BABY'S FIRST ESSAY
THIS IS RAMBLING! Rambling about Envy! It's not really an essay even because it's not coherent! JUST RANDOM THINGS I HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT. Also contains random babble about Devit, and spoilers for FMA 95. WHOO.
Stuff about Envy's nature lies under the cut.
I HAVEN'T TOLD ENVY'S APP STORY YET because at least part of it I need to get permission from someone else to tell. The hilarious part. But in any case, unrelated to that, I first started thinking vaguely about apping Envy when FMA 93 came out and we got this page. I had always liked Envy! I used to play Greed back in the day, and ever since then I really loved the homunculi in general and their fucked up happy human-hating mass-murdering family (CAN YOU PICK OUT ANY APP PATTERNS OF MINE YET?). I have a thing for "fake" humans who end up totally inhuman. But I never really considered apping Envy because . . . I didn't think I could pull it off. AT THAT POINT I had never played a heavy sadist or anything. Greed is in a category of his own among the homunculi, being the one who gets humanized (first figuratively and then literally later, in a sense). Playing Greed, who doesn't lie or hit women or kill his People and tries not to hurt feelings unnecessarily, is totally unlike playing Envy, who just . . . has no scruples. Not a scruple to be found. I HAD NEVER DONE THAT BEFORE. Also, reading the series as far as I had (up until about where they bring Winry to Briggs), I had gotten this "Envy tops" impression that was sort of mistaken, and it's hard for me to play characters who top unless they're hilarious in doing so (like Haru and Hyuuga).
THEN I SAW THAT PAGE and that whole sequence in general, where Envy basically gets verbally owned by Roy, and I was like "Ha ha, man, he fucked that up BAD." And then chapter 94 came out, where he gets SLAUGHTERED by Roy in their fight and is like shaking and cowering in front of him, and UPON SEEING THAT I decided I had to app him, because I realized I'd been wrong about his character all along! Envy doesn't top! Envy actually bottoms really hard! GO TEAM APP PATTERN!
I mean, I say this, but I do realize that sometimes Envy tops. He tops the fuck out of Hughes when he kills him, he tops Marcoh the first time they speak in canon--he is a horrible, horrible being (I really hesitate to use "person" for Envy) and extremely manipulative and he is not stupid (all of the time). He can be really, really good at reading people and twisting their hearts to his advantage, and then breaking them in half for the lulz. Envy is a badass. It's true!
The first time I read the series, though, or part of the series, it never really sunk in for me just what a slave to his emotions and personal failures Envy is. I remember back when I played Greed, how I had a conversation once in the comments of an essay I wrote, SEE HERE! About how some of the homunculi seem totally ruled by their sins, and others don't. BACK THEN, chapter 95 hadn't happened, and we both placed Envy in the latter category. But now 95's come and gone and Envy is dead and everything makes sense, as Himeko put it in the comments there:
he's a bully who wants to build himself up at the expense of others, because he's got the issues you mention of, well, being a horrifying monster and a "flawed creation" and thus envies others who aren't saddled with that.
And it contradicted what I said in that essay:
Envy has uh, body image issues, but he's not jealous of everyone and everything.
And the point of chapter 95 and Envy's suicide is that TWO YEARS AGO I WAS WRONG; HIS ENVY REALLY DOES INFLUENCE HIS EVERY ACTION. He is envious of humans for the fact that they're so very strong despite being so very weak, and that they have support and love and he will never have those things. As Desu pointed out back then, because of those feelings, he's obsessed with taking humans down a peg. And this obsession does in fact totally rule him. SO MANY TIMES IN CANON he loses it because someone makes him feel inferior, by insulting his looks or escaping his clutches or pitying him or dissing him. He makes stupid decisions in these circumstances because he's so ruled by his sin that he can't logic his way through the situation with a cool head--see the scene where he blows up at Wrath for allowing Roy and the others to live because what's the point of our existence if people laugh at us?
There are eyes of calm within these hurricanes of anger, and Envy operates within those eyes in a disturbingly calculated fashion, except for how sometimes he doesn't and instead opts to just go LOL TURNING INTO A DRAGON AND CRUSHING YOU NOW BECAUSE YOU LOOKED DOWN ON ME. The angrier you get him, the dumber the decisions he makes, moving from "let's get these filthy humans to kill one another" to "let's snap and take out these humans myself" to "let's make dumb mistakes and rant and rave in the process." But even when he's at his chilliest and most intelligent, laughing off insults and manipulating people to do his bidding, the ROOT of that behavior is still "BAWWWWW I HATE MYSELF."
