Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part 2

I realized that I didn’t explain last time what I meant by “Part 1”, “Part 2”, etc. Netflix (where I’m watching this show) has it split up by cour, but calls them “parts”. So “Part 1” is the first cour, or thirteen episodes. Part 2 is the next thirteen, and so on until the show ends. I decided to cover them this way because thirteen episodes is a good unit; you can cover some major story threads in that amount of time, and it’s nowhere near as exhausting as single episode reviews where you have to come up with something interesting to say about episodes like “Envoy from the East” where nothing important to the plot happens and everything is just setup for the next storyline, but it’s also a lot easier to cover usefully than the entire series in one go, at least for a show this long.

Part 2 is where Brotherhood works out the last of its problems from its perfunctory coverage of the early material. There are still a few story beats that feel poorly motivated or don’t land well because of how much of the early manga stories was cut, but the plot flows a lot better than in Part 1, and is easy to follow, exciting, and emotional—except in the wrap-up to the Greed story, which begins Part 2. The show acts like we’re supposed to care when the Führer unceremoniously dispatches Greed’s henchmen, but all we’ve seen of them aside from fight scenes is a few lame jokes that just made them look unthreatening, so they’re neither good villains nor sympathetic characters.

After wrapping up the Greed story with uncomfortable abruptness, Part 2 introduces the Xing characters–Prince Ling Yao and his ninja-like attendants, cute young girl Lan Fan and grizzled old soldier Fu, as well as May Chang, a little girl who comes separately from Ling and his group and ends up traveling with Scar. Where Amestris is the fantasy counterpart German Empire circa the rise of Nazism, Xing is basically Imperial China. It has its own version of alchemy, alkahestry, which is focused on medical uses. The Xing characters and alkahestry end up being important in a few different ways later on, but since they need to be established, an episode, “Envoy from the East”, clumsily shoves them onto the scene by having Ed and Al fight Ling, Lan Fan, and Fu for dubious reasons that ultimately don’t mean anything or further the story at all. I don’t know if this was better handled in the manga, as I never got to this point, but “Envoy from the East” is a pretty pointless episode and definitely counts as filler in every way except for its introduction of Xing.

After this we get four episodes about Mustang and his crew unraveling the mystery of Hughes’s death, and this is where I started to enjoy Brotherhood more than the 2003 series. In the 2003 series, it takes forever for Mustang to get any closure on Hughes’s death, and if I recall rightly, he only finds out what happens because Ed and Al tell him. Other than that he has nothing to do for the entire series—other than his awesome final battle against the Führer—which was disappointing, because he was my favorite character. (Honestly, mostly because it’s so much fun to snap your fingers and make a whooshing sound as if a giant ball of fire had just appeared. But favorite characters have been chosen for pettier reasons.) In Brotherhood, he pulls off a scheme that puts his squad of soldiers, Barry the Chopper, Ling Yao and his retainers, and Ed and Al into a fight against the Homunculi, who are forced to come into the open and reveal themselves. Then he gets an awesome battle against Lust, managing to kill her and prove that the Homunculi aren’t invincible after all. (Hawkeye, another character I always liked who didn’t get a chance to shine in the 2003 series, also gets some badass moments here, as does Alphonse, who only got to be cool towards the end of the 2003 series.) Mustang also gets to say my favorite line of the series so far. When he’s making the meat mannequin that he burns to fake Maria Ross’s death, one of his men (I forget which one) questions whether he’ll be able to burn the meat mannequin enough that no one will be able to tell it’s a fake, and Mustang replies, “Making charred corpses is my specialty”. It packs so many things we know about his character—his confidence, his wit, his guilt over the Ishvalan massacre—all into one line.

As much as I liked this story for its overall plot and the development it gives us for Mustang, it really suffers from how little time we got to get to know his squad during Part 1. For example, Jean Havoc is crippled after being attacked by Lust, and loses the use of his legs. If this had happened in the 2003 series, it would have been shocking; Havoc was a comic relief character, and seeing him so badly injured would have driven in how high the stakes are now that Mustang has chosen to oppose the Homunculi. In Brotherhood, though, he’s just one of those four guys that work for Mustang.

