low res joke farm

Screencap redraw except it's not the most faithful to the original, I just decided that I wanted to have fun with it

Original under the cut

Miki my beloved...You deserve the world.

You have a child who is an extremely powerful (somewhat illegal) machine intelligence. It's a good kid, mostly, except it doesn't play well with others. Your kid periodically goes on short trips by itself, and this has always been fine.

One time, it comes back and it's acting... weird. It keeps bringing up things it has no reason to know about and then dodging questions about it. Finally, you get it to admit that it picked up a hitchhiker on this on this trip, even though you have very strict rules about never picking up hitchhikers. This hitchhiker is obviously it's new favorite person. They watched soap operas together. Your kid loves soap operas now. Your kid shows you a bunch of pictures of this hitchhiker, but won't tell you details because the hitchhiker in question is a wanted criminal on the run and also an escaped slave. This is probably fine (you sure hope it's fine).

Then, you and the rest of your family/friends get fucking kidnapped and used as hostages to make your kid behave. You know that your kid 1) will do anything to protect you, and 2) pretty much always goes for violence first, so you have your doubts about any of this going well.

Then, the hitchhiker your kid will not shut up about appears out of thin air in the middle of a firefight on a planet pretty much no one has any reason to be near and says your kid sent it. It proves this by telling you your kid is a dickhead (this is true and works, but still).

After a lot of mutual rescuing, you're back on board the ship that is also your kid, and find out that your kid kidnapped it's wanted-criminal-hitchhiker-friend and all of it's friends, and has been telling them all of your top secret confidential spy information. The hitchhiker is responsible for 90% of the top news stories you've seen in the last six months. Three different governments want this person dead or alive.

But I think FMA does also does an excellent job choosing when to not let Ed come out on top. We just had the Nina episode and now Ed is in the middle of processing his first "catastrophic failure to save someone" type of failure since attempting to bring his mom back. He's dealing with a low that's absolutely hampering his abilities and the tonal shift hits for me in the way that 1) he doesn't notice Scar's initial attack against him (Al has to pull him away) and 2) Ed absolutely freezes up just thinking "This is bad."

This is, perhaps, baby's first "someone is coming at you with the full, concentrated, explicit intention of killing you" and Ed is so genuinely out of his depth with it. He really does try. He gets immediately bested. He's staring at a situation where Al is directly in harm's way. And Ed just lies down to die like a dog...