A Wild Headcanon Meme Appears!

[usedlaserbeam]

✭ A HEADCANON/QUESTIONS MEME ✭
Because there's never a wrong time for headcanon.

→ Post with a list of your characters.
→ Comment to other people asking them questions about their lineup. Ask anything you can think of: questions about personal headcanon, thoughts on your CR, hypothetical situations, off-screen interactions, future plans, serious business, random crack, whatever!
→ Respond to the questions you receive!
→ LEARN NEW THINGS ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE'S CHARACTERS THAT YOU NEVER KNEW BEFORE.
→ Discover things your characters have in common and forge excellent CR and shenanigans accordingly.
→ Repeat steps 2-5 forever.
→ Holy Voltorbs.

Comments

[usedlaserbeam]

Round 1: Reenvision FMA with Kimblee as a female alchemist. How, if at all, would things be different? In providing your answer, please pay specific attention to good lord, son, get yourself a different hairstyle. I picture Sara J. Kimblee with a fabulous and practical bob, somehow.

ETA: Pictured: what I actually envisioned the moment I asked this question. Her hair decs are Philosopher's Stones.

Round 2: Why does Kimblee loathe Ishval so much? Is it something about Ishval in particular, or would he exhibit equal amounts of racist fuckwaddery against any nation assuming it manifested X trait, and if so, what is that trait?

[explosivecombat]

OH BOY.

Round 1: The funny thing about this is that every time I have tried to discuss Rule 63 Kimblee, pretty much the only thing that tends to change is her hairstyle. Everything Kimblee does could just as easily be done by a woman as it could a man, and since gender doesn't seem to hinder Amestrian women in the military nearly as much as one might suspect given that it takes place in 1915, there wouldn't be much conflict there, even. Somehow I doubt people would give her too much shit anyway, because you just don't fuck with the walking bomb, that's not a good idea.

...the hairstyle would be something short and decidedly more practical, however, though she'd still like wearing suits just because ahahaha like hell if she's going to be fighting battles and jumping around on moving trains and running around in blizzards in a skirt. (She'd also be really flat-chested and hating every second of it, and taking advantage of Amestris' schizofashion to get herself a damn push-up bra because look there are twelve-year-olds that look less like a twelve-year-old than she does.)

Round 2: I actually wouldn't go so far as to say that Kimblee loathes Ishval. It sounds contradictory given how he is, but hear me out for a sec.

During the chapters depicting the war itself, Kimblee has many racist individuals in his unit; there are a lot of remarks made by these individuals - there are comments made about enjoying seeing the Ishvalans die, there are comments about how stupid/backwards they are, there are comments made about how they can't be trusted, the whole nine yards. Kimblee actually never makes any of these remarks himself; he generally remains fixated on his task, and even after the war is over, he never makes any direct derogatory comments toward the people of Ishval himself - he actually doesn't say much of anything to imply that he has thoughts on them one way or another. He isn't kind towards them, but he isn't insulting, either; he gets annoyed with Ishvalans being condescending towards him and he's more than condescending himself when one of them is getting on his nerves particularly badly, but I'll get into those thoughts in a second - for the time being, directly-stated thoughts on Ishval are as follows:

When Envy goads him into making the initial racist fuckwad comments to establish that Kimblee Is A Bad Person, what he actually says, directly and straightforwardly, about Ishval is that he was told to slaughter all Ishvalans in his path, and if one of them got away from him, then that means he didn't do his job very well. Envy says he thought it would be a fun job for him, and Kimblee doesn't disagree, but he doesn't directly agree either.

The only other time he brings up Ishval is when he's talking to Major Miles in Fort Briggs, at which point he asks Miles why he has so many issues with him, and asks him directly whether it's because he was an active State Alchemist during the war. He asks if Miles wants an apology, or money, or if he wants to kill him; then he says something about how nothing Miles does to him will make the loss of Ishval any less painful.

It's pretty much implied, then, that his thoughts on Ishval are that it was a job and that's literally all it was to him - no more, no less. He loves his work, and he doesn't feel any guilt or remorse for what he's done; he's known as the Destroyer of Ishval, and he takes a lot of pride in that title because it means that he did well at his job. He is very sadistic and not above using what happened to taunt people he doesn't like, but that's something he does to literally everyone, and Ishval happens to be the most convenient sore spot to press on when he's dealing with Ishvalans directly.

However, as a result of the Ishvalans losing the civil war and the fact that he's still being goaded into killing them with references to that war and implications that he's not very good at his job if he can't kill them all, he's very much of the mindset that Ishvalans don't deserve to live. He has a very strange understanding of the concept "survival of the fittest," and he generally takes the Ishvalans' collective loss as a sign that they don't deserve to inherit the world - that for whatever reason, they hadn't adapted enough or acquired enough resources to be able to defeat the Amestrian army and defend themselves. It's less that he hates Ishval as a whole and more that he's adopted a really, really extreme us -vs- them mentality that admittedly tends to be found in places such as war zones, but he never really came out of it and he still tends to think of Ishvalans as The Other rather than as people. This would be why he gets pissed off at being condescended to, and why he talks down to them so much - they simply aren't people to him.

It's also worth noting that he treats the Drachman soldiers that he sacrifices for the blood crest with the same sort of attitude as he does the Ishvalans, presumably because...well, they're sacrifices. They're going to die, so he doesn't need to treat them on the same level as he would people who can still influence the world and have the right to inherit it. So it's not so much a problem with Ishval itself, nor is it anything the people did outside of lose the damn war in the first place.