- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Oh. I think you'll be disappointed by the response you'd be getting if this isn't a turnaround but the start of one.
Top Level Canon Reviews - relaunched!
- Thread starter Leila Hann
- Start date
- Review
- Location
- Patriarchova
That's what everyone said about episode 4 lol.
khan2012
Very Tired.
- Location
- North Carolina
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They/Them
And I'm pretty sure people meant the end-credits scene from the episode when they talk about that because it directly plays into the next episode. That end credits scene is literally the only thing from the first four episodes that really stuck in my memory. Not trying to claim this an objective truth or anything, this is just what I remember when I watched the show a while back.
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CV12Hornet
Riter.
- Location
- Tacoma, Washington
Y'all are remarkably desperate to get Leila to like this, and I say that as an avid Symphogear fan.
khan2012
Very Tired.
- Location
- North Carolina
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They/Them
Yeah, now that I think about it you're right. I have a tendency to get like this and pester people about shows I like and try to get the last word on everything, even when it's really not worth it to drag out a discussion and honestly rude. I apologize @Leila Hann .
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
But what about the double-magical sixth episode?
khan2012
Very Tired.
- Location
- North Carolina
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They/Them
This keeps becoming more true the longer I think about it, and I think I hit upon an idea that might explain some things. People (myself included) equate enjoying a show with it being good, and in the process somehow end up absorbing "liking the show/it being good" into our perceptions of ourselves. "I'm a member of X Fandom" becomes part of an identity, and this really shouldn't be the case and is in large part based on the false assumption that a show must be objectively good because I like it, that liking it means that we are smart enough to discern a shows' objective quality and that our personal preferences are backed up by objective evidence. It's possible to enjoy a piece of media that is not that good from an intellectual/objective perspective, as liking a show is largely subjective. I think that I need to remember that more.People say this shit with every. Single. Show. That Leila watches. It's never been true before. I can't really blame her for deciding to use her sense of basic pattern recognition.
Either that or I should just accept I have shit taste.
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- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
The true shit taste was the friends we made along the way.Either that or I should just accept I have shit taste.
Entropy Judge
Recurring Bouts of Misanthropy
I don't know, I'm starting to think that Pattern Recognition, like Common Sense, is so rare it's a goddamn superpower.I can't really blame her for deciding to use her sense of basic pattern recognition.
- Location
- West Michigan
It's more of a quadratic. The concert scene in 1, taken alone, is good, but the rest of 1 and 2 are bad and 3 is the absolute nadir. 4 lays the groundwork for the recovery but isn't that much better than 3, and 5-8 are an accelerating curve that finally produced the series that fans remember. The fandom largely ignores the bottom of the curve, only keeping the broad strokes and bare minimum of details that were introduced then and remained important later.
I mentioned The Shield earlier because that grabs the viewer's attention from the start and keeps it for all but a few of its (almost) 90 episodes.
- Location
- Inside my own head
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I mean, I know I just mentioned how I almost dropped it, but I personally would still defend Symphogear S1 as good. Not even because I disagree with most Leila has said, but just because I think the show also has strong points and because a lot of what she says is/was a lot less important for me.
Though I do also have some personal reasons that influence my view of all seasons extremely heavily.
Though I do also have some personal reasons that influence my view of all seasons extremely heavily.
But what about the double-magical sixth episode?
I would honestly say that the optimal way to experience Symphogear involves skipping forward to the third season.
But only until the opening action set-piece finishes. Then you can genuinely just close the window and never look back. (At least until you get the urge to rewatch those super rad five minutes.)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Eh, I think it depends on how you weigh good v bad moments, and someone who devotes this much thought to each episode won't be able to lessen the weight of the bad bits.
Case in point, I loved the early bits of FMA:B, and among other things thought there wasn't much Winry in them looking back. It's only reading this thread that I realize I thought that only because I brainscrubbed rush valley and the more tsundere bits of her other appearances.
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- Location
- Canada
The key takeaway is to never commission things you actually like, that way you don't have to worry about seeing stuff you like be panned
What if I know that I have superior taste to the plebeian masses, and the things I like will never be panned?
- Location
- Plato's Cave
What if I know that I have superior taste to the plebeian masses, and the things I like will never be panned?
You're a liar, that's what.
Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
Honestly. I don't think the three episode rule is a perfect rule of thumb, or anything, but when you get down to it, if an anime has lost the plot for the first three episodes or more, that's a bad sign.
