Friday, 4 October 2019

4/10/19 - Favourite Character Praise Friday - Riza Hawkeye


Hello and welcome back to Favourite Character Praise Friday! This is one of my absolute favourite posts to write and I hope you enjoy my picking apart of my favourite characters enough to stick around while I examine my next victim, I mean, character. Don’t worry, I do not rank these characters in a particular order, it just so happens that some characters are better worth sharing praise for at a different point in time to others! Remember, every fifth instalment is Least Favourite Character Praise Friday, so keep an eye out for me probing at characters I can’t stand and raving about how well they were written in order to evoke such a reaction.

So, who is the subject of my next Favourite Character Praise Friday?

Riza Hawkeye from the Fullmetal Alchemist Franchise 



Warning! The following content will contain spoilers for the Fullmetal Alchemist Franchise! 

So, who is my first victim, post-hiatus? Riza Hawkeye from the Fullmetal Alchemist Franchise. I’ll admit, you’ll be seeing a fair amount of her this month as she is one of my all-time-favourites. I actually wrote an essay about her for university coursework because a friend of mine insulted her and her character arc.

I have been a fan of Riza’s character for many reasons, and not just because of her heavily implied romantic relationship with Roy Mustang, despite my shipping it. I generally love seeing such a complicated character be presented. Hiromu Arakawa gave us an absolute gem with Riza, being a multi-faceted, insubordinate yet trustworthy character with an immensely well-crafted story, which interweaves perfectly with her perceived love interest.

I feel like a lot can be learned about Riza from both a stand-alone character perspective but also in the idea of writing an established relationship, whether romantic or platonic.

The first thing I think that I, as a writer, learned from the way Riza was written would be that dry humour is equally as effective. When I was writing, particularly for young adults, prior to exposing myself to Arakawa’s content, the majority of the humour I used was loud and boisterous, with characters poking fun out of each other, bawdy banter and crude jokes. I even once had a character dare his best friend to carry him on his back in a pair of golden high heeled boots that belonged to another one of their friends. While these aspects of humour worked, especially in circumstances where characters are either immensely comfortable with one another, or are in a 21 Dares type of scenario, they weren’t necessarily the be-all and end all of humour. Riza’s means of joking with her superior, Roy, tended to be similar in reference to what she would say, however, her delivery was usually quiet, snide and sharp. In their case, it tended to be quips about Roy’s inability to use his alchemy in wet environments, which became a running joke throughout the franchise, particularly as Riza had snubbed him as being useless, as if his other military training was surplus compared to his alchemic prowess. Observing this as someone consuming this content exposed me to a more adult and mature method of sharing how a character may feel about a companion, and establishing their rapport for the readers / consumers. I thought this was really interesting!

Another aspect of Riza’s character that I adored to no end was how serious she was in contrast to the other characters in her company. Despite her being a lieutenant in the military, she is surrounded by young and boisterous male characters that tend to be over-dramatic when left to their own devices. She, in contrast, is significantly more reserved and stern, yet still gets along very well with her colleagues, despite the differences in their behaviour and outlook. In some instances, it is the way in which they share trauma, with many of the older characters in the series having served in the military during the wall in Ishval, however, even with that in mind, they do not tend to discuss those events due to them being too horrific. I found Riza’s perspective on her actions in Ishval as interesting when compared to other characters like Kimblee, who seemed remorseless. In contrast, her reaction to the atrocities that took place was that she deserved to be executed for the war crimes she committed, and she was willing to serve her country until she was granted the chance to die by court martial as she felt she deserved.

The last thing was how to portray a different type of devotion. Regardless of how one looks at the relationship between Roy and Riza, romantic or platonic, their storylines are closely interwoven to demonstrate how close the pair are. The level of trust they have in each other is hard to pull-off in fiction, in my experience, without the action coming across as forced. However, Roy and Riza are constantly demonstrating that they will help one another when they need it, with Riza saving Roy’s life as early as episode five, and him returning the favour by episode nineteen. They are co-dependent on one another, sharing the same goals and ideals, deciding it would be better for them to be punished for what they did at war, instead of getting on with their lives as if nothing happened, or ending their lives themselves. Which, ultimately, made Riza’s declaration that she had “no intention of going on by [herself]” toward the end of the series to be much more emotive, as she never wanted to end her life by suicide. This is, likely due to the fact that military systems tend to consider suicide or attempting to do so as cowardice.

Ultimately, I love Riza’s character, regardless of what she taught me. I hope that my analysis will help you see her in a new light!

Please, if you have opinions on Riza, feel free to share them with me! Don’t forget you can check out my previous Character Praise by looking through the hashtags below.
And remember!

Per Aruda Ad Astra!

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