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Much has been written about shoujo's relation to gender and with good reason. After all, it is the one umbrella genre (along with josei) that deals the most overtly with gender matters as such. But shounen has plenty to say as well, a lot of it being considerably awful- which is not the case here.
One of the reasons why shounen's interaction with gender is so interesting is that it pertains not just to the content proper but, on a meta level, to the creators. Shounen mangaka are still overwhelmingly men (and the protagonists, boy) but there are quite a few very well accomplished women mangaka whose work has been nothing short of revolutionary.
FMA is one such manga. I first encountered the franchise in the anime series and the remake at a time when I was quite ignorant about wider issues so my reading the manga, in the original, allows me to have a very different perspective. All that I loved about FMA, the very coherent worldbuilding, well accomplished characters and dynamic storytelling sustained via inner logic, is still there but I can see connections now that I would never have seen then. Let us hope that this series of reviews reflects this.
Volume 5 brings into play some interesting issues relating to gender that set the stage for later developments, so I will spoiling tagging rather liberally.
We are introduced to Rush Valley, the capital of automail. It is the perfect environment for Winry to shine and shine she does. Her passion for designing mechanical prosthetics and perfecting her skill gets plenty of attention. Winry does not simply want to help the brothers, although that is very much her role, but she follows her own path, including her own apprenticeship.
Spoiler for this volume, feel free to toggle if you have read it:
FMA is not the first shounen manga to portray birth but the way in which it is handled is quite refreshing. The brothers, Winry and a character they just met, a girl thief who stole Elric's watch but ended up being befriended by the heroes, find themselves stranded with a pregnant couple and the automail master that Winry wants to train under. What follows may be predictable but Arakawa's touch elevates the situation. The woman goes into labor and the brothers' alchemy cannot fix the destroyed bridge so the automail master has to take the long road through the mountains to bring the doctor. This leaves Winry in charge.
Interestingly enough, not because she is female. There tends to be a prevailing idea in fiction that women and even girls are somehow privy to how to help others give birth. In this case, though, what makes Winry the most qualified to do so has little to do with her being a girl and all with her experience as the child of doctors. Edward explains that growing up she was immersed in medicine and actually read plenty of medical books, including on childbirth. This is an anime trope, very young characters gain an absurd amount of knowledge by reading very adult books that in reality they would not have been able to at all understand. FMA does with the brothers in a much more detailed manner. In Winry's case, it is somewhat believable as she is not presented as an expert. She is not a doctor, not even a midwife, and as Edward says, she has not been reading on medicine for quite a while. Winry herself is very obviously terrified but knows that she is the person most likely to be helpful in this situation.
The brothers have to come terms with another kind of helplessness. Childhood tends to be a period of frustration for the shounen hero- more on that in the next volume- and while by narrative standards both of the Elric siblings have graduated from this early period, this kind of frustration they encounter here differs from the usual. The volume brings it home on a more visceral way by presenting these two forms of frustration side by side: on one hand, Edward's realization that his skill is simply not enough to repair or rebuild the bridge, is the typical mode in which frustration descends upon the shounen hero whose quest for power becomes nothing short of existential; then we have the brothers' fear and cluelessness as how to proceed as the woman goes into labor and all they can do is sit and wait, in anguish. They actually discuss this and bewail their uselessness. No amount of hard work is likely to bridge this particular helplessness, it is a different category altogether.
The female thief's role is also interesting. Winry gets her to assist- and here one does wonder if Panina's being female was not the deciding factor- and she collapses after the baby is safety delivered. She is horrified at all the blood, too. Panina gets a redemption arc, too, and is right there with Rose in the gallery of supporting characters who get more development than a lot of main characters in other titles. She lost her legs as a child and was a beggar on the streets until the automail master fixed her with prosthetics, she took to stealing in order to pay him back. The scene in which she finally stands up on her new legs is really well done, it is a whole story onto its own.
The tone throughout this entire birthing episode is one of psychological veracity. Winry helps deliver baby but as soon as all is over, she cannot get up and needs Edward's help. This is a common reaction following an intensely stressful situation, as soon as the adrenaline drops, the knees buckle. Another detail that bring this closer to reality is how the doctor, when he finally arrives, is impressed by Winry's postpartum treatment. A lot of fiction forgets that a baby being safely delivered does not mean things cannot go very badly for the mother. It may be a detail but it is very telling of how thoughtful the mangaka is.
