[ SECRET POST #5700 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5700 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 61 secrets from Secret Submission Post #816.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

10. https://i.imgur.com/nhc2jNG.jpg

[(Anonymous)]

Hey leave Riza out of this.

[(Anonymous)]

Fine, make it a pic of Lan Fan instead.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

Nice! I actually like Riza though.

[(Anonymous)]

It's been too long since I watched FMA to remember Hawkeye's motivations. I do remember her being kickass though. What are some other female characters that fit this trope? I can't think of any examples which is weird because I love tough badass women and loyalty/devotion is my favourite thing.

(And my favourite character is a tough badass man whose motivation revolves around his devotion to another man. Sorry OP, can't really relate.)

[(Anonymous)]

(Sounds like my favorite type of character, please tell us more about him.)

[(Anonymous)]

It's Roronoa Zoro!

He's tough, he's a badass, he has ambition. When we're first introduced to him, everyone knows his name and thinks of him as this ferocious, heartless bounty hunter. And his appearance and demeanour certainly match that reputation, but at the same time he protects a random little girl from the spoiled son of a corrupt government official, and then lets himself be imprisoned to spare the girl and her mother retribution from the corrupt officials.

He's so badass and cool that in a lot of other shows he might even be the protagonist. Instead, he supports his captain (the protagonist) and has taken his captain's ambition on as his own as well. In one instance he even says that his own ambition is worthless if he can't make his captain's ambition come true. Considering how ambitious he is himself and how single-mindedly he has pursued his own goals for a long time, that was just right in the feels for me.

He's not a loud character, but when the focus is on him it's always badass. My favourite moments are when he's supporting his captain, covering his weak point. I don't mean this physically in a fight, but emotionally. Zoro's devotion to his captain is rarely the focus, but it's always undeniably there (and when it is the focus it results in some of my favourite scenes in the whole series).

If you don't mind spoilers, here's someone more eloquent than me gushing about the character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX0rC0jnRhg

If you have as much as a loyalty kink as I have, I heartily recommend One Piece. The whole series is full of themes of devotion and loyalty and the most beautiful thing is that almost always you see and understand why characters develop these bonds. You share the emotional ups and downs of the characters as the story progresses because the character work the author does is just fantastic.

[(Anonymous)]

I don’t care if people like iddy loyalty kink ships, my problem is that people write literal essays on how FMAB has the greatest female characters and egalitarian healthy relationships ever and no it does not

[(Anonymous)]

Well, there's Su Nan from the Lost Tomb series. She belonged to an Evil Illuminati Cult which believed the hero was destined to screw them up so they raised one of their members as his Evil Opposite to kill him. And, honestly, I found her story very interesting, enmeshed as it was in duty, agency, friendship over enemy lines, following the destiny your predecessors laid out for you or fighting it, what to do when your job is over... They get an arc where they're holed up in a remote monastery kinda quietly being friends? While she's still planning to kill him because that's her job? And he knows that? But he's finding the whole situation weirdly restful?

If we're talking about the Non-Evil type (which I suspect OP was), in general I *like* dutiful, unshakeably loyal characters, so, uh, I guess I don't agree with them.

[(Anonymous)]

Winry mostly fits the trope in Brotherhood, but in the 2003 anime she has a bigger arc about coping with her parents' death and has more solo time. Hawkeye fits it in both.

The ultimate example of this trope in my opinion is Mikasa from Attack on Titan.

[(Anonymous)]

I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

[(Anonymous)]

Riza isn't sexist, though, and here's why:

- the profoundly loyal subordinate is a trope we often see with guys, too, and nothing about the way Riza and Roy are written makes it, like...sexy or tawdry or about secret love. they even use the sexist assumption that it IS like that to trick Envy into revealing themself! Yes, fandom ships the fuck out of it, but again, they do that to dudes in the same trope as well. You're free to not like that particular trope in general or when it's women, but I want women to be able to fulfill all the narrative roles men do, not just trite cookie cutter girlboss roles

- the problem with tropes is in aggregate, not (generally) individual characters. A character who's a mother isn't a bad character - lots of people are mothers! The problem is when that's the only kind of character women get to be. And in FMA, there's tons of women being all kinds of character types, with all kinds of motivations! In a cast with Olivier Armstrong, Winry, Mei Chang, Lan Fan, Peninya, and Izumi, you've got a big variety of women with different motives, goals, personalities, and archetypes. It's women as People, not as set dressing.

- more subjectively, Riza just feels like a fully realized character with agency, and her relationship to Roy, although hierarchical, is still a mutual partnership. They both need each other and they both value each other, and Riza is still perfectly capable of operating independently from Roy, like when she's being held hostage by Wrath and Pride and very much holds her own in that difficult position.

I feel like there are definitely ways you could do this trope that would feel skeezy and have the dreaded Problematic Implications™, but Riza ain't it.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for this comment, you've formulated it much better than I ever could.

Also

OP, leave Riza out of this!

[(Anonymous)]

On top of which Riza is a military character who's been through a horrible war campaign like half of the cast; she isn't singled out for being a tough badass woman but rather an experienced soldier like... half the cast. (Maybe a third of the cast, but still, a large amount of the cast.)

[(Anonymous)]

Further to the aggregate point, her character is the way it is because it's part of an assemble. Everyone in Roy's crew is like that. They have individual quirks and backstories but ultimately they exist to further his character's goals. Hawkeye is just the most prominent example.

[(Anonymous)]

Fair enough. I guess I just have a hard time thinking of strong examples of this particular trope. Maybe it's more prevalent in part of the fictional media landscape I don't have much experience with.

[(Anonymous)]

FMAB did Riza such a dirty. 2003 Riza can stay.

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed buuuut Riza would hardly be the character I dislike because of this trope. When I think about this trope, it is the reason why I hate CloTi shippers (they want to turn Tifa into this hot housemaid 100%) and many other ships I hate... But Riza, eh. I don't know. Is she all that in love? Can't remember. I like her as a stand-alone entity.

[meadowphoenix]

i don't think either of those character archetypes are sexist. i think framing those archetypes as the pinnacle or ideal or the most desirable or "the one way to woman" is sexist.