One thing to note is that fanfiction.net doesn't have an easy way to differentiate between FMA 2003 and Brotherhood, which start at the same point but sorta wind off in wildly different directions and sometimes you don't know which it is until halfway through a story. (A good barometer is Alphonse's sass, which is nonexistent in 2003 and through the fucking roof in the manga.) This is also because ff.net pre-dates Brotherhood by, like, a while so it was just anime vs manga verse back then. Now it's a crapshoot. Spoiler: unnecessary tangent I get a weird feeling of nostalgia from the really early fics, before the official subs and dubs could solidify the terminology.
wow wtf I really can't imagine Alphonse without the sass. I've decided to actually go ahead and read the manga before starting in on the fanfiction though, partly because none of the top rated fic I could find looked to be as good as the canon :P I'm wondering if Ed and Roy had more chemistry in the '03 anime or the manga, because it seems like 90% the shipping fic out there is about them and I really didn't get that vibe from Brotherhood.
I never really got that vibe from what I've read of the manga. Nor did I really get it from the 2003 anime.
you guys are making me want to get back into FMA, stop that at once (don't actually stop, it's a great series) I uh have a totally different thing to complain about though. Spoiler: not really nsfw but noncon-related So this fic was tagged non-con, I expected it to be non-con, and behold, there was non-con. All of that is 100% as it should be! The problem arose from the author's note which stated that it wasn't REALLY rape because [train noises, no actual reason given] but someone wanted it tagged so OKAY FINE, and then the premise of the fic itself was like…A and B are dating, C is jealous, A rapes C and that makes his relationship with B even better and C is miserable forever, the end. (It should go without saying that all of this is wildly OOC on many levels. Also, C is canonically a sexual abuse victim, sooooo.) And the sex scene…did not read as consensual. At all. In any way. It read as traumatic and extremely disturbing, which would have been great if the author hadn't made it clear it wasn't meant to be, or maybe it was but the readers were supposed to be fine with that because A and B were so happy together afterwards? I DON'T KNOW IT WAS VERY UPSETTING.
omg you agree with me on lust, aka the ultimate waifu of fma VAL I KNEW WE WERE FRIENDS FOR A REASON also wtf is that fic you found jesus
@valenstyne Is it okay to say which fandom it was? If not that's okay too. Just makes me really curious about the relationship involved and who this fucked up scenario is being applied to That sounds fucked up though! I'm not even sure how you could write a story with that overall message while being unaware of what a Scenario that is
unrelated to the current discussion but: Spoiler: the entire steamworld dig tag on ao3 yes, that's right, there's only 3 of them and they're all by the same author ETA: and there are only 4 steamworld heist fics and every single one of them is a Piper/Rabbit shipfic
@Aondeug LUST WAS ALWAYS MY FAVORITE although I also loved Rose absolutely to pieces and I don't completely remember why. I'm sure I had my reasons. @Charlie Saiyuki. Apparently Hakkai and Gojyo have the purest love to ever love but occasionally Gojyo's just gotta force himself on an unwilling third party, you know how it goes (did I mention this was so OOC that I nearly cried tears of blood)
Yeah! and she was totally in lesbians with Dante at the end I think I still ship it It was kinda funny though because nobody else in the fandom seemed to give a damn about her, which is entirely consistent across 90% of my favorite characters, haha. (But also, kind of a gripe itself. LOVE SECONDARY CHARACTERS WITH ME DANG IT)
I was huge into the FMA fandom back in the day. I don’t claim to have anything like the full story about what happened but I have a few details? Spoiler: long Greed was quite a popular character in the pre-Brotherhood days. He was not at all an unusual pick for favorite character, and often quite high on people’s favorites lists. For all that Brotherhood is amazing and I love it, it wasn’t the kindest to Greed fans. He’s one of the major reasons I must rewatch both shows if I watch Brotherhood. He got more time and space to breathe as a character and have an arc and all that. For existing fandom, Ling was a new character that people had very little attachment to compared to a familiar and really pretty beloved character. I don’t remember any great dislike for him or anything, but his arc came at the expense of so much that people associated with Greed. I remember some authors dabbling with the possibilities a bit, but I get the feeling a lot of fans sorta decided they preferred a version of Greed that wasn’t entirely compatible with the Brotherhood storyline. Then there was Livejournal. FMA fandom was deeply rooted there in earlier days. Yes but maybe not for the reasons people might think of today? There was quite a bit extremely interesting, experimental, explicit-as-it-gets fanfic out there. I think it was comfortably after the first wave of FMA super popularity but before Brotherhood when shit started going down. Authors started making their works more difficult to access and/or moving them to decentralized locations. They were afraid of losing their LJ accounts. They were definitely a thing for fandoms with a reasonably large and dedicated fanbase. Touka Koukan was another FMA one that enjoyed a reasonable amount of fanfare but I think it only exists on the wayback machine anymore. Specialized archives were enough of a thing that people used to put lines at the top of their fics about not archiving this work without permission from the author. Web design was often.... creative. There were also a lot of personal websites where authors would archive their own works, maybe works of a few friends, and usually have a recs page linking to other fic. Sometimes there were actual webrings. Those things never didn’t suck though. People definitely posted on ff.net, but it wasn’t particularly well-regarded at the time from what I remember. It was absolutely not considered a safe place to put anything remotely controversial, or maybe anything at all.
Spoiler: 2003 anime spoilers It's really sad how little people give a fuck about her. Because she's just so fucking rad???? I was honestly very disappointed with Brotherhood when I found out she died so early and with so little development into her character. Because like her relationship with Dante and Gluttony were like among my favorite things in the 2003 anime. As was just...her entire story and where she ends up emotionally in the end? Like it has that thing of here's this person who wants to be human and is based off some actual human drama like the whole Nobody situation in Kingdom Hearts. And she's got some tragic bullshit going on with Ishval which is radical because ISHVAL FOREVER DAMMIT. ;-; and yes dante/lust is good shit spoilering stuff because vuaston hasn't seen 2003
No. Nooooooope. No. Absolutely not. Every word of this is filthy libel. Except the tears of blood. *wipes face, inspects hand* Yeah that part checks out.
The premise: the way Mick is treated in post-season-one LoT is really shitty, and I'm going to write a fix it! Me: oh, nice! The execution: let's woobify Heatwave, take away all responsibility for all the bad things he's done, not just the ones that happened when he was brainwashed, and caricaturize all the other characters as evil meanies. Oh, and have Snart swoop in and not only have over-emotional conversations with Mick, because emotional honesty and openness is totally something he's comfortable with, but also tell the rest of the crew alllll about all of Mick's mental health issues, because that's likely. Me: ...why. But seriously, I like characters like Mick who have done awful shit because of all of their characterization, not just the "nice" parts. Don't sanitize them.
