Sunday, February 6, 2022

Fullmetal Alchemist Rewatch Post




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.

12 comments:

  1. Anime has a tendency towards generation-definers, and this was certainly one of them.

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  2. Love these revisits whenever they come up. It's amazing to me how the modern cartoon landscape (your SUs, your SPOPs, your Dragon Princes) really were built on the foundations of the early 2000s anime boom.

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    1. Kaptain Kristian on Youtube, some years ago now, did a short video on the importance of Toonami as a curator during those years. Remains one of my favorite essays

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  3. As a paladin of the 2003 version, this is a good post that points out what's great about Brohood, bad about 2003, and vice versa.

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  4. In 2003, Envy's an interesting character for being the only homunculus who identifies as his human self - and identifies strongly enough to be his mommy's weird Oedipal lackey for centuries. This is important though. The real magnum opus in the show wasn't the red rock that lets you do the clappy clappy good. It's the homunculi themselves, the resurrection body.

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    1. Yeah, it's definitely worth nothing how in both versions the homunculi are treated as essentially disposable by their creators (Except Izumi, and to a lesser extent the brothers)

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    2. I think in Envy's case it's precisely the opposite - there's references to other Greeds and Lusts before the current ones, but there's only ever been one Envy. The trio of Dante/Envy/Hohenheim are a foil for the Elric brothers - before Hohenheim's conscience got the better of him they were all perfectly content to be an immortal family together no matter the cost (whereas Ed & Al blanched at it - initially).

      That's part of what makes the 2003 anime interesting to me, is the juxtaposition of this petty immortal family drama against the atrocities of industrial modernity. Dante (and Envy and Hohenheim) was only ever a vulture, an opportunist. Amestris's mirror is Nazi Germany, which of course never needed any immortal alchemists interfering to commit its atrocities. And in the end Ed goes down pretty much the same path Dante did, building rockets and not caring where they come down so long as he can be reunited with his family.

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    3. That's a very good way of looking at it, for sure.

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  5. First anime I finished and still a touchstone for me. I should try out the 2003 sometime, it looks interesting

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  6. I know I can't stop talking about / thinking about Saker Tarsos' Concept Crafting lately, but seriously it would be perfect for a FMA-style system: https://tarsostheorem.blogspot.com/2020/05/crafting-with-concepts-1-system.html

    Granted I have not seen FMA in a very long time and it was 2003 not Brotherhood but unless I'm completely misremembering...

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  7. While I feel the first episode of Brotherhood was a bad move and exists becuase Bones felt the train fight and coal town wasn't strong enough, it did show the cast weren't the only ones who figured things out.
    The manga had really fun omakes that skewed whatever the dramtic efents of the plot were.

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  8. If I have to said Dante for me beat father because how it end: Dante just stright out kill Ed faith in the equivalent exchange and...nothing, Ed have nothing to said over that rather than acepted and then Dante die not because of Ed or some big ass fight that somehow prove Ed better than dante because catharsis. she just die right there.

    I also didnt like brotherhood envy because aside of the cheer "yeah" of mustang killing him(even of he kill himself in the end is a technicism at best) he come as petty bitch nobody really care, while 2003 have a thing over being the first son of ed, which make him the "real" one over Ed and Al, the fact he die with his father really sell it.

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