Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part 4

Unfortunately, after all the praise I gave Part 3 for working out its story structure problems, Part 4 starts to fall back. It’s not quite the mess Part 1 was, but because there’s so much going on it’s even more confusing and hard to follow. There was so much packed into these thirteen episodes that I keep being amazed that things that happened early in Part 4 weren’t in Part 3, or maybe even Part 2. Things just keep on happening. Part 4 throws a million plot threads at you and then only follows up on maybe half of them. It sends characters off on pointless side quests in order to set things up ten episodes later. It’s so packed with plot and yet so loosely connected that it’s really hard to keep track of what’s going on. I had to start writing notes. Then my notes weren’t enough, so I had to go to the FMA wikia, which has excellent full synopses for every episode, to fill in my notes. And there are still things that I missed. Since I never read the manga that covers this part of the story, and none of this was in the 2003 anime, I’m pretty sure this is how people who aren’t familiar with Full Metal Alchemist would feel when watching Part 1.

Part 4 begins by showing us where Father came from and how Hohenheim became immortal. He used to be an inexplicably blonde slave without a name in Xerxes, the FMA counterpart to Persia. Father was a black blob in a flask who talked him into a plan that used all the people of Xerxes to create a Philosopher’s Stone, which in fact was Hohenheim. He is a Philosopher’s Stone. That’s one of those insane late-series reveals that I expect from anime. Father also created a body for himself, which is a copy of Hohenheim’s, and set about creating the Homunculi and enacting his plan to do the same thing with Amestris, founding it and then using all its people to create a Philosopher’s Stone again.

Back in the present, Al manages to reach Winry and Scar’s group, but he blacks out as his original body tugs on his soul. They find him half-buried in snow and he’s able to warn them that Briggs isn’t safe anymore. May and Marcoh discover a secret message hidden in Scar’s brother’s journal that shows the nationwide transmutation circle Father is building, but also reveals a second, similar circle that uses alkahestry.

Meanwhile, Ed and Major Miles are arguing about whether to kill Kimblee and the men he has with him. They try to snipe him, but Ed goes up to him to try to talk to him on purpose so they can’t take the shot. Kimblee figures out they’re trying to snipe him, and he and Ed fight. Ed also fights his two chimera buddies, Darius and Heinkel, a gorilla man and a lion man. These two are still cheesy, but they’re not as bad as Bebop and Rocksteady. Their designs are more restrained—they look like a guy who’s part gorilla and a guy who’s part lion, but not in the same over-the-top Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles way. They don’t have insane weapons like gooey spit and quills that shoot out like darts, which are perfect for replicating on action figures that no one buys because they want Raphael, and when he runs out they’ll settle for Michelangelo. Plus, lions and gorillas are just cooler animals than weird spitty frogs and porcupine rhinos. Kimblee defeats Ed and escapes, putting his chimera buddies in danger in the process, so Ed saves them and convinces them to help him so he can heal his injuries.

Kimblee escapes and meets Pride in the tunnel that Sloth was digging. This seems like as good a time as any to warn you that a lot of things in Part 4 don’t make sense. Or at least, the weight they’re given doesn’t make sense. Among these is the next major event, when Pride sends Kimblee north to Drachma to lead an army to attack the wall at Briggs. He tells them there are traitors inside that will let them in, but it’s a lie and they just get obliterated. I assume the purpose of this was more lives for the transmutation circle. We see wars going on in the south and east too. But the show gives it so much weight by showing Kimblee, who’s been built up as a major character, going off to effect this attack. Then it comes to nothing, narratively.

