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Fullmetal ANNCast: Brotherhood

The English dub... well, I just don't particularly like Vic Mignogna as Edward Elric. Caitlin Glass is shrill as Winry, Chris Patton drops the ball as Greed (fortunately Troy Baker takes over and excels), and Wendy Powell's Envy is frankly one of the worst performances in an English dub I've ever heard in my life. I can't even imagine what her approach for the character is, but it's all wrong. There are plenty of good performances, as I mentioned, Troy Baker, but also Todd Haberkorn as Ling, Stephanie Young as Olivier Mira Armstrong, Chris Sabat as Alex Louis Armstrong, Christine Auten as Izumi Curtis, Kent Williams as Father, and Colleen Clinkenbeard as Riza Hawkeye. But there's so little to work with otherwise. A lot of VAs are just phoning it in and a few are just plain terrible actors. Funimation has plenty of good VAs and some great, solid English dubs, but I don't understand the attention this dub gets. It's vastly overrated.

It always made zero sense to me why Ed and Al's mother got the Sloth moniker. Made absolutely no sense and what could you infer to that? That she was a terrible lazy mother? Bad characterization and choice.

I don't really agree with Hope's characterization of the Homunculi in Brotherhood though. I believe she said in the recording that they were embodiment of a bunch of souls of people who had those vices and created into their own being, which isn't correct. They were extensions of Father himself, which in turn characterizes the homunculi differently. They share the same motivation of Father for the most part, baring Greed, which makes sense given they are extensions of him, thus adding more depth to the Homunculus character rather than each individual homunculus themselves

But he did end up growing on me through his interactions with Greed. He just isn't one of my favorite characters, and I resent that you can't find any good original Greed action figures because the closest they have is Ling-Greed. Greedling. Whatever.

Nocturne123 wrote:

It always made zero sense to me why Ed and Al's mother got the Sloth moniker. Made absolutely no sense and what could you infer to that? That she was a terrible lazy mother? Bad characterization and choice.

It doesn't really make much sense to me either, but last I checked, odd name choices don't equate to bad characterization.

It doesn't really make much sense to me either, but last I checked, odd name choices don't equate to bad characterization.

Both you and Hope were correct. The Homunculi are the embodiments of the sinful souls that came from Father after he absorbed the souls of the people of Xerxes. So it's not just one or the other. Remember, Father on his own is just tiny ball cyclops incapable of living outside of a flask, much less branching off seven offspring.

I always figured that when the homunculus's "sin" did mean anything in 03, it was meant to reflect more on the alchemist who created them than on the dead person they were trying to resurrect. Lust was created because Scar's brother was trying to resurrect his lover, and this is reflected in terms of, um, which body part he lost to the Gate (re-watch the scene where he emerges from having transmuted her). So my interpretation with Sloth was that the Gate "thought" Ed and Al created her because they wanted to continue to rely on their mom rather than take the responsibility to find a way forward for themselves, and it's reflected in them losing what allowed them to keep moving (Ed's limbs and Al's body). It's a bit of a stretch, but it's the closest one out of all the deadly sins for what they did. There's definitely a feeling of helplessness they have after their mother dies, and falling back on the one thing they do know how to do -- alchemy -- as the only possible solution.

Also, sloth as a sin is often associated with grief and depression in traditional understandings of it. (And it make sense, since one of the major symptoms of depression is it making you lose interest in or motivation for doing stuff, to the point where getting out of bed feels like an effort.)

Either way, I think it fit Sloth the character well because her main struggle was a refusal to do the "mental labor" of reconciling her memories of Trisha's life with the person she wants to be now. Instead, she just wants to destroy that former baggage by killing Ed and Al. On a more literal level, you see a lot of moments where she extends her watery arm to fight someone alone while the rest of her stays sitting at her desk, so she's kind of a lazy character anyway.

I've spent a lot of time overthinking this show, I know.

penguintruth wrote:

But he did end up growing on me through his interactions with Greed. He just isn't one of my favorite characters, and I resent that you can't find any good original Greed action figures because the closest they have is Ling-Greed. Greedling. Whatever.

If there's one thing I quite disliked about Mangahood is how blunt they were the direction Greed's character took with "I VALUE MY FRIENDS" cheese. It was at that point I realized how much I prefer his portrayal in the 03 anime as a straight anti-hero right till the end, however soon that end came. He managed to go out on his own terms whilst sticking it to Dante and the rest of the Homunculi in a way I can't help but respect.

I get people liking character driven story in FMA, however I don't think we're really being fair to FMB which really isn't doing too badly in the character department either. Both are really good, its just the 2003 anime decidedly hones in on character as the something paramount.

That being said, I think what puts FMB on top for me is that to be better, you have to take everything as a whole, and honestly the weird twist at the end, strange side plots that go nowhere (or when you really think about them don't make a ton of sense), FMA has it's fair share of focusing too much on trying to SAY SOMETHING and not actually entertain.

Not that you can't be entertained, people obviously really enjoy the 2003 anime, it's just that there are moments in FMA where I remember even the first time I watched it I asked a lot of "Why?" questions that can really take you out of the story. Why does the one homunculus have the ability to use alchemy and the others can't (I mean, I know why, but why does that particular homunculus birth get the limbs)? Why is Rose popping back up into the story now - was the connection really that deep? How do Hohenheim and Dante get to the other side in the first place, and if you really think about it, are we supposed to take seriously that they were the only ones in the whole history of OUR world to make it? A witch hunt, really? Why is it that the actual remains still...remain around to conveniently take out the homunculus?

A lot of FMA seems very convoluted to the point where you just have to roll with it. Because you love the characters by that time so much, you tend to ignore the rather jarring revelation later on that suddenly we find ourselves in Europe. The physics are vaguely explained and they pull the origins story for Dante right out of thin air that really throws the entire premise for the show's world into whack. It's very surreal and when I first watched the show I honestly thought it was like someone else wrote the second half of the series (and I had never read the manga, so I didn't know). Now it's very clear to me that the beginning of the 2003 anime was based off a very clear vision by the manga author and that the anime writers just didn't have that same vision.

If you examine it, the 2003 anime tries to meld the two and actually does a decent enough job, but there is no denying that in a plot sense it falls short of FMB which is very straightforward in the story it's trying to tell...and it all fits together because indeed it was one vision.