“Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is Alchemy’s first law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days we really believed that to be the world’s one and only truth.”
That one little speech is, for many Anime fans of my age, one of the most emblematic of their early experience with the medium. The 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist anime isn’t just a classic; it’s notable as a pioneer and gateway for tons of fans. And so, it was inevitable that I would have to delve into it on this blog some time.
Before really getting into the plot, I want to talk a bit about what I think made Fullmetal Alchemist such a critical gateway. Specifically, while part of it is the fact that the show and its storyline are of quality, and part of it is likely “right place at the right time”, I think there’s a degree to which FMA was a pioneer anime because it was almost but not quite a Western-style fantasy story.
Because FMA, no doubt, draws heavily on Western sources. The Alchemy performed in the show, while not perfectly aligned with historical ideals, is somewhat familiar to hermetic magic and historical alchemy. Many of the conceits, like Homunculi and the Philosopher’s Stone, would be familiar to Western audiences. The setting is heavily styled after Europe, with significant leanings to German or Prussian, making it familiar turf for most English-speaking audiences, more than shows set in Tokyo or (fictional futuristic city, Japan). Even many of the motifs, like the Seven Deadly Sins, would be well known to anglophone Americans. The names are all European-style names. You’d be surprised how much that matters to some people.
This recognition serves to ease audiences into the material. There are some things that they ‘get’, so it feels safe. But FMA isn’t 100% Western Fantasy; there are some very critical ways in which it differs, especially from the Western Fantasy that was popular in the early 2000s.
For one, Fullmetal Alchemist doesn’t take place in a medieval setting. The vast majority of popular English-language Fantasy, at least from Tolkien to the rise of the popularity of Anime in the West, takes place in worlds that exist ambiguously in “the past”, particularly in a pastiche of the middle ages and antiquity, but with more modern social mores. Emulating Middle Earth and the stories of King Arthur, the genre was seen as existing in that misty timespace with no guns (despite firearms actually being quite old in some forms) or industrial-era inventions that blends elements ranging from the days when the kingship was in Uruk to the romaticized image of the Hundred Years’ War. Everything that was perceived as being between Gilgamesh and Joan of Arc was more or less fair game, other elements (fitting or no) would be excluded. Even fantasy that technically took place in the modern world, like Harry Potter, would often choose to shoo away elements that wouldn’t vibe with the “general fantasy aesthetic”.
There are exceptions, of course, and many of them are and were pretty well regarded, but if you asked a layperson to describe what kind of setting a Fantasy story would take place in, I’d be reasonably certain that they’d come up with a lot of those details and rules. While the genre feels a little more diverse now, some of them would still be pretty contentious topics
Fullmetal Alchemist is different. It seems to exist in a world that’s roughly parallel to World War I, maybe a little earlier given that we don’t see broad adoption of aircraft. It has electric lights, fascist dictators, civilian steel, snazzy military uniforms, and internal combustion engines. This alone, the setting’s relative modernity and willingness to openly include supernatural abilities alongside the growth of technology, would blow peoples’ minds. For the uninitiated, it still might, but back then it was primed to do a number.
