Seen enough marvel shlock, want something that isn't subversive within a system but directly fights against it and loudly
Keep your negative takes out please I've had it with the irony poisoned doomerism of late
Seen enough marvel shlock, want something that isn't subversive within a system but directly fights against it and loudly
Keep your negative takes out please I've had it with the irony poisoned doomerism of late
At least they solve their problems by killing people, mostly.
But yeah, FMA has some issues. The core premise of the story is "Actually the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces felt very bad about committing atrocities in China". The whole thing is sort of a soft apologia for Japan's wartime atrocities.
I'd be more sympathetic to the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces if they led a coup with the goal of being prosecuted for their war crimes, at least. Which totally proves your point, though I don't know if it was as intentional as you make it sound
Intent is a slippery thing. FMA is, at the textual level, a story about Axis power analogues using super-weapons made from mass human murder to win a war. Then, later, the people who used the super-weapons regret what they did and stage a coup against the fuhrur.
That's just the textual level, basic story.
It's not very hard at all to say that the Japanese author, consciously or not, is writing an apologia for the conduct of his nation during WWII.
I mean, I think that's a valid reading. And if in our world the Japanese military had been ordered by the emperor to do the Rape of Nanking and afterwords overthrew the government as a reaction against that, it would definitely read like that. But though it definitely isn't as critical as it should have been, it's still a far cry from all of the actual WWII military apologia you can find in anime. There are a whole lot of writers out there who are open about thinking Japan has never done anything wrong, and I really don't think she's even close to being that. Though like I said, it's definitely way more sympathetic to the soldiers than I think is fair. (Also, the author has said that she views the series as being more about the genocide carried out by Japan against the Ainu people indigenous to Hokkaido.)