As with my prior revist posts (
Avatar,
Lord of the Rings,
Cowboy Bebop), this is disorganized and has no thesis. Spoilers everywhere, naturally. Unlike those prior ones, though, I don't have notes and there's been several months (by this point, nearly a year) of downtime since the viewing. Shoulda been more on the ball, but so it goes.
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Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood was another formative work for me (as these revisits seem to be trending towards). Right time, right place. Watched it as it aired in 2009-2010 (which, if we are paying attention to timelines, came right after Avatar wrapped up), read the first couple volumes of the manga at the library, and didn't get around to watching the 2003 anime until last year, after finishing my most recent (fourth) Brotherhood rewatch.
Going forward, when I say FMA that is in reference to Brotherhood or elements shared between the two. Presume that as the default. If it's specific to the 2003 adaptation, I'll call it 2003.
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God this show still looks so fucking good.
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Lots of anime have the "did you get to that part" shibboleth, and against all odds FMA does it twice. And while I know I said there would be spoilers up top it still feels unfair to say precisely what they are, just in case someone has managed to miss nearly 20 years of spoilers.
And if you know, you know. Critically, there's not a whole lot to say. It speaks very well for itself.
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Anime often has this thing of having a phrase that keeps getting repeated but it's just clunky enough in translation that the meaning takes entirely too long to sink in. Or perhaps I am just thickheaded and was not being an active viewer at the time, because it took me until now to actually realize what is going on with the taboo on human transmutation. What it is actually saying is "a purely transactional worldview will only lead to continual horrors visited upon humanity" and yeah, yeah that's pretty on point.
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FMA is a poster child for the cathartic benefits of melodrama. Sometimes you feel big emotions and want to have a solid cry and/or scream about it, and this series is all about big emotions with attendant crying and/or screaming. Many tears have been shed.
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I very much appreciate that the cast of FMA generally look like actual people. And unique ones, too; you can easily identify even incidental characters. I remember what Sheska's coworker looks like and she shows up in maybe 30 seconds of one episode.
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Another soundtrack that's been burned into my brain. Can't pick a top song, they're all great.
This is a lie; best songs are One is All, All is One, Knives and Shadows, The Fullmetal Alchemist, The Intrepid, OPs 1, 2 and 4, ED 1 and 4.
That is also a lie; The actual best song is Amestris Military March.
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I do wish we could have seen a bit more of the other state alchemists. I understand why we didn't, but I'd like at least a little throwaway line of "they're all at the southern front" or something like that. We do get to see a bit of the everyday working-class alchemists, and that's nice.
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FMA is actually one of my go-to mental references for D&D wizards. When you have someone who can set someone else on fire with their brain (and is willing to), whoever is in political power is going to want to get as many of those folks around them as they can. Regardless of how centralized power is, you can expect to see war-wizards as a standard, and the structures in place to create more of them.
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Brotherhood's pacing in particular is worth some praise; it is steady as a long-distance runner (once the intial rush is done, I must admit), and I (notoriously bad at watching anything that isn't a video game for long periods of time) can easily do 5-6 episodes a night, every night. Got a weak first episode, though, not a fan.
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Things That 2003 Did Well
- "I LOVE DOGS!", "TINY MINISKIRTS!", etc
- The Philosopher's Stone is a crapshoot - all you'll do is murder hundreds or thousands of people for diminishing returns.
- The final confrontation between Mustang and Bradley.
- Homunculi as the end result of human transmutation.
- Lust having a character.
- Man they weren't fucking around when they were dealing with how Amestris treats Ishval. Writers who use subtext are all cowards indeed.
- The little bit of extra time spent on Al wondering if he was programmed or not.
- Mustang's flashbacks, holy shit (and as part of that, the fact that he killed the Rockbells).
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Things that 2003 Did Not Do Well
- Robo-Archer, what the actual hell.
- Wrath's part in the story gets undermined by being an obnoxious screeching child, which is at least the third worst anime archetype.
- The early filler episodes are generally pretty weak and anomalously of their time more than the rest of the show.
- The plot kinda limps across the finish line.
- Sloth is just kinda eh. I mean so is the Brotherhood version so at least its consistent.
- Not a big fan of what they did with Kimblee. I mean he's still a monster either way, but the loss of the dapperness is too far.
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It has been noted before by many other people that Lust is the only homunculi who serves as the object of the sin rather than the subject. This works very well with her backstory in 2003, and next to not at all with hers in Brotherhood.
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In case anyone has forgotten, on this blog we stan 2nd Lieutenant Maria Ross.
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Winry's great. That's it, that's the point. Winry's just great.
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Honestly let's just expand this to "I like everyone in the cast". Even the weird chimera guys towards the end who really feel like fifth wheels, they're fine. 2003 dropped the character ball in places but Brotherhood nails it. If I hate a character, I like hating them.