Spoilers for following volumes:
The baby's birth serves as a moment for the characters to reflect on life and its transitory nature. This will gain a greater importance when we found out just why Izumi, the boys' alchemy teacher whom they will meet at the end of this volume, has no children. She tried to bring back her dead baby with alchemy and it went horribly wrong, as it always does, costing her her womb. Her tragedy is a rare case of a woman's plight rendered very well in shounen. It happens but hardly ever with this kind of poignancy. The theme of life and death being deeply interconnected is at the heart of FMA and yet we cannot help but feel deeply for those who cannot conform themselves to this. Accepting it, fully, is what the brothers should do as Izumi herself will have them learn, the hard way, but the painful road to get there is not underestimated as such. The little girl who wants Izumi to bring "fix" her recently deceased kitty, is respected as someone whose grief is real. Izumi understands this more than anyone else: she explains to her that the kitty cannot be brought back, that all creatures are born, live, and eventually die and are absorbed by the cycle of nature but she gives the kitty a grave. Izumi goes a step further and tells her that this happens to all life, including Izumi and the little girl herself.
Izumi's wisdom was gained the hardest way possible. The manga does not go into this, yet, but by setting an episode in which we see a baby being brought into the world and a happy mother, all that Izumi lost is brought home in a most powerful manner.
The volume ends with the almost mandatory flashback episode, in which the shounen hero's childhood frustrations- as mentioned before, it is their plight to go through a childhood in which they are routinely reminded of their powerlessness- are put to the test via a period of intensive training/testing. Before that, though, we get to see the toll that the loss of their mother took the brothers. Here, too, there is a thoughtful depiction of not just grief but love.
Anyone who has even a passing contact with shounen knows that parents are there to die and provide the heroes with a motivation. Dead relatives are a dime a dozen but the actual connection is not always all that well realized. For an example of this done really badly, turn to Gundam SEED Destiny in which Shinn, in typical mecha hero fashion, has his entire family obliterated when he was fourteen. Shinn spends most of the series grieving his little sister's death but since we barely see her and most of what Shinn does is mope about, fans became extremely tired of it.
Edward's narration of how he and his brother took to even learning alchemy so they could impress their mother, her struggle as a single parent to bring them up, everything brims with understated but very real emotion. It also introduces one of the most distinctive features of FMA that must be spoiler-tagged at this point:
The way in which the brothers deal with their father's abandonment. Fathers up and leaving and being entirely absent from their children's lives, is quite common in shounen. Oddly enough, these children often take it in stride. They admire their fathers from afar and/or have a rivalry with them so as to "overcome" them. It is all very Freudian, in a sense, outdoing the father at the father's skillset is just something of a hallmark, so much so that you find it across widely disparate titles: from Prince of Tennis (a rare example of a father being, if anything, too involved in micromanaging his son's life), to Shokugeki no Souma, Hunter X Hunter, with the Ur-example being (and this is a spoiler within a spoiler, Shingeki no Kyojin. Of course, this is mostly about growing up, and leaving the shadow of one's father. What sets anime/manga and in particular shounen apart is the combination of the above described attitude with a perplexing lack of angst from being basically abandoned. And that reflects back on mothers who stayed behind and are diminished, almost by their default, in their sons' eyes who do not take into consideration the burden the father's absence places on the mother. This can reach paroxysms of absurdity as is the case with Usopp from One Piece whose father, a pirate, took off and abandoned the family, eventually causing the mother to die, pining for him. This does not lead Usopp to at all resent his father but instead he up and decides to become a pirate himself.
FMA breaks the mold. Edward, as a child, barely remembers his father. We see young Edward watching his father from behind, sitting in his study, where he usually closed himself working on his alchemy. Edward has no memories of him as a father and in fact refers to him not as "father" but as "that guy" [あいつ] but he does remember his mother smiling through her tears when Edward asked why he left and he never forgot how hard she worked for the sake of the brothers. Al, perhaps because he may not recall his father at all, is less extreme in his rejection.
The mold is further broken that it was not the father, who actually carries the secrets of alchemy, who introduces the brothers to the science. Part of this is a means of reinforcing the before alluded to method of making children learn way too much from books but it removes the father in the brothers' motivations to even pick up alchemy in the first place. They learn the basics from the books the father left behind but use this in order to make their mother smile.
The rejection of the father, in itself, is not that rare but the reasons behind it, is. Edward does not reject his father because he wants to become a better alchemist. He rejects his father because said father walked out on him, his little brother and his mother who died shortly after and did not even bother attending the funeral. It is a very real reaction, the kind of psychological realism that makes one so invested in FMAS's characters. As an aside, I often find shounen heroes to be absolutely insufferable: they are too shouty, too eager to shove their life philosophy down everyone's throats and above all, are unwilling to ever genuinely contemplate any point of view that is not their own.
Ed, however, grew on me. A little boy who deeply loves his mother and who pays for the crime of trying to bring her back to life in truly horrendous ways. By giving value to traditionally nurturing, motherly love, Edward becomes more of a person than his many peers who expect their mothers to take care of them, because, that's what they're there for. Voicing the injustice to which his family was subjected at the hands of a father who up and leaves is important in genre relevant ways- shounen often fails in this regard- while intersecting with gender, motherhood counting and not just taken for granted background- and creating a level of empathy that is very much at the heart of FMA.
