#swing left

[muffinlance]

Consider: Post-canon Zuko wakes up in the body of his childhood self, the morning of That War Meeting. Would he still speak against the plans, knowing his fate? What do you think he would do differently the second time around?

"Turned away at the doors, Zuzu?"

"Shut up, Azula," her brother sulked. But sulked weirdly, after staring at her too long and too wide-eyed, not like she'd surprised him but--

But like he hadn't expected her to be there. At all.

He turned away. ...He turned back. "Hey, Lala? Do you think you could help me practice that one set?"

He didn't meet her eyes.

She narrowed hers. "Which set?"

"The one I'm bad at."

She scoffed. Pushed away from the wall she'd been leaning against. "That's all of them, Dum-Dum."

He didn't shout or stomp or yell about the nickname. His lips twitched.

"It's okay," he said. "If you're afraid you won't be a better teacher that my instructor..."

It was the most obvious manipulation ever.

Perhaps if he proved an adequate firebending student, she'd work on his courtly survival skills next. Honestly, it was good that not even Uncle Gets-Cousins-Killed had been fool enough to take Zuko into that war meeting. She could only imagine how terribly that could have gone.

"Keep up," she said, and turned her steps towards the training grounds.

He did. There, and during the katas she ran him through.

Azula kept her eyes narrowed.

"Hey," he asked, "do you know how to bend lightning yet?"

As if he could have missed it, if she'd been able to get more than sparks. "I will soon," she said.

"You will," he agreed, and flowed through his next set. The one she'd only just mastered.

Father didn't notice how weird Zuzu was being. Uncle never noticed anything. Zuko ate dinner and asked a servant for seconds and didn't stutter or flinch or lose his appetite when father asked, coolly, what he'd done with his day. Azula's shoulders tensed, because one mention of how she'd squandered her own training time teaching him--

"Azula hogged the training grounds. For hours," Zuzu scowled, exactly like a petulant thirteen year old.

Exactly like he hadn't been acting all day.

By the time Father was looking her way, Azula had her usual smirk in place. "I'm sure there would be room for both of us," she said, "you're not afraid of a little friendly fire, are you, brother?"

Zuko sulked. And ate his seconds, like he was enjoying each bite. There was something in his eyes, like a joke no one else was getting.

---

Father died that night. A heart attack. There were the faintest of burns to either side of the treacherous organ; the royal physician hypothesized that he'd grabbed at his chest, fingers burning hot in his final moments; so hot they'd only exacerbated the problem.

The royal physician would never have been brought any victims of lighting strikes. Those that occurred in the capital did not generally require a doctor in the aftermath.

Zuzu ate a hearty breakfast.

He didn't order seconds. Azula gave him points, at least, for not being tacky.

---

The sages named Iroh as regent.

They named Zuko as Fire Lord.

"No," the tiny Fire Lord in his perfectly miniaturized Fire Lord robes said, sitting at the head of his war council. "We're not doing that. And I'll be reviewing all recent battle plans, as well. What's this I hear about a division of new recruits being deployed to the front?"

He did not mention how he'd heard of the 41st Division. No one asked.

"Prince Iroh, surely--" one of the generals tried to appeal.

The young Fire Lord's regent was looking as startled as the rest of them, for a moment. Then he sipped his tea, and smiled.

"Your Fire Lord is correct, of course. A change in our leadership--a change the other nations may mistakenly view as weakness--will necessitate a change in our strategy."

"Now," said their lord, "what, exactly, is our overall objective in this war?"

War, the new Fire Lord decreed, was not an end unto itself.

---

The new Fire Lord continued to have time, to pretend to be trained by her. Azula watched him. Adjusted her footwork. Did not tolerate, and was not offered, any commentary on who was teaching who.

"What did you do with my brother?" she asked, as they flowed from one set to the next. As her hands, poised to throw fire, just so happened to be pointed his way.

He missed a step. It didn't look like an act.

"I'm, uh. Right here?"

She didn't bother to dignify that.

He didn't bother to look worried about her hands, one movement off from a true attack.

He looked around, then grabbed her sleeve, and tugged her further from any walls that may hide ears. The royal family's private training grounds were wonderfully large, and wonderfully open.

"It's me," he said. "It's still me. Just. More of me? Longer of me?"

She narrowed her eyes. A familiar expression, by this point. "Explain."

"...I found the Avatar," he said. "And this is definitely his fault, but--but I guess it started at a war meeting, when I was thirteen."

Azula listened. It was a very Dum-Dum story.

[sunbeamedskies]

The left SUCKS at recruiting people. And so many of you are part of the problem.