The characters are also… not particularly Western in terms of the archetypes they follow. There’s no one factor that keeps Edward Elric from being a Western character, but his combination of traits isn’t or at least wasn’t really done en masse in Western stories. Most characters (regardless of origin) tend to have at least the skeleton of their characterization drawn from a pool of resonant archetypes specific to their genre and role. For the male lead of a Western Fantasy story circa 2000, your basic chassis would probably be the inexperienced callow youth dreaming of more, the wowed outsider drawn into a new world of wonder and/or threat, the small child or broody teen transported from regular Earth as we know it to an entirely separate Fantasy World, the noble and courageous fighting-man, or the saint-like paragon of virtue. Bucking these would not be impossible (Bilbo Baggins doesn’t fit any of them. Nor does Frodo in the books, though Elijah Wood’s portrayal skews towards the “callow youth” take) but it would be a mark of the uncommon. Even very well written characters can usually be boiled down to a core archetype they’re built outward from
Very few FMA characters, if any, fit into the Western Fantasy character archetype lexicon from the period in which they appeared. Some are at least a little familiar, but often not to the perceived genre or in the roles they’re given. For instance, Alchemists in FMA (which is to say most but critically not all of the important cast members) are essentially Magic-user characters. Western Fantasy very seldom permitted characters trained in the arcane arts to take main protagonistic roles. That rule isn’t as hard as things like “No Guns” (Potter, after all, was a thing, though that has the excuse of everyone having the trait) but experienced wizards would usually be advisors and sages like Gandalf or Merlin or Akiro from the Conan movie. Wizards placed more to the forefront were usually depicted as incompetent in some regard (Schmendrick from The Last Unicorn, Ergo the Magnificent from Krull) and even then usually stayed out of the absolute lead role.
The way that magic is depicted as well isn’t something that would have been familiar to casual viewers. Edward Elric’s Alchemy, in terms of how he moves and how he uses it to fight, is more familiar to the realm of comic book super heroes than it is to characters in “serious” fantasy when compared to Western genres. And in the early 2000s, comic book material had its own stern codes that set “cape” stories apart, and also didn’t have a great deal of respect from the general populace (the likes of which Fantasy in general was beginning to earn with the success of the Harry Potter franchise and the Lord of the Rings films). Nowadays, I think non-anime viewers have seen enough influenced media that they’d accept it, but when FMA first appeared on American shores, this kind of thing would have been remarkable even if it wasn’t unique.
I could go on much longer, but in the interests of actually getting to that whole “plot summary and review” thing I’ll cut to the chase here: the Western Elements served to ease viewers who might have otherwise been dubious about a foreign piece of media into experiencing something that, despite coming from a fairly developed art form (unlike most ‘genuinely new’ things, which suffer from a lack of refinement) ultimately felt very different because it used a different lexicon of basic building blocks and expected conventions. In turn, familiarity with FMA would make it easier to watch and get into other shows that use the Japanese tropes and expectations, because the viewer would recognize at least some of what they were getting into.
And that’s the anatomy of a “gateway” material, for which I have to offer FMA my sincere respect. Now, on with the review.
Fullmetal Alchemist starts something in media res, with Edward Elric, the titular Fullmetal Alchemist, and his little brother Alphonese (who is a giant suit of armor), visiting a city hat has a vaguely middle-eastern vibe to it and sparring with the local religious leader, who is using a power granted by a nefarious villian to manipulate his flock into believing he has real miraculous abilities. After dealing with this situation in a visually impressive way with a ton of memorable speeches, we move into an extended flashback to the history of the brothers, how they got into their current situation and why they’re seeking the Philosopher’s Stone.
In a sense, this is the strongest element of Fullmetal Alchemist, perhaps not in abstract, but when facing up to the elephant in the room. That elephant is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, the 2008 remake that faithfully followed the manga rather than diverging like the 2003 FMA did. I’ll say my piece about Brotherhood at the proper time, but suffice to say that whatever the general takeaway from the comparison may be (more on that when talking Brotherhood) this opening arc is done powerfully better in 2003.
The basic outlay of the Brothers’ history, and the setting details that must be explained are as follows.
The setting of Fullmetal Alchemist includes the power known as Alchemy. Alchemy is a science (in setting. It’s magic to viewers) by which, while respecting the Law of Equivalent Exchange, matter may be transmuted in both quality and shape. This is achieved, usually, by intricate diagrams (called Transmutation Circles) that channel power and basically make the magic happen when the Alchemist puts their will and mind to it, and that can be drawn for a single use or crafted in more permanent forms for quick deployment. In addition to the hard and fast laws of Alchemy, there are also taboos among Alchemists, chief among which is that one must never perform transmutation on a human,
The brothers are the sons of a potent Alchemist, Hoenheim (who they take after in aptitude), and an ordinary woman, Trisha Elric. Hoenheim leaves when the boys are quite young, giving them some serious abandonment issues and meaning they’re largely raised by their mother until she goes and dies.
