Alchemy & Capitalism

 Will I get to 50 Saturday Notes in 2023? We shall see!

I have finished the Thrawn Trilogy, and now I’m going to read a couple of books before we get to the next Skulduggery Pleasant, I think? I am not sure. I have some mixed feelings about this Anne Bonny book (it relies heavily on using modern arguments about sexism to make its point, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong; it also doesn’t cite sources in a few early statements which I have questions about), but who knows?

I’ve started replaying Shadow of War again, too. It’s fun–and I’ve found that I prefer messing around more fun than the storyline? Not that the story is un-fun, but even in the tutorial phases the Nemesis System is really cool.

Alchemy & Capitalism

A few months ago, Kotaku published an article (and they weren’t the only ones who released the article, as a quick Internet search revealed) in which the central thesis–helpfully summarized in the article’s title–was that the story of Fullmetal Alchemist was written as an effective and blistering critique of capitalism.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this again. I made comments about it when I saw it in August. For whatever reason, I thought I’d talk a bit about it again and expand my thoughts on the subject.

I’m going to come right out of the gate and tell you that I think that’s bunk. The article more or less conflates capitalism and fascism as the same thing, which they’re not. I think the biggest hole in the entire argument is that if the story was really about the evils of capitalism, then the main villain would be a capitalist seeking power and influence through wealth. But that’s not what we see–the main villain of the story is trying to become God. In fact, none of the main villains are characters who are trying to attain more capital. Even Greed, who is more of an antihero than a villain by the end of the story, is not seeking to increase his wealth or influence; instead, “greed” in the story is defined as wanting more of everything, including not just money, but also minions, objects, and women.

The only way that analysis remotely works is if you define capitalism as ‘bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it’, but that doesn’t actually work. It’s a popular thing nowadays to blame a lot of things on capitalism on the Internet, though even those cases generally involve greed and the accumulation of wealth.

With all of that being said, it’s a shame because I think a story that heavily features alchemy would be perfect for talking about modern greed, especially with how mechanical magical systems often are in modern fantasy. Consider: in the real world, Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his diaries about how much he hated alchemists for being hucksters. He acknowledged that some had invented useful things–though they also created things that harmed people. Most were peddling crap based on sleight of hand or ignorance so that they could make a quick buck.

Imagine: a fantasy world in which alchemists have created a treat to a common ailment, except they charge exorbitant prices so that most people can’t afford it. Or they can cure it outright, though they instead make people pay a lot of money for pieces of the cure instead of curing it outright. Or! They can’t cure it at all, but make a placebo treatment that makes it look like they did, and no one can tell the difference.

Imagine: alchemists using their power to turn something into gold. Except then after a certain amount of time, it turns back into whatever metal or substance it was before; therefore, if you were a noble who hired the alchemist to make money for you, if wanted to keep your wealth, you had to keep paying the alchemist to make sure that your gold stayed gold.

Imagine: your alchemists have made devices that give you certain advantages, like communication across the kingdom or being able to see across great distances. Every so often the device breaks down, and can’t be fixed. You have to buy a new one at a higher price. The audience finds out that alchemists could build the device to last, but doesn’t so that they can make more money.

There are so many stories in which real world issues are translated into science fiction or fantasy analogies. There’s no reason you can’t use alchemy to do the same. And alchemy already has a lot of real world baggage! Even though alchemy helped pave the way to modern chemistry and science (remember, Sir Isaac Newton was also an alchemy scholar), there were also quite a lot of alchemists out there trying to hustle people, and they gained a reputation for it! Why, then, are alchemists in fantasy fiction not portrayed like this at all?

And when the idea of “Alchemy as a critique of capitalism or greed” comes up, there is so much you can do with this concept. Maybe it exists out there somewhere, but I haven’t seen it anywhere.

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