Avatar

genetically discombobulated meme animal

@spidermanifested / spidermanifested.tumblr.com

my name is manfred and welcome to my internet zone. my "main" blog is manfredvk, i dont use it but if you see that blog follow you or like your posts: that me -_-

okay heres the new pinned post. whats up im manfred (he/occasionally they) and welcome to the place where i talk about side characters from fullmetal alchemist and whatever else i feel like (but mostly the former). for goofy fma comics drawn by me go to @funnybido. elicia hughes dni

click the readmore for a tiny png of bido going "ei!"

martel fullmetalalchemist is a deadly ex-military lady with short blonde hair, snake theming, including a large vaguely snake shaped design on her body, & a scene where she tries to sneak around inside a container. at one point in the 03 anime she hunts snakes for food, and in the same anime shes shown to have been part of a secret military taskforce that was eventually betrayed by its own government. her name sounds similar to "metal" especially pronounced in japanese (maateru –> metaru). she is even killed by a guy known for wearing an eyepatch. the ONLY thing stopping me from declaring, factually, that she was inspired by the metal gear series, and specifically the character "the boss". is that the chapter where she is introduced was published over a year prior to the release date of metal gear solid iii: snake eater, making that physically impossible

It's easy to call Grimes stupid. But if I were Grimes I would also make every single choice she made in the order she made it in because I would be Grimes and I would experience Grimes's life in the order it occurred. In this way we are all trapped inside of ourselves, and none of us know just how stupid we fucking are.

okay ive got to get this post out before april fools day so everyone knows this is important and serious information. i believe ive solved a mystery that i might have been the only person on earth who ever cared about and im taking you with me on this journey

For the uninitiated (aka people who have never looked at my blog in their whole life). there is this character called bido from fullmetal alchemist. hes greeds friend and goon and he shows up in like 5 chapters. he looks like this

and if youve never seen him before you are going to be baffled to find out that a large percentage of people who even bother remembering him seem to genuinely believe that he is a young child. and this goes beyond your regular fandom infantilization. i have had people comment on my very own posts, telling me "but wait, i thought bido was a kid".

for years i did not know how this misconception was even possible (look at him), let alone get so widespread, but that might be because the chiefest example of it exists... in the scanlation thats up on most "read free manga" websites. Aka; the one most people these days are reading. perhaps this is the mother of all other bido-child-takes. we may not ever know.

but either way, that scanlation team apparently decided at some point in their workflow, that not ONLY was bido a kid, but it made sense to have an ACTUAL kid* (*15-year-old) call him one. which at that point just feels like rubbing salt in the wound like come on

anyway the first time i checked the original dialogue to compare, i didnt know much japanese, but i was still pretty confident there was zero basis for the mistranslation. this scenes official translation makes no reference to bidos age, and aside from the obvious factor of "are you fucking serious just look at him", there was an ACTUAL reference to his age in the japanese dialogue of an earlier chapter; alphonse calls him "ojisan". which... surely the scanlation team would have seen. if they were translating the manga. but i guess it would be easy to forget a chapter you read that long ago if you arent similarly enamored of every detail regarding one of the least present background characters

Still. it seems like such a weird and out of nowhere choice to make and there didnt seem to be any reason for it. even replacing dialogue with lord of the rings quotes has a clear and almost understandable motivation (hubristically riding the coattails of sam and frodos legendary romance). so WHY did they just suddenly up and decide this bald middle aged man was some kind of precocious Crime Baby.

well in the past couple years i have learned a little bit more japanese. & since last night i think i have found the answer.

heres the original dialogue again, and then here it is simplified for one of the official video games.

"ビドーとやらが言ってた事も", aka, "and the stuff we heard bido say".

"言ってた事も", pronounced "いってたことも", aka "itteta koto mo".

Except. if you arent reading too closely, or your image quality sucks, and you mistake the と (to) for a ど (do).

言ってたこども*..............

*translators note: koto mo means "and stuff". kodomo means child.

i cannot stress this enough. the kanji for "koto" is right there on the page. this mistake would only happen if somebody was ONLY looking at the furigana and not even doing a good job of that. how did they get it this wrong. how did nobody second guess it. i know that scanlators are mostly a bunch of hobbyists trying their best and i do not mean to disparage them as a collective. its just , that i think these specific ones should maybe be pelted with an assortment of overripe fruits for a little while, for giving me this hyperspecific grievance to suffer.

At least maybe now that ive solved the riddle the truth will prevail in time. tell your friends, or something

were I to create an original piece of media I would create bait so queer in order to create a fanfic environment I like. I find you guys do your best work under duress.

I’d say “jeez can two people not be friends anymore?” and then I’d give one of them amnesia in which they only recognize the other above anyone else

not only this but arad "served" during the 1967 naksa which displaced 300,000 people and COMPLETELY emptied the villages of bayt nuba, imwas, and yalo. like he participated in an event that was (until the last year) one of the biggest iterations of the nakba ever.

speaking of transfem interpretations for characters presented as men in the source material. one such case i have been stewing in my mind for a while is black sails charles vane

which i realize (hence the big post about it) would probably not be most peoples first assumption because vane is very stereotypically masculine on first blush. youve got the whole rugged individualist sigma male thing going on, the growly voice the immaculately shaped stubble, etc. but: as the show goes on we get more insight into WHY he presents himself that way and it becomes more and more clear that there are two (well, three but we'll get there) major reasons for this