Scar and Winry’s group lure out Envy by having one of Kimblee’s chimeras call in a tip to Central that Dr. Marcoh is there. They set a trap and Marcoh uses a new technique he developed to destroy Philosopher’s Stones to reduce Envy into a weird gross lizard embryo thing, which they put in a jar and give to May so she can return to Xing and use it to find the secret to immortality. Envy tells them that Ed is missing and Al decides to move on, heading for Lior, since he thinks there will be a tunnel there like the one at Briggs that he can destroy to impede Father’s plan. They meet Rose and Hohenheim there, and Al hears the whole story from his father about what they’re fighting against. Hohenheim tells Al not to go into the tunnel because Pride is guarding it, and they still have time before the Promised Day when it all goes down. Envy convinces May to turn around and go back to help the people of Amestris.

The Gecko man who worked for the original Greed way back in Part 1 and whose only role was to lure Al into the alley where he was captured is still alive and he sees some soldiers show up at Izumi’s house to look for her. She and her husband are on vacation. They ran into Hohenheim earlier, who rearranged some of Izumi’s guts so she would have less trouble with coughing up blood. Hohenheim told them about the Promised Day. After that, they went to Briggs and attacked it so they could relay the message about the Promised Day to Major Miles and Captain Buccaneer. The Gecko man ends up finding the sewer entrance to Father’s lair, where is killed by new Greed / Ling, which triggers some of old Greed’s memories and makes him go crazy. He tears off and attacks Bradley at the Führer’s mansion, then runs off, where he runs into Ed and his two chimera buddies outside of town at the house where Lan Fan was treated after they captured Gluttony back in Part 2. They team up.

Olivier Armstrong fights her brother for control of the Armstrong family and somehow wins, even though we see later that Alex Louis Armstrong can fight Sloth, a being capable of taking a blast from a tank, hand to hand. They smash up the mansion during their fight. Olivier later uses the repairs as a pretext to smuggle in a bunch of weapons along with the building supplies.

Mustang and Olivier are both gathering forces for the Promised Day. Mustang has coordinated with his buddy General Grumman, who it turns out is a sexual harasser when he grabs his adjutant Rebecca’s ass. Rebecca is a stereotypical working woman who can’t land a man, except in a fascist country’s military. Rebecca and Hawkeye are friends, so they relay messages by having Rebecca go to Central, where the two of them shop up a storm, because that’s just what women do, even when they’re military sharpshooters, amirite? Hawkeye was earlier able to slip a note to Mustang about Selim Bradley being a homunculus, so he’s all in on that too.

Several months later, a train arrives at Resembool with Winry, Al, and the Briggs men on it. Winry finds Ed and his buddies staying at her house and after a “hilarious” scene where he almost sees her naked, they have a little reunion and then part again as Ed leaves. The Briggs troops end up in the east, where they team up with General Grumman’s troops and betray Bradley, who came to watch the joint military exercises. He gets a fake call back to Central and they blow up his train on a bridge. Al somehow (I can’t remember how, and the wikia is not enlightening me) ends up going on to Central, where he’s taken captive by Pride and Gluttony.

Ed’s group arrives in Kanama, a slum outside Central, and meets Hohenheim, who explains everything to him. They meet Al outside the city and Pride and Gluttony attack. There’s a protracted battle during which Fu and Lan Fan show up to help fight the two Homunculi. They realize they can neuter Pride’s shadow powers either by making it completely dark or by setting off flash bombs that make too much light. Ultimately, they rescue Al from Pride’s grasp. Pride eats Gluttony to gain extra power, and Al and Hohenheim trap him in a giant dome that looks like an orange, where it’s dark so that he can’t use his powers. Al gets himself trapped inside with Pride for some reason. He says it has to be him because he doesn’t eat or get tired, but I didn’t catch why it had to be anyone since Pride stood there yakking with Hohenheim for like five minutes, during which Hohenheim could have easily created the dome without anyone needing to be inside with him. Greed runs away sometime in the middle of the fight and heads for Central, figuring that Father is now only guarded by Sloth and this is his chance to kill them off and take over the country for himself.

