“What? Like, a disabled protagonist? How would that even work? How could someone with a disability be the hero in an action show?” local anime trash boy wonders while sitting next to his box sets of Full Metal Alchemist, showing no hint of irony or self awareness.
but is Ed really disabled? sure I get he lost his arm and leg
but he’s still able to move and do things perfectly
He has prosthetics. Having prosthetic limbs (that more than once break amd need repair) doesnt make him not disabled
It should also be noted that Ed:
-had to undergo very painful surgery to get automail
-had to relearn how to write because of his prosthesis (there’s a post going around showing he had to switch hands etc) and his handwriting is likely a lot worse due to that. This means automail isn’t super good for delicate work, unsurprising, considering what it’s made of.
-experiences phantom limb pain and therefore other associated stuff (this was only really shown in the manga)
-cannot go anywhere too cold without changing his automail or he’ll get really bad frost bite and it will stop working
-cannot go anywhere too hot, period, because the metal attached and under his skin will overheat and he will be badly burned
-Reattachment is painful, but needs to be done frequently if he breaks or outgrows his automail
– it’s HEAVY so much so that the strain has the potential to cause stress on his body, enough that it’s even theorized as possibly stunting his growth.
-it requires regular maintenance or it will break down, as shown when he forgets to do that and it…breaks down
-when it does need to be repaired, it takes time to do that, during which Ed uses regular prosthetics (that usually don’t quite fit him).
-costs a lot of money (not a problem for Ed due to high state alchemist salary/having mechanics as surrogate family, but explicitly noted to being the reason why most people in the fmaverse stick to regular prosthetics along with the painful surgery)
So Ed can’t actually do everything perfectly and experiences a lot of extra hassle, problems and pain people without automail don’t have to deal with! And any advantages he does have are more suited to fighting than day to day life (being able to incorporate weapons/fake out people who want to blow up his arm).
Arakawa did her research and thought it through. Automail is by no means a magic cure that solves all problems associated with losing a limb.
My BiL is a neurologist who has done a lot of sleep research and one of his favorite areas of study is circadian rhythms. He says that being a night owl is real, it is predicated on the genetic structure of the brain, it is not just “laziness,” and it is not a disorder. He hypothesizes that its original evolutionary purpose was basically to produce night watchmen—people who can stay awake and alert at night to protect the domicile while the early birds sleep.
So we’re not lazy, night owls; we’re the fucking late shift lookouts. Gonna grab my torch and patrol the perimeter if anyone would like to join me.
It’s called the foot-in-the-door method. First, you propose something that is slightly outside of allowable norms: denying gay people wedding cakes on grounds of “religious freedom”. Then, you slowly ramp up how extreme your demands are, coercing the other side to giving a tiny bit of ground each time, until you’ve shifted the entire fucking playing field. Conservatives are also very fond of the door-to-face method, which is demanding something completely outlandish that you know will be refused, and then asking for something less ridiculous by way of compromise, again resulting in a gradual shift in norms until views that were once considered moderate or reasonable become unthinkably liberal by destroying people’s sense of standards. The combination of these methods is called the “foot-in-the-face” method, which sums up where this whole thing is headed quite nicely.
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