I've got no context for what Symphogear is like, so IDK whether it actually gets better or not, but you'd think if you wanted to make someone a fan of a show you know has a weak start, you'd start them somewhere later that works as a better start instead?
I've got no context for what Symphogear is like, so IDK whether it actually gets better or not, but you'd think if you wanted to make someone a fan of a show you know has a weak start, you'd start them somewhere later that works as a better start instead?
The Hard Truth (FMAS1E12 analysis)
- Location
- Patriarchova
EDIT: I've been advised to include a content warning to this post for depressing philosophical horror. So, if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, be warned going in.
...
"The flow of this world follows laws so great, we can't even imagine them."
-Edward Elric
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but unable? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
-Epicurus
Years ago, while working as a tourguide at an Alaska Native history museum, I read a book of legends and fairy tales from the nearby tribes. One of the stories stuck with me in particular because of the immediate, visceral reaction I had to it:
I think you all can understand the punch that story had for me. Some of you might have felt it as well, though I didn't write it as well as the compiler of that book. But either way, here's another story now, written by myself slightly after I read the above:
So similar, and yet absolutely nothing alike.
The main intended lesson of the original fable is pretty obvious. There are probably other messages in it too that no one who hasn't lived the traditional Tlingit lifestyle would be able to catch, but that's beside the point. At the time that I wrote the shorter and happier version, I was 18 years old and at least as dumb as Edward was being in the stargazing scene in "One Is All, All Is One." My intended message in it was "do not anthropomorphize nature, because then animals are people, and if animals are people then that means that people are animals."
I was really proud of myself for that one, at the time.
In his lesser known book Homo Deus, historian and sociologist Dr. Noah Harari put forth the idea that scientific progress in the fields of genetics, neurobiology, and information technology would lead to the death of humanism. So many of our values, even what we consider our most fundamental moral axioms, are predicated on the belief that human lives are valuable in a way that no other things are. The problem is that the more we learn about what we actually are and how the universe around us works, the more it seems that concepts like "human" and "life" are built on sand. There isn't a sharp distinction between species, in the way the Victorian-era naturalists who put together the category of kingdoms, phylae, orders, etc thought, but merely a sliding scale of gene commonality. Many of the animals that we give no moral weight to whatsoever have most of the same emotional spectrum that we do, are aware of their own existence, and are capable of learning and changing from experience. Neurobiology has failed to locate any "sentience lobe" that makes you a person rather than an animal. And, with the advancement of information technology, the very hows and whys of thought are being demystified one step at a time.
We already sort of knew this. We have so much doublethink built up around it that there's no way we couldn't, deep down inside, have already known it. The way people feel genuine concern and care for the emotional well being of their pets, but eat meat from not-too-distantly-related species without a thought.
Not that vegetarianism would be an actual escape from this moral paradox either. Growing vegetables kills animals too. Not as many, but still enough to make the people doing it mass murderers. And I'm not even counting insects and the like; I'm just talking about the birds and mammals that we know are capable of thinking, feeling, and experiencing. But I digress.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood has been playing with these ideas, albeit indirectly and only in the vaguest terms, ever since "An Alchemist's Anguish." Shao Tucker was the only example we'd been shown at that point of someone doing alchemical research rather than just using known principles for law enforcement or engineering or the like. A dozen episodes later, we've now had even more sinister hints about the character of the only other "researcher" we know about (Hohenheim Elric, if that's his real name), and the most important lesson that Izumi needed the brothers to learn in order to actually understand and advance the field of alchemy rather than just copying preexisting spells involved (among other things) the importance of killing and the futility of empathy. As Edward said, the ants, the foxes, and the rabbit were no different from himself and Alphonse. He was even able to maintain some ironic affection for those fox brothers that were so like the two boys, even while acknowledging that they would happily eat him if they could and implying that he'd do the same to them without blinking if need be.
With where that philosophical path seems like it should lead, though, we come to something of a contradiction in Edward's character. Despite having learned and internalized these nihilistic lessons, and despite not being the most ethical person in general even besides that, Edward is extremely averse to killing other humans. Even ones who he knows deserve it. At first, I assumed that this was just generic hero-coding for the benefit of the typical shonen audience. At this point though, I really don't think that that's it. Or at least, it isn't just that. Edward learned another lesson in the time between his experience on that island and becoming a State Alchemist. There's the truth that Izumi taught him, and the truth behind the truth that she foolishly kept to herself.
Why The Taboo?
