transmutations, took center stage in leveling the cities and fortresses, but much of the actual killing was down to common soldiers. Riflemen and artillery crews knew that they were killing people. Snipers like Hawkeye, however, saw a closeup of each and every last kill that they made. The example we see is her shooting a fleeing Ishvalan soldier in the back of the head, as nearby some Amestrian riflemen proceed to stab a pile of wounded civilians to death with their bayonets.

Other highlights of this city-destruction scene aside from Hawkeye's part in it are Basque Grande (the cannon-conjuring guy who Scar killed in his entrance to the story) destroying a building full of Ishvalans with gusto, Mustang destroying another one with considerably less enthusiasm, and...huh.

Okay, back in Scar's flashback, we saw an alchemist raising a gigantic wall of stone (and I mean gigantic; taller than the buildings, and quite long) to cut off fleeing civilians. We now see that the alchemist who did this was Armstrong, in seemingly his one act of participation in the genocide before he dropped to the ground, trembling and choking on his own conscious, and abandoned the front lines. So Armstrong actually did do war crimes, if only very, very briefly and without directly killing any civilians. What raises my eyebrows a little more, though, is that the lightning effect when he raised this ginormous wall was just the normal blue, and there didn't appear to be other alchemists assisting (though I suppose they could have been offscreen). That's...very, very much an outlier in terms of power, for Armstrong. I would assume he was unknowingly armed with protostone or something, but there was no red lightning effect here.

Anyway, after the slaughter, the Amestrian troops are sitting around in the ruins drinking tea. Major Mustang is approached by his academy friend Captain Hughes, who he hasn't seen in a while. They both remark on how the other has changed. They're both butchers, now, to different degrees. Mustang deals with this with a glower. Hughes, with a smile. I continue to feel justified in being not at all sure about that guy. They start walking and talking.

Hughes gets a letter from his fiance, Gracia, and there's a little scene about him worrying about her getting tired of waiting for him and Mustang teasing him about what happens to soldiers who talk about being engaged while on duty.

The conversation turns serious again as they watch the smoking ruins their force just left. Hughes wonders what they're even fighting for. What in this miserable sandpit is worth so many Amestrian lives, to say nothing (and by that I mean that he doesn't say anything about this) of the Ishvalan ones? As they talk, they're approached by Hawkeye, who seems to be a new-ish recruit. Mustang is surprised to see her here, and having gained the hardened look of a desensitized killer herself.

They return to the post ethnic cleansing tea party, and sit in a tight little circle. Hawkeye asks Mustang to please explain the rationale behind the wholesale slaughter of civilians and the use of alchemy to level city blocks. As an officer, he can hopefully say something to reassure her that what they're doing is in fact necessary. He doesn't answer.

Someone else sitting a few meters away does, though.

What is the deal with this character? He gets cameo after cameo without ever really interacting with the story, like some sort of fantasy nazi version of Where's Waldo. I get that he's being built up as a villain for later, but doing so from the damned pilot onward is just excessive. It's justified if he's going to actually supplant Father as the main antagonist in a surprise twist or something, but otherwise it's just getting silly.

Kimblee tells Hawkeye that the purpose of a soldier is to kill the enemy. The Ishvalans are enemies. If she didn't want to kill them, why did she even come here? This galaxy brained take is accompanied by a sublime-sounding musical piece that the show normally reserves for hopeful and introspective revelations, which is darkly hilarious. When Mustang gets all up in Kimblee's face and asks him what the fuck his damage is, Kimblee just tells them all to think of that moment of elation - like the high of scoring a point in a game - that he knows they all get when they see a target go down, despite their misgivings. That thrill, he says, is in fact their own better judgement guiding them.

The inspirational music continues as Hawkeye looks like she's about to kill herself and Mustang politely questions Kimblee's grasp on human psychology by grabbing him by the collar. Kimblee just rolls his eyes and says he supposes he'll just never understand people like them, before the bell rings and signals them to start packing up. Kimblee's final words to Hawkeye, over Mustang's head, are to look death in the face untroubled, and to not forget the faces of the enemy, because they're definitely not going to forget yours.