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I like how the antagonists compliment each other: Father and Dante are both trying to cheat death, just with different methods. Dante has embraced the rot, clinging to her life despite the ever-diminishing returns of her stones. Father is hellbent on breaking out of the limitations of mortality entirely by going for the all-or-nothing option. Both options fitting for the overall themes of their respective series.
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I feel like it was part and parcel for the era, but FMA leans very heavily on the comic-relief violence vs. real violence divide.
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The one scene in 2003 with Scar's brother, when he walks out into the street naked but for the tattoos of the Grand Art, is one of the most effective moments of cosmic horror I've seen. That's the look of a man who has seen the truth and it is more terrible than anyone can imagine.
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I love how Envy is just, beginning to end, a repulsive piece of shit without a single redeeming quality. They just like hurting people. No sob story, no glimmers of redemption arcs, just this absolute monster cackling with glee over the time he murdered a child and killed a guy while disguised as his wife. A wonderful change of pace of a genre beset by "we must understand this genocidal maniac's motivations because you see, they were sad once." None of that bullshit. Envy's just cruelty and spite and ultimately pathetic.
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Ishval being destroyed in antiquity by a philosopher's stone transmutation in 2003 is better than Xerxes doing the same in Brotherhood. Fuckin' inexplicable blond haired white people in the middle of the fucking desert, what the fuck. Also we get the old Ishvalan man telling off Ed for presuming that they were just ignorant desert barbarians.
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Hoenheim in 2003 is...strange. I was used to him being a rather integral part of the story, and then he comes along as just kinda a deadbeat with a degenerative brain condition. It's thematically appropriate for 2003, but I found it a lot less compelling on the whole. He just kinda shows up and putzes around.
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I am forever amused by Arakawa's "Men should be buff! Women should be vavoom!" quote. She knows what the peorple want and by jove she will give the peorple what they want.
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Olivier Armstrong definitely got kicked down a few notches on the character rankings on rewatch. "Ridiculing your brother as a coward for having a mental breakdown brought on by being forced to mass-murder civilians" is certainly a look, and I wish she got challenged more on that than not at all. Like holy shit. She is a very good example of how fandoms will twist themselves around to favor terrible people because they are quote unquote badass.
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I love everything with Mustang's underlings and the counter-conspiracy. Especially when we get to the end and everything is tying together. When similar "heroes' cunning plan executed perfectly" moments show up in other media I will still call them an FMA moment (The sequels to Sabriel had a notable one)
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I appreciate the chutzpah of the real world twist at the end of 2003, but it falls into the same issue I have with a lot of multiverse stories: when you introduce one alternate world, I immediately think "but what about all the others" and start fixating on that aspect. It's a me problem to be sure, but a problem nonetheless.
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One of the bloopers for Brotherhood features Hoenheim shouting 'FUCK HIM UP!' during Ed's last fight with Father and I am devastated that they didn't include that. You can get 1 F-bomb and still be Pg-13 and that would have been the perfect place.
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So they just let Ling go with a Philosopher's stone, right? I'm not misremembering that? That's kinda fucked.
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It would be, all things considered, rather easy to do a live action FMA adaptation. Yes I know that there was one already and that it failed miserably, but hear me out.
Live-actions often fail because they are trying to capture the style of animation with living people, while ignoring the spirit. The style is nearly impossible to translate and so we end up with cosplay fights on a cheap sound stage.
If you're trying to adapt the exact mixture of melodrama or the exact plot it won't work, but if you stick to "~WW1 era elseworld with alchemy + war is hell + militarist autocrats are evil fucks + nothing is gained without loss + childhood trauma", you should be all good to go. That's the important stuff, the plot can be whatever. Get a director who can do a solid WW2 movie and you're halfway there.
Let's skip over Liore. We're not doing Liore, we're not dealing with the homunculi (we can deal with homunculi, and honestly I think we should, but not those homunculi.) Ed and Al return to central after another bust on looking for the stone. There are two routes we could go here: adapting the Tucker arc, or making something like it (another state alchemist working with incredibly shady shit, possibly with homunculi). Scar can be in the background. Potentially wrap in Lab 5 stuff. You can make a solid movie out of that.
Most difficult thing would be finding a child actor who can convincingly sell his leg being forcibly amputated.
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Overall - I like many of 2003's themes and detail work a whole lot, in many places a touch more than Brotherhood's, but it's overall plotting and pacing is shaky at best; Brotherhood wins handily in the beat-to-beat plot category and has aged a lot better, if we were making this a contest. Which we shouldn't but does feel inevitable in the comparison.
This makes compositional fanfic nice and easy, as you can port the good stuff from 2003 into the good framework of Brotherhood without much trouble.