One of the reasons why shounen's interaction with gender is so interesting is that it pertains not just to the content proper but, on a meta level, to the creators. Shounen mangaka are still overwhelmingly men (and the protagonists, boy) but there are quite a few very well accomplished women mangaka whose work has been nothing short of revolutionary.
FMA is one such manga. I first encountered the franchise in the anime series and the remake at a time when I was quite ignorant about wider issues so my reading the manga, in the original, allows me to have a very different perspective. All that I loved about FMA, the very coherent worldbuilding, well accomplished characters and dynamic storytelling sustained via inner logic, is still there but I can see connections now that I would never have seen then. Let us hope that this series of reviews reflects this.
Volume 5 brings into play some interesting issues relating to gender that set the stage for later developments, so I will spoiling tagging rather liberally.
We are introduced to Rush Valley, the capital of automail. It is the perfect environment for Winry to shine and shine she does. Her passion for designing mechanical prosthetics and perfecting her skill gets plenty of attention. Winry does not simply want to help the brothers, although that is very much her role, but she follows her own path, including her own apprenticeship.
Spoiler for this volume, feel free to toggle if you have read it:
FMA is not the first shounen manga to portray birth but the way in which it is handled is quite refreshing. The brothers, Winry and a character they just met, a girl thief who stole Elric's watch but ended up being befriended by the heroes, find themselves stranded with a pregnant couple and the automail master that Winry wants to train under. What follows may be predictable but Arakawa's touch elevates the situation. The woman goes into labor and the brothers' alchemy cannot fix the destroyed bridge so the automail master has to take the long road through the mountains to bring the doctor. This leaves Winry in charge.
Interestingly enough, not because she is female. There tends to be a prevailing idea in fiction that women and even girls are somehow privy to how to help others give birth. In this case, though, what makes Winry the most qualified to do so has little to do with her being a girl and all with her experience as the child of doctors. Edward explains that growing up she was immersed in medicine and actually read plenty of medical books, including on childbirth. This is an anime trope, very young characters gain an absurd amount of knowledge by reading very adult books that in reality they would not have been able to at all understand. FMA does with the brothers in a much more detailed manner. In Winry's case, it is somewhat believable as she is not presented as an expert. She is not a doctor, not even a midwife, and as Edward says, she has not been reading on medicine for quite a while. Winry herself is very obviously terrified but knows that she is the person most likely to be helpful in this situation.
The brothers have to come terms with another kind of helplessness. Childhood tends to be a period of frustration for the shounen hero- more on that in the next volume- and while by narrative standards both of the Elric siblings have graduated from this early period, this kind of frustration they encounter here differs from the usual. The volume brings it home on a more visceral way by presenting these two forms of frustration side by side: on one hand, Edward's realization that his skill is simply not enough to repair or rebuild the bridge, is the typical mode in which frustration descends upon the shounen hero whose quest for power becomes nothing short of existential; then we have the brothers' fear and cluelessness as how to proceed as the woman goes into labor and all they can do is sit and wait, in anguish. They actually discuss this and bewail their uselessness. No amount of hard work is likely to bridge this particular helplessness, it is a different category altogether.
The female thief's role is also interesting. Winry gets her to assist- and here one does wonder if Panina's being female was not the deciding factor- and she collapses after the baby is safety delivered. She is horrified at all the blood, too. Panina gets a redemption arc, too, and is right there with Rose in the gallery of supporting characters who get more development than a lot of main characters in other titles. She lost her legs as a child and was a beggar on the streets until the automail master fixed her with prosthetics, she took to stealing in order to pay him back. The scene in which she finally stands up on her new legs is really well done, it is a whole story onto its own.
The tone throughout this entire birthing episode is one of psychological veracity. Winry helps deliver baby but as soon as all is over, she cannot get up and needs Edward's help. This is a common reaction following an intensely stressful situation, as soon as the adrenaline drops, the knees buckle. Another detail that bring this closer to reality is how the doctor, when he finally arrives, is impressed by Winry's postpartum treatment. A lot of fiction forgets that a baby being safely delivered does not mean things cannot go very badly for the mother. It may be a detail but it is very telling of how thoughtful the mangaka is.
