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Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
...YES. I am about halfway through Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I am blaming ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
genarti for this one, because she just had to show me that great Roy and Riza icon that got me thinking, hey, you know, seeing this in color could be really cool… And I am also blaming the fact that they are less than half an hour long each, which was very appealing because I have no attention span anymore. (HA, by the way. This turned out to be irrelevant, as I usually snarf down at least two episodes at a time.)
Anyway! Really good! By and large very faithful adaptation! I have all sorts of emotional feelings about it! I am a sucker for voice acting in general (and I find all the actors superb)! It makes me extremely emotional pretty regularly! I am really glad I read the manga first, though. One reason is that I tend to multitask when I watch TV, so I often miss huge glaring parts of the plot, and this is one show where that… doesn't work so well. The other is… why I had to make this post. Spoilers through Episode 30 / manga volume 16. (Yes. THAT ONE.)
I mean, in broad outline Ishval is the same in manga and anime — and the animation does convey, probably better than static black-and-white, how awful and horrible it is. It's a lot shorter (with some scenes cut, like the alchemist Basque Gran killing a superior who makes horrible decisions, and the people under his command — including Hughes! — calling it a "stray bullet"), and the Scar arc is moved earlier so is not present here. I understand why they did this — it does make plot arcs which make a little more sense in a lot of ways — and they couldn't have kept it up for the multiple episodes the manga sort of demands — but it does have the effect of sort of isolating and containing the horror, dissipating it. Whereas part of what the manga does is pile brutality on top of brutality until you can't contain it, you can't sanitize it. And it doesn't show things concurrently from the point of view of the Ishvalans, which… ugh. And although the manga sympathizes with the Ishvalans, which it should, it does not cut corners that they all do horrible, terrible things — and what the anime doesn't show to me, not viscerally, is that the atrocities piled on atrocities, both the Amestrian and the Ishvalan, come in response to the other, that they escalate and escalate beyond sanity.
The other big change is that in the anime, Kimblee is the person who ends the war by his use of the Philosopher's Stone to exterminate Ishvar. This is not what happens in the manga, and it REALLY BOTHERED ME. In the manga, Roy Mustang is the "hero of Ishvar." The whole point of this is that it's the characters we've come to know and love that have done unforgiveable things. It is Mustang who burns whole swaths of Ishval, who burns the Ishvalans into submission. The anime, I feel, gives Mustang and Hawkeye and the others an out. Oh, it seems to be saying, oh sure, they did bad things, but hey, look, the psychopath did worse things! In the manga, they don't get that out. Mustang, Hughes, Hawkeye: they are the ones who did the evil, right alongside Kimblee, and Mustang did the worst. Not Kimblee. They can't hide behind him.
So yeah, I feel like the anime pulled its punches here, and it makes me angry just because the manga so did not pull its punches.
(Also — Mustang looks so young in this episode! It makes my heart kind of twist a little for him.)
genarti for this one, because she just had to show me that great Roy and Riza icon that got me thinking, hey, you know, seeing this in color could be really cool… And I am also blaming the fact that they are less than half an hour long each, which was very appealing because I have no attention span anymore. (HA, by the way. This turned out to be irrelevant, as I usually snarf down at least two episodes at a time.)Anyway! Really good! By and large very faithful adaptation! I have all sorts of emotional feelings about it! I am a sucker for voice acting in general (and I find all the actors superb)! It makes me extremely emotional pretty regularly! I am really glad I read the manga first, though. One reason is that I tend to multitask when I watch TV, so I often miss huge glaring parts of the plot, and this is one show where that… doesn't work so well. The other is… why I had to make this post. Spoilers through Episode 30 / manga volume 16. (Yes. THAT ONE.)
I mean, in broad outline Ishval is the same in manga and anime — and the animation does convey, probably better than static black-and-white, how awful and horrible it is. It's a lot shorter (with some scenes cut, like the alchemist Basque Gran killing a superior who makes horrible decisions, and the people under his command — including Hughes! — calling it a "stray bullet"), and the Scar arc is moved earlier so is not present here. I understand why they did this — it does make plot arcs which make a little more sense in a lot of ways — and they couldn't have kept it up for the multiple episodes the manga sort of demands — but it does have the effect of sort of isolating and containing the horror, dissipating it. Whereas part of what the manga does is pile brutality on top of brutality until you can't contain it, you can't sanitize it. And it doesn't show things concurrently from the point of view of the Ishvalans, which… ugh. And although the manga sympathizes with the Ishvalans, which it should, it does not cut corners that they all do horrible, terrible things — and what the anime doesn't show to me, not viscerally, is that the atrocities piled on atrocities, both the Amestrian and the Ishvalan, come in response to the other, that they escalate and escalate beyond sanity.
The other big change is that in the anime, Kimblee is the person who ends the war by his use of the Philosopher's Stone to exterminate Ishvar. This is not what happens in the manga, and it REALLY BOTHERED ME. In the manga, Roy Mustang is the "hero of Ishvar." The whole point of this is that it's the characters we've come to know and love that have done unforgiveable things. It is Mustang who burns whole swaths of Ishval, who burns the Ishvalans into submission. The anime, I feel, gives Mustang and Hawkeye and the others an out. Oh, it seems to be saying, oh sure, they did bad things, but hey, look, the psychopath did worse things! In the manga, they don't get that out. Mustang, Hughes, Hawkeye: they are the ones who did the evil, right alongside Kimblee, and Mustang did the worst. Not Kimblee. They can't hide behind him.
So yeah, I feel like the anime pulled its punches here, and it makes me angry just because the manga so did not pull its punches.
(Also — Mustang looks so young in this episode! It makes my heart kind of twist a little for him.)
no subject
(One of the reasons I am so adamantly opposed to the first anime is that there, the main burden of Mustang's guilt is that he kills the Rockbells, under orders. And that actually makes me furious, because, like ... it's not bad enough unless he kills some white people who are related to our protagonists? The rest of what he did to Ishval isn't ENOUGH for us to understand how horrible it is?)
no subject
Yeah, I mean, now I can understand a little more how people who are familiar with only FMA:B can downplay Ishval and the war-criminal status of Mustang/Hawkeye/Hughes in their heads... but...
...wow. I... that is sort of spectacularly cringeworthy. I... am not sure I want to watch the first anime anymore... (Huh. I'd never thought about it, but it's an interesting choice that in the manga/second-anime Kimblee does not, in fact, kill the Rockbells, which would have been an easy way to build sympathy, and what I expect a less talented writer would have done. It was the tough choice to make it Scar.)
(Also, I adore that icon.)