Edward almost realized his mistake ahead of time when he mused that the rules of the universe are bigger than he could understand. Unfortunately for he and his brother, the thought passed him by a moment later, and he went on about how we are all interchangeable matter that can be understood and manipulated. Within the world of Fullmetal Alchemist, people aren't just the sum of their physical components. If they were, he and Alphonse might have actually succeeded in recreating some fascimile of their mother, and entities like Alphonse, Slicer, and Chopper would not be able to exist. We know, from Izumi's example, that others have met the entity that calls itself God. And I'm pretty sure that previous meetings, in the distant past, are the reason why the taboo against human transmutation came into being.
People being made of carbon, water, and trace elements isn't bigger than humans can understand. There are equivalent exchanges being made beyond the limits of any alchemist's perception or comprehension. Things have some sort of value to them that can't be divined from just their material characteristics. And, apparently, a human life is worth more than the two boys had to give.
That, I think, is why Edward won't kill humans. He knows that their lives are incredibly valuable in some cosmic sense that he cannot understand, but has been made to respect and fear. Destroying one must have some kind of great equivalent exchange effect, and he doesn't know what. And he sure as hell doesn't want to come near the unknowable part of alchemy (or life; as he said on the island, the two work on the same cosmic principles) again.
This is also where Izumi's failings, both as a teacher and as a thinker. show themselves. We know that she has a strong sense of right and wrong (well, the manga version of her does at least
), has enough moral objections to the ruling regime for her to be absolutely furious at Edward and Alphonse for serving it, etc. We also know that she knows both the truth, and the truth behind the truth. And yet, by guiding the boys see only the outermost layer of the onion, she basically put them on a path to either really acute cognitive dissonance, or total nihilism. She also all but guaranteed that they'd repeat the worst mistake of her own life. She taught them alchemy. She (probably inadvertently) taught them a certain contempt for the powers that be and the rules it enforces, on top of Edward's preexisting rebellious streak. And, she taught them just enough about equivalent exchange for them to mistakenly think that a human was only worth the sum of its chemical components.
Really, if you were going by the logic of their island survival lesson alone, why WOULDN'T you try to create a human if you felt like it?
Izumi wasn't good at thinking things through beyond the immediate future. Perhaps that itself is a symptom of thinking too much about equivalent exchange as a way of life. Not all consequences are immediate actions-and-reactions, and alchemists might, as a group, be bad at remembering that. That brings me back to the philosophy of alchemy, and what it's likely to do to one's sense of...well, your sense of everything really. For those alchemists who know the truth, and for those who know the truth behind the truth.
The Nature Of "Value"
As I've alluded to above, following the "everything is just spare parts for everything else" philosophy earnestly just leads to nihilism, and to people like Shou Tucker and (if my suspicions at this point are right) the Father. But knowing that humans actually do have a value beyond that, and that that value is not only impossible for us to understand, but also nonetheless distinct and negotiable, is almost kind of worse. It's the difference between an uncaring universe, and a universe that cares about us just enough to deliberately mess with us. It's not any less brutal than the materialist dog-eat-dog version. It's still just as brutal in exactly the same way, but the consequences of each dog eating each other dog are less predictable, and not all of the eating is visible to us.
I don't know what to think about the value of human life, in the real world around us that increasingly seems to have been a (really banal) cosmic horror setting all along. I guess if there's a message to be gotten from Edward's story, it's that we shouldn't assume we understand everything just because we've made a few discoveries. So, maybe there actually is a "moral" way to live. Maybe there actually is some internally consistent philosophical different between eating food that animals were killed to make and murdering a human, even in the face of what we're learning about consciousness and the ever blurrier line that separates us from "lesser" creatures. Or, maybe humans just aren't evolutionarily meant to have internally consistent philosophies. Just navigating in modern society requires enough doublethink just to get around what that society does to other humans, let alone our prey species and agricultural pests. Maybe stabbing a random person to death in person because you felt like it doesn't actually make you any morally worse than anyone else.
Well, doing things like that seems more wrong that not doing them. And, since we don't know everything, it's best to err on the side of safety. Or maybe that's just one of the lies I tell myself in order to stay sane. But, whatever the truth may be, I'd still take our world over the one that the Elric brothers inhabit. Equivalent exchange plus greater-than-material values for some things just adds "sacrificing truckloads of prisoners to make alchemy booster-shots" and suchlike to the system.
A world in which humans have a great, metaphysical value. And yet, they are exposed to the same conditions - both environmental and psychological - as humans in real life. So much worth, destroyed so constantly, so trivially, so carelessly, and with no recourse.