Mustang meets up with his flunkies again through an elaborate series of events involving his foster mother, Chris Mustang, the madame of the brothel that Mustang has been visiting for information for a while now. In the end, he’s in the sewers with Hawkeye, Breda, and Fuery ready for action. They kidnap Bradley’s wife, Mrs. Bradley, who we found out earlier Bradley actually loves. We’ll also find out later that Pride actually loves her. A group of soldiers surround them and show no regard for her life at all, their leader saying they can shoot everyone except Mustang. The eastern soldiers come in and save them, and with the arrival of the united eastern and Briggs forces there’s a full-out battle in the streets. A bunch of characters I didn’t really care about, including Rebecca, Maria Ross, Havoc, and Sergeant Brosh, return to be involved in this.

Scar, Marcoh, and Bebop and Rocksteady meet up with Ed, Darius, and Heinkel at the battlefield where Pride is trapped. The four chimeras have a little powwow about their choice to work with Ed, saying they knew they were expendable to Kimblee and respect Ed for his regard for their lives even when they were enemies. I’m pretty sure this is going to set up a big “Ed was right about not killing” moment, which I am not looking forward to because this series is already stuffed with so many moral questions that it had to start just dropping them and deciding not to address them. The group heads off for Central to try and reach Father and stop the Promised Day. They go down through the entrance in the Third Laboratory that Al and Mustang found back in Part 2 when they fought Lust. Hohenheim and Lan Fan split off from the group, and Hohenheim tells Lan Fan to go look for Ling on her own like she wanted, while he does something or other that we don’t see in Part 4. Meanwhile, Olivier Armstrong makes her move and kills off the last few generals on the council, except for one who goes down into the secret chamber and unleashes the alchemy zombies, which surge out to attack Ed, Scar, and the chimeras.

Heinkel the lion man, who stayed behind in the slums due to his injuries, goes to the dome to talk to Al. He hears Pride beating on Al’s head with a stick and realizes that it’s Morse code. Somehow, Kimblee was able to hear this from wherever he got to in the many months of the timeskip, and he shows up and frees Pride. Al fights Pride and Kimblee with a Philosopher’s Stone that Heinkel apparently picked up when Kimblee dropped it back when he first joined Ed. He and Pride fight to a standstill. Kimblee still has one Philosopher’s Stone, but Heinkel is able to get the drop on him and rip his throat out. Marcoh and Yoki, who also remained behind, drive up in a car and cart out Al and Heinkel. Pride gloats over the dying Kimblee for a minute and then eats him.

Olivier Armstrong teams up with her brother to fight Sloth. Just when they think he’s dead, he comes back to life.

May has reached Central and is in the sewers going to Father’s lair. She runs into the alchemy zombies. Envy escapes its jar when one of the zombies inexplicably eats it, and is able to take over that body and absorb all the other bodies to reform its original body, a gigantic green Cocker Spaniel with ugly faces coming out of its back, which we first saw back in Part 2 when Envy was trapped inside Gluttony’s stomach with Ed and Ling.

Mustang and his group drive a truck around Central for a while and then they send Ross off with Mrs. Bradley to go to a secret hiding spot. Mustang then busts in to help Ed, Scar, and the chimeras fight the alchemic zombies.

A State of Confusion

My synopsis above might have looked like a strange, disjointed series of events. That’s because Part 4 is indeed a strange, disjointed series of events. My synopsis might have instead looked fairly coherent. That’s because I did a surprising amount of work to glob up each individual event following a group of characters into scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends. In the actual show, most of these events are cut up into five minute slices and then alternate with slices from other storylines across four or five episodes. The fight with Pride and Gluttony that ends with Pride and Al trapped in a dome, which I summarized in like one paragraph, actually took place over three episodes. It was sliced up into five-minute segments and then a few were sprinkled into each episode alongside five-minute segments showing us what Mustang and Olivier Armstrong were up to. It would have been so much less confusing if each episode just dealt with one group’s storyline and left it off at the point where they were about to meet up with another group.

