A thought in my head, which I am getting out by dropping it into the abyss of tumblr…
If you’re a fan of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga/Brotherhood, you’ve probably seen people analyzing the deaths of the homunculi and the ironies therein before, whether in full essay format or in super simplified lists. Gluttony is eaten by an ally/brother homunculus, Greed finds peace and satisfaction in self-sacrifice for the sake of the friends he always wanted and actually had in the end, Envy commits suicide after being called out on his jealousy of humans despite his outspoken derision of them, etc. etc.
I recently saw one of these simplified lists elsewhere online and one of the points this person put up bothered me. Well, two, actually, but the one about Pride is something I’d want to get into separately if at all.
This is about Lust’s death, and Mustang’s part in it. This is about the idea – held by some fans, but not all, I’m certain – that it was ironic because she was killed by a womanizer.
This is based on a misconception. I want to pick at it a little bit, for the sake of my own brain if nothing else. I’m sure others have made this analysis before. I’m going to do it over myself anyway. So, here we go:
Mustang was not, in actuality, a womanizer, or anything similar. He just made sure he appeared that way for his own reasons. For one thing, it made him seem less of a threat to senior officers as he climbed the ranks. A young officer with obvious laser focus on higher and higher seats, on more and more power, on getting into positions of command further up the chain and giving all he had to get there? That’s a concern. But a young officer with an almost lackadaisical attitude about him, one who, yes, does his job and all and even generally seems to do it well, but who primarily seems to have flirting and dating and general fooling around on the mind whenever he can spare a thought? Not such a big deal. Sure, he’s still getting promotions despite his relative youth, but it’s not like he’s gunning for them, right?
For another, it masks his information network, his alchemical notes, and the off-the-record missions he gives his closest and most trusted subordinates. Those dates he goes on, almost every time with a different girl? Totally just dates. He’s a young playboy officer. Everybody knows it. It doesn’t even bear thinking about.
Except…no. Not dates. Not girlfriends or romantic or sexual interests. Those are his adoptive sisters masquerading as the interest of the day, and those are information trading meetings masquerading as fun, easygoing, inconsequential nights out on the town.
His alchemy notes, encrypted as a harmless little black datebook. This is entirely in keeping with his persona. A cookbook written by a scientific researcher with no further explanation or apparent reason honestly stands out more. But Mustang’s datebook? Who’s going to think twice about it? For that matter, who’s going to want to sit and try to decipher whatever’s on the surface of that just on the assumption that there’s more to it?
And those missions. Everybody who knows of Mustang’s office habits knows that when Lt. Hawkeye is out on leave, Mustang takes it as an excuse to slack off and fool around on the job. Without her watchful, strict, no-nonsense eye on him, he feels free to call up his favorite ladies and pass the time in flirty chitchat. What an idle fool he is, unable to discipline himself and focus on anything other than pretty women and petty charms when left to his own devices, right?
Only on the surface, really. The readers and watchers of the manga and Brotherhood know better. We got to see “Elizabeth” on the other end of the line. We caught the double meanings of their conversations after that was revealed. But to an outsider, who doesn’t already know what’s up? Clearly Mustang’s up to his womanizing ways again, and there’s nothing more to it.
So that’s Mustang and womanizing. Now let’s bring it around to Lust and the lead-up to her incineration. Let’s look at Mustang’s motivations to crisp her down to ash and bones.
First, there’s her part, however small, in Hughes’ death. Mustang’s been on the hunt for his friend’s killer since it happened of course, and while Lust wasn’t the one, she pretty much admitted in their confrontation that she was at least involved. She said it was too bad she couldn’t finish him off herself. That’s the first thing that set him off, even before attempting incinerations.
Second, she nearly killed Havoc, one of Mustang’s subordinates. She definitely paralyzed him, as we discovered later, but there was certainly intent to kill. That drove him to try to rip the stone from her very chest in an attempt to save Havoc’s life. She also attempted to kill Mustang after this, and, most cruelly of all perhaps, left him to slowly bleed out while watching Havoc do the same.
And finally, when Mustang caught up with her, she was about to kill Hawkeye.
Vengeance and protection, for the sake of his friends and loved ones. That’s what drove Mustang to go as far as he did. That’s why he reduced her to ash over and over and over again, until her apparent immortality ran out and she faded away forever.
