FMA Brotherhood...

[seawasp]

Two episodes. Several Crowning Moments of Awesome. ARMSTRONG RULES!

That is all. Good day.

Comments

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

My friend jordannamorgan has fallen hard - and most uncharacteristically - for FMA in the last several months. I'm still Officially Unacquainted, despite a verbal sketch of the premise and lots of pics. (Mostly because I'm planning to recreate Edward's coat-cloak for her.) She's sucked me into several other things in years past, though. What's the particular attraction for you?

[seawasp]

FMA is ... well, just a very well done series. It's set in an alternate world which is CLEARLY heavily based on the Europe of roughly WWI era. A lot of the styles and technology are derived from roughly turn of the century ones in this universe. The major difference is that at some point in the past (around 1400 I think) it was discovered that "alchemy" worked. Alchemists in the FMA universe think of themselves as scientists with a particular talent; an alchemist can transmute matter by using the proper matrices of symbols and then using his inherent power to trigger the transmutation.

The attraction I suppose comes from the combination of a deep and complex world, believable characters, and a very interesting plotline.

The problem with the current (second) FMA series (Fullmetal Alchemist:Brotherhood) is that it sort of fast-forwards through the first several months to a year of story events. The reason for this is that the FIRST series (just called Fullmetal Alchemist) was based on the same manga up to a certain point, so the first series tells that part -- mostly unchanged -- in detail, and presumably the producers of the second series didn't want to spend 26 episodes re-doing the first series with only minor tweaks.

The second series is doing the story in the manga from start to finish, because the manga is ALMOST finished now. The first series couldn't have done that, as the writer wasn't even halfway finished. What this means is that the first series diverges from the manga and ends up telling a very good alternate story which is completely different from the manga.

Overall, I think both are very good.

I particularly like certain characters and events. The main characters Ed and Al are good, of course, but often the secondary characters steal the show.

There are references to FMA in my writing, most significantly in _Threshold_; the Captain of the Odin, General Hohenheim, is named after the character who is Ed and Al's father, and looks very much like him.

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

The first series *drags the early manga out with vast scads of unnecessary filler*. It wouldn't have taken them anywhere NEAR 26 episodes to do it straight.

[seawasp]

What are you talking about, specifically? I can't think of vast scads of unnecessary filler. Well, technically the entire series is "unnecessary". But I can't think of "vast scads" of stuff I'd cut from the first series, unlike -- say -- Dragonball Z or Naruto or Saint Seiya.

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

Okay, you can strike "unnecessary" from the sentence and it'll make more sense. :)

But they did pad out the manga storyline a lot, in addition to rearranging some of it.

(One example: Al's angst after Barry plays on his insecurities lasts, what, five episodes in the first anime?! It's barely a single chapter in the manga before Ed and Winry snap him out of it!)

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

Also, if I recall, they animated at least one of the spinoff novels. I call that filler.

[seawasp]

I'd call that the opposite of filler. The entire latter part of the SHOW could be called Filler, as Dante and her entire plan had nothing to do with the manga. But then, the manga was nowhere near done when they started the show, and Arukawa gave them the green light to do an alternative ending. I think it was an excellent sequence.

The spinoff novels are considered canon by The Cow herself, and so that's not filler.

I can think of only about 2 episodes that really qualify as "unnecessary filler", in the sense that they are (A) not taken from the manga or other sources that the author created, and (B) serve no purpose in the plot. One is the Psyren episode, which AFAICT did nothing to advance the plot OR develop the characters in a meaningful way. The other is actually a couple half-episodes, where they took up a large section of the episode with something irrelevant (the Roy VS Ed duel).

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

Well, the duel was taken from a manga omake, so that qualifies as (A). :)

[voradams.livejournal.com]

My FLBS has my copy of GCA. It will be mine, oh yes.

Unfortunately it is dead tree version, I will need to work out where the bateries belong.

[seawasp]

That version has an eco-friendly energy harvesting approach; it uses the energy generated by the owner to turn the pages! Isn't that neat?