It’s also confusing to keep track of all these characters, where they are, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. As I was watching the episodes, I kept forgetting which group Marcoh was with. I kept forgetting why Edward was doing what he was doing. I kept forgetting what Scar’s plan was. I’m still not sure what Mustang’s plan was. (Maybe they’ll explain it in Part 5?) I couldn’t be bothered to keep track of the tag-along characters like the chimeras and Yoki; from my perspective, they would just show up somewhere and do the thing when the plot required it. I don’t know which parts of the story we haven’t been told yet and which parts were slipped into some five-minute scene that immediately left my mind once the next five-minute scene, involving entirely different characters, started assaulting me with information and noise and philosophical questions. The months-long timeskip exacerbated this problem early on; it completely reset where everyone was and what they were doing and why, and the show was very unclear about reestablishing it. Even with the help of a blow-by-blow plot synopsis from the wikia, I couldn’t remember what happened to Al after the train left Resembool that led to him being captured by Pride.

The protracted action scenes in Part 4 didn’t help any of this. Part 4 had a lot of confusing plot dumps, but when it wasn’t dumping plot, it was all action. It’s easy to lose the thread of the plot during a long action scene, especially when that plot is confusing and boring to begin with. If an action scene spanned multiple episodes, I was done; good luck remembering anything that happened in the plot last time.

In the end, I don’t believe all this confusing plot spew advanced the actual story in a significant way. The first part just summarily wraps up the Briggs storyline so we can be done with that. Then Hohenheim tells everyone that the Promised Day is coming and they’d better all get ready. The entire rest of it is just setting up all the action figures so they can knock each other down in Part 5. There’s no character advancement. Ed and Al haven’t had their views challenged. Scar magically decided last time that he’s going to try to pursue peace between the races and stop murdering people, so he’s lost his character arc. Everyone else is also just continuing with whatever they were doing at the end of Part 3. Finding out that Bradley and Selim actually care about Mrs. Bradley is the only thing close to character advancement we get here, but it’s just more setup for Part 5—maybe. They might just never go anywhere with that. They’ve done it before.

I’m Not Laughing

The humor continues to be a sore spot. Most of it just isn’t funny. The show has made me laugh on rare occasions, but it’s like a 1:50 ratio of hits to misses. It still has a terrible habit of shoving in slapstick at serious moments. It was such an anticlimax when the huge battle against Envy, where Marcoh unexpectedly got to be awesome, basically ended with Fozzy Bear popping up and going “Wakka wakka wakka!” Envy’s real body looks ridiculous. I made jokes about it above. But Envy was treated as a serious threat up to this point. You can’t just ruin that by turning it into an object of slapstick humor. Especially if you’re planning to bring it back as a real threat later on, as the show does in the final episode of Part 4. And now the humor has gotten even worse, adding tired jokes about lovable sexual harassing bosses and their stereotypical working woman who can’t get a man subordinates. Not that many, thank goodness, but they were so bad that they stuck out to me even though they only occupied about three minutes of total screentime.

This sort of humor is par for the course in anime, and in my opinion it’s one of the worst legacies left to us by the massively overrated Rumiko Takahashi. Not all anime use this kind of dumb humor. The humor in Bakemonogatari is infinitely more clever. The humor in One Punch Man is infinitely more clever. Hell, the humor in Yuru Yuri is infinitely more clever. The characters in Full Metal Alchemist are so well developed that there are definitely opportunities for real character-based humor. Ed being insecure about his height is a good basis for jokes, but having him constantly yell and throw things at people who call him short wasn’t the way to capitalize on it. And I refuse to believe that there was no way to make funny character-based jokes about a character as dark and tormented as Scar, once he joined the heroes’ side. Adam West’s Batman is even more hilarious today because we have Christian Bale’s Batman and Ben Affleck’s Batman. Taking a tortured antihero down a peg can be hilarious, but the show never even attempts it.