Lust wasn’t killed by a womanizer. She was killed by someone who simply wore the mask of a womanizer.
Her death wasn’t ironic because she was killed out of lust, or even by a man who lusted.
It was ironic because she was killed by a man who loved.
it’s very, very American. While there are certainly antis who aren’t American, many of them are.
I have a lot of theories as to why this is, but a lot of them are covered in this post: anti-shipping as the cool new trend (while it’s mostly about the age bracket of anti-shippers as of June 2017 (this time last year), it’s an americentric post talking almost entirely about US phenomena).
tl;dr version? anti-shipping is:
the natural result of growing up both LGBT+/queer and marinated in American-flavored Puritan Christianity/purity culture
with a side order of valuing safety over freedom
b/c you’ve always had freedom of information
but you’ve never known a sense of security
thanks to lifelong internet access
paired with post-9/11 paranoia.
add a dash of radical feminism/exclusionist thinking
never being taught how to think critically, and
zero education on sex of any kind, and
viola: anti-shippers.
someone* added these tags to their reblog of this post, which, uh: this is literally the basic, standard fandom anti-shipper position on ships.
Whether you call yourself an ‘anti’ or not, this is precisely what a fandom anti does: ‘throw down’ if they think someone’s ships are ‘abusive’, ‘pedophilia’, or ‘incest’ (generally with widely expanded definitions, hence the scare quotes).
it’s a pretty solid example of how this works, though:
tag op is 21: too young to remember a world before 9/11 happened or remember a world without internet access
tag op’s strong feelings about fictional ships suggests they flatten fiction and reality to equal levels of potential danger: classic black & white thinking structure that is strongly encouraged by American Protestant Christianity
tag op didn’t read this post with self-awareness and/or application of critical thought, much less click the link that the tl;dr list references
tag op feels justified in limiting other people’s freedom to use fictional ships to explore certain social/romantic/sexual dynamics, threatening to throw down over it.
this is because those social/romantic/sexual dynamics are not safe or healthy in real life.
even though ships are fictional, the safety of censorship is more important than freedom of expression or thought.
the concern is always about ships/sex fantasies: never violence/fantasies about harming others. this is the combined effect of purity culture and radical feminism in a society that glorifies and normalizes violence.
tag op will fight you for bad ships, because it is okay to fantasize about fighting people but not okay to fantasize about unhealthy fictional relationships
Anyway.
I have a lot of sympathy for antis because I think their lives often set them up to favor censorship and abhor education-as-inoculation, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re being jerks to fellow fans on the basis of assuming things about the core of their person because of what they ship.
fandom policing of this sort is assumptive, presumptive, and deeply damaging, both to the victims of anti-shipper cyberbullying and the anti-shippers themselves, who are encouraged in this abusive cycle hellhole behavior by emotional manipulation and coercion.
(I want to end this with a joke about how American this is, but assholes are everywhere tbh. Americans are just especially susceptible to the thinking patterns established by fandom antis at this precise moment in history because of the factors listed above.)
*if you figure out who it is, kindly be a decent person and leave them the hell alone.
In
America, sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world, it’s a
fact. ~
Marlene Dietrich
What I hate is that OP also makes a similar black and white argument. In that it ignores the reality that pornographic content does effect our minds and how we objectify things. If someone consumes incestuous, romanticized rape fic, it does over time make that more acceptable in their heads. If someone likes, sees out, and consumes hardcore pornography of women being brutalized, it makes them more likely to objectify women and see women as less than human (just look at incels). The study I mention is about midway through the article. Now what this basically means is that while by and large, sexism and watching porn don’t go hand in hand, it does show that men who are sexist and violent become MORE SO by consuming content that normalizes it. This is very, very bad. This is how we get incels. This is how we get murderous incels. We don’t have studies on fanfiction but if you think about it, written porn is not all that different from visual.
We do have some degree of responsibility when it comes to the content we produce. We just do. What we put out into the world does effect our society and normalize certain attitudes and that’s really, really dangerous. That doesn’t mean go harass every author ever. That doesn’t mean authors should never ever write problematic content. But I do think there’s a big issue with just saying: just let people write romanticized incestuous rape abuse fic it’s fine. Cuz. It’s not really. It helps normalize a destructive world view for people. I’m just really not into the line of thinking that everything is hunky dory.
