Fullmetal Alchemist // Hiromu Arakawa

I love how Arakawa clearly wrote detailed backstories for her characters and just like… never elaborates on them. I found an old interview where she was asked why she didn’t include a resolution for Hawkeye and Mustangs goals and her response was essentially “cause this story is about Ed :)”

She’s my biggest inspiration.

hiromu arakawa is a genius because she made a huge muscular angsty warrior priest with an intensely tragic past who uses alchemy to murder war criminals in revenge who's so badass he doesn't have a canon NAME and is just called SCAR and she looked at him and said "you know what he needs? fatherhood" and decided to make his canonical best friend a four foot tall princess who wears pink and braids her hair and has a baby panda and thinks her life is a YA paranormal drama series

Hiromu Arakawa’s genius is obvious throughout all of FMA but her first and biggest leap of genius was in how she crafted her protagonist. 

Arakawa realized the burgeoning youth of the early 2000s wasnt interested in another plucky spry optimistic young shonen protag. Instead she gave us a short ugly egotistical asshole smarter-than-you atheist with so much money and power that people could no longer best him in arguments by telling him “dude shut up ur literally like 12″ 

Five pages in we’re told Edward’s famous and rich and powerful. Five more pages and he’s calling some girl stupid for thinking God exists. Five more pages and he’s proven right. Five more and he’s kicked an evil priest’s teeth in. And no one can tell his mom on him.

Hiromu Arakawa figured out the dream of every edgy young weeb discovering internet arguments for the first time and she cast them an idol made of gold.

It’s like the original protagonist got turned into a suit of armor, so his asshole sidekick had to fill in as the face.

Wait holy fuck

there’s an agenda at play

from her autobio comics:

#on a darker level #being from Hokkaido means she has reason to be personally invested in the Ishbal annihilation #because Hokkaido is stolen land #like a lot of other places colonized in the last few hundred years #if you’re sensitive to this kind of thing #it gives you a personal stake #in genocide stories #that most Japanese people don’t have #>> #idk i felt the way she handles the genocide #speaks to having been aware of that #from a formative age (via whetstonefire)

Those tags are 100% right and Arakawa has confirmed that it was intentional in an interview as she has family that are part Ainu.

So her family history definitely had a role in how she presented the genocide in FMA.

Hiromu Arakawa’s genius is obvious throughout all of FMA but her first and biggest leap of genius was in how she crafted her protagonist. 

Arakawa realized the burgeoning youth of the early 2000s wasnt interested in another plucky spry optimistic young shonen protag. Instead she gave us a short ugly egotistical asshole smarter-than-you atheist with so much money and power that people could no longer best him in arguments by telling him “dude shut up ur literally like 12″ 

Five pages in we’re told Edward’s famous and rich and powerful. Five more pages and he’s calling some girl stupid for thinking God exists. Five more pages and he’s proven right. Five more and he’s kicked an evil priest’s teeth in. And no one can tell his mom on him.

Hiromu Arakawa figured out the dream of every edgy young weeb discovering internet arguments for the first time and she cast them an idol made of gold.

It’s like the original protagonist got turned into a suit of armor, so his asshole sidekick had to fill in as the face.

Wait holy fuck

newton’s second law of motion: f=ma

newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction…equivalent exchange

Sleepy Elric boys