By this point, the story structure of Brotherhood is pretty unimpeachable. It’s not perfect—nothing is—but it’s not the major problem it was back in Part 1, or the continuing minor problem it was in Part 2. The show has also gotten a lot better about not putting in “I’m not short!” jokes at inappropriate times.
We finish out the story from Part 2 with Ed and Al fighting against Envy, Gluttony, and Father. Gluttony dies, but the fight goes against them when Ling decides that Father has the path to immortality he wants and agrees to become the new Greed, taking in the Philosopher’s Stone that the original Greed was boiled down into. Scar and May crash in and help them, but Father has a way of disabling alchemy inside his lair that he uses to take away their ability to fight. Ed and Al notice that May’s Xingese alkahestry isn’t affected by this, however, May is injured and Al gives her to Scar to get away.
Meanwhile, up on the surface, Mustang trusts the wrong person—General Raven—and ends up dragged before a council of corrupt generals and the Fuhrer himself. After Ed and Al’s capture, they too are brought before the Fuhrer and hear from Mustang what’s happened. The Fuhrer doesn’t kill them since they’re valuable sacrifices, but he does tell them they’d better behave themselves and not try to recruit anyone else to their cause, because he’s got men watching Winry, ready to kill her if the brothers go against him.
Edward goes to visit Hawkeye and return the gun she gave him way back in the forest before he was sucked into Greed’s belly. He didn’t end up using it due to his aversion to killing. She tells him about what happened during the Ishvalan massacre, where she was a sniper. We also see how she and Mustang met—her father was Mustang’s alchemy instructor, and asked him to look after her when he died. They happen to meet up coincidentally later on during the war. Hawkeye also casually mentions that it looks like Ed has feelings for Winry, which he denies, even though he’s starting to think he might (and Winry has also been thinking that she has feelings for Ed).
Ed and Al decide to start looking for May, since her alkahestry still worked inside Father’s alchemy cancelling field, and also because alkahestry might be useful for restoring their bodies. May has headed north with Scar and Dr. Marcoh, whom Scar found in a holding cell in the sewers when he was escaping from Father’s lair. He wants Marcoh’s help deciphering his brother’s research notes. Armstrong gives the Elrics a letter of recommendation to his sister, Olivier. (Which is a man’s name. Whatever.) Before Ed and Al leave, they run into the Führer’s son, Selim Bradley, who idolizes them as well as his father and wants to be an alchemist when he gets older. After this, they head north.
The Führer releases Solf Kimblee, the Crimson Alchemist, from prison to hunt Scar. I barely remember anything about Kimblee from the 2003 show, except that he was a crazed serial murderer. In Brotherhood, as we’ll see going forward, he’s a brutal and ruthless adversary, but nothing about him strikes me as unhinged. Mustang and Hawkeye had a run-in with him during the Ishvalan war when he criticized them for their moral hand-wringing, but interestingly, he kind of had a point; he tells them that ultimately a soldier’s job is to kill, and asks Hawkeye if there isn’t some small part of her that feels satisfied with her skill when she makes a kill, and wonders why they became soldiers in the first place if they had such a problem with the carnage of a battlefield. Brotherhood’s Kimblee so far reminds me of Watchmen’s Comedian: as a soldier, he’s a killer, and he knows it; he doesn’t particularly enjoy it, but it’s part of the job, and he’s good at it. This makes him a good foil to Scar, who’s also an unflinching murderer, but where Kimblee is pragmatic about it, Scar is passionately ideological. With Ed and Al now unable to directly fight the Homunculi, Kimblee was exactly the villain we needed to move the story along.
The Elric brothers go the wall at Fort Briggs and meet General Olivier Armstrong, a hard-ass commander charged with securing Amestris’s northern border against Drachma, the large nation bordering them. Her men are equally hardcore and include Buccaneer, who’s like eight feet tall and has a chainsaw for a hand, and Major Miles, her adjutant and an Ishvalan. (There’s some convoluted story about him being a quarter Ishvalan, but he looks exactly like all the other Ishvalans, so he’s basically just Ishvalan.) After Sloth bursts through a tunnel in the ground and has to be covered in tank fuel and frozen, General Armstrong claps them in irons and throws them in the brig until they tell her the truth about why they’re there. They end up telling her everything, so that she’s in the know when General Raven shows up, accompanied by Kimblee, freshly healed after a battle with Scar on a train, and wielding a philosopher’s stone. General Raven orders them to unfreeze Sloth and put him back in the hole, then seal the hole with concrete. General Armstrong tricks him into telling her about the Homunculi and offering her an army of immortal soldiers and eternal life herself; she then cuts him open and throws his body in the concrete.
The Elrics are horrified to find that Kimblee brought Winry with him, under the guise of replacing Ed’s automail with a special alloy that won’t give him frostbite where it touches the skin, like Buccaneer’s chainsaw hand. Kimblee gained Winry’s trust on the car ride over by telling her that he knew her parents in Ishval, how much he respected them, and that he was the one who found their bodies after Scar killed them. (Edward discovered this all the way back in the beginning of Part 2 when he ran into a group of Ishvalans in the ruins of Xerxes. Winry happened to stumble on their battle with Scar during the plan to capture one of the Homunculi, and in a moment of panic, Ed spilled the beans. Winry pointed a gun at Scar and tried to get herself to kill him, but she couldn’t, and Ed stopped her.) Winry is horrified to find out that Kimblee is keeping her to threaten Ed and Al. She helps them come up with a plan to get out of it: Ed will pretend to help Kimblee hunt Scar and look for an opening to get her away. They also need to find Scar because they now know that May is with him. In the ruined mining town of Baschool, they manage to slip away from Kimblee’s men and find Scar and Marcoh.