Later, Mustang asks Hughes why he, personally, is fighting. Hughes says that it's because otherwise he'll die, that's all. I'm guessing that non-alchemists can't get away with just a demotion if they do what Armstrong did. Mustang is crushingly unsatisfied with that answer.

Back to Dr. Marcoh and Scar, finally. Earlier in the civil war, the Amestrians used prisoners of war to supplement their death row criminals in philosopher's stone experiments. A turning point in the research was when he and some other alchemists (most of them more enthusiastic than himself) successfully converted fifteen mostly Ishvalan prisoners into a jewel-sized protostone, through an agonizing transmutation process.

So, 15 souls make a jewel-sized protostone. It's been strongly implied (through visual indications if nothing else) that the Sins have hundreds if not thousands of souls packed into an only slightly bigger core. Hence, protostones can be depleted in just a few months of use, while Greed was able to survive for a century without maintenance.

The fruits of this first successful experiment were given to one of the state alchemists around the launch of the extermination campaign. Kimblee, of course.

Cue a short sequence of Kimblee getting off in his pants as he uses the stone to murder people by the hundreds. Also, he seems to have kept the stone in his mouth while using it, so that bit in the OP wasn't just artsy symbolism. He's like...a haemoncaboo, or something. Marcoh says that this one protostone-armed alchemist turned the tide of the first battle of the extermination operation. I'm guessing they made more protostones since then and gave them to certain other state alchemists for later battles, given that Kimblee didn't seem to have any celebrity status when we saw the others interact with him during the previous flashback. MacDougle would have probably been another of them, if we're acknowledging his existence.

We return to Hawkeye's story before Marcoh can explain how many other stones were used during the war, or what he thinks the genocide phase that followed this might have been motivated by. Hopefully we'll get back to that soon.

Hawkeye explains that after the first few cities were flattened, the Ishvalan high priest and his top officials surrendered to Wrath in person, with the high priest himself offering his own life in exchange for sparing the remaining few tens of thousands of Ishvalans. Wrath refuses. After all, that wouldn't be an equivalent exchange. The high priest is a mere human, and thus worth only as much as any other human. Um. I think the priest was talking about sociopolitical value, not metaphysics, but given that we don't know why Father ordered the genocide in the first place Wrath could have any number of reasons for this obvious deflection. When the priest and his retinue tell him that God will strike him down for this, Wrath just tells them that he's been hearing that since this operation began, and is still waiting to be struck down. How many civilians does he need to massacre before he ends up in God's crosshairs? The fact that it still hasn't happened suggests that it never will.

The degree to which this echoes Edward's own smug rant back in "City of Heresy" can't be accidental. Though there is one little detail that jumps out at me as potentially having a double meaning.

Is he maybe throwing a little shade at his own creator, who styles himself as a god? Reminding himself that for all his vaunted superiority, Father was created at some point by the lowly humans he claims to think so little of?

Also, there's a few places in his villain speech here where Wrath uses the word "human" in a way that strongly implies he isn't one. I'm going to assume that this is a translation bug, because I don't think he'd be going mask-off in front of a bunch of random soldiers and captured enemies. Especially since Hawkeye is supposed to be narrating this, implying that the conversation wasn't kept secret from the general soldiery.

Anyway, he ends up having them dragged away to be killed, and continues the purge until the only ishvalans left are the ones who ran away and hid. We see a repeat of Mustang's previous flashback, with him and Hughes performatively saluting Wrath with the rest of the officers when he makes his victory appearance in the ruins of Ishval's capital. Then, the newly promoted Colonel Mustang is talking to Hawkeye in his new office, and offering to make her his adjutant should she choose to accept the position. She'll have his back in case anyone tries to foil his and Hughes' plan through dirty business. He will also have his back exposed to her, and he entrusts her with one final responsibility:

Um. O...okay?

