i see that the blind roy discourse has reemerged and in case anyone was wondering, the official stance of this blog is that roy should have stayed blind
okay, i have been asked for my Full Thots and so here they are. these are mostly points i have made elsewhere on this blog, now collected in one convenient location.
as is obvious from this post and literally everything about my blog, i think roy mustang from full metal alchemist brotherhood should have stayed blind. NOT because he "deserves" it, because disability isn't something you "deserve" or not (morally upright people aren't entitled to abled status), but because (drumroll please):
1) giving roy access to the philosoher's stone is imperialist and racist. ishvalan souls are in the stone and will be used to fix roy's eyesight. as such, ishvalans should get to decide what happens to the stone. narratively giving that decision to marcoh and roy just reinforces the idea that the imperialist military has the sole access to power (both in that only they can decide what happens to the stone and that roy must be cured in order to make progress for the ishvalans, instead of allowing ishvalans to decide what's best for their own people).
2) having roy accept the stone undermines his own growth and characterization. he knows what goes into making a stone, he is clearly able to work toward his goals without his sight, and having him willingly benefit from his own genocidal actions - at the expense of his victims - goes against all of his best and most redeeming traits. like. the man wants to be put on trial for war crimes. imo, he isn't first in line to try and avoid hardship
3) magically curing characters is an ableist trope. this is a common occurrence in fantasy, but it's ableist and typically equates happiness and resolution with the elimination of disability. fma:b already toes the line with it's general theme that certain morally wrong actions (e.g. trying to raise the dead) are punishable w disability, thus equating moral wrongdoing w physical disability. however, this is usually tempered or at least complicated by the sheer sympathetic-ness of its transgressors - children trying to raise their mom and a mom trying to raise her kid with the elrics and izumi respectively. are they really morally blameworthy? the answer isn't fully clear. disability could at least reasonably interpreted not as a punishment but just a cosequence - something that happens in response to risky action, regardless of blame. but then w roy the answer is allegedly no, it's not his fault, and the effects are immediately reversed.
4) the fact that the philosoher's stone works goes against the internal logic of the show. the show has a simple rule: you break the taboo, you meet truth, truth takes something (a body part) from you. it doesn't matter why you do it and your involvement is not necessarily correlated with what is taken. alfonse is least involved in any of the transmutations and yet he loses the most. on top of that, you can't get back what you lose. even hoenheim, a walking philosophers stone, can't cure izumi. in a way, meeting truth is like touching a hot stove. it doesn't matter how your hand gets there - whether you fall or reach out or someone forces you. you touch it, you get burned. and yet at the eleventh hour, they change the rules! truth takes sense not parts. morality matters. what's lost can be regained. it's a cop out!
on top of all this, keeping him blind would just be interesting! disability is part of the human experience and it deserves full exploration by authors, not to be discarded on a whim or made into a tragedy. roy is a character who strives on exploiting stereotypes and being underestimated. i know his disability comes at the very end of the series, but it still had the opportunity to be very interesting and was cast aside. i genuinely enjoy fma:b and its writing for most of the series and that's why this decision is such a disappointment
