Not to bust in on someone else’s post but hiiii royed shipper here. This is all very accurate and good but I would like to also add: the guilt complexes. Roy and Ed are both defined, narratively, by their past mistakes via alchemy. From their first interaction in the manga, they are explicitly shown to be more similar then they are different through the text and paneling. They butt heads, but to the average person they are both terrifying state alchemists who wield a lot of power. We get this very lovely panel where Ed and Roy are literally set out from the rest of the crowd, literally placed separately and away from average people with some text along the lines “they aren’t quite human.” In the manga, this is our introduction to their dynamic. They fight, they both aren’t quite human. Roy and Ed both are working to fix their past mistakes and they are using and bouncing off of eachother to do so. There’s this utter blatant you scratch my back I scratch yours to their early dynamic that really compels me. Roy understands Ed from the minute he meets Ed, but Ed doesn’t really understand Roy until the end of the series. They clash because they are both too similar, have different methodology and Ed again doesn’t really understand Roy’s whole Deal™️ for a long time. Only for them to finally come together in full understanding in the finale of both mangahood and 03.
I find their relationship to be a really fun twist on the mentor/mentee shounen trope, and easily one of the most compelling dynamics in FMA. But I actually didn’t come out of FMA as a royed shipper.
Unfortunately, I found that the vast majority of the fandom sees Roy and Ed as having a father/son kind of relationship, and this is 90% of what platonic royed fics are about. Frankly, I feel like parental!Roy flattens so much of their more interesting elements as a dynamic and removes a very important thing both mangahood and 03 establish by the end of their runs: Roy and Ed are equals. If not in actual societal status, then how they view each other. Ed has grown up enough and understands the world enough that he can look Roy in the eye. Parental Roy kind of… reverses that in my mind, as well as I think introducing a kind of tenderness that we understandably want Roy to have towards kid Ed but really doesn’t match his canonical approach to mentoring Ed.
So I looked on the other side of the fence and found that, in my opinion, royed shippers were engaging in the royed dynamic in much more nuanced, layered ways then parental, platonic royed enjoyers were.
(NO hate to parental Roy, it’s just not my thing)
Also. The majority of royed shippers are interested in near the end of canon to post canon settings where Ed is an adult. Some aren’t and I truly do not care what people do with fictional barbie dolls (fantasy and play is not incriminating and never should be) but it’s a bit of a misrepresentation to flatten all royed shippers and all royed content/fic/art as underage when that’s just statistically not very true. Especially Royed in 2025.
I completely understand why people aren’t into royed, it’s absolutely not the vibe for everyone. But that’s the textual evidence that really drives that ship IMO and my personal experience of getting into it. (Also. COS. COS is so fucking royed coded it’s crazy)
