Why White SFF Writers Should Watch Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

I mean, everyone who likes epic, dark, steampunk-y fantasy should watch the anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. But for a deeper understanding of writing better, white, Western writers in particular should watch it.

Why?

Because we often try to write characters from other cultures from a place of privilege, and many of us–those who aren’t also living within an additional, marginalized culture, and also those who are–don’t understand the depth of research necessary and the limitations of that research.

So anime like Fullmetal Alchemist, which are rooted in a Japanese storyteller’s idea of “European” cultures are important to help us understand what even those of us with the best intentions sound like when we try to write about cultures not our own.

It’s also a great example because–Fullmetal Alchemist is a great story! It’s gripping and exciting and full of interesting characters and an interesting world. Understanding our limitations doesn’t mean being resigned to write bad stories or stories only about people exactly like us. It means being mindful that we are always writing our own story, not others’, no matter what characters we might choose.

So here’s the sitch with Fullmetal Alchemist. It’s about two brothers, Edward and Alphonse, who live in a world where powerful people practice alchemy, a half-science, half-magic dealie based on the principle of equivalent exchange. But there’s also some kind of natural order to the world that Ed and Al violate when they try to use alchemy to bring their dead mother back to life. For breaking this taboo, alchemy itself takes away Al’s body and Ed’s leg. They start off the series searching for clues to making a Philosopher’s Stone, a powerful legendary item that would allow them to ignore equivalent exchange and get their original bodies back.

There is a lot of Western culture embedded in this manga/anime. The ideas of alchemy and Philosopher’s Stones are commonly associated with European historical tradition.* The characters have Western-sounding names like “Edward” and “Roy” and “Armstrong.” They play games more strongly associated with the Western world**, like chess, and there are English and Judeo-Christian Hebrew words in the backgrounds.

But no Westerner would ever mistake this series for a Western production.

For one thing, the animation and production style are thoroughly Japanese. The show is split in runs of thirteen episodes. It uses anime-style design, including manga/anime signifiers such as sweat beads, cross-popping veins, and other iconography not usually seen in Western animation.

For another, elements of the plot–things that motivate the characters, the way characters react to each other and particular situations, underlying themes–feel more anime than Western.

However, we don’t have to get into deep plot and style analysis to get the point. Instead, let’s focus on a simpler coal-mine canary: names.

Some characters, like Alphonse and Edward Elric, have names that make sense to a native English speaker or European. But others have names that most native English speakers would consider to be unusual: Winry, Maes Hughes, Van Hohenheim (as a full name), King (first name of a national leader) Bradley (last name), Olivier (as a woman’s first name). All of these names have European roots–they definitely don’t sound Japanese in their phonemes, and the Japanese-voiced characters can’t pronounce them as an English- or German/Dutch/etc.-speaker would–but they just as definitely sound like anime characters, not Western characters.

If you look up the elements of the names, they are connected to European roots. Maes is a common Dutch/Spanish/Belgian surname, though a rare given name. Van Hohenheim sounds like a single surname; though Van is occasionally a given name, just like Maes, its use is rare. Olivier is most often a male name–at least 11 times more often, according to sketchy internet stats sites–but of course it can be given to girls and women too, or perhaps it could be an eccentric spelling of the more common feminine name Olivia. Winry is a very uncommon diminutive of Winifred that I have heard of, nevermind literally heard used in real life, exactly zero times outside this anime.

But that’s the thing. You can explain how all these characters have unusual-sounding names within Western culture; you can explain anything, because people are free to name their kids whatever they please, and there are plenty of European people of European heritage with rare and unusual names walking around. But that doesn’t change the fact that the names do sound weird to Western ears and need that explanation.

That weirdness might be way harder to spot if you aren’t Western yourself. Even if you’ve done a ton of research on Western/European nomenclature and verified that “Van” can be used as a given name, you still don’t have the cultural experience to know that “Van Hohenheim” is a confusing full name.***

Which is my point for white writers like me.

When we are writing about other cultures, whether they are cultures that inhabit the same geographical space as ours, like marginalized communities in our own country, or cultures in other countries, we must have the humility to understand that our best efforts will be “Maes Hughes” and “Winry Rockbell.”

For example, let’s stick with names. In the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling gives Harry’s racialized love interest the name “Cho Chang.” White readers are meant to understand that Cho is of East Asian descent based on her name. But–well, I’m not the right person to decide what’s “right” and “wrong” about her name. Instead, listen to someone who knows more than I do and expresses it beautifully: Rachel Rostad’s “To J. K. Rowling from Cho Chang”.

Is it possible that a girl living in the UK with East Asian heritage could be called “Cho Chang”? Sure. Like I said above, parents are allowed to name their kids whatever, and maybe you could imagine important personal reasons they’d choose this name. Just like, to use Rostad’s example, Garcia Hernandez could be a French guy whose paternal grandfather happened to be Spanish, and his parents really wanted to call him Garcia because that was the name of their favourite celebrity or their best friend or the doctor who delivered the baby. It could happen.

But it’s still Maes Hughes or Ms. Olivier Armstrong. It’s the technically correct but fundamentally odd phrasing in the English-language signs in the backgrounds, the exotified trappings of Judeo-Christian mythos, the weird-sounding place names like “Resembool.”

No matter how loving or well-intentioned, it’s still the (maybe hardest and best!) work of someone on the outside looking in, writing for others on the outside.

And you might get the wrong idea here: there are great reasons why it’s okay for Japanese manga and anime artists to approach Western culture this way but problematic for white Western writers to do the same to other cultures. They’re reasons of history and colonialism and whose voices already get heard the loudest, and even if this blog was ten times longer, there wouldn’t be space to get into them all here.

Just remember–and I will too–that even with the most diligent research and in-depth conversations, we will never be able to spot our own “Maes Hughes.”

* This blog entry is so not the place for the actual history of those fields/concepts.

** Ditto the previous footnote, except about the history of chess etc.

*** Yes, yes, you can Watson this away by making reference to the circumstances under which the character got this name, but the point is that you have to Watson it away.