FMA rant

In today's fandomsecretsthere was a FMA secret about Hawkeye (#109). The secret itself was basically to the effect that Hawkeye was the secretmaker’s favorite female character ever and they hated people who bashed her. The comments, sadly, centered around how the anime treats the series female characters amazingly and the manga makes them dependent and clingy. (Barring the fact that I find it very difficult to view either Winry or Hawkeye as clingy or dependent in either version, one of my problems with the anime is the roles of the female characters in the anime as compared to the manga, though the anime still does better there than most other anime. But that’s not the point.)

Among all the bashing came the latest manga chapter.

( spoilers for chapter...95? )

manhua: Divine Melody Vol 1

At last! A manhua I like that isn’t impossible to find and by a defunct publisher!! Well, I like Four Constables, too, but it reads bother quickly and stilted to me, and I freely confess that I’m mainly interested in one aspect of it.

Cai-Sheng is a fox spirit, but unlike other fox spirits, who must wait 500 years to be able to take on a male of female form and require assistance to be able to take on a human form, she was born with a human form and will be able to take on a male form after only two hundred years, and is the daughter of a divine fox and a nine-hundred-year-old nice-tailed fox. Taken and raised by a clan of fox spirits who were once ordinary fox spirits who want her to father their children once she can take on a male form so that their clan can survive, Cai-Sheng isn’t allowed to interact with anyone outside of her clan.

One day, however, she sneaks away and meets two human children, Duo Xi and Xiao-Que, who become her only friends. When the two are injured protecting her, her sister (in the context of the two having the same master, not biological) Hui-Nyang marks them where they were injured so that Cai-Sheng will be able to find them after they’ve reincarnated and repay her debt. Two hundred years later, Cai-Sheng meets Duo Xi, now a third-rate exorcist named Yun-Shi, defeat a demon who has cursed Xiao-Hui, now Su Ping, the sheltered daughter of a judge. Realizing that Yun-Shi has a crush on Ping, Cai-Sheng decides to repay her debt by match making them, not realizing that the sheltered Ping fell for her male form when she rescued her.

It has the makings of a decently-original complication for a triangle, but doesn’t quite seem to be going that way, and while the tone is rather light so far, there are indications that the main plot surrounding Cai-Sheng’s nature and origins, not to mention the fox clan are rather dark. It’s also steeped in mythology and folklore, and I absolutely adore the fashions.