Fullmetal Alchemist

Okay, where do I even start with this one? This is one of the few anime series I've watched dubbed -- and from what I've heard (*IN PASSING*) from Erika and Walker (*WE DEFINITELY DO NOT GET TOGETHER TO TALK ABOUT ANIME*) is that some people really, really don't like the voice acting in the Funimation dubs. Okay let me back up here.

There are two Fullmetal Alchemist anime series.

Both were produced by Bones and Aniplex, and dubbed and released in English by Funimation. But the first one doesn't follow the books, and the second one (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood) does. I haven't watched the second one yet. Sue me. I watched it a while ago.

So the two are known as "Fullmetal Alchemist" which ends with a film called "Conqueror of Shamballa", and "Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood" which has a film after it called "The Sacred Star of Milos".

What's really going to bake your noodle is that a *lot* of the events are similar. At least to start with. So when I say I haven't watched the second one, I mean I watched the first episode and thought I had seen it and stopped. But apparently I haven't seen it. So I guess I will. I'm going to need a drink by the end of this post.

So to basic plot is this: there's a crazy-as-hell world where the "science" of "alchemy" is real. If you know how to do it, you draw a fancy circle thing with squiggles and you can rearrange pretty much anything into anything else, if the first thing has all the composite parts of the second. So you can turn a broken radio into a fixed radio. Or a pile of iron filings and a pinch of charcoal into a steel knife. There's one catch: no doing this with living things. It gets very icky, very fast. Now take two strangely-gifted little boys with an absent father and a recently-dead mother, and the results are predictable.

The way that turns out isn't though. Predictable, I mean. Apparently the reason you don't try this crap with living people is that things go badly. So the way it seems to end up is these two brothers, Edward (the older brother) and Alphonse (the younger brother), the Elric brothers, end up giving a lot more than they get for the trade. Edward loses an arm and a leg, and the only reason any piece of Alphonse survives is that Edward grabs his soul and sticks it to a suit of armour that's lying around. And what they get in return is a smoking, writhing mess of almost-living certainly-not-human mess.

This is not a family-friendly series.

In fact, it's so not family friendly that Cartoon Network stuck it in the Adult Swim timeblock, because it fits in well with the level of maturity needed for Aqua Team Hunger Force and Harvey Birdman.

HA!ha... Gold On Gold...

Actually, maybe it needs more maturity.

Basically over the course of the series, the writers do everything in their power to emotionally scar and otherwise f*#k up Ed and Al and pretty much everybody else they meet, too. The moral depravity involved in any serious quest for power is definitely the point, but Jesus. Not. A. Kids'. Show.

So this is Ed and Al.

Ed on the left, Al is the suit of armor with the little kid's voice. That alone is creepy.

And they've got a pretty sweet kickass mechanic named Winry.

She's tough.

This guy bosses them around a lot.

Military man and alpha male Roy Mustang: the flame alchemist.

And this guy... he's pretty into his own muscles.

Alex Louis Armstrong: the strong arm alchemist

Oh, and there are villains. You see, the brothers metallic are looking for something called the philosopher's stone, which is supposedly able to do these magic tricks (called "transmutations") without obeying the first law: that whole, you get what you give thing. And that kind of power (they want it to get Al's body back) is something pretty much everybody wants.

So there are these not-quite-human things called Homunculi, which are powerful as heck and also looking for the stone, and then there's this guy.

Appropriately named: scar.

Scar here is an Ishbalan. He's from Ishbal. Ishbal was the site of a state-sanctioned campaign of ethnic cleansing a few years back, and nobody seems to know about it. Or at least, they all seem willing to forget. This is a dark as hell anime.

Scar has a fancy tattoo on his arm that lets him do "half-way" alchemy: he can take things apart, but not put them back together. And he (maybe rightly?) blames state alchemists for the genocide in his homeland, and wants to see them all die horribly.

So that's the major players and the background. It's messed up, and dark, and overall a well-told story. It's a lot longer than the others I've talked about here, clocking in at something like 51 episodes and a movie, but it's worth it. I'll give it four funny alchemy circle things out of five.

Now I'm going to have that drink.

Or not. Tanaka just called. Guess that's that.