Edward and Alphones decide that rules were meant to be broken, and prepare to use Alchemy to resurrect their mother. This goes very poorly – the transmutation appears to fail in a spectacular way, with Edward losing a leg and Alphonse’s entire body vanishing. Bleeding and reeling from the event, Edward uses what strength he has to perform another feat of alchemy and bind Al’s soul to a convenient suit of armor, costing Ed his arm and resulting in the Al we know.
Recall, these kids are still really young. I don’t think Al was even in his teens at this point.
Ed ends up taken to their neighbors, the Rockbells, where his childhood friend and obvious love interest, Winry, and her grandmother specialize in the creation of Automail – mechanical prosthesis – which sees Ed loaded out with his trademark metal arm and leg, replacing the ones he lost in his little Human Transmutation adventure.
At about this time, a man named Roy Mustang arrives. He’s a military officer and a State Alchemist (The Flame Alchemist, since he uses alchemy that manipulates air composition in order to create flames on command), and while he recognizes that the boys have been through some very illegal behavior, he sees some very promising skill in them since they survived at all, and suggests Ed try to become a State Alchemist himself, possibly because Ed’s experience grants him the ability to transmute without using circles. Ed resolves to do just that, hoping to gain access to the government’s secret records regarding the Philosopher’s Stone, a mythical tool of Alchemy that would allow someone to violate Equivalent Exchange and Ed at least to restore his brother’s body from the void.
Following this are a series of vignettes chronicling Ed’s journey to become a State Alchemist and then some of his earlier missions in which he earns the reputation he has by the first couple of episodes. Most of these episodes, while individually good, are vignettes that sort of start nowhere and go nowhere, but that are quite entertaining and of good quality on their own. You could consider it a sort of monster (or mad alchemist) of the week phase.
During this phase, there are a few things that must be addressed: two particular episodes, and one major conceit.
I’ll start with the facts: we’re introduced properly to our first major villains, a trio of homunculi known as Lust, Envy, and Gluttony. Homunculi, in setting are artificial life-forms created by Alchemy. In the case of the various ones named after deadly sins, they’re quite human-like, but possess psuedo-immortality and powers far beyond those of mortals: Envy can shapeshift into the forms of other humans, Lust can turn her fingers into long-reaching stabbing claws (this is more dangerous than it sounds – she does a decent gun impression), and Gluttony seems capable of biting into and eating literally anything. They have very human intelligence as well. Gluttony is rather dull, but Envy and Lust are quite capable schemers in their own rights and can very much hold up their ends of a conversation.
Also introduced is Scar, a brooding brown dude from the religiously and ethnically distinct territory of Ishval, who sees alchemy and alchemists as sinful but uses a grafted arm tattooed with alchemical circles to disassemble alchemists and their creations.
There are also those two episodes that bear special mention before “cutting back in” to the story as a whole. The first is Episode 7, “Night of the Chimera’s Cry”. It concerns a time when Edward is, as a newly-minted State Alchemist, essentially apprenticed to a senior State Alchemist named Shou Tucker, the Sowing-Life Alchemist, who earned his rank and title by, years before, producing a chimera (Alchemical melding of living creatures into a single entity) that was capable of speech. The brothers learn, and bond with Tucker and his daughter Nina. However, some brilliantly traumatic horror (for both the cast and the audience) strikes when Tucker, who is running out of time in the “publish or perish” world of Alchemical academia and who hasn’t done anything impressive since that first talking Chimera (which did only ever say “I want to die”) decides to go ahead and make another one rather than lose his livelihood and ability to care for his daughter… even though the process means using said daughter and the family dog as the components for the Chimera, like he used his wife years in the past (they were on the rocks). Ed gets to be absolutely sickened by how far the abuse of Alchemy can go, and nobody ends happy as while he releases the Nina-chimera hoping to find a way to separate her back out of it, said creature comes upon Scar, who sympathizes with it and also messily puts it out of its misery.