Wasted Opportunities, Pointless Scenes

Last time I complained that the Winry / Ed romance is uninteresting, and it would have been a lot more interesting if Winry were in love with Al. I think this was a big wasted opportunity, but at least I understand why they went the way they did: Ed is the actual hero, the one who does all the cool things and drives the plot. Al ranges from damsel in distress to a good excuse not to draw backgrounds, since he fills up the entire backdrop when he’s standing behind Ed and the camera is positioned to get both of them in frame. I wish it weren’t this way—I kept waiting for him to get his chance to be awesome, and he never did. (Though the fight scene where Al uses the Philosopher’s Stone against Pride and Kimblee is amazingly cool. That’s one of my few compliments for Part 4. If that becomes a pattern, maybe I’ll rescind those words. But one fight scene where he’s dependent on a glowing red rock isn’t enough at this point.) Why would the damsel in distress cum background extra get the girl? That’s just silly. Of course Winry is in love with Ed. Of course Al only gets the joke romance with May that can’t go anywhere because she’s a child.

In Part 4 there are three character arcs that the show went out of its way to set up earlier on which we can now say are not going to go anywhere and were entirely pointless: Scar’s crusade against alchemy; Kimblee’s entire history and personality; and the tension that comes from innocent little boy Selim being the Elrics’ biggest fan in the world when he’s also the son of the Führer who’s also a homunculus, their most deadly enemy.

I’ve already ranted about Scar. It makes practical sense for him to team up with Ed and Al the way he does, and the end of Part 3 really sold me on it. But Scar in earlier stories was a zealot, and possibly not right in the head. He strongly believed that alchemy was evil, and he was willing to murder for that belief. I can buy him teaming up with alchemists as a practical matter, and to stick it to the people who initiated the Ishval massacre, but there were still alchemists on the ground in Ishval slaughtering people, and his enemies are still using alchemy to kill and torture the innocent, so I can’t believe he would just decide after one five-minute conversation that his entire way of looking at the world was wrong and he needs to work peacefully to overcome racism. And that’s pretty much where his character sits during Part 4; he says as much to a group of people he meets in the forest on his way to Kanama, who react with alarm to the news that Ishvalans are massing in Central.

I was interested in Kimblee after Part 3. He had a different way of looking at the Ishval massacre, a way that maybe is closer to what a soldier in that situation would actually think than the moral hand-wringing of Mustang, Hawkeye, and Armstrong. He seemed genuinely horrified by what happened to Winry’s parents. We never get any sign that he was lying when he told her that story, and she already trusted him completely so he had no good reason to make up a lie anyway. He was a great villain for about five episodes. He was powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with Scar, and smart enough to outmaneuver the heroes, and he looked cool and was a snappy dresser. Then he disappeared, did a few things that didn’t make sense, and died. We never find out anything about Kimblee. We never find out why he was in prison other than some vague hints that he killed some officers. We never find out why he would have done that, given that he doesn’t seem to be a psychotic killer in this version like he was in the 2003 series. When he’s first freed from prison he gets the mandate from the Führer to hunt down Scar, who at that time is a fugitive, murderer, and terrorist. At some point he just kind of slips without any trouble into this new world where everyone is a homunculus and the plan is to vaporize all of Amestris into a Philosopher’s Stone. He goes and leads the Drachma army to its death, and then he drives around the country for several months until he hears Pride knocking on Al’s head with a stick in Morse code and shows up to save him. Then he dies, and Pride eats him. I have a feeling some sort of ghost Kimblee is going to come out of Pride later, but you can’t develop someone’s character when they only exist as a ghost that comes out of another character who’s a villain.

And then there’s Selim. We spent half an episode seeing Ed and Al meet him in a library, go to his house, learn that he’s their biggest fan and the Führer’s son. I assumed this was leading to some scene where he finds out that the Elrics and his father are actually enemies, and is torn apart because his beloved father and his beloved idols hate each other. Nope! He’s a homunculus, and that whole setup was completely pointless. It pretty much only existed so that when Hawkeye passes Mustang a note that says “SELIM BRADLEY IS HOMUNCULUS”, we know who the hell Selim Bradley is.

