Brotherhood is a very faithful anime adaptation! There's a weird intro-to-everyone first episode which is eminently skippable -- it's got some fun bits but it's mostly clunky, and it introduces a lot of spoilers for later in a dizzying whirl that the first-time viewer won't catch and the viewer who knows manga canon will be astounded by -- but after that it settles down. There are some manga bits it does differently, some in ways that work well and some in ways where I prefer the manga version, but they're mostly small things, and I personally really like having motion and color and good voice actors. (I've only watched the sub; I can't speak for the dub, except that Vic Mignogna annoys me in general so I don't really want to listen to his Ed. YMMV.)
YES YES SO MUCH YES -- the Elrics, who can actually grow apart a little and into their own lives, yes, awesome, thank you Arakawa for making that a happy ending while still maintaining that utter bedrock of trust and love! Emperor Ling! Mei and Al! Havoc doing physical therapy, because nothing is 100% easy, yessss! The chimeras in the circus! Scar and Miles, rebuilding Ishval because it needs to be rebuilt BY ISHVALANS at heart even if the Amestrian military also has a responsibility here! SO MANY CHARACTERS GETTING TO COME BACK ONSCREEN. I LOVE EVERYTHING.
And okay yes. You're right, I was partly referring to Hohenheim! Also partly to Scar and to Marcoh, since I couldn't remember where they were in their arcs. But Hohenheim's arc is so interesting to me because a lot of the others -- well, they're complicated and layered and nuanced, but the basic framework of I did this and now I need to figure out what to do with that guilt and responsibility is fairly clear. Hohenheim's backstory takes a while to come out, and it's huge and weird and hard to grasp, and his reactions are also weird and hard to grasp, because he's kind of an odd guy and because he's had literally centuries of grappling with this. But the more you stop and think about it, the more affecting and complex it is. The reveal about how he knew all their names -- I couldn't do anything but keyboardmash for a while. All we'd had was, you know, the souls as a bubbling or occasionally wailing mass, no sense of real humanity left beyond shreds, and then Hohenheim knew their names, he spoke to them, every single person inside of him, and THAT was part of what he'd spent his hundreds of years doing, getting both them and himself past the trauma enough to be able to do that. I hadn't even thought of it as a possibility. And it's so huge, and so in keeping with all the themes of humanity and personhood in this series, that he did that.
And yet he remains, you know, a pretty terrible deadbeat dad despite his best intentions and his genuine reasons for leaving. And that's not forgotten either, and Ed is allowed to keep his anger and his hurt over it. I love Arakawa for that too, because people are complicated, and they're allowed to be complicated.
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YES YES SO MUCH YES -- the Elrics, who can actually grow apart a little and into their own lives, yes, awesome, thank you Arakawa for making that a happy ending while still maintaining that utter bedrock of trust and love! Emperor Ling! Mei and Al! Havoc doing physical therapy, because nothing is 100% easy, yessss! The chimeras in the circus! Scar and Miles, rebuilding Ishval because it needs to be rebuilt BY ISHVALANS at heart even if the Amestrian military also has a responsibility here! SO MANY CHARACTERS GETTING TO COME BACK ONSCREEN. I LOVE EVERYTHING.
And okay yes. You're right, I was partly referring to Hohenheim! Also partly to Scar and to Marcoh, since I couldn't remember where they were in their arcs. But Hohenheim's arc is so interesting to me because a lot of the others -- well, they're complicated and layered and nuanced, but the basic framework of I did this and now I need to figure out what to do with that guilt and responsibility is fairly clear. Hohenheim's backstory takes a while to come out, and it's huge and weird and hard to grasp, and his reactions are also weird and hard to grasp, because he's kind of an odd guy and because he's had literally centuries of grappling with this. But the more you stop and think about it, the more affecting and complex it is. The reveal about how he knew all their names -- I couldn't do anything but keyboardmash for a while. All we'd had was, you know, the souls as a bubbling or occasionally wailing mass, no sense of real humanity left beyond shreds, and then Hohenheim knew their names, he spoke to them, every single person inside of him, and THAT was part of what he'd spent his hundreds of years doing, getting both them and himself past the trauma enough to be able to do that. I hadn't even thought of it as a possibility. And it's so huge, and so in keeping with all the themes of humanity and personhood in this series, that he did that.
And yet he remains, you know, a pretty terrible deadbeat dad despite his best intentions and his genuine reasons for leaving. And that's not forgotten either, and Ed is allowed to keep his anger and his hurt over it. I love Arakawa for that too, because people are complicated, and they're allowed to be complicated.