That, I think, is another message that can be gleaned from this story. Imagining that there's a higher purpose to the world around us is not a comforting thing to do if you apply your critical thought. Even if the universe just appears to be hostile to any way of life besides utter nihilism and actually isn't, the thought that someone or something would even make it look that way to us is unpleasant, to say the least. And, going by the pantheistic route, an entity that embodies or encompasses the workings of our universe would be...well, something heedless and inattentive like Lovecraft's outer gods would be the most optimistic take. Do not look to a higher power for justice or purpose. You'll only find baby seals being murdered by pedophile-coded mink.
This is also why I don't believe most religious people when they say that they earnestly believe in God the same way that they earnestly believe that the sun will rise tomorrow or that water is wet. If you actually thought someone was responsible for this, you wouldn't be praising and adoring them. You'd be trying to figure out what we can do about the motherfucker.
...
"The flow of this world follows laws so great, we can't even imagine them."
-Edward Elric
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but unable? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
-Epicurus
Years ago, while working as a tourguide at an Alaska Native history museum, I read a book of legends and fairy tales from the nearby tribes. One of the stories stuck with me in particular because of the immediate, visceral reaction I had to it:
I think you all can understand the punch that story had for me. Some of you might have felt it as well, though I didn't write it as well as the compiler of that book. But either way, here's another story now, written by myself slightly after I read the above:
So similar, and yet absolutely nothing alike.
The main intended lesson of the original fable is pretty obvious. There are probably other messages in it too that no one who hasn't lived the traditional Tlingit lifestyle would be able to catch, but that's beside the point. At the time that I wrote the shorter and happier version, I was 18 years old and at least as dumb as Edward was being in the stargazing scene in "One Is All, All Is One." My intended message in it was "do not anthropomorphize nature, because then animals are people, and if animals are people then that means that people are animals."
I was really proud of myself for that one, at the time.
In his lesser known book Homo Deus, historian and sociologist Dr. Noah Harari put forth the idea that scientific progress in the fields of genetics, neurobiology, and information technology would lead to the death of humanism. So many of our values, even what we consider our most fundamental moral axioms, are predicated on the belief that human lives are valuable in a way that no other things are. The problem is that the more we learn about what we actually are and how the universe around us works, the more it seems that concepts like "human" and "life" are built on sand. There isn't a sharp distinction between species, in the way the Victorian-era naturalists who put together the category of kingdoms, phylae, orders, etc thought, but merely a sliding scale of gene commonality. Many of the animals that we give no moral weight to whatsoever have most of the same emotional spectrum that we do, are aware of their own existence, and are capable of learning and changing from experience. Neurobiology has failed to locate any "sentience lobe" that makes you a person rather than an animal. And, with the advancement of information technology, the very hows and whys of thought are being demystified one step at a time.
We already sort of knew this. We have so much doublethink built up around it that there's no way we couldn't, deep down inside, have already known it. The way people feel genuine concern and care for the emotional well being of their pets, but eat meat from not-too-distantly-related species without a thought.
Not that vegetarianism would be an actual escape from this moral paradox either. Growing vegetables kills animals too. Not as many, but still enough to make the people doing it mass murderers. And I'm not even counting insects and the like; I'm just talking about the birds and mammals that we know are capable of thinking, feeling, and experiencing. But I digress.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood has been playing with these ideas, albeit indirectly and only in the vaguest terms, ever since "An Alchemist's Anguish." Shao Tucker was the only example we'd been shown at that point of someone doing alchemical research rather than just using known principles for law enforcement or engineering or the like. A dozen episodes later, we've now had even more sinister hints about the character of the only other "researcher" we know about (Hohenheim Elric, if that's his real name), and the most important lesson that Izumi needed the brothers to learn in order to actually understand and advance the field of alchemy rather than just copying preexisting spells involved (among other things) the importance of killing and the futility of empathy. As Edward said, the ants, the foxes, and the rabbit were no different from himself and Alphonse. He was even able to maintain some ironic affection for those fox brothers that were so like the two boys, even while acknowledging that they would happily eat him if they could and implying that he'd do the same to them without blinking if need be.
With where that philosophical path seems like it should lead, though, we come to something of a contradiction in Edward's character. Despite having learned and internalized these nihilistic lessons, and despite not being the most ethical person in general even besides that, Edward is extremely averse to killing other humans. Even ones who he knows deserve it. At first, I assumed that this was just generic hero-coding for the benefit of the typical shonen audience. At this point though, I really don't think that that's it. Or at least, it isn't just that. Edward learned another lesson in the time between his experience on that island and becoming a State Alchemist. There's the truth that Izumi taught him, and the truth behind the truth that she foolishly kept to herself.