1) his father figures' enduring influence (the conflicting desires to both appease and outdo them, to different levels for each, but both sides of which can only be achieved by performing masculinity The Best),

and 2) the practical need, as a pirate, to be respected and feared by the men following him,

both of which can be boiled down to "we live in a society". and on their own i would just take these parts of his character as an exploration of how gender roles are socially mandated and reinforced, but, unusually for this type of character, he seems very matter-of-fact and self-aware about the reasons hes Doing Masculinity. this is one of his parallels with flint, whos also consciously spinning his motivations through a narrative of cishet machismo to achieve respectability under patriarchy.

obviously to some degree vane IS shown to have internalized the bioessentialist 18th century england view of gender roles ("i can understand a womans desire for domesticity", etc) (and even still! you CAN understand it? interesting wording!). but he doesnt express things like this remotely as often as, say, jack, who repeatedly goes full throttle Boomer Wifejokes Mode when he feels undermined or slighted by a woman, even one he cares about. in contrast vane is quick to empathize with and relate to and even (especially!) project onto the women in his life. he strikes up a weird rapport with abigail; max, a total stranger to him, gets past his selfish crew-appeasing decision to keep her prisoner by appealing to their similarities. its not just that hes attracted to women (though he obviously very much is), he views them as people who are Similar To Him. maybe more similar than men?

the biggest example is his whole relationship with eleanor. hes CONSTANTLY pointing out how alike they are, how much they hate being oppressed by fathers, aka by men. arent you tired of being tied down by gendered expectations? dont you just want to go apeshit? hes constantly trying to pull her out of this box society has built around her but also hyperaware of and seemingly resigned to his OWN box. he identifies with and lives vicariously through her rebellion. shes his strongest and most genuine emotional connection, and not in a woodes rogers "grieving my beloved unlawfully-wedded wife. what do you mean she was a real person who didnt just sit in the corner and knit silently" way, but like, For Real. even if they were ultimately so incredibly bad for each other.

which brings us to the third secret reason he performs masculinity so hard. that connection, his bonds with women (like flint and the Witch Puppetmaster Rumors about miranda) is repeatedly shown to be considered by the men around him to be a weakness– one that might need forcibly correcting if he ever falters from peak masculinity even a little. hes only allowed to continue to explore that side of himself via the narrow avenues of male heterosexuality and social dominance– his actual relationship with eleanor is very equal, he has no desire to dominate her, or... anyone, really? hes super big on just letting his crew do what they want (to the extent where this winds up causing severe issues). but his ability to lead men requires that he put on the show. and even still, he never seems willing to sacrifice the part of his life with eleanor in it no matter how much pressure is exerted on him from men above or below him in the pecking order. SHE is always the one who winds up abandoning him for HER goals.

shes ultimately too caught up on the lie of finally achieving respectability. and, vane is too, just from a different facet of society. his character arc is about confronting that desire, reckoning with it, and discarding it, choosing to follow flint instead of blackbeard.

(meanwhile we have eleanor falling back on the patriarchys narrative in order to dehumanize him before his execution, even though she ALSO grew up without a mothers love. theyre the same, but through her privilege and adjacency to even more privileged men, shes been given all the tools she needs to deny it– at the cost of boxing herself further into her own role. a cost she chooses to pay every time, no matter how much she claims to hate it.)

theres just...... a whole lot of really good commentary about gender in this show. other characters have their own ways of exploring it but normally their sense of displacement within the gender binary is via the lens of queer sexuality, whereas vane is judged mainly for having a relationship to womanhood that goes BEYOND sexual attraction. and i think that while this part of the narrative stands strong on its own without it, a transfem reading would add some fun new layers and make a lot of sense. and i would love to know if anyone else has had the thought that hrt could have. well maybe not saved her. but definitely Helped

my final miscellaneous piece of analysis, is that aside from that one clothes-on nut-and-bolt between miranda and the pastor, which lasted ~5 seconds so it doesnt count. the only mutually passionate sex scenes shown happening on screen, either(?) involve two women, or a woman and charles vane. & like im just saying. for consistencys sake. we could just resolve that one outlier real quick

This analysis is fantastic. I’ve been rewatching black sails and I kept thinking how interesting Vane’s relationships with women are. There really is a lot more going on than the repeated ‘he’s misogynist and thinks houses are gay’. (Which I want to point out, is essentially the same as what Teach says a few episodes prior about men becoming easy to control because they are comfortable).

I also highly doubt, considering the people that made this show, that it was a coincidence there was a rainbow shining on him when he said he was no longer as worried about his men’s perception of him, after killing Albinus and coming back to find Anne and Jack had killed the last of his previous crew for what they were doing to Max. Like whatever his inner identity with gender or sexuality or masculinity, this is clearly a turning point of self growth.

I really like this website because somebody will be like “there’s nothing wrong with darting out from behind a parked car into traffic, bootlicker” and you can be like okay this clearly evolved from a valid point about how the US is too car-centric. But something happened to it.

This is what non-abstinence-only sex ed looks like in the Crash (1996) universe.

I feel like I’m understanding the current political climate in a more comprehensive way than ever before.

this is either coing to sound like nonsense or like something everybody following me has already been thinking about for years but Do you ever just sit and think about how theres so many people for whom vast swathes of language doesnt really register as relating to actual tangible concepts because they live in platos allegory of the cave (privilege and/or alienation from the rest of the world) and so everything really is just a collection of Vibes to them with no touchpoint in living reality. everything is a fantasy and the fantasy is whatever you dont need to work hard to imagine. words mean nothing. words are interchangeable. words are all there is. pinterest board ai generated nighttime cityscape, close up of raindrops on window, white womans hands in oversized sweater holding coffee mug, faceless thin white man in business suit. Dont you wish the whole world looked like this and you never had to think

You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.