Returning to the present, Hawkeye finally lets Edward in on the plan. Spread their influence among the newer wave of officers, propel Mustang to the Fuhrer (which may or may not require a violent coup), and then...restore the largely powerless Amestrian parliament to control of the government (aha, so they do have a history of democracy!), dissolve the junta, and put the officers most responsible for the Ishval genocide on trial. Including himself.

I...wow is there a lot to unpack here.

Armstrong might look like the most stereotypically "shonen" character in this story, but Mustang...take the weird mix of idealism, naivete, and toxic masculinity that permeates much of the genre, concentrate it into a quantum singularity, and the shape that it takes on will be that of Roy Mustang.

The fact that he wants to make things right, and to hold himself and everyone else accountable for what they did, is of course admirable. Like, as close to Hero Classic as you can possibly come after having done what he did in Ishval. But his plan for how to go about this requires him to simultaneously a) know that the system is corrupt, b) count on that system to cooperate with his attempts to reform it even though he directly threatens most of the more powerful players in it, c) trust most of his own co-conspirators to stay committed to a plan that will likely get themselves tried and executed and that will give them many years to have second thoughts before it happens, and d) have total confidence in his own ability to manage this fool sized operation and assume that he can restore democracy with the same tools he'll need to gather to make himself dictator.

Like I said, it's admirable, but it's also insane and stupid in the way that only machismo can lead to. Any plan that hinges on "I need to get absolute power so that I can be held accountable" is that. Going rogue with likeminded officers and (especially) alchemists and trying to win hearts and minds like a normal revolution would be the obvious path forward, especially if he courted the other insurgent movements that fought on the Ishvalan side of the civil war. But, then he wouldn't be The Hero, and he wouldn't be able to hang onto the illusion that the worldview he was raised and indoctrinated with isn't total fabrication.

I also get the impression that, as a relatively young man himself, his understanding of democracy might be purely theoretical. We don't know when or how Amestris became a military dictatorship, but it's implied to have been so for some time before Wrath had the big chair (how proactive verses how opportunistic Father was in bringing these conditions about, we might find out later. At the very least, I suspect that a string of anti-militarization MP's abruptly changed their tunes and voted to cede more power to the military before retiring and then mysteriously vanishing from public life one by one). If Mustang's only lived experience for how to get things done is through strongman politics, it's perhaps understandable that his mind would go there for a solution.

Of course, this makes the reality check he got in "Belly of the Beast" that much more important. You can't end dictatorship by becoming the new dictator. You can't get rid of the bad apples and keep the good when the entire bunch are sitting in a puddle of bacterial sewage. The show is clearly aware of this. Fullmetal Alchemist is smarter than the stories that would typically make someone like Mustang unironically right about everything.

When Hawkeye explains everything, Edward is horrified when he realizes that Mustang, and possibly herself, Armstrong, and other people that he knows, would likely be executed if this plan were to work. Hawkeye just nods and confirms it. He tells her that that's not fair, it's the haemonculi who made them do it. Hawkeye says that that's really not true. They'd have followed those orders if they came from a human-controlled government just the same. And really, no one MADE them do it. No one can make you do anything. At most, they can kill you for refusing.

She then repeats a version of Kimblee's words, with the opposite message. She has to look at death head on, because, well...

He tries to object to this logic, but can't seem to think of a good argument. And, really...I'm not sure if I can either. She tells him to just worry about himself and his brother before trying to save the unsaveable.

Cut to Alphonse at Dr. Knoc's house (oh right, that was his name!), where May Chang has recovered and is ready to go out and find Scar and/or Yoki again or whatever. It turns out that Alphonse is a lot closer to her imagined version of the Fullmetal Alchemist than Edward, so she transfers her fangirl crush to him now before leaving with her pandarat.

Cute.

Once again, there's a stinger after the fluffy shojo Winry outro. Envy delivers breakfast to Dr. Marcoh's cell, only to discover that we're going to have to wait for our next Scar-focused episode before learning what else he told him.

The end.


