Category: Fantasy

Fullmetal Alchemist: Comprehension, Deconstruction, Reconstruction

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hisui_icon_4040 I recently had to take a Friday off of work after I had spent most of Thursday expelling the contents of the digestive system. That meant I spent a good deal of two days mostly lying in bed. While the experience was hardly pleasant it did give me a good deal of time where I needed to entertain myself passively as I recovered. This gave me a good chance to knock out a very vital title in my pile of shame.

A while back Kate and I were asked if we could get the other host of the Speakeasy to watch one show what would it be. Kate said that she would get me to finish Fullmetal Alchemist. Fullmetal Alchemist was an odd case in my library. I started watching the original TV series but then the overwhelming outcry was the original manga was better. (If this is true is a matter of contention I will touch on later in the post.) So I put the TV series on hold and started reading the manga. I played with the idea of watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood but I was already decently invested into buying the manga and I heard that while Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood only got really good when it got into new material as the first parts of the story were extremely rushed since they were in the 2003 TV series. The problem was that halfway through the Fort Briggs storyline I got outsourced at work and my pay was significantly cut. This meant that I stopped buying a lot of manga series and one of those titles was Fullmetal Alchemist. I always meant to finish off the series but I just never got around to it.

So Fullmetal Alchemist fell into this limbo where I had gotten fairly far into the story so there was a drive to finish off the series but starting over from the beginning was a bit of a pain in the ass. I’m definitely in that position with Nodame Cantabile. I was really hoping that someone would get the itch watch Fullmetal Alchemist and I could tag along with them but that never happened. So I was in limbo until I got sick. It seemed to be the perfect catalyst. It also worked really well since I was a little loopy during the episodes I watched on Friday but that was mostly when I watched the part of the story that I had experienced multiple times. By the time I was generally feeling better on Saturday I had caught up to where I was in the manga. I then just spent the next week finishing off the series.

Now a LOT of ink has been split on Fullmetal Alchemist. If you want a complex analysis of the themes, characters, and plot it is not too hard to find. I instead wanted to just go over five things I noticed since I watched all of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood in 2019. There are certain observations that are easier to make a full decade after the show premiered. Some might only be possible with that much distance. That is worth talking about thanks to perspective.
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Secret Santa Project Review: KonoSuba – God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World!

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hisui_icon_4040_round If you were curious my three choices for Anime Secret Santa this year were both seasons of KonoSuba, both new parts of FLCL (FLCL Progressive and FLCL Alternative), or both seasons Blood Blockade Battlefront. For some reason, my Secret Santa seemed hellbent on me watching two seasons of whatever I picked.

I passed over FLCL mostly because while I was interested in watching the series I heard it was extremely disappointing. It was not horrible, or even worse, it just was a pale shadow of the original. It felt like something that would produce a rather limp review. Blood Blockade Battlefront seemed the safest choice. At worst I might find the show dull but it would have to go some really bad places to be hard to watch. KonoSuba seemed to be the show most in the spirit of the Secret Santa Project. It was a show I avoided because it seemed like more of the same isekai nonsense that has been flooding the market. But along with Re:Zero it is one of the few transported to another world series that I actually saw good reviews for. It seemed like a title I might have wrongly prejudged as another wannabe part of the Sword Art Online wave.

To be perfectly honest I also had I plan that if KonoSuba was Texhnolyze bad I could just hit the eject button and review the far safer Blood Blockade Battlefront. I’m not going to suffer THAT much for this project. Once was enough. I’m not that much of a masochist.

Clearly, since this is my Secret Santa review KonoSuba was not total unwatchable trash like The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar but that does not mean it was good. Does KonoSuba rise like cream to the top of the isekai barrel? The short answer is: It’s complicated.

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