Why The Taboo?
Edward almost realized his mistake ahead of time when he mused that the rules of the universe are bigger than he could understand. Unfortunately for he and his brother, the thought passed him by a moment later, and he went on about how we are all interchangeable matter that can be understood and manipulated. Within the world of Fullmetal Alchemist, people aren't just the sum of their physical components. If they were, he and Alphonse might have actually succeeded in recreating some fascimile of their mother, and entities like Alphonse, Slicer, and Chopper would not be able to exist. We know, from Izumi's example, that others have met the entity that calls itself God. And I'm pretty sure that previous meetings, in the distant past, are the reason why the taboo against human transmutation came into being.
People being made of carbon, water, and trace elements isn't bigger than humans can understand. There are equivalent exchanges being made beyond the limits of any alchemist's perception or comprehension. Things have some sort of value to them that can't be divined from just their material characteristics. And, apparently, a human life is worth more than the two boys had to give.
That, I think, is why Edward won't kill humans. He knows that their lives are incredibly valuable in some cosmic sense that he cannot understand, but has been made to respect and fear. Destroying one must have some kind of great equivalent exchange effect, and he doesn't know what. And he sure as hell doesn't want to come near the unknowable part of alchemy (or life; as he said on the island, the two work on the same cosmic principles) again.
This is also where Izumi's failings, both as a teacher and as a thinker. show themselves. We know that she has a strong sense of right and wrong (well, the manga version of her does at least
), has enough moral objections to the ruling regime for her to be absolutely furious at Edward and Alphonse for serving it, etc. We also know that she knows both the truth, and the truth behind the truth. And yet, by guiding the boys see only the outermost layer of the onion, she basically put them on a path to either really acute cognitive dissonance, or total nihilism. She also all but guaranteed that they'd repeat the worst mistake of her own life. She taught them alchemy. She (probably inadvertently) taught them a certain contempt for the powers that be and the rules it enforces, on top of Edward's preexisting rebellious streak. And, she taught them just enough about equivalent exchange for them to mistakenly think that a human was only worth the sum of its chemical components.Really, if you were going by the logic of their island survival lesson alone, why WOULDN'T you try to create a human if you felt like it?
Izumi wasn't good at thinking things through beyond the immediate future. Perhaps that itself is a symptom of thinking too much about equivalent exchange as a way of life. Not all consequences are immediate actions-and-reactions, and alchemists might, as a group, be bad at remembering that. That brings me back to the philosophy of alchemy, and what it's likely to do to one's sense of...well, your sense of everything really. For those alchemists who know the truth, and for those who know the truth behind the truth.
The Nature Of "Value"
As I've alluded to above, following the "everything is just spare parts for everything else" philosophy earnestly just leads to nihilism, and to people like Shou Tucker and (if my suspicions at this point are right) the Father. But knowing that humans actually do have a value beyond that, and that that value is not only impossible for us to understand, but also nonetheless distinct and negotiable, is almost kind of worse. It's the difference between an uncaring universe, and a universe that cares about us just enough to deliberately mess with us. It's not any less brutal than the materialist dog-eat-dog version. It's still just as brutal in exactly the same way, but the consequences of each dog eating each other dog are less predictable, and not all of the eating is visible to us.
I don't know what to think about the value of human life, in the real world around us that increasingly seems to have been a (really banal) cosmic horror setting all along. I guess if there's a message to be gotten from Edward's story, it's that we shouldn't assume we understand everything just because we've made a few discoveries. So, maybe there actually is a "moral" way to live. Maybe there actually is some internally consistent philosophical different between eating food that animals were killed to make and murdering a human, even in the face of what we're learning about consciousness and the ever blurrier line that separates us from "lesser" creatures. Or, maybe humans just aren't evolutionarily meant to have internally consistent philosophies. Just navigating in modern society requires enough doublethink just to get around what that society does to other humans, let alone our prey species and agricultural pests. Maybe stabbing a random person to death in person because you felt like it doesn't actually make you any morally worse than anyone else.
Well, doing things like that seems more wrong that not doing them. And, since we don't know everything, it's best to err on the side of safety. Or maybe that's just one of the lies I tell myself in order to stay sane. But, whatever the truth may be, I'd still take our world over the one that the Elric brothers inhabit. Equivalent exchange plus greater-than-material values for some things just adds "sacrificing truckloads of prisoners to make alchemy booster-shots" and suchlike to the system.