Again cuz this is the internet and no one is going to read the nuance of this – please note that the point isn’t that this content normalizes that behavior for everyone. It normalizes it for people already inclined towards that disturbing morality. And that’s a big fucking deal. We don’t need people feeling emboldened to act on those attitudes.
And no, I don’t have a solution. I just wanted to add some god damn nuance to this discussion cuz everyone is like: no rules or all rules and like. you’re all wrong lol
I’ve started replies to this ask twice now and abandoned them because they got overly specific in taking apart this argument. sorry for the lateness of this that resulted from it.
I too am all about nuance. this post is not the most nuanced post I’ve written because it was addressing a very specific aspect of anti-shipping per an ask. If you really are interested in nuanced discussions about this stuff, I have a few tags related to nuance that you might enjoy reading through.
[tw for discussions of csa, pornography*, misogyny, rape, and incest.]
That said: your basic premise seems flawed to me for a few reasons, but I think it’s because you were trying to make one argument and accidentally made another. I believe that you’re making this addition at least partially in good faith, so I would like to address it as I can.
Your comparison of mainstream porn audiences and fanfiction audiences is nonequivalent in scale.
mainstream porn has thousands of times as many consumers as even wildly popular fanworks do, so the potential for serious social damage is significantly different.
the audiences are also different: many, if not most, fanworks are by and for people who are marginalized or silenced; mainstream porn is mostly aimed at (cis) men. fanworks that have problematic elements are more likely to be wrestling with the fear or trauma of being a victim/potential victim of these kinds of relationships. Mainstream porn is playing into an existing social balance that reinforces the cultural message that the expected viewer has power over (perceived) women.
the number of misogynists who are culturally unchallenged in their misogyny is much higher than the number of people who think that abuse/rape/csa are literally okay irl. your imaginary incest rape fan who is reinforced in their beliefs by fanfic is a comparative strawman to the misogynist who is reinforced in his beliefs by mainstream porn.
Further, your mention of ‘incels’ who have resorted to violence to take their hatred out on women in mass shootings, softly implying that incest rapefic fans are liable to do the same if denied access to real life family members to sexually assault, is disingenuous: I guarantee you the incest rapefic fan has not spend their whole lives being told by every cultural message that they are owed a family member to sexually assault the way an incel cis (white) man has been told his whole life that he’s owed a woman. (and porn didn’t drive these men to violence – their own sense of entitlement did.)
now that I have addressed what your argument seemed to actually say …
I think you meant more to point out that both porn that shows abusiveness towards women and incestuous rapefic are dealing with issues of consent, and you are concerned that both can reinforce toxic messages about consent if they portray situations that lack proper consent as positive experiences.
and on that point, I don’t think you’re entirely wrong.
Americans of all genders are often severely under-educated about informed consent to sex. (below examples use ‘men’ and ‘women’ b/c of how we still assume binary genders in our social messaging, but they affect nonbinary people too.)
in general, the attitude that men should chase women, women should play ‘hard to get’, and that women put up an initial resistance against men showing interest in them to test their interest level or increase their interest is still in the US cultural ether.
the idea that men are owed a woman, that women should eventually give in because of being owed to men – that’s still a thing.
the idea that it’s sexy and desirable to be chased by a man and to have him persist until you love him back is still a thing.
the idea that anything but a strict, straightforward ‘no’ counts as refusing sex is still a thing.
the idea that ‘no’ really means ‘maybe later’ is still a thing.
and plenty more besides.
and with these messages existing in real life, they also exist in mainstream fiction. the there’s plenty of examples of questionable consent being portrayed as a positive experience in mainstream media – obvious, long-standing examples of such tropes being put out into the mainstream by women for women being 50SoG, which was itself a fanfic for Twilight. But it’s also action adventure movies, and romcoms, and fratboy movies, and everyday marketing, and porn aimed at straight men, and much, much more.
but which came first: lack of education about healthy, equal consent or popular fiction about lack of healthy, equal consent? isn’t each reinforcing the other?
when people who are on the (so to speak) wrong end of these consent issues – the ones being told that being coerced into sex is the healthy, hot thing to want and experience, which most of transformative fandom is made up of – wrestle with those consent issues in fiction, are they the cause of the problem, or the symptom? or both? why do women/perceived women enjoy or create romance stories featuring these elements? do we blame the people enjoying these stories, or the culture that reinforces the notion that these things are desirable?