The talk about centrists and moderates being the literal devil I see constantly in online leftist spaces is one great example of the left's failure. Yes, it sucks when the people don't see how horrible the right is. But centrists are some of the most open people to discussion- and some already lean left!!

You can't demonize moderates to such an extent that you close yourself off to them and then wonder why you're losing swing states.

Centrists aren't even always people with all the privileges- you will find plenty of people who are part of marginalized groups who are concerned about politicians on all sides.

You can be a smol radical leftist bean all you want who only talks to other smol socialist and communist beans, but you're never going to make the difference you want to in the world that way. It's the cold, hard truth. It doesn't mean you have to engage in discourse with everyone- some people have no real hope of changing and are emotionally draining- just more than your bubble.

I am tired of the left eating itself alive and deranged people like Trump winning.

[politijohn]

Left-wing populism is, and always was, the answer

[fanaticalthings]

Jason being the easiest kid is super funny. Bruce looking at Jason and remembering Dick at 18: “we can work through this. He’ll come around if I don’t give up on.”

Bruce, watching over a freshly street-snatched Jason: Why is he so calm

Having Dick as the rambunctious, feral, and unhinged first child must've given him SO much whiplash once Jason entered the picture. Lil guy just vibed in his own world. Just reading books and doing schoolwork. Baby Jason hurt nobody.

Bruce will just be going over the ground rules of the manor, remembering all the chaos Dick brought upon the household.

Bruce: No swinging from the chandelier.

Jason: ?? I wasn't planning to?

Bruce: No murder.

Jason: What? That never even crossed my mind-

Bruce: And please, for the love of God, don't sneak out and try to beat up the nearest criminal on our block

Jason:

Jason: WHO is responsible for these rules being created??

Bruce will just come home from a long day of work. He's tired and just wants a nice, quiet evening, but he's subconsciously psyching himself up to prepare himself for the chaos he'll witness once he enters the manor

but then Jason's just quietly doing his own thing, maybe even helping Alfred with some chores, reading, or just lounging about in the manor. In general, just causing no trouble and Bruce just turns to Alfred, all worried like, "Is he sick? I don't think children are supposed to behave this way."

[chimerafeathers]

i love that isafrin can be the most straightforwardly romancey, wholesome pairing on a surface level and then you go one (1) level deeper and run into siffrin’s seething guilt and convoluted feelings around touch and intimacy and the extent to which they want or don’t want those things in a specifically romantic way or if he was trying to seek connection and love in any way he could once he knew that Isabeau wanted those things from him in that context, and the combined power trip/self disgust at “manipulating” Isabeau’s desires without his knowledge to make themself feel wanted and in control. and then you keep going and there’s also Isabeau’s own warped self image (still, in spite of all his changes, fearing that he’s someone that would be shameful to know), his “emotionally stable pillar” role and self-taught therapy talk masking his deep fears of real confrontation (struggling loop after loop to confess, not wanting Odile to confront Siffrin about their weird behavior in the sus quest bathroom talk) and how Siffrin’s fear of vulnerability and Isabeau’s fear of Pushing Too Hard allow both of their issues to fester unspoken long after it’s clear that the problems exist.

all this to say. duality of isafrin. makes my heart full and warm and happy to see the sweet, fluffy, silly love and connection between them (mutually romantic or otherwise). and then also. the delicious, delicious complications. gnawing on them like a dog with a beloved bone

[notandvm]

so my book of bill copy arrived

[ndostairlyrium]

it's missing my beloved advisors hours

[billymarvel]

a magic user reading up on ancient texts talking about The Champion and their obligations and trials they go through, and thinking out loud 'wow, this guy is insane. if that were me, i woulda lost it long ago'.

cap standing not too far away bc theyre at jld hq and hes just downing a coffee that he never needed, thinking 'the only thing keeping me sane is that goddamn tiger and the game console waiting for me at the rock. and also the several people in my corner, but we wont talk about that'.

[countingstars-17]

the way he kept cracking his neck at the start of the press conference 🙂‍↔️

[transmascutena]

when loving you is actively putting someone in danger and you feel so deeply unloveable that you think it's all for nothing and that they're stupid and naive for even trying

[visro]

haikyuu fandom did i cook

[scarwasright]

Asking white people why we feel the urge to portray the Elrics as brown.

To nip this bad faith reading in the bud: No, I'm not speaking against the re-imagining of protagonists as people of color because a fan might want to see themselves in a work of art where they are underrepresented.

I'm speaking to the very specific recent (last ~5-10 years or so) fandom trend of giving Ed and Al darker skin and changing absolutely nothing about the context under which they move through their fictional world.

