Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

If there's one thing I really don't like, it's the shonen offshoot of anime in serial form. But from time to time, I give some of the classics of the genre a try to see if I can't break it after all. And it was the younger of the Fullmetal Alchemists who came the closest to this, because I gritted my teeth and tried to take all the annoying "trademarks of shonen" at my mercy, which, even with the best will, is simply impossible. The protagonist behaves in such a way that even a person with multiple personality disorder acts consistently compared to him. Edward is now a single-minded genius, now a naive, now a cynical, horny bastard, now a good-hearted hero, now a wronged little kid, and a dozen other forms. And not within a saga, or from episode to episode, or in different scenes, no, within a single one, over and over again. The solidly staged dramatic moments are deliberately (however incomprehensibly) devalued by a force-fed childish element (initially in every episode, almost not at all during the final episode). Everyone is constantly proclaiming all their thoughts and plans to everyone in sight. The heroes have a macabre penchant for screaming their inner feelings at the top of their lungs, but the viewer sees them through the animation and understands how they feel from the action. And yet, they will still scream it to your face. In contrast to this, such details as the fact that it has a reprehensibly poorly constructed, curtailed and even slow start (it gets interesting around the eighth episode and picks up the pace even later), the fact that the same characters keep meeting each other randomly in every backstreet in the wide world, that it often jumps to an unnecessary plot detour that solves nothing and moves the characters nowhere, or that the main characters are completely in the hands of the writers in terms of their level of abilities. And so, without any logic, they are very good at what they do for a while, only to lose a scene later with one touch from a nobody, but in the end they win by being the best in the world again. That’s shonen for you. Anyway, by biting my tongue, I survived the opening and the "they're going to scream something blatantly obvious for one more minute, I'm going to blow my brains out" elements started to feel like pure guilty pleasure, and eventually Stockholm Syndrome kicked in and I was able to accept them enough to ignore them, to focus on what makes the show so damn good and what makes it a classic. And that is no small feat. Once it gets going, it's downright addictive, the final third is excellently paced, many of the characters are impossible not to like (except for Chang, who is unbearably annoying even by anime standards), the saga is truly epic, full of twists and turns and well grasped big themes, the steampunk-imperial-fascist world is so tangible that you care about its history and the particulars, the mythology and rules of alchemy are also solid, the action is playfully imaginative and frequent, the central brother duo is put on the back burner especially in the second half, giving space to more interesting characters, and there are many a powerful emotional moment. However, every time it looked like it would even begin to grow on me, it would unsportingly trip over its own feet with some of the above. It oscillates to its own detriment too much between "almost absolute quality" and "almost absolute garbage", but the former prevails more and more as time goes on, until it eventually takes over completely. So my allergy to shonen was not cured, but for once, with a proper dose of Zyrtec, it didn't stop me from enjoying it properly in spite of it. (12.01.2021) (menos) (más)