and
how much of an impact do transformative fanworks featuring abuse/dubcon/noncon really have on the general consciousness of consent, compared with all these other cultural messages? especially given that we have such a strong tagging culture, which essentially encourages creators to call themselves out for the problematic elements of their works before someone stumbles on them by accident? if a fanfic treats a story about rape as a sexy, good-times experience, but tags it ‘rape/noncon’, is anyone going to be duped into thinking that it was any less rape?
and finally: wouldn’t it be more productive to address the consent issues in society by educating about what true, informed consent looks like, rather than to try to eliminate every depiction of problematic consent from the internet?
here’s some further reading regarding fandom, questionable morality in fanworks, and social responsibility:
– because fandom doesn’t exist in a vacuum, we need to consider why fandom does what it does and its role in society at large, not just within its microcosm
– what’s worse – the story that has a warning for ‘coercion/dubcon’ or the one with coerced sex in it, but no warning for it? why?
hope this gives you some interesting food for thought.
(*side note: the porn industry has its problems, but as I’m more concerned with the safety and livelihood of the workers involved with it, this is not a condemnation of porn as a whole – only its playing into existing cultural misogyny for money. (fix the cultural misogyny and the porn will change too, imho.))
What other people ship, read, or write is NOT YOUR CONCERN or JOB TO STOP IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT.
I really haven’t seen this argument around much, but a big part of the shame of being a survivor–any kind of survivor, of things small and big–is dealing with the part of the abuse YOU ENJOYED. Now, some people go reactive and explode here, and say, “fuck you there is nothing here I enjoyed this is all wrong you’re blaming the victim.” Which is not what I am doing. To have enjoyed a part of it doesn’t mean it wasn’t abuse or you deserved it or it wasn’t bad enough therefore you deserve no compassion, or whatever. But many people stay stuck there, and in staying stuck there, they keep rejecting the part of themselves that enjoyed it and thus stay stuck in the shame.
What do I mean by “enjoyed a part of it”? A non-comprehensive example:
– you liked being groomed
– you liked the attention of an adult, and having an adult give you the time of day for once
– you liked the part that someone thought you were good for something
– you liked the part where you could do something for a person you loved (many abusers work this)
– you happened to orgasm during a rape because of the purely physical stimulation
– you were terrified of how he scared you, but you felt safe from the world under the wing of someone so aggressive and scary
You can insert your own. None of the above “romanticize” what happened or mean that what happened wasn’t abuse, or wasn’t horrible, or you deserve no help for your trauma, or whatever.
But maybe as a survivor you need to make a story about, “you know, I did have a piece of agency there, I wasn’t all a helpless victim” (this=/=victim-blaming, I don’t mean “it was my fault” I mean going through the trauma and on the other side of it. This is re-capturing a sense of agency.)
Maybe you need a story of, “you know, I wouldn’t have even minded, just, why did it have to be *like that*?” Then re-tell your own story in how part of you wish it happened (doesn’t have to be all of you, your rational adult self can still be, you know what, my biggest wish is that this hadn’t happened at all).
The tl;dr: is that we contain contradictions and multitudes and layers and sometimes part of, say, combat PTSD is confronting how much you -enjoyed- violence, confronting who that makes you, etc. Sometimes there’s part of a person that enjoys victimhood–maybe you personally didn’t, but enough people do. People write for so many reasons, their stories serve so many purposes for them. WRITING THESE STORIES CAN BE EMPOWERING FOR SURVIVORS. And you don’t get to tell others they have to recover “correctly” or in the way you think is morally right. There’s no way out but through. Writing these stories can be someone’s “through.” You’ve got no business dictating to them what road they should take to radical self-acceptance.
at the end of the day, when all the censorship debate is over and gone threadbare, we come back to the most important, central issue:
getting rid of stories about sexual abuse will not make real sexual abuse stop happening.
and until sexual abuse stops happening, it’s unfair to demand that stories of sexual abuse stop existing. it’s akin to sweeping a prevalent problem under the rug: if we just don’t say anything, we can pretend it’s gone, right? (except it’s not, and now you’ve silenced the people who most need to be allowed to air out their trauma.)
i'll apple your turnover 