(AS A SIDE NOTE I find it interesting that at one point when Hohenheim is talking to Pride, Pride claims that he feels no wrath or envy or the like because he is PRIDE, but Envy explicitly indulges in most of the other sins--there's even a hilarious line about "the wrath of Envy," and his pride is on a par with Pride's. Totally unrelated, I also find it interesting that after the 95 revelation and the earlier revelation that Pride is a copy of Father's original form, signifying his pride in himself, we STILL have no explanation for Lust, who never displayed any lustful traits at all.)
Anyway, what I'm saying now about Envy also contradicts other things I said in that essay, such as
A homunculus isn't "born" with a predisposition to hate humans, or to want to cause pain and chaos.
Rather . . . Greed wasn't born with such a predisposition. At the time I assumed it applied to all homunculi, but it doesn't; it varies based on the sin they represent. Envy was born with the predisposition to hate humans and want to cause them pain, because he is Envy. Greed's purpose in life is to want things; this can never be fully satisfied, but it can be satisfied to an extent by . . . getting things. "Getting stuff" doesn't necessitate hurting people. Envy's purpose in life is to envy humans. And the only way to alleviate that pain is to bring humans down to a level beneath him by breaking them, so that he won't envy them any more, and even that doesn't work. So Envy's acting in accordance with what he is does necessitate that he hurts people in the process.
This is why I'm going to say it HERE AND NOW FOR THE RECORD. THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO HELP ENVY, EVER. No matter who you play. XD He is beyond Jesusing. He is a thing and he's completely irredeemable and he cannot be changed.
You MAY HAVE NOTICED in my description of him and his motives how similar he is to Devit! I have character pings, okay. :( I mean, "hates humanity, hates being seen as a monster or pitied, flies into rages when he's looked down upon, bully who knocks down others to try and make himself feel superior when he knows he's not, superhuman being who kills people without remorse." They are very similar in those ways. But I WAS THINKING ABOUT THIS, and I was thinking about the differences--namely, I was thinking about how Devit in camp right now is sort of making friends and building a life and has a boyfriend and is coming to understand humans better than he did in canon. He is still a Noah and he still has a genetic hatred of humans and a predisposition to want to destroy them. But he manages to--live, despite that, in both canon and now even moreso in camp. And Envy CAN AND WILL NEVER HAVE THAT. Envy is not going to settle down with a nice patient priest who listens to him and play video games and fumble towards happiness. XD Ever.
WHY IS THIS THE CASE? If they're so similar in motive and attitude, why am I absolutely adamant that Envy is incapable of love, understanding, and even basic sexual attraction, while Devit, although still a Noah and still completely fucked up in the head and genocidal, has been touched by these things in camp and is growing slowly because of them?
Most importantly, Devit is a human. He doesn't identify as human, but he IS one, as Ticky points out in canon. He's a human with a thing in his head, a thing that tells him to do the bad things he does. The Noah is a separate being that lives inside of him and talks to him. And he can and does fight it. ALL of them do; in the manga, Ticky is the one who is referred to by the Earl as "repressing his Noah," but Devit mentions that all of them except Skinn do this to an extent, because if they didn't they'd be mindless killing machines and would make stupid choices. So Devit can choose whether or not to listen to his voices. The nature of those voices makes him default to thinking it's a GOOD IDEA TO DO SO, but he also has the presence of mind and the humanity to balance that out if it's not in his best interest.
Envy is . . . nothing. Envy is not a human with a thing in his head. Envy is all he has and all he is. If you get rid of Envy's web of complexes and urges and instinctual motives, there's nothing underneath. This is why he can't be reasoned with, nor can his behavior be changed. Envy's response to people understanding and reaching out to him is to kill himself! As he says to Wrath, what is the point of his existence if he's lesser than humans? You can't make Envy not envious, and as long as he's envious he's hurting and angry and he needs to hurt people. There aren't OTHER ways of making him happy. Devit, you know, he likes killing and ending the world, sure, but he also likes playing, and dancing, and good food, and having sex, and people liking him--because he's a human being. Envy isn't a human being, and what he likes is "not hating myself in comparison to humans," and he achieves that by making humans hurt. Reaching out to him only drives the point home that you're better than he is, and he will want to make you hurt more. SUCH IS HIS LIFE.
In a gameplay sense, I do realize that this--raises issues! Because Jesii will want to try and ~help~ him. And he will hurt them emotionally, and then physically, if emotionally didn't do the trick. Really this goes for everyone he threads with. So here is my statement: COMMUNICATE WITH ME, GUYS. :|d I want to play to people's comfort levels, and we can come up with ways to cockblock him if and when we need to. If you want to play out heavy mindfuckitry, I am up for that (or I wouldn't have apped him). If you don't, I am up for that too, and if things start heading in that direction we can DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. I don't want anyone to be scared to play with me XD (On the other hand, USE DISCRETION? Only throw characters into situations with him if you're comfy, and so on. If you don't want your six-year-old child to run away bawling, maybe don't jump me.)