Night of the Chimera’s Cry is a damnably effective episode, an emotional gut punch of a gothic horror story about science gone mad. For half an hour, that’s darn impressive work.
The other episode is called “Be Thou for the People”, though I think of it as the Youswell mine episode. It involves Ed getting his good rep with common people apart from the reputation of State Alchemists when he visits a town being ruthlessly exploited by its military administrator, Lieutenant Yoki. The people are not fans of the military-government apparatus in which State Alchemists are a part, and try to charge Ed an absurd fee for an inn stay before he runs into slimeball Yoki, who wines, dines, and attempts to bribe the brothers while also having the inn burned down for the peasants daring to speak out.
Ed doesn’t take kindly to this and decides to retaliate. He uses the bribe money to gild a mass of bricks and claim he’s discovered gold for the state in the local mine (which is is its livelihood), and convinces Yoki to part with the deed to the mine “free of charge” with an unrelated gift of a giant palette of “gold bars” that would be much less problematic.
Yoki catches on far too late, and Ed offers the deed back to the townsfolk – not without making them squirm a little as he goes on about how valuable the fancy paper is, but the price he ultimately names “just happens” to be the price quoted for one night in the local inn. Which Ed also points out is standing right over there, nicely not burned down (thanks to a load of offscreen transmutation work from Al). The people get their lives back, and Yoki, who has also now more or less admitted to giving and receiving bribes on record, is all set to be figuratively and perhaps literally sodomized before being run out of town and dismissed in disgrace.
It’s a good episode, but there’s an ulterior motive to my bringing it up now: Yoki shows up later with a new “peniless drifter” design, and gets promptly killed by the Homunculi in order to incite a riot. In Brotherhood, however (last time until the ending discussion, I promise), Yoki comes back as an actually fairly important character, including his grudge against the brothers and something of a redemption arc as he helps, in whatever cowardly way he can, to save the world. But Brotherhood has no Youswell Mine episode. In fact, I’m pretty sure the extremely brief flashbacks to the events (which aren’t enough to totally put it together if you don’t know) are clips directly from “Be Thou for the People”. I have… no idea why they left it out when that’s the version where it would actually help to know where Yoki came from and how the brothers dealt with him before.
In any case, after that we “catch up” to the present, where Ed is working for Mustang as a State Alchemist while also seeking the truth of the Philosopher’s Stone, which seems to attract the attention of the Homunculi. We get some more fairly one-off stories but eventually receive a promising lead in the search for Dr. Tim Marcoh, an Alchemist doctor who cooperated with the military in the past and who seems to be something of a miracle-worker when it comes to medicinal alchemy (which is distinct from Human Transmutation, just as Tucker’s heinous deeds were, because neither attempts to transmute a human soul).
Ed and friends track down Marcoh, and he tells them of the Philosopher’s stone, and how at least a crude form was used in the Ishval uprising, and how the massive amplification of power for participating State Alchemists turned it into a massacre that still haunts many of the more principled participants, such as Mustang.
However, they aren’t the only ones looking for Marcoh. On one side, military forces more directly loyal and answerable to the nation’s leader, Fuhrer Bradley, have come to collect Marcoh. On the other side, Scar is still looking to avenge the Ishval Massacre, and that puts Marcoh firmly on his hit list. In the end, the brothers gets torn up pretty badly, we get to meet badass comic relief Alex Louis Armstrong (The Strong-arm Alchemist and possibly the only guy who can really pull off sparkling.) while the Fuhrer’s security forces take Marcoh “somewhere safe” (if you trust that I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Fuyuki City) and Scar escapes for future terrorism. This leads to Ed and Al heading back to their home town (with Armstrong) to have all the king’s horses and all the king’s men – or at least a certain tomboyish love interest – put Edward Elric together again so he can restore Al.