Any person with even some faint trace of a critical pulse can smell the stink on FMA's, particularly the manga's and PARTICULARLY BH's, racial politics. The protagonists are descended from a mythologized dead race of pale blond people from the desert, and Edward is also posited as the ultimate moral compass on which the series' thematic logic turns. The latter is archetypal of a Shounen. From jump, if we're delivering A Lesson, Edward is always right. The series generally doesn't think there's anything wrong with the militaristic status quo (so long as we rout the shadow cabal living under the capital (don't think about that too hard)), so Edward also thinks there is nothing wrong with it. This causes him, from time to time, to butt heads with survivors of a genocide perpetrated by the army that he works for. Because FMAB wants to have its cake and eat it, too: It postures as being about Serious Things, like industrialized imperialism, but it also abjectly refuses to shed its Shounen trappings, lest it come to the not-so-feel-good conclusion that it was the militaristic status quo that enabled horrific violence in the first place. The protagonist is a willful member of an elite class of soldiers who were deployed in recent living memory to wipe an indigenous population off the map, but he is ideologically opposed to using guns because they kill people. The protagonist must always win with friendship, might, and vague niceties about how all lives matter.

Making Ed brown does not alleviate this contradiction. It only highlights the insecurity of the white people in the room who can tell that something is Off, but aren't willing to engage with it in a meaningful way.

The knee-jerk reaction to make Xerxians darker isn't an unreasonable one. The canon as it is presented could have been lifted from one of many white supremacist pseudo-histories about mystical ancestral white people. The fact that FMA wasn't created by a white person does not negate this, especially when that person is of the majority within her own imperial nation. Hiromu Arakawa is not Ainu, and she has never claimed to be. The idea that she is comes from a game of fandom telephone based on an interview where she mentions that she has relatives who are. This erroneous extrapolation fits within the same bubble of white comfort as redesigning Ed to be brown: If Arakawa is indigenous, she has implicit authority on the subject of indigeneity within her fiction. If Edward is brown, then all the Ick that self-proclaimed progressive people get when he is talking down at Scar or Miles goes away.

But both of these sentiments are self-comforting fallacies.

Making Edward brown within the fiction of Fullmetal Alchemist while changing nothing about his worldview and experiences does nothing but provide a notion of legitimacy and authority to his moral stances that clash with other brown characters who have less favorable views on the military status quo. He is still a willing servicemember in an army that only a decade ago wiped an entire ethnic region off the map.

Brown Edward is just another entry in fandom's long legacy of "brown paper doll" characters-- Characters who are visibly people of color, but who have no cultural or ideological grounding that might reasonably stem from their racialization within the fiction. Characters who are palatable to white people because they do not force us into discomfort, whose suffering is Noble because it does not move them to hatred or violence against the systems and people who oppress them. Characters who very often have skin that's been eyedropped a shade darker, but who lack any other features deemed unfavorable by white supremacy.

I don't engage much with fandom critique these days, because after so much time here, I have come to the conclusion that the vast majority of people would rather dig their heels in and continue to pretend that an anime they like is something that is simply is not. That a cartoon "likes women" (whatever the fuck that means) simply because it has more women in it than others of a similar genre. That it is "anti-imperialist" because the imperialists who have more power when the curtain closes than they did when it opened Feel Bad about the genocide they did. This post is already written from the assumption that the reader is aware of the reactionary undercurrents of FMAB's themes and political messaging, which means it's already going to miss a lot of people who are, frankly, ignorant, be it because they lack the critical framework to deconstruct a story's contradictory or problematic elements, or because they simply don't want to or don't care. I know I'm not reaching them. I haven't even gotten into how glaring it is that the vast majority of fandom would rather put a coat of paint on Good Golden Edward than meaningfully engage with the characters of color who already exist in the show and whose identities are not so toothlessly convenient for a white audience's comfort.

My hope is only to encourage that, rather than shoving the discomfort out of sight and mind with a performance of progressivism, we face it down in our art. Edward Elric is a racist dickhead. How can we meaningfully explore that? How does he become a better citizen of the world? And by extension: How do we? Certainly not by reframing our thematic mouthpieces in the facsimile of a marginalized identity to lend legitimacy to everything they say in support of the oppressive status quo.

[personthattoleratesme]

The way they both absolutely did not like the other’s fake spouse. Like they’re not real kings they’re not gonna steal your man 😭

[dangoulains-devotion]

to catch a falling star

[thechibilitwick]

creachures

[beautifulstorms]

Ikura Kushida, SP Sway / Mucho Mambo • JGP Riga 2024