Spoilers for following volumes:
The baby's birth serves as a moment for the characters to reflect on life and its transitory nature. This will gain a greater importance when we found out just why Izumi, the boys' alchemy teacher whom they will meet at the end of this volume, has no children. She tried to bring back her dead baby with alchemy and it went horribly wrong, as it always does, costing her her womb. Her tragedy is a rare case of a woman's plight rendered very well in shounen. It happens but hardly ever with this kind of poignancy. The theme of life and death being deeply interconnected is at the heart of FMA and yet we cannot help but feel deeply for those who cannot conform themselves to this. Accepting it, fully, is what the brothers should do as Izumi herself will have them learn, the hard way, but the painful road to get there is not underestimated as such. The little girl who wants Izumi to bring "fix" her recently deceased kitty, is respected as someone whose grief is real. Izumi understands this more than anyone else: she explains to her that the kitty cannot be brought back, that all creatures are born, live, and eventually die and are absorbed by the cycle of nature but she gives the kitty a grave. Izumi goes a step further and tells her that this happens to all life, including Izumi and the little girl herself.
Izumi's wisdom was gained the hardest way possible. The manga does not go into this, yet, but by setting an episode in which we see a baby being brought into the world and a happy mother, all that Izumi lost is brought home in a most powerful manner.
The volume ends with the almost mandatory flashback episode, in which the shounen hero's childhood frustrations- as mentioned before, it is their plight to go through a childhood in which they are routinely reminded of their powerlessness- are put to the test via a period of intensive training/testing. Before that, though, we get to see the toll that the loss of their mother took the brothers. Here, too, there is a thoughtful depiction of not just grief but love.
Anyone who has even a passing contact with shounen knows that parents are there to die and provide the heroes with a motivation. Dead relatives are a dime a dozen but the actual connection is not always all that well realized. For an example of this done really badly, turn to Gundam SEED Destiny in which Shinn, in typical mecha hero fashion, has his entire family obliterated when he was fourteen. Shinn spends most of the series grieving his little sister's death but since we barely see her and most of what Shinn does is mope about, fans became extremely tired of it.
Edward's narration of how he and his brother took to even learning alchemy so they could impress their mother, her struggle as a single parent to bring them up, everything brims with understated but very real emotion. It also introduces one of the most distinctive features of FMA that must be spoiler-tagged at this point:
The way in which the brothers deal with their father's abandonment. Fathers up and leaving and being entirely absent from their children's lives, is quite common in shounen. Oddly enough, these children often take it in stride. They admire their fathers from afar and/or have a rivalry with them so as to "overcome" them. It is all very Freudian, in a sense, outdoing the father at the father's skillset is just something of a hallmark, so much so that you find it across widely disparate titles: from Prince of Tennis (a rare example of a father being, if anything, too involved in micromanaging his son's life), to Shokugeki no Souma, Hunter X Hunter, with the Ur-example being (and this is a spoiler within a spoiler, Shingeki no Kyojin. Of course, this is mostly about growing up, and leaving the shadow of one's father. What sets anime/manga and in particular shounen apart is the combination of the above described attitude with a perplexing lack of angst from being basically abandoned. And that reflects back on mothers who stayed behind and are diminished, almost by their default, in their sons' eyes who do not take into consideration the burden the father's absence places on the mother. This can reach paroxysms of absurdity as is the case with Usopp from One Piece whose father, a pirate, took off and abandoned the family, eventually causing the mother to die, pining for him. This does not lead Usopp to at all resent his father but instead he up and decides to become a pirate himself.
FMA breaks the mold. Edward, as a child, barely remembers his father. We see young Edward watching his father from behind, sitting in his study, where he usually closed himself working on his alchemy. Edward has no memories of him as a father and in fact refers to him not as "father" but as "that guy" [あいつ] but he does remember his mother smiling through her tears when Edward asked why he left and he never forgot how hard she worked for the sake of the brothers. Al, perhaps because he may not recall his father at all, is less extreme in his rejection.
The mold is further broken that it was not the father, who actually carries the secrets of alchemy, who introduces the brothers to the science. Part of this is a means of reinforcing the before alluded to method of making children learn way too much from books but it removes the father in the brothers' motivations to even pick up alchemy in the first place. They learn the basics from the books the father left behind but use this in order to make their mother smile.
The rejection of the father, in itself, is not that rare but the reasons behind it, is. Edward does not reject his father because he wants to become a better alchemist. He rejects his father because said father walked out on him, his little brother and his mother who died shortly after and did not even bother attending the funeral. It is a very real reaction, the kind of psychological realism that makes one so invested in FMAS's characters. As an aside, I often find shounen heroes to be absolutely insufferable: they are too shouty, too eager to shove their life philosophy down everyone's throats and above all, are unwilling to ever genuinely contemplate any point of view that is not their own.
Ed, however, grew on me. A little boy who deeply loves his mother and who pays for the crime of trying to bring her back to life in truly horrendous ways. By giving value to traditionally nurturing, motherly love, Edward becomes more of a person than his many peers who expect their mothers to take care of them, because, that's what they're there for. Voicing the injustice to which his family was subjected at the hands of a father who up and leaves is important in genre relevant ways- shounen often fails in this regard- while intersecting with gender, motherhood counting and not just taken for granted background- and creating a level of empathy that is very much at the heart of FMA.