The boys head back to the capitol, where they hope to find Dr. Marcoh’s research notes. Unfortunately, they’re a bit behind Scar and the Homunculi, who were looking for the same thing and managed to burn the library down fighting over it. However, a former secretary of Marcoh’s turns out to have memorized all his writing, and is able to faithfully reproduce everything for the brothers. It’s encrypted and she has no idea what the cleartext is, but it’s a start. They crack the code and learn the horrible truth: the Philosopher’s Stone is people.
However, after a very needed bit angsting about the nature of their pursuit, they figure that it’s still a jumping-off point, and even if they’re not going to sacrifice human lives to make a Stone, understanding what was done could still be valuable. This leads to the two of them setting out to investigate the theoretically mothballed Lab Five, where some of the Stone production was done.
Suffice to say, Lab Five turns into a hellish experience. They have to face the soul-attached remnant of a serial killer they formerly brought to justice (Barry the Chopper, now an existence like Al). The parade of the should-have-been dead continues as they run into Tucker (now a chimera himself), who shows Ed around the lab. The Homunculi are also making a play, bringing in more prisoners, while the commotion allows an imprisoned Homunculus, Greed, to escape.
Even with Al teaming up with Scar to take them on, the Homunculi get the upper hand, and try to force Ed to create a new Philosopher’s Stone. He’s saved from the mess by the arrival of a military strike team, arranged by Mustang’s friend and confidant Maes Hughes (who we have spent a lot of time with by this point, as he seems the sane man in Mustang’s operation), with Fuhrer Bradley himself leading the charge.
In the aftermath, Ed and Al travel (with Winry for a bit, after a brief team-up with Scar) and Hughes investigates the happenings and the government’s actual connections to Lab 5, Ishval, and a lot of dirty deeds. This ultimately alerts the homunculi, and Hughes is attacked by Lust and ultimately assassinated by Envy.
This is a major turning point for the show, and also something of the most notable divergence point: from here, the plot largely belongs to 2003’s FMA
The Elric Brothers, meanwhile, end up caught by their former teacher, Izumi Curtis, a very cool alchemist lady who decides that her wayward pupils are in bad need of a little re-education. She re-teaches them some important lessons, including by stranding them on an island. While with her, they encounter a new Homunculus, ultimately revealed as Wrath, who seems to have Ed’s arm and leg. Before he recovers his memory, though, he’s sort of looked after by Izumi, which makes things hard on her when the military nab him for a moment.
Once Wrath remembers he’s Wrath, though, he’s fully an enemy, though Izumi breaks up the fight between him and the Elrics. The reason for this cuts to the truth of the Homunculi in 2003’s FMA: each one is, apparently, the result of a failed Human Transmutation, coming into being somewhere in the aftermath. And Wrath, despite somehow having Ed’s limbs welded to him, is mostly the result of Izumi’s own failure, an attempt to give life to her stillborn child. So, while Wrath has grown up since then, she’s still kind of attached to it.
Izumi sends the brothers off to meet with her own teacher, a woman called Dante, who also seems to have taken a young lady alchemist as a new apprentice. Greed shows up with his gang, though, and kind of ends up kidnapping Al. The effort to rescue Al is interrupted by another round of the more sinister military types, and the sequence as a whole sees Greed betrayed, his gang mostly wiped out, and Greed himself going to face Dante. When he gets there, though, Dante is dead in what’s very obviously some kind of evil ritual and her apprentice (or more properly, Dante in her new stolen body, because bodysnatching is what she does) renders Greed fully mortal, which doesn’t end well when Ed shows up to find Greed and the corpse of the previous Dante, resulting in Greed’s untimely death.
And this is about the point where the show starts to get… kind of chaotic. Most individual episodes still read fairly well, but it’s pretty obvious that nobody actually knew what was going on.