I also have to wonder how much I would have cared about Hawkeye if I hadn’t seen the 2003 series already, though she at least has the advantage of being a character who stands out—an awesome lady sharpshooter isn’t the sort of character you can just forget about, even if you don’t know anything about her. A lot of the jokier moments early on when she first meets Barry the Chopper didn’t work as well here as they did in the manga and 2003 show because we’d gotten such little time to know her. There was a tiny little attempt at a character moment where she loses her will to live in the face of the Homunculi’s overwhelming power and Mustang has to convince her to snap out of it, but it was so badly constructed that I didn’t even realize that’s what had happened until she explained it to Havoc later, trying to make him feel better. We can still sort of get a picture of who Hawkeye is if we think a lot about what’s happened in her few scenes so far. We know she’s brave and awesome because there was a moment back in the fight against Scar in Part 1 where Hughes says that as a normal human, he’s not getting involved in a battle of freaks; Hawkeye, on the other hand, runs right into that battle of freaks with two guns blazing. We also know she’s kind because of how she came to Ed and Al’s side when they were sitting injured after the battle was over, and because of how she tries to make Havoc feel better after he’s injured. Still, from a relatively straightforward show like this, I don’t know if I would have picked up on that if I hadn’t known it already.

For the next half of Part 2, Ed and Al get to prove they’re no idiots themselves when they realize that Lust’s unwillingness to kill them or Mustang, since they’re “sacrifices”, means it’s also likely the Homunculi would come out to fight against Scar if he were threatening them. They come up with a plan to lure Scar out, and enlist Ling and Lan Fan to capture one of the Homunculi for questioning. Lan Fan is injured and loses an arm in the battle against Gluttony and Führer Bradley, but the plan succeeds and they manage to capture Gluttony. In a battle between Ling, Ed, Al, Gluttony, and Envy, Gluttony flies into a rage trying to avenge Lust and runs off into the forest after Mustang, who comes in to assist mid-plan. Gluttony opens his stomach up, revealing there’s a black hole portal inside, and sucks in Ed, Ling, and Envy, who briefly fight but decide to make peace since they’re stuck there. Envy reveals that the Homunculi started the Ishvalan massacre so they would have raw materials for making Philosopher’s Stones, and explains that the inside of Gluttony’s stomach is a failed attempt at creating a Gateway to Truth. Ed realizes that this means he can probably get them out by attempting human transmutation again.

Meanwhile, with Mustang, Hawkeye, and Lan Fan safely away, Alphonse convinces Gluttony to bring him to Father, the Homunculi’s leader. Scar, on the trail of May Chang’s mini panda bear friend Shao Mei, follows them down into the sewer. When Alphonse and Gluttony meet Father, Edward, Ling, and Envy suddenly pop out of Gluttony’s stomach after a brief moment in the Gate where Ed sees Al’s body, still intact, and swears to come back for him. At the same time, Mustang, who is now aware that Bradley is a Homunculus, finds that his faithful underlings have all been dispersed to the four corners of Amestris, and Hawkeye has been assigned as the assistant to the Führer himself.

This storyline concludes in Part 3, so I won’t talk about that here, but what we get in Part 2 is extremely satisfying all on its own. It’s dense with plot and worldbuilding. We start to learn more about Ling, the Homunculi, the Ishvalan massacre, and Scar, and move forward on some of the mysteries that have been building up since the beginning. This is the first story in the show that I can honestly say is without flaws. It’s more plot-based, so for me it doesn’t have the same emotional impact as the previous story (even when you factor in the conclusion that comes in Part 3), but it unfolds its own story flawlessly and isn’t affected by any of the flaws of earlier stories.

Part 2 is a big improvement over Part 1. It still has some problems coming from just how compressed and warped the story in Part 1 was, but it got me a lot more invested in the story and characters than Part 1 did, and now I want to keep watching the show, instead of forcing myself to do it in the hopes it will get better.

I just wish they hadn’t begun Part 3 with a filler episode so shitty, it almost made me drop the show all over again.