K YOU LOVE IT GO
Stuff about Envy's nature lies under the cut.
I HAVEN'T TOLD ENVY'S APP STORY YET because at least part of it I need to get permission from someone else to tell. The hilarious part. But in any case, unrelated to that, I first started thinking vaguely about apping Envy when FMA 93 came out and we got this page. I had always liked Envy! I used to play Greed back in the day, and ever since then I really loved the homunculi in general and their fucked up happy human-hating mass-murdering family (CAN YOU PICK OUT ANY APP PATTERNS OF MINE YET?). I have a thing for "fake" humans who end up totally inhuman. But I never really considered apping Envy because . . . I didn't think I could pull it off. AT THAT POINT I had never played a heavy sadist or anything. Greed is in a category of his own among the homunculi, being the one who gets humanized (first figuratively and then literally later, in a sense). Playing Greed, who doesn't lie or hit women or kill his People and tries not to hurt feelings unnecessarily, is totally unlike playing Envy, who just . . . has no scruples. Not a scruple to be found. I HAD NEVER DONE THAT BEFORE. Also, reading the series as far as I had (up until about where they bring Winry to Briggs), I had gotten this "Envy tops" impression that was sort of mistaken, and it's hard for me to play characters who top unless they're hilarious in doing so (like Haru and Hyuuga).
THEN I SAW THAT PAGE and that whole sequence in general, where Envy basically gets verbally owned by Roy, and I was like "Ha ha, man, he fucked that up BAD." And then chapter 94 came out, where he gets SLAUGHTERED by Roy in their fight and is like shaking and cowering in front of him, and UPON SEEING THAT I decided I had to app him, because I realized I'd been wrong about his character all along! Envy doesn't top! Envy actually bottoms really hard! GO TEAM APP PATTERN!
I mean, I say this, but I do realize that sometimes Envy tops. He tops the fuck out of Hughes when he kills him, he tops Marcoh the first time they speak in canon--he is a horrible, horrible being (I really hesitate to use "person" for Envy) and extremely manipulative and he is not stupid (all of the time). He can be really, really good at reading people and twisting their hearts to his advantage, and then breaking them in half for the lulz. Envy is a badass. It's true!
The first time I read the series, though, or part of the series, it never really sunk in for me just what a slave to his emotions and personal failures Envy is. I remember back when I played Greed, how I had a conversation once in the comments of an essay I wrote, SEE HERE! About how some of the homunculi seem totally ruled by their sins, and others don't. BACK THEN, chapter 95 hadn't happened, and we both placed Envy in the latter category. But now 95's come and gone and Envy is dead and everything makes sense, as Himeko put it in the comments there:
he's a bully who wants to build himself up at the expense of others, because he's got the issues you mention of, well, being a horrifying monster and a "flawed creation" and thus envies others who aren't saddled with that.
And it contradicted what I said in that essay:
Envy has uh, body image issues, but he's not jealous of everyone and everything.
And the point of chapter 95 and Envy's suicide is that TWO YEARS AGO I WAS WRONG; HIS ENVY REALLY DOES INFLUENCE HIS EVERY ACTION. He is envious of humans for the fact that they're so very strong despite being so very weak, and that they have support and love and he will never have those things. As Desu pointed out back then, because of those feelings, he's obsessed with taking humans down a peg. And this obsession does in fact totally rule him. SO MANY TIMES IN CANON he loses it because someone makes him feel inferior, by insulting his looks or escaping his clutches or pitying him or dissing him. He makes stupid decisions in these circumstances because he's so ruled by his sin that he can't logic his way through the situation with a cool head--see the scene where he blows up at Wrath for allowing Roy and the others to live because what's the point of our existence if people laugh at us?
There are eyes of calm within these hurricanes of anger, and Envy operates within those eyes in a disturbingly calculated fashion, except for how sometimes he doesn't and instead opts to just go LOL TURNING INTO A DRAGON AND CRUSHING YOU NOW BECAUSE YOU LOOKED DOWN ON ME. The angrier you get him, the dumber the decisions he makes, moving from "let's get these filthy humans to kill one another" to "let's snap and take out these humans myself" to "let's make dumb mistakes and rant and rave in the process." But even when he's at his chilliest and most intelligent, laughing off insults and manipulating people to do his bidding, the ROOT of that behavior is still "BAWWWWW I HATE MYSELF."
(AS A SIDE NOTE I find it interesting that at one point when Hohenheim is talking to Pride, Pride claims that he feels no wrath or envy or the like because he is PRIDE, but Envy explicitly indulges in most of the other sins--there's even a hilarious line about "the wrath of Envy," and his pride is on a par with Pride's. Totally unrelated, I also find it interesting that after the 95 revelation and the earlier revelation that Pride is a copy of Father's original form, signifying his pride in himself, we STILL have no explanation for Lust, who never displayed any lustful traits at all.)