This is probably because they didn’t. When the original Fullmetal Alchemist anime was put together, the manga hadn’t ended, and the studio wanted to create a full story rather than stopping part way (as is now more the thing to do) they created what’s often called a “Gecko ending” – like a gecko can shed its own tail and grow a new one, the original ending (not yet written or at least not yet revealed) is shed, and a new one created in its place.
FMA’s Gecko phase is pretty long, all things considered. Often times, shows that have Gecko endings just try to provide a satisfying conclusion in a couple of episodes, resolving major plot points early. FMA either couldn’t (because of the sprawling nature of the story) or didn’t want to do that – almost half the show is firmly the “Gecko Ending”, including some time after the proper introduction of Dante where we largely spin our wheels.
Major movements see Ed and Al bounce all over the map, particularly ending up both in Ishval (it’s ruined) and the city from the first episode (it’s in crisis, with a now-mute girl they helped back them forced to be its messiah figure and an unwanted extra romantic interest for Ed as the show unceremoniously shoves Winry aside).
Along the way, Lust gets a surprising lot of character development, ultimately leading to her coming off as… not so bad. In fact, she’s the remnant of the fiancee of Scar’s brother, and ultimately finds her human attachments to Scar and the rest of the family are too great, leading to her switching sides and teaming up with the brothers.
This is a good thing, too, as they also have to deal with Sloth – the homunculus born from their attempt to resurrect their mother, and thus the closest thing to her in this world. Sloth is ultimately taken down, but it’s a pretty fulfilling and rather painful road to the brothers, as they have to accept, vehemently, the final nail in their mother’s coffin and also take responsibility and clean up their terrible mistake.
For those who have been counting along, Greed and Sloth are dead, Wrath is a kid with Ed’s limbs, Lust is a good guy, Envy and Gluttony are still doing their things… so what about Pride? Pride, it turns out, is none other than Fuhrer Bradley himself, explaining why some government forces are so darn sinister.
The brothers’ father, Hoenheim (aka Hoenheim of Light), also reappears, briefly flirting with women we’ve met in passing and then going on to confront Dante. The truth seems to be that he and Dante are two of a kind – they were a couple way back when, and ultimately set upon their immortality regardless of how many lives they’d have to destroy along the way. Somewhere in the program of mass murder and body snatching, Hoenheim got cold feet and decided to go womanize elsewhere, resulting ultimately in the brothers, who he went and abandoned because his stolen body was running out of time. I guess he must have nabbed another one just like it, because he’s looking pretty good as he faces Dante and she… unceremonious throws him through the mystical gate thingy that appears when human transmutation is done. Well, that was important and entertaining. At least, it got me 100% on Ed’s side with holding a grudge against Hoenheim and considering him a slimeball. Even ignoring his past as one of history’s greatest monsters he’s genuinely just not a good person, and his attempts to make up for it all here are halfhearted at best.
Mustang (remember him?) finalizes his plans for a rebellion against the Fuhrer. Ed meets up with him and they exchange intel and make up before going their own ways: Mustang to a mildly satisfying final conflict with Bradley that will have to wait a bit, and Edward to face Dante, leader of the Homunculi.
Edward’s confrontation with Dante goes a lot like dear old dad’s. She’s planning to body snatch the poor traumatized girl from episode 1 who is apparently special to Ed, Ed doesn’t like that, the budget largely runs out so we get long, long pans of empty room around the two of them while they talk, and Dante ultimately… pitches him through the gate just like she did with Hoenheim. Like father, like son I guess.
The other side of the Gate turns out to be Earth as we know it, or at least a closer alternate history with the familiar powers rather than the fictional countries of FMA’s main setting. It’s currently something like World War I, London is being bombed to hell by zeppelin, and Ed meets up with his dad.