I'm not sure if I'm reading too much into the story at this point, but to not delve further into this would be risking saying much too little. On one hand, the author being from a country that did war crimes doesn't automatically mean that any story she writes involving those is supposed to reflect on her national culture. On the other hand, the list of specific parallels keeps getting longer. Conquest followed by black flag terror attack followed by genocidal crackdown is pretty much exactly the timeline of the second Sino-Japanese War, with Envy's child murder standing in for the Manchurian railroad incident (sure, black flag launched by a third party and against the occupiers in this case, but still, it's close enough in spirit). The transition from parliamentary republic to military dictatorship - and the form taken on by that military dictatorship - also resembles the Taisho-Showa transition more than, say, Fascist Italy or Germany's origins.

So, regardless of how intentional it is, I'm seeing this aspect of Fullmetal Alchemist as very much part of Japan's ongoing culture war. And, as that, I have mixed feelings about it.

Before getting into why, let me just say that my assessment of this is still mostly positive. Any story acknowledging the historical reality of war crimes and the way that they get downplayed by history, and that acknowledges the culpability of the people who carried them out, is a step in the right direction. For a story from any country. Just by even trying to engage with this, FMA is accomplishing something positive.

With that said, I feel like there's a bit of...maybe you can call this "moral wish fulfillment" going on here. Early on in the show, we were told that a number of state alchemists resigned over the Ishval atrocities. The characters who didn't are engaged in a (quixotic and poorly-conceived, but still) plan to atone for what they did, and they launched this plan pretty much immediately after the war with little to no outside prompting. And sure, small numbers of war criminals *have* had crises of conscience and blown the whistle in similar circumstances.

My problem is that when it comes time to show the perpetrators who DIDN'T have crises of conscience, our only name and face is Kimblee. An obvious, loud-and-proud psychopath who - and this is the really important bit - has spent the entirety of the story so far in prison for killing a fellow officer.

So, we have the good people who complied with evil in moments of weakness and regretted it immediately afterward, and we have the mustache-twirler who's already in jail anyway and would have almost certainly ended up there with or without a war to indulge himself during. What's missing from the picture is the vast majority of the soldiers and officers involved who just shut their consciences off during the operation or made up justifications. The ones who, after the fact, will either rewrite their memories of their own role in the atrocities, or start feeling guilty about them decades later with public encouragement. And that's the demographic that actually allows these things to happen.

We did get a *little* look at that type, at least implicitly. Basque Grande has a name and a face, and while he may or may not have regretted his actions soon after the war we've seen nothing to suggest it. That isn't much, but it's something. And, of course, Mustang's previous realization that the Amestrian military as an institution was the problem rather than corrupt elements within it prevents this from just being a liberal fantasy in which good actors defeat bad actors with minimal changes to the landscape. But, it strays a little close to that. And when you combine this with the fact that the only Ishvalan character who gets more than a few minutes of screentime is Scar the terrorist, well...coming from a Japanese author who would have grown up surrounded by war criminals, it does feel like softballing.

Granted, playing hardball might make it difficult-to-impossible to get published. So, there's that. And, the story does still have plenty of time to engage with the silent majority of unthinkingly complicit soldiers, which would help a ton. As it is so far though, Amestris comes across as a more moral society than Japan, Germany, the United States, Israel, Russia, England, Turkey, or pretty much any other real life country I can think of that's done anything close to this sort of atrocities. Which at best kind of limits its usefulness as an exploration of this unfortunate reality, and at worst comes across as handling the guilty with kid gloves.

I'm at a very comfortable distance from the history of Japan, China, and Southeast Asia. But, I've been a white person benefiting from the status quo in America, an Israeli Jew doing likewise during the country's recent rightward turn and resulting consequences, and I'm also the descendant of an almost completely eradicated culture in the Ashkenazim. I may have never shot a civilian or been shot at by a soldier, but I've personally known more than enough people who have been on either side of such. And from my perspective, well...if Scar were a real person, I think that maybe that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.