Anyway, what I'm saying now about Envy also contradicts other things I said in that essay, such as
A homunculus isn't "born" with a predisposition to hate humans, or to want to cause pain and chaos.
Rather . . . Greed wasn't born with such a predisposition. At the time I assumed it applied to all homunculi, but it doesn't; it varies based on the sin they represent. Envy was born with the predisposition to hate humans and want to cause them pain, because he is Envy. Greed's purpose in life is to want things; this can never be fully satisfied, but it can be satisfied to an extent by . . . getting things. "Getting stuff" doesn't necessitate hurting people. Envy's purpose in life is to envy humans. And the only way to alleviate that pain is to bring humans down to a level beneath him by breaking them, so that he won't envy them any more, and even that doesn't work. So Envy's acting in accordance with what he is does necessitate that he hurts people in the process.
This is why I'm going to say it HERE AND NOW FOR THE RECORD. THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO HELP ENVY, EVER. No matter who you play. XD He is beyond Jesusing. He is a thing and he's completely irredeemable and he cannot be changed.
You MAY HAVE NOTICED in my description of him and his motives how similar he is to Devit! I have character pings, okay. :( I mean, "hates humanity, hates being seen as a monster or pitied, flies into rages when he's looked down upon, bully who knocks down others to try and make himself feel superior when he knows he's not, superhuman being who kills people without remorse." They are very similar in those ways. But I WAS THINKING ABOUT THIS, and I was thinking about the differences--namely, I was thinking about how Devit in camp right now is sort of making friends and building a life and has a boyfriend and is coming to understand humans better than he did in canon. He is still a Noah and he still has a genetic hatred of humans and a predisposition to want to destroy them. But he manages to--live, despite that, in both canon and now even moreso in camp. And Envy CAN AND WILL NEVER HAVE THAT. Envy is not going to settle down with a nice patient priest who listens to him and play video games and fumble towards happiness. XD Ever.
WHY IS THIS THE CASE? If they're so similar in motive and attitude, why am I absolutely adamant that Envy is incapable of love, understanding, and even basic sexual attraction, while Devit, although still a Noah and still completely fucked up in the head and genocidal, has been touched by these things in camp and is growing slowly because of them?
Most importantly, Devit is a human. He doesn't identify as human, but he IS one, as Ticky points out in canon. He's a human with a thing in his head, a thing that tells him to do the bad things he does. The Noah is a separate being that lives inside of him and talks to him. And he can and does fight it. ALL of them do; in the manga, Ticky is the one who is referred to by the Earl as "repressing his Noah," but Devit mentions that all of them except Skinn do this to an extent, because if they didn't they'd be mindless killing machines and would make stupid choices. So Devit can choose whether or not to listen to his voices. The nature of those voices makes him default to thinking it's a GOOD IDEA TO DO SO, but he also has the presence of mind and the humanity to balance that out if it's not in his best interest.
Envy is . . . nothing. Envy is not a human with a thing in his head. Envy is all he has and all he is. If you get rid of Envy's web of complexes and urges and instinctual motives, there's nothing underneath. This is why he can't be reasoned with, nor can his behavior be changed. Envy's response to people understanding and reaching out to him is to kill himself! As he says to Wrath, what is the point of his existence if he's lesser than humans? You can't make Envy not envious, and as long as he's envious he's hurting and angry and he needs to hurt people. There aren't OTHER ways of making him happy. Devit, you know, he likes killing and ending the world, sure, but he also likes playing, and dancing, and good food, and having sex, and people liking him--because he's a human being. Envy isn't a human being, and what he likes is "not hating myself in comparison to humans," and he achieves that by making humans hurt. Reaching out to him only drives the point home that you're better than he is, and he will want to make you hurt more. SUCH IS HIS LIFE.
In a gameplay sense, I do realize that this--raises issues! Because Jesii will want to try and ~help~ him. And he will hurt them emotionally, and then physically, if emotionally didn't do the trick. Really this goes for everyone he threads with. So here is my statement: COMMUNICATE WITH ME, GUYS. :|d I want to play to people's comfort levels, and we can come up with ways to cockblock him if and when we need to. If you want to play out heavy mindfuckitry, I am up for that (or I wouldn't have apped him). If you don't, I am up for that too, and if things start heading in that direction we can DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. I don't want anyone to be scared to play with me XD (On the other hand, USE DISCRETION? Only throw characters into situations with him if you're comfy, and so on. If you don't want your six-year-old child to run away bawling, maybe don't jump me.)
K YOU LOVE IT GO