On the other side, Gluttony mopes over Lust being dead rather than focusing on devouring Al to make a new Philosopher’s Stone, so Dante goes ahead and mind crushes him like that won’t bite her in the rear. She’s also so good as to remove Ed’s limbs from Wrath (leaving him a torn up wreck missing mama Sloth and no longer able to use dangerous superpowers)
Ed and Hoenheim send Ed back to their homeworld, where he ends up fighting Envy, revealed to be the original son of the original Hoenheim and Dante, whose death they tried to reverse and who thus, in the second to last episode, is revealed to hate Ed for taking his place as Hoenheim’s son. He then kills Ed and ends up encountering Ed’s soul at the weird gate. Envy hates Hoenheim more, though, so turns into a dragon and charges through the gate when Ed tells him that dad’s still alive on the other side. It is strongly implied this won’t end well for Envy. Al, meanwhile, uses himself as a philosopher’s stone to put Ed back together (limbs and all). Useless girl leaves with Wrath like we’re supposed to care about the little punk, and then Ed just reverses what Al did and uses himself to restore Al. This works, leaving Al in his original body, amnesiac, on the home side of the Gate while Ed is back on Earth. Dante books it, but Insane Gluttony gobbles her up on her way out. Way to go out like a total chump, Dante. Meanwhile, Mustang assassinates Pride in a pretty good battle, and the series ends with the brothers now on opposite worlds, looking for a way to meet again.
So, some mixed feelings about the 2003 FMA. On one hand, it is absolutely a solid action show, through and through. Even when the budget shows some really noticeable strain in the last episodes, they knew what they were saving for and execute it well. On the other hand, the plot takes the bullet train to crazytown, and not in a good way. Convention after convention and twist after twist are introduced in a misguided attempt to keep things fresh or provide something the viewer wouldn’t have predicted, and while a surprising number of them land (like creepy Chimera Tucker being a thing and a character who the brothers have to deal with a few times), others (like the nature of the Gate) really kind of don’t.
I think the most damning part about the Gecko Ending phase of FMA is how much we’re asked to be invested in characters who are just awful, unlikable, or straight downgrades from other characters we’d rather be watching. We get too little out of Mustang and his squad (most of whom were pretty colorful and memorable characters, even if I didn’t need to mention them by name), criminally too little out of Winry for the amount of show she was incidentally in earlier, and far, far too much out of Hoenheim, Wrath, and the boring girl.
For that matter, Dante is… not a particularly compelling villain. She’s hardly the worst baddie anime has seen, but she doesn’t make a very good presence, and while some effort is made to build her up as the boss of the Homunculi (who she nurtured into their current forms and gave their weirdly thematic names), she feels like a downgrade from the phase where our antagonists were led by Lust.
That said, I do think there’s still more good in FMA, even in the Gecko Ending, than there is bad. Lust’s redemption arc is really well handled, and asks some good questions about what the homunculi are and what it means to have free will. The confrontation with Sloth is a solid turning point for the brothers, even as late as it comes.
In the end, FMA had an absolutely stellar start, creating a vivid picture of a fantastic world with deeply explored magic, while delivering some truly top-notch action to visualize it. It had a deep and tangled plot, amazingly memorable characters, and a powerfully mythic feel for a story set in a world as close as it is to the modern. It’s just something of a pity that it lost most of its spark about halfway through, and had to drag itself blindly across the finish line.
Which is, let’s be honest, probably why we have Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. When you really think about it, it’s kind of shocking how close on FMA’s heels the release of Brotherhood was. I get that the franchise was seriously hot stuff, but a full remake within five years? That’s pretty unheard of, especially when the original, while marred, was not badly regarded as a whole.
And, frankly, it doesn’t deserve to be badly regarded. At its absolute worst, FMA struggles, flailing for a solution to an incomplete problem. At it’s best, it’s an absolute landmark for a reason. The 2003 show is one that I rate A- with firm confidence, despite all my misgivings around the second half.
As for Brotherhood… we’ll be coming back for that next week.