My hypothetical Winry / Al romance was fan-fiction; I looked at the show and said “This would be more interesting and daring than what you’re doing”. These stories are things the show actually went out of its way to set up, and then just threw away. With how little actually happened in Part 4, I’m positive some of these things could have been developed more. Scar pretty much does nothing and Kimblee is MIA, so there was room for a Scar / Kimblee story that could have told us more about both of them while also driving forward the main plot.

Other Random Complaints

• When Al and Winry’s group reaches Lior, Rose offers Winry a bath. Winry gets in the bath, and the camera pans lovingly over her breasts and thighs while she gets jealous about the way Rose talks about Edward. If I wanted to see this stuff, I’d be watching To-Love-Ru, guys.
• During the Briggs / East City joint military exercises, General Grumman has a long inner monologue about how he’ll withhold help from Mustang and Olivier Armstrong so he can let them die, then sweep in with his forces and take over, becoming Führer himself. It ends with Major Miles looking at him and thinking, “That’s probably what he’s thinking.” So was he thinking that or not? And given that Briggs and East City forces do show up to help Mustang in Central, what was the point of ever casting doubt on Grumman’s intentions in the first place?
• Gluttony has gotten really fucking annoying. Something about his voice and the fact that he only has three different lines of dialogue (“Can I eat them?”, “Lust!”, and “Otousama!”) just grates on me. He was creepy at first, but he’s been overused. I was surprised that they brought him back after his death in Part 3, and glad when Pride chomped him down and got rid of him.
• Fu has chi-based kung fu homunculus detection. I accepted this weird mixture of magic, technology, religion, and martial arts in Negima because that world was incoherent anyway. Full Metal Alchemist has such a cohesive world that it takes me out of it when they reveal the existence of kung fu-based homunculus detection methods.
• Finding out that the brothel madam is Mustang’s foster mother added nothing to anything. It already made sense that Mustang would be gathering information from a brothel madam; he’s interested in stuff going on in the military, and soldiers like brothels, so of course she would hear a lot of stuff going on in the military.
• The eyecatches where they show a picture of a character and some random dude says “Full Metal Alchemist!” are weird and annoying. They’ve been that way since Part 1, it was just especially annoying this time.
• Bebop and Rocksteady are still lame.
• The music is, in my opinion, terrible. I’m qualifying with “In my opinion” even though this entire rant is in my opinion because music is even more subjective than things like story and character and even humor. I’m sure a lot of people love the music in this show. But I don’t enjoy it. The background music sounds like it’s from the most generic Playstation 1 JRPG ever, but the openings and endings are really the worst part. The openings all sound like mediocre boy band music. Whenever I listen to them, I imagine five Japanese guys with perfectly tousled hair thick with product, on stage in white leather pants gyrating their hips, while hordes of schoolgirls scream in the audience below. The endings are a little bit better but sound a bit like hip hop dance mixes of the most generic J-Pop songs ever. I wish they could just steal the soundtrack from Last Exile and transplant it onto Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. That was a good soundtrack. (I wouldn’t complain if they wanted to steal Range Murata’s art, either; the art style in Full Metal Alchemist isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty uninspiring. The manga had a bit more character, but translating its style directly to the screen probably would have created the wrong tone.)

