Forgive me for sounding like a total dork here, but as we were sitting in class the other day and talking about the "yuck factor", I couldn't help but note some similarities between what we are talking about now and two anime series, Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Both of the series have the same premise, but from what I have heard Brotherhood is closer to the manga than is the original Fullmetal Alchemist.
In the series we have the two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric. They lost their mother to sickness, and so they made a plan to use alchemy to bring their mother back to life, by using human transmutation. Their father is an alchemist, but he has been out of the picture for quite some time. After years of studying alchemy (which does exist in their world; it's a world parallel to ours) they make the attempt, but it goes horribly wrong. A portal to another dimension opens, reaching out for a toll because, in alchemy, there is a law of equivalent exchange: you cannot create something out of nothing. At first, Ed loses his leg below the knee, and his brother is taken and rendered apart. In their place is a creature, maybe female, that is supposed to be human but is only human in the barest of senses: it is made out of blood, with sunken areas where the eyes and mouth would be. Viewers do not see what happens to this creature, but in desperation, Ed crawls over to a suit of armor and knocks it over. (When a state official goes to investigate after all of these events, viewers do see a dark stain on the floor.) At the cost of his arm, he is able to rend Alphonse's soul to the armor. From then on, any time anyone encounters the brothers without knowing them already, if they find out about Al, that he's not just wearing the suit of armor, they recoil because, to them, it is unnatural.
This made me think greatly of transgenesis, taking genes from one species and transferring it to another, like with taking Al's soul and binding it to the suit of armor. Also, how everyone recoiled from him definitely reminded me of the so-called "yuck factor".
My question now is: Are there other parallels between what we've been discussing in class and what has been discussed here?
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