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part I

A lot of people love Brotherhood because it’s closer to the manga than the 2003 series. There’s a lot to like in Brotherhood, but compared to the 2003 series, it’s really oddly paced, and the story isn’t as well constructed, especially early on. I’ve found that every time I try to watch it, I struggle with how disjointed the early episodes feel and how badly motivated and based on coincidence a lot of the plot is. It definitely feels like they were just trying to cram in all the early parts of the manga so they could get to the juicy stuff. A tacked-on anime original first episode that introduces all the major characters (the Elric brothers, Mustang and Hawkeye and their group, Hughes, Armstrong, even Kimblee) by showing them tracking down and fighting a rogue State Alchemist, Isaac the Freezing Alchemist. (By the way, Isaac’s ability to control water should make him so overpowered—like Magneto levels of overpowered—which I guess was necessary for him to be a credible threat to nearly every heavy hitter in the FMA world, but then he just goes down like a punk when the half hour is up, and is never mentioned again.) Then we spend 13 episodes trundling through chopped together clipshows of the early stories: the battle with Cornello in Lior, Shou Tucker turning his daughter into a chimera, the first encounter with Scar, meeting with Dr. Marcoh and deciphering his notes, the visit to Izumi, the battle with Greed.

The only story I felt got real justice in the first thirteen was the Fifth Laboratory and the following death of Hughes. I give the writers credit for realizing that they had to get this right for the emotional punch to land later on when Ed and Al and Winry find out that Hughes is dead and how he died. I was almost ready to drop the show again until I got to that first Fifth Laboratory episode and the exciting and fluidly animated fights against the armor suits guarding it. The Izumi visit and following battle with Greed were also pretty well handled until their abrupt end (but that falls into Part 2, so I’ll complain about it there instead.)

The Lior story is the worst adapted by far, and sort of sums up all the problems I’ve had with the writing throughout Brotherhood, but especially in the earlier episodes. In the 2003 series it was spread over two episodes, and served as a great introduction to the series and the world. We found out what alchemy is and how it works; we got an exciting battle against Cornello and his chimeras; we got to understand Rose’s character and the position she was in; and later on, Lior was used to make the point that fanaticism outlives any single demagogue, since throwing out Cornello didn’t actually change anyone’s mind. In Brotherhood it’s all squeezed into one episode, so there’s no time to let any of these concepts play out. Rose is a poorly defined character. The fight between Edward and Cornello is decent, but in a later fight where there should be tension, Ed and Al just turn into chibis and stomp on over all the bad guys. (Brotherhood has a terrible habit of turning everyone into chibis or throwing in a “Don’t call me short!” joke at the absolute worst times, like when we’re in the middle of reeling from a series of startling revelations about the nature of the Amestrian government.) There are also some scenes that were important world- or character-building in the 2003 series, like Al introducing the concept of alchemy by fixing a radio or Ed having a complete list of physical ingredients in a human body and knowing they can be bought on a child’s budget, that become pointless in Brotherhood because we already know about alchemy and we already know about their past. On the other hand, Ed’s final speech to Rose carries more meaning in Brotherhood than it did in the 2003 series. Some of this might be a difference in how Vic Mignogna and Romi Park interpreted the speech; in the dub of the 2003 series, Mignogna delivers the speech like it’s supposed to be inspirational, whereas Park’s delivery in the Japanese version of Brotherhood comes off as if Ed is saying it’s just a grim reality of the world that can’t be escaped from. Either way, the speech has more weight because we already know that Ed and Al have been through significant hardship themselves; it’s not the naive blather of a hero who’s never faced a setback, but the hard-won wisdom of someone who’s been through hell himself.

That sums up my two biggest problems with Brotherhood so far, even where I am now 28 episodes in: the story has been squeezed and squished and chopped and rearranged so much that plot developments feel rushed or poorly motivated; and the series seems to think there’s a mandated quota of “I’m not short!” jokes per episode, and it’s not too concerned about where they fall. The humor in general isn’t good. It’s definitely from the old school of anime humor, where the height of hilarity is guys and girls with secret crushes on each other yelling at each other, ending with the guy getting bonked on the head. The manga had some much better character-based jokes, especially involving Mustang and Hawkeye, but none of those made it in. Unfortunately, the lack of downtime to get to know Mustang, Hawkeye, and the rest of the crew affects a lot of the plot in Part 2—as we’ll see.