There Are Many Ways to Skin a Cat
So I've been watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, reading a bit more of the manga, and thinking on FMA series 1. I fell in love with the first series before even glimpsing at the manga. It's just a brilliantly well done show. The characters are rich and well developed, the action is exciting, the music and animation are beautiful. I love the strong female characters, I love the fighting. When Izumi stands in front of the Gate and screams and the focus zooms out... just wow. It's the screamiest, angstiest anime I've ever seen, as well as one of the funniest. It's stunningly original and, while it does get preachy at times, there generally is a good balance between adolescent confusion and moral clarity. It ended well. I wasn't a huge fan of the movie, except that one part where Wrath fights Gluttony, but overall: thumbs up.
Brotherhood... I'm just not as crazy about. To be fair, I never really like the manga. I have problems with the anime too, of course. There aren't many strong female characters other than Izumi, who wishes she was a mother, and various other mothers who never become action characters. Winry isn't a mother, but she spends most of her time worrying about and or scolding Ed, delivers a baby, and helps raise a little girl. She is very motherly. Even Dante is a mother, but she shirks the responsibility and becomes a villain, while Hohenheim also shirks, but reconsiders later and becomes a hero. It also seems that, once labeled “good mother,” characters don’t develop significantly or become involved in the action at all. The same can be said for the manga, really. It always irked me just a little bit in the anime that Rose chose to keep a pregnancy that resulted from rape, effectively letting a rapist decide the course of the rest of her life, but that’s just my own opinion. His fight with Greed seems harder, and when he finally wins, it's more of an accomplishment. Ed gets to be too much of a hero sometimes, and in the manga, at least the Xing characters show up to take him down a peg, but then in the anime, the homunculus are just more formidable over all. Ed is nicer in the first anime. When he walks by Rose, who is lying in the dust, distraught, I actually winced. Jeez, that’s unnecessarily cold. Would it kill him to help her up? The image of her on her knees while he stands is a powerful one. I suppose if I had just one complaint about Brotherhood, it’s that we don’t get to spend as much time with the characters. I just don’t care about them as much as I did in the first anime.
Also, question: in the first animeverse, Ametris is sort of like an alternatre version of WWII Germany, correct? Making the Ishvalans Gypsies/Jews who go nomadic as the tides turn/possibly any other race as they have their own country, something Gypsies and Jews did not. Although Jews had their own towns… Whatever. But. Does that make the Alchemists members of the SS? They are the elite human weapons at the control of the fuehrer. They have to pass a test. They are treated with a certain level of deference by the other soldiers. Creepy.
Hm. Just received the following review on Come What May.
You're a Buddhist and Jewish? okay, i can take Buddhism, but how can you not believe that Jesus wasn't the Messiah? that's pretty stupid. Judaism's a piece of crap. You're going to hell. you should convert to Judaism. So, are you conservative? cause I'm pretty sure that both Buddhism and Judaism are liberal. except for conservative Judaism, or reform Judaism.
Thank you, brilliant internet friend. If you or someone you know would like to harp on my religion, please follow this link over to my Artemis Fowl fanfic (power and finesse obviously run in my genetics)! http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3786642/1/Come_What_May
Hurrah. I’m not Buddhist, but the way, although I have an enormous respect for their peaceful philosophy. I am culturally Jewish bordering on atheist.