Purple Cows & Teal Dolphins: Blogging Brotherhood: The Intro

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Blogging Brotherhood: The Intro

I was eleven years old when the first Fullmetal Alchemist series aired on Cartoon Network in 2004. For whatever reason, I never watched it. Never. Didn’t even catch one episode. It was one of those shows that slipped completely under my radar, and part of that might have had something to do with my bizarre loyalty to Nickelodeon as a kid that hung around until I was maybe fifteen and realized that a lot of their shows were terrible. Regardless, Fullmetal Alchemist was a show that I heard about all the time—and many of my friends had watched it—but I knew nothing about it and had no real interest in finding out more.

Then along came this weird new interest in anime, and the next thing I knew a friend of mine convinced me to watch it. It’s a little disappointing for me to find out that a show, especially one as notorious as this one, is so long, as life and general other real-world obligations get in the way and prevent me from finishing a series in a timely manner. It took me two months to get through all 51 episodes of Fullmetal, and the last twenty or so I binge-watched over the course of three days.

Now here’s a little bit of hard truth: it’s far from perfect. Even in my limited experience with anime, I’ve noticed a trend that seems to run pretty consistently amongst shows regardless of genre: the moment when they deviate from their source material (if there is one), the plots tend to get…weird. As much as I enjoyed season one of Black Butler, I will be the first to admit that, despite the more serious and straight-forward tone that the show took in its latter half, the storyline had a lot of elements that felt awkward or forced. And it makes sense—writers don’t know where the original story was heading since they aren’t the creators, so if a manga isn’t finished, they have to use the characters and ideas from their own imaginations to finish it out. The result is that those plot points often feel disjointed from the rest of the story. There’s a lot of “let’s bring back this character from the first episode who had one line and turn them into a villain muahahahaha!” kind of stuff that happens, as well as grand, sweeping notions that are meant to explain certain elements of a story but just end up complicating them. FMA is guilty of both of these—bad. And as much I will say that this show is a solid 7/10, those elements frustrate me because the rest of it so dang good. I may or may not do a full review at a later date, but for now I'll leave it at this: It was a delightful and joyous experience that, despite much affection, has a few considerable flaws.

Then there’s Brotherhood.

Okay, if I'm being totally honest here, I watched the original FMA for two reasons: One, it's considered a classic and a show you should watch before you die. Two, it's easier to watch the original first before getting into Brotherhood, because I'm told that if you watch Brotherhood first, your viewing of the original will be less than satisfying. Not that it couldn't be done, but the odds aren't in your favor.

So in a nutshell, I watched the original because I wanted a base before going into Brotherhood. That was my ultimate goal. Sorry, original FMA, I used you for my own personal gain. I'm a terrible human being, abusing cartoons in such a fashion.

But yes, as an added bit of fun for myself, I'm planning on blogging my thoughts after EVERY SINGLE EPISODE of Brotherhood, in part because it seems like fun and also because it's like watching an old person play with a computer: You know all about what they're experiencing for the first time and it's amusing because they have no idea. I'm hoping it will prevent me from binge-watching fifteen episodes in a row because I could never hope to write about them in one sitting. That being said, I will probably aim for two episodes per blog entry, since 64 blog posts (DEAR GOD IT'S LONGER THAN THE ORIGINAL) is...a lot.

Some rules I'm setting for myself:

1. No more than three episodes per sit-down/blog post.
2. They will be as short as I can possibly make them.
3. I won't compare Brotherhood to the original in a "which is better" sense, at least not in a petty kind of way. The original is allowed to be stomped all over and Brotherhood changes can suck. I will make connections and note the differences, not whine about how one thing is worse because it's different. Obviously, since I'll be recounting my thoughts as the episodes play out, there will be spoilers.

Here's to my sanity, which I'm sure will be gone by the time I'm done with everything. Cheers.