A world in which humans have a great, metaphysical value. And yet, they are exposed to the same conditions - both environmental and psychological - as humans in real life. So much worth, destroyed so constantly, so trivially, so carelessly, and with no recourse.
That, I think, is another message that can be gleaned from this story. Imagining that there's a higher purpose to the world around us is not a comforting thing to do if you apply your critical thought. Even if the universe just appears to be hostile to any way of life besides utter nihilism and actually isn't, the thought that someone or something would even make it look that way to us is unpleasant, to say the least. And, going by the pantheistic route, an entity that embodies or encompasses the workings of our universe would be...well, something heedless and inattentive like Lovecraft's outer gods would be the most optimistic take. Do not look to a higher power for justice or purpose. You'll only find baby seals being murdered by pedophile-coded mink.
This is also why I don't believe most religious people when they say that they earnestly believe in God the same way that they earnestly believe that the sun will rise tomorrow or that water is wet. If you actually thought someone was responsible for this, you wouldn't be praising and adoring them. You'd be trying to figure out what we can do about the motherfucker.
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Great alchemist, but not a great teacher.
She taught them as she learned it...failing ti make the last connection that if they learned as she did they might do as she did.
Perhaps she was just optimistic that two young boys wouldn't even need to think about the possibility of human transmutation for years yet, nevermind desperate enough to try it without consulting her on the matter even obliquely
Huh, that brings to mind another obvious question though -- if human transmutation is taboo because humans are more than the sum of their parts, why isn't animal transmutation taboo as well? Okay obviously it's going to be a "No" because people don't care about animals as much but. The creation of living beings in general?
Is it only humans that have something ephemeral in them that prevents easy resurrection and easy creation and leads to loads of prisoner human sacrifices? If yes, then why? Why human life specifically? Has anybody tried to bring a dead pet back to life? If yes, what happened? Does it result in the same sort of failure as for a human resurrection? How many things have some sort of extra, some sort of cosmic value, and what does it mean for the world if they do?
How far does it go?
Why is there a taboo on human transmutation rather than a general taboo about Playing God or something?
Is it just a matter of culture, humans obviously caring about humans more, and a matter of power -- of humans being able to be sacrificed? So it's better to close the loophole on anyone who'd be willing to commit crimes against humanity and prevent anybody else from sacrificing truckloads of prisoners. Or is there something more special about humans rather than animals or matter? Of course if the answer is "because we don't want to give people ideas by specifically saying 'don't do this' banning resurrection and human sacrifice, so we just go with a neat Human Transmutation Is Taboo" that'd make sense. They wanted something punchy, something that instantly makes sense on a gut level, and that didn't give people too many ideas specifically, and 4 words is memorable.
But if it's only humans that are special in this way, then... why? And what does it mean? Or does it not mean anything at all.
I guess that's just the only universal truth or lesson here, I guess.
Hmm...
I wonder if anyone's ever tried to get an animal to perform alchemy. A bear or a crow or an ape or a dog or something.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Implicit in the fact that WOGDAT only shows up for human transmutation (so far only for trying to create a human ex nihlo or attempted resurection) is that in the world of FMA humans are special and animals are not people. That's what I think Leila was saying, in our world we know that humans are animals and animals are people but in FMA we now know that only humans are people and that WOGDAT made and/or governs us and our place in the universe. Since evil also exists in FMA the conclusion is that God exists and that he is an arsehole.
Macros
omnisciently vague councilman
- Location
- Dirac Sea
To be fair, we don't actually know that. Or more precisely, it's unclear if:
1) Wogdat shows up for EVERY kind of human transmutation - and I'd argue it probably doesn't. After all, there's no indication it showed up for Tucker's experiments, and those were clearly at least partially human transmutation
2) Wogdat wouldn't show up if you, say, tried to resurrect your cat
But if that were the case, wouldn't that mean that resurrecting dead pets is easier than dead humans? There'd be no reason -- or special barrier -- to not bring dead pets back to life, right?
Hmmm... changing the topic a little bit, there's probably some difference between Medicinal/Biological Alchemy and full-blown this-is-taboo Human Transmutation, right? It just makes sense that some amount of medicine and biology would be possible and allowable and non-taboo. I mean, surely Truth isn't going to show up every time somebody uses alchemy to splint somebody's bone or seal up a cut, right?
It seems reasonable to assume that medicine and biology are topics that don't breach "the line" whatever that line is. But where exactly is the line? Is it just when you get to outright resurrection or something? Where does resuscitation fall under, though?