Beefstew posted:

FMA also draws comparisons between Japanese internment camps in the US and Nazi ones (Fuhrer signs order mirroring the one Roosevelt did, but for a middle eastern coded people).
FMA actually handles this issue worse because there's this dumb scene where an Ishvalan soldier at Briggs brings up his animosity on account of the whole genocide thing, and Ed is like "well, an Ishvalan man was mean to me once. I judge on a personal level. I don't see race." And I never got the sense that Brotherhood was interested in critiquing Ed on this point. FMA 03 actually did confront Ed's subliminal racism more directly, but I digress.
The thing is, using poo poo as allegory, where each thing needs to stand in for one specific other thing, and all of the relationships between the signifiers and what they represent need to be preserved - that is a really bad way to go about reading pretty much anything. All metaphors are messy. And thank God for it, because literature would suck poo poo otherwise.