A female character who is a cold, relentless leader, always pragmatic, and able to make whatever hard decisions need to be made in order to ensure success and survival, tremendously skilled and devastatingly efficient at her job, tragically terrible at being overtly nice to people, who is also not evil and is still fundamentally a good person.
The Moral of This Post is: No matter how genius your idea is, Hiromu Arakawa probably already did it, and she did it better than you could ever hope to.
2 AM mood: fullmetal alchemist continues to be the best executed series I’ve ever had the pleasure to read in my life and I thank arakawa everyday for delivering it to me thank u cow mom
27 books and the plot is still understandable, well-rounded character arcs, consistent characterization and style, no loose ends despite an incredibly detailed multifaceted narrative???? The most well-paced, filmic action sequences I’ve ever read?????? When has another manga E V E R
Their boobs move. Like…realistically move. As in, the way actual breasts would motion if a woman made that movement without an over the top exaggeration and the camera is framed in a way so that it’s clearly not supposed to be sexual the way most anime would stage it. The scenes in question are meant to be taken seriously so the animators and direction is take things seriously. Either it’s just a character walking down a hall or clapping her hands.
If this were any other action/adventure anime, the camera angle would’ve been something like this for Winry’s introduction:
This is weird, but what I find so sexy about Riza is, well… How she isn’t sexualized. Like, she isn’t a pure sex object in nonstop sexy outfits. She’s a beautiful military woman, and she dresses appropriately for the role. Along with that she’s NEVER used as the ‘sexy distraction’ trope that women often are used for. She has a good role, she’s a fighter, but also has a kind heart for her friends.
That and more are reasons Riza is my favorite female anime character, and FMAB is my favorite anime.
Well said my friend.
I think there was only one instance of jiggle physics and that was with lust but that was when they were trying to make a joke about havoc having a thing for boobs and the joke was more about havoc than lust having big breasts.
“You fell into my booby trap” (proceeds to paralyze Havoc afterwards)
What I also love is that their boobs are in equal proportion to every other body part. Like, yeah, a character might have bigger boobs, but she also had a big waist/hips/legs/etc to go with it, so the largeness doesn’t feel fake. Plus, they never draw attention to the sexual stuff, and the only exception was the joke with Havoc. And it was posed in a way that made it feel like less of a raunchy boob joke and more of a joke on Havoc and how his attraction to boobs is what led him to be deceived, which doesn’t leave female viewers uncomfortable, or feeling like their body is constantly the butt of a joke, like some other animes do
That’s a good point that I didn’t realize. All of characters in the show have equally proportioned bodies.
Ed’s muscles get larger as he gets older but never reaches John Cena level of jacked since he’s still under 6 feet tall. He’s always presented as ripped and not ‘bulky’ like Sig or Alex.
Riza is about the same height as adult Ed, but they have different body styles thus the word for her would be toned. She’s still lean but her muscles and body shape are the same aren’t ‘compact’.
Fmab follows the basic body designs for males and female characters and doesn’t exaggerate a specific feature to the point where it’s comedic. It makes it’s bed, and lies in it.
Every time I see a girl in just about any other action/adventure (shonen) anime I just think:
“is your back okay? You need a doctor? Hey Thomas! Call Lucy a chiropractor!”
or better yet:
“Good Lord! Get this man a sandwich!”
The only real exception to the whole body proportion thing is ALEX LOUIS ARMSTRONG
But his ridiculously bulky muscles are used largely as a comedic element, in which the overly toned nature of his body is commented on as the “freak of nature” kind of idea and definitely not presented as if that’s some kind of expectation for anyone else in the show.
#fma#whispers: its bc a woman made it
don’t fucking whisper it scream it from the rooftops: IT’S BC A WOMAN MADE IT.
i really cant get over how in episode two of fmab they like straight up just show us that ed basically met the closest being-like thing to god and then. then in literally the next episode hes like. yeah. yeah im an atheist
truth to ed in fmab ep2: i am what you call the world, or perhaps the universe, or perhaps god, or perhaps truth, or perhaps all, or perhaps one, and i am also you.
ed in fmab ep3:
Ed decided that God was a lil bitch and he just wasn’t going to endorse that.