Ramblings of a Fool (FMABS3E3 analysis)
As the title implies, this isn't the most organized article. FMA's been covering a lot of philosophical ground, and I haven't had as much time or attention as it really should get. So, until my end-of-the-show final article, here's the best I can do for what the last few episodes have focused on.
Content warning for more depressing stuff, though not as bad as the last couple of times.
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"Belly of the Beast," with its revelations about the nature of the philosopher's stone and haemonculi, made this story's existential horror elements much more overt. Instead of just embodying human depravity in an abstract sense with their seven deadly sins motif, the haemonculi are now a very overt examination-through-exaggeration of the moral perils of existence. They're made of tortured souls, their every thought and action burns those victims away, and it's pretty well implied that they can only extend their lives by absorbing more of them. The life of a haemonculus is an ongoing atrocity, regardless of how it chooses to behave, simply because of its nature. Obviously, that's a lot worse than our own biological needs of killing to eat, or our more advanced societies only existing because of their carefully ignored histories of exploitation, subjugation, and mass murder. But, blowing a problem up to grotesque proportions can make it easier to understand, and I'm pretty sure that that's what the show is doing.
Picking up where my last analysis post left off, the rebirth of Greed in "Father" is also a pretty good answer to the question of "shouldn't we all kill ourselves, then?" The answer is no, because the nature of organic life is just the symptom, not the cause.
We exist in our state because of a confluence of natural laws. Removing yourself from the picture isn't actually going to help anyone, because the conditions that cause life to be this way will persist, and someone who cares much less about the suffering of others than you do will be only too happy to take your place. The world that generated and shaped life will still exist, and will likely continue to generate and shape life even if all living things we know of were to be wiped out by a lazily written JRPG villain. Now, in "Struggle of the Fool," we've gotten an illustration of this with Armstrong's service career. He washed his hands of the atrocity around him and removed himself from the situation, but it's doubtful that even a single Ishvalan was saved because of this. And he knows it.
I think my favorite thing about that scene was what Mustang said after Armstrong's flashback: absolutely nothing. And, that's where I'm going to have to put the philosophical mumbo jumbo on hold and start engaging with the elephant in the room. The very specifically Japanese elephant.
Sins of the Father
So, I'm going to preface this section with a reminder that I'm not Japanese, or Chinese, or any ethnic group that was directly involved in the Second Sino-Japanese War. I've studied it a fair amount, but I've never even been to any of those countries, and I've forgotten much of what I did learn in the decade since my undergrad. So, take what this white girl says about where a Japanese author channeling Japanese history might have been coming from with a grain of salt.
So, with that out of the way.
Tens of thousands, at the very least, of Japanese soldiers actively and knowingly took part in the atrocities of world war 2. Hundreds of thousands more, at the very least, were aware of what their friends and comrades-in-arms were doing, and said nothing about it. The total number of people with some degree of complicity was certainly in the millions. Only a few dozen men were tried and sentenced at the Hague. The others made up a non-negligible percentage of Japan's adult population for the rest of the twentieth century. They raised a non-negligible percentage of the generation that followed.
Fullmetal Alchemist is to be commended for not absolving the Amestrian people of all complicity and trying to pin the atrocities entirely on the evil wizard and his secret cabal, like most stories (Japanese or otherwise) would. But even so, it still feels a little bit like moral wish fulfillment; if only there was an inhuman mastermind to at least blame a little of it on, wouldn't that grant some peace of mind?
““After having been called a weapon, or a monster, it’s only when I’m fighting real monsters that I truly feel that I’m just a human.””
Real monsters. Just imagine how great that would feel?
Part of me wants to say that, were it up to me, I'd make sure Mustang ate a bullet the instant the haemonculi were dealt with. I lost enough of my extended family in the holocaust to have some strong opinions about state-sanctioned mass killings. But, that would also make me a hypocrite, since I probably know people who are at least tangentially guilty of war crimes myself, and I haven't exactly acted on those suspicions. And, well. There's a lot of pretty horrific things I'm tacitly complicit in myself, just by virtue of not being willing to shell out for locally-produced clothing, free range meat, and electronics whose minerals didn't come from slave mines (okay, that last one might not actually be a thing that exists period, but the first two are things I could conceivably manage). I could do that. With my income I wouldn't have the money to afford anything but the bare essentials of life, but I could do it, and I've chosen not to. I continue to choose not to every second of every day. And someone who chose otherwise would arguably have as much justification to stand me up against the wall. So, maybe I really don't get to judge anyone. Which is kind of too bad, as I'm sure you've all noticed how much I enjoy being judgmental.
But here's the thing. Not all evil is equivalent. There's passively allowing or contributing to atrocity, and then there's actively and consciously taking part. And, even when the latter has society and government openly behind it, there's always an Armstrong. There are always Rockbells. All the people besides them who actively participated in genocide could have listened to them. And, afterward, the many thousands of people who chose to ignore them go back to their lives, knowing that they could have done otherwise. And they just keep on living with that knowledge, usually long after the point where the atrocities have been acknowledged as such and roundly condemned. Maybe your country doesn't, right now. Maybe it only has the generation that they've raised. How many of them, I wonder, earnestly regret what they or their parents or grandparents did? How many even bother to pretend?