Actual Compliments

• Al with the Philosopher’s Stone vs. Pride and Kimblee was awesome. Too bad the budget ran out.
• Olivier and Alex Armstrong vs. Sloth was also pretty cool, but the budget had already run out so we didn’t get as much dynamic combat.
• The scene in Resembool where Ed almost sees Winry naked was terrible (again, I’d be watching To-Love-Ru if I wanted to see that, guys), but the part afterwards where they talk was pretty good. It was the usual “I want you to leave so you won’t be in danger” / “No, I’m not letting you face that alone” sort of thing, but it felt in-character for both of them, and they came sort of close to acknowledging their feelings for each other without having to make a big deal about it. Plus, I liked that we see Ed is taller than Winry now. Back in Part 1, we found out that when they were kids, Winry said she couldn’t marry Al because she didn’t want to marry a man who was shorter than her. Now that Ed isn’t shorter than her anymore, she’s free to be with him. (I still think it would’ve been more fun if she were in love with Al, and it was pointed out that he’s now taller than her.)
• Last time I complained about how stupid it was that Bebop and Rocksteady are all emo about getting their original bodies back so they can see their families, since they can turn back into human form whenever they want. This time Heinkel and Darius say they don’t care that much about getting their original bodies back, which makes more sense. Sure, if you’re single and trying to date, it might be a problem that you can turn into a lion. But if you’ve already got a wife and children who thought you were dead, they’d probably be glad to see you, even if you can turn into a lion now. (Or even a frog with gooey spit powers. Maybe. Some women might divorce a man, yelling at him that he couldn’t even get the lion powers. But I think most would be glad to see him.)
• The black coat and white shirt that Ed wears for most of this part looks cool. I don’t think he should have gone back to his weird red hoodie coat with the caduceus on the back.
• This show has tons of bad-ass female characters—Hawkeye, Olivier, Izumi. Even Winry; not every chick can whip you up a robot arm or come up with an amazing plan to trick a dangerous guy like Kimblee. And despite all the crap going on in Part 4, we got to see a little of each of them. Olivier was probably the standout. She’s ruthless, terrifying, and brutally effective. There’s no way that woman hasn’t spent a tour in the world of Attack on Titan. There was a great joke (one of the ones that did make me laugh) back in Part 3 where she pretended she was just a soft woman who loves children and whose biological clock was ticking to get General Raven to open up to her, and Ed couldn’t stop cracking up as he listened to her lay it on. Sadly, Part 4 can lay no claim to it. That joke belongs to Part 3.
• Rose didn’t get raped, have a rape baby, and become a cult leader. Brotherhood overall has been a lot less dark than the 2003 series, and I thought it was nice to see her and Lior recovering and doing well. One of the (many, many, many) themes of Brotherhood has been the resilience of the people of Amestris, even in the face of homunculus plots to keep them at war all the time, and Lior getting past its troubles and rebuilding was a great way to illustrate that theme.

Am I dropping the show?

No. I might take a break before Part 5, but I do want to finish this show.

Unlike Last Exile, I care about the characters in Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Maybe I don’t care that much what’s happening with Denny Broush or Captain Buccaneer or May Chang, but I do care about Ed and Al and Mustang and Hawkeye and Winry. I do want to see Father’s plans defeated. Until their stories were cut off in Part 4, I was interested to see what would happen with Scar and Kimblee.

Also, Last Exile felt confusing for no reason. To my knowledge it was anime-original, so there was no source material they were trying to condense. They did an unspeakably bad job of teaching us enough about the world and the characters that we would care when things happened to them. There was no apparent aim to the story.

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood is more a victim of source material distillation. The manga was very long and had like fifty characters. They’ve tried to squeeze the entire story into one anime series. That would be challenging just due to sheer length, but adapting a manga to an anime is always structurally dicey. The rhythms of the story are so different between the two media. If it’s badly done, you can see the seams where they stitched together multiple manga chapters to make one anime episode. There isn’t time to do justice to like fifty characters unless you adapt the manga frame by frame, and making anime is expensive, so even for one like this that was popular and brought in good returns, there weren’t enough resources to do that. Even though I complain a lot about the story structure and pacing, I understand all of that, and I do cut the show some slack. The adaptation has a lot of problems, but the story being adapted is a good one, with a creative and original concept; well-developed, likeable characters; and a world that feels real. Those good qualities do still shine through, even when the thread of the plot is totally buried under confusing noise and information overload like it was for me through most of Part 4.

So no, I’m not going to drop it. I want to finish this.