Fullmetal Alchemist Characterization Thought/Question:

[tiamatschild]

So, engineered famine as a method of providing an appropriately massive blood/soul sacrifice to activate one of the points on the Big Circle TM, yes/no?

I thiiiiink it would work? But we're not explicitly told that they did it in canon, despite the fact that engineered famine is a fairly basic totalitarian control tactic that causes lots of death (right up there with mass political purge as social control, which is implied in the text) which seems to be. Uh. The MO.

Totalitarian AND ritual motives for mass murder as connected and essentially the same! This is the best text ever.

My point! My point and I did have one - is famine something that works in this context? Is it the massive amount of death that counts, or is it the Death By Violence? What I mean is, is the death somehow unsuitable if it is caused by long, slow terror, the body being forced to destroy itself? Since that's almost a natural process. Is it the sudden shock, the drama of seeing and being seen, the moment of enacted knowledge that characterizes death in a massacre or war the goal? Can we assume that what works for totalitarian control also works for this particularly distressing brand of alchemic practice?

That is: is would an engineered famine in one of Amestris' border regions some, say, ten years prior to the start of the manga read as completely implausible?

Comments

[simargl]

I would say it's possible, because the goal is the "sacrifice" of human lives. IIRC Amestris constantly had low-level skirmishes on many of her borders that were specifically engineered to provide deaths for the Circle but didn't "count" as a full blown war, so a slow-and-steady approach to killing lots of people should fit.

It's human "energy" they're after, so unless a sudden painful death somehow increases that energy, I can't see the difference. The only issue I can think of is that you'd have to somehow stop people from leaving to look for food, like put them in death camps or something.

FMA suddenly got so much grimmer...

[tiamatschild]

Yeah, and there's all that equation of "lives" and "souls". Which is interesting in itself.

They wouldn't need purpose built camps, necessarily. A pre-existing city or area isolated by geographic quirks and/or people with guns empowered to shoot on sight works just as well. One of the things that happened in Kiev during WWII, just as an example, was that Nazi planners redirected most of the food supply away from the civilizan population and let it be known that people who tried to leave without permission would be shot - the whole city became a starvation camp. (Of course they took lots of people out and killed them, but the rationing policies were geared towards extermination as well.)

[aldanise]

Perfectly possible, I agree, especially since the methods of totalitarian control seem to get paralleled pretty strongly by the soul sacrificing. My own instinct was to say that there is something different about starvation, since the body sort of consumes itself (its own energy) in dying, but on balance I can't think of anything in the series that actually suggests that. (Keep in mind that I am still mostly an anime (plural) girl and only working through the manga slowly in Japanese.)

[tiamatschild]

Yeah, that was my quibble too. Although on further thought I think you're right - - during the Ishval campaign flashback Wrath says something about all souls being equal that implies it doesn't work that way. And there's clearly some degree of enforced starvation going on in Ishval anyway. Blockades of civilian population centers always mean that.