I guess that brings me back to the existential stuff.
Minimizing Evil
The question that the show seems to be tackling now is how culpable individual people actually are for the harm they cause, and what it takes to redeem them, if redemption is possible. That's the struggle of the fools. It's easy to blame god for everything that's wrong with us (as I acknowledged above, having an evil inhuman force who we can blame ourselves on would be just a little too good to be true), but the fact is that some people do much better with their circumstances than others. Armstrong's backstory makes Mustang look really, really bad.
People often point to the Milgram experiments as proof of humanity's moral weakness. 65% of the subjects kept applying electrical shocks all the way up to 450 volts, well after the screams had fallen silent. What gets less attention is the fact that 35% of them didn't go past the 330 volt level when the screams stop. Even less attention is paid to the 17.5% who stopped at 150 volts, as soon as the screams began. Which you could easily interpret as proof that the rest of us have no excuse. The Milgram experiments have come under fire recently due to some evidence surfacing that suggests many of the subjects figured out it was fake early in the experiment. However, the fact that another, more rigorous, version of the experiment was conducted in the early 2000's (with pains taken to ensure that the subjects didn't know about the original experiment) with similar results suggests that the numbers are only slightly off at most.
What's conspicuously absent from the Milgram experiments, though, is someone who did what Armstrong claims to wish he'd done. Nobody tried to beat up the doctor, break into the test chamber, and make sure for themselves that the "student" was okay. Maybe most such people just don't survive long enough in our world to be participating in scientific experiments.
However, there is another solution.
In one version of the experiment, Milgram had a pair of actors in the same room as the subject pretend to be other "teachers" and start arguing about whether or not it was right to continue after the 150 and 330 volt marks. In this instance of the experiment, the compliance rate fell from 65% to a mere 10%. What makes this surprising is that in other permutations of the experiment (both under Milgram in the 60's and 70's, and in the 2006-9 repetitions), simply seeing another "teacher" refuse to comply didn't make much of a difference. Only talking about it with them (or at least, hearing it being discussed) did. I guess that's another reason why authoritarian regimes hate the free press so much. It's not just to suppress information, but to stifle conversations and critical examination around the information that isn't suppressed.
Those conversations are happening in the story now, though too late for Ishval. Armstrong had the strength of character to refuse on his own. Most people need some encouragement to listen to those nagging doubts; maybe Mustang, Hughes, etc would have also been turned before the genocide ran its course if they'd had a friend or two like Armstrong at the time.
Better Than Nothing
The previous incarnation of Greed didn't accomplish much by letting Father kill and recreate him (at least, as far as we know; NuGreed could still be running a long con). But, in light of his act of futile defiance, the other haemonculi seem to represent some of other ways that people confront the hard truth.
Gluttony, the simpleton, either isn't capable of understanding right and wrong, or - if he theoretically could be - he's been guided away from it. Envy embraces her monstrosity, choosing to revel in it. Lust, for as long as we knew her, seemed to just keep her mind too distracted to have to think too deeply about things. Wrath, though...he's an interesting one.
Despite being the second to youngest of the Sins, Wrath is directly responsible for the most harm as far as we know. I'm still not sure how much agency a newly created haemonculus has, or what circumstances might allow one to eventually defy its creator like Greed did. But he seems to be trying to get free now, and - unlike Greed, who ran away twice (first by hiding from Father, and then by choosing death over resubjugation) - he's trying to actually change the world around him in a way that will let things be different. I also find it notable that, unlike Greed who loves the sound of his own voice almost as much as Lust did, Wrath is both a talker and a listener. The first evidence we see of him resenting his situation was in a conversation with another active participant. What may have been a minor turning point for him was when his attempt at having a heartfelt conversation with Pride was rebuffed with threats and blackmail. His method of undermining Father has also, so far, been through conversation, exchanging covert information with Mustang and Edward. And, Yao's outburst during his conversation with Greed might have been awakening him to certain possibilities for another human-based haemonculus like himself.
So, if Wrath really does manage to defeat Father by the end, it'll be the same way that Milgram and the others got the lowest compliance rates. By being in situations where he can think, talk, and learn about things, and seeking more of those situations out. He might give up before that can happen. Certainly, he's been playing things close enough to his chest that indecisiveness is an easy reading. I'm definitely rooting for him. If a monster made of tortured souls can find redemption, then anyone can.
I guess that's the message I'm getting from the show at this point. Reality might be a cosmic horror story in which we're among the monsters, but if you stick around in it and try to make some parts of it slightly better in whatever small way you can, then you can make your existence worthwhile. And, the first step to doing that - or at least to stopping things from getting worse - is by thinking about things, and talking them over. Do that, and there's a chance the world might get better. Don't do that, and we know for a fact that it won't.
“When God put man in a garden
He girt him with a sword,
And sent him forth a free knight
That might betray his lord;
”He brake Him and betrayed Him,
And fast and far he fell,
Till you and I may stretch our necks
And burn our beards in hell.”
But though I lie on the floor of the world,
With the seven sins for rods,
I would rather fall with Adam
Than rise with all your gods.”
