Thoughts on Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood

Spoilers. Watch out! (though this goes without saying for all posts on this blog)

Let me begin my saying that I am incredibly biased towards this series. I've been watching/reading Fullmetal Alchemist since the age of 13 or 14. I own several translated volumes of the manga. I own some FMA junk. I have sketched amateur versions of Ed's face on the margins of my homework in years past. FMA Brotherhood's logical progression or storyline completely fracture in the last 10 episodes or so, after "The Promised Day", or the solar eclipse begins. There are far too many separate strands and the cast is scattered all over the place, doing significant things but told too far between. Important events which occurred several volumes ago but were only described in e few panels and never mentioned again are shown through brief flashbacks. Obviously, the studio was either tied up by budgeting issues or constrained by the 18 minute formula.

FMA Brotherhood is 64 episodes and manages to cram in about 108 chapters of the original manga, with a few small adjustments here and there. If you are *true* fan then you no doubt will have read it and watched it. Congratulations, you know the story inside out.

That said, it is a story and I want to try and deconstruct it and make it understandable. At its heart, Brotherhood is not so different from the first anime version which ran between 2003 and 2004 and was done by the studio Bones. There isn't much information about Hiromu Arakawa and this is the norm for most mangakas who tend to draw little avatars of themselves on inside flap of their tankobons and ramble on about their killer deadlines and maniacal editors. But wikipedia states she is from Hokkaido (yes, wiki is actually citable on this webpage) and given that her most recent manga focuses on agriculture, I would say that themes of rural life are present in FMA.

Apart from that, the usual ideas of growing up and "finding yourself" found in a a bildungsroman (my favourite genre in books and on screen) are present as well. To make this a little more manageable, I've added subheadings for the first time ever. (I am dreadful at structuring essays by the way, so this makes my life a lot more easier.)

Character development: the Elric Brothers:

• The story begins when they are children and ends (exact age depending on which you watch - the movie, the first or second anime) when they are adults. At the age of 10 and 11 (Alphonse and Edward respectively), they commit a taboo in Alchemy: human transmutation in an attempt to revive their dead mother. This backfires. Al loses his entire body in the process and Ed loses a leg as part of the "toll" to activate the transmutation circle. Instead of bringing their mother back to life, they find themselves sucked into the Gate of Truth, where all the knowledge if mankind is forcibly inserted into their heads. So they did not get what they wanted. Instead, Ed wakes up, realizes that his brother's body has been taken as "toll". With this new knowledge, he sacrifices one arm to attach his brother's soul to a suit of armor. 
• Growing up, adolescence and responsibility: Naivety is something which does not change for the two brothers. They still continue to believe the best in people, even in the most depraved of situations. One character in the story describes the Elric brothers as possessing the eyes and attitude of an "unreasonable child", despite their age.

Revenge & the Past
Alchemy & some fundamental, philosophical questions