After rescuing Scar from Bebop and Rocksteady from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (a pair of chimeras that Kimblee brought with him), they decide to team up. Winry isn’t quite able to forgive Scar, but she does get over her desire for revenge and comes up with an ingenious plan: she’ll pretend that Scar broke free and abducted her so that she can run off with his group and get free of Kimblee, while Ed and Al will act furious and pretend to help Kimblee hunt Scar down. Scar’s group will head through the mines back to Fort Briggs, where General Armstrong will protect them. However, after they leave, Major Miles gets a call that General Armstrong has been called to Central, and the base is no longer under her command. With a snowstorm rising, there’s no way they can reach Winry and Scar’s group to get the message to them—unless Al, who doesn’t feel cold, goes alone. Part 3 ends here.
“Interlude Party”
Part 3 is, for the most part, great. I was absorbed in the story and fascinated with everything we learned about the characters. There were only two blights on Part 3 that came to mind, and one of them was “Interlude Party”.
“Interlude Party”, which is the first episode of Part 3, is a crappy recap episode interspersed with footage of Hohenheim drinking by a bonfire with a younger Pinako Rockbell (Winry’s grandmother). It’s even crappier than your standard clip show because they don’t even recap the story, they just show tiny clips from Parts 1 and 2 with no context. Then Hohenheim and Pinako will come on for two minutes, and it’s pretty clear this is in Hohenheim’s head since young Pinako knows about things that are going on in the present. They have some nonsensical pseudo-philosophical back and forth, and then it’s more clips.
I used to watch clip shows because I was so eager to see anime that I would even sit through crappy supercuts of everything that had happened already. I skip them nowadays, mostly. I didn’t skip “Interlude Party”, but I didn’t watch it either; I fast-forwarded all the clips and watched the scenes with Hohenheim and young Pinako. Which were shit. Don’t do that. Just skip this episode. I watch this show in the morning, before I go to work, because doing something I enjoy early in the morning helps set up a good tempo for the rest of the day. Except when the episode is a crappy clip show that I have to fast-forward most of, and which is crappy even when it’s not clips. Then it sets up a day where I do things I’ve already done in the past again, interspersed with some really nonsensical new things.
Heroes in a Half-Shell
Nothing in Part 3 broke the mood like all those out-of-place short jokes and hatcheted-together stories in Part 1, but Bebop and Rocksteady sure came close. (I can’t be bothered to find out what their real names are.) The fight against them was cheesy and way too comedic for this point in the series. It wasn’t as bad as the “turn into chibis and beat up everyone offscreen” fight from the Lior story, but it was very slapstick, as it must be when you’re fighting a guy whose power is gooey spit. Scar is a bad-ass antihero; for a serious fight, he needs a bad-ass anti-villain like Kimblee, not these rejected Skeletor minions.
After they’re defeated, everyone lets them hear Winry’s entire plan to let herself be taken captive by Scar so they can go back and tell Kimblee what’s really going on. Major Miles wants to kill them to prevent this, but Ed won’t let him. Conveniently, they decide they never liked Kimblee anyway and they want to switch sides so they can get their old bodies back and see their families again. The kicker, the thing that makes this really dumb and not just a lazy way of letting Edward be right without any consequences, is that they can transform back and forth at will between Bebop and Rocksteady and human forms. So what the hell do they need their original bodies for anyway? It’s not like Al, who can’t even eat or touch someone in his current state. They can just turn into humans and go home to their families.
This is lazily repeated early in Part 4 when Edward saves two more of Kimblee’s chimera henchmen, who also decide that they never liked Kimblee anyway and they’re on Ed’s side now. What is this, Yu-gi-oh?
The Question of Race
Edward wants you to know that he doesn’t see color. Everyone’s blood is red just the same as his.
Seriously, the way Edward addresses race when he finds out Major Miles is Ishvalan is way too naive. I know he means well, but it felt like the show was saying that solving racism is really quite simple: we all just have to stop seeing race and get along. It makes sense that Edward would think this way—he’s not Ishvalan, he wasn’t in the war, and no one he knows died in it. But Major Miles, whose grandfather died in the massacre, acts like this is some profound truth that he never thought of before, even telling Scar later that Edward drastically changed his opinion on the whole matter.
I hope this isn’t just the show’s way of shoving aside the whole ethnically-motivated genocide thing so everyone on the “good” side can team up to fight the evil Homunculi.
Winry’s Heart
I have no particular feelings either way on Winry and Edward’s budding romance. It doesn’t annoy me, but it doesn’t interest me at all either. I don’t think they really have any chemistry, and their occasional Rumiko Takahashi-esque screaming matches neither amuse nor anger me; I just kind of tune out until it’s over.
There is someone Winry could have fallen in love with that would have made me interested: Scar. That would be insane, though. But there’s also Al. She’s known Al just as long as Ed. She and Al are always the ones worrying together when Ed pushes himself too hard and gets hurt. There was some actual drama between them back in Part 1 when Al was worried that he might be a fabricated personality and Winry got angry at him. There’s no reason why she couldn’t have loved Al instead of Ed. Then the romance would’ve had real pathos, since Al doesn’t have a body and may never. They wouldn’t be able to touch or kiss until his body was restored. Al keeps on mentioning that Winry’s apple pie is the first thing he wants to eat when he gets his body back; that would have even more meaning if they were in love. Falling in love fits Al’s gentle personality more than Edward’s. I like Al, and I don’t think he gets enough to do to get out of Edward’s shadow; a romance with Winry would be a big step towards that.
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