FMA 43-51 + Conqueror of Shamballa
Nov. 10th, 2015 11:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schneefinkThe last few episodes left me blinking at the screen and wondering what the heck just happened. Then I watched the movie and suddenly I was completely on board.
(This took me three days to write up because I kept thinking of new things to add.)
Ed + Al vs. Roy + Armstrong, nice, though if Al had dared to perform alchemy I'm pretty sure it would have ended differently. Hah, Roy being pissed they didn't ask for his help after Liore. It's understandable once you know that the Fuhrer is a homunculus, which Roy didn't know because Al didn't tell him. Communication!
The Elrics' dad came back! Interesting. He even recognized Al immediately, though it's very likely Pinako just told him. Ugh, it must feel terrible for Ed to feel like Al is choosing their dad over him, even temporarily. Ed is angrier at Hohenheim for leaving. We later learn he did have a good reason, I just wonder if he told Trisha about it. If he did, fine, if he didn't he's still an ass. If he did, why wouldn't Trisha just have told her sons that Hohenheim was looking for a cure for his illness? Maybe she didn't realize how angry Ed was and didn't want to worry them.
The Elrics find out that Hughes is dead, ouch. Winry admits she was wrong about Roy and Ed says he now hates him. No matter how much growing up Ed has had to do, he is still a teenager, temporary fits of anger are natural. (Btw he looks cute with his hair down.)
So Dante is wearing Lyra! That is why Lyra was transmuting without circles, makes sense. Why did Ed smell Lyra rotting, but not Dante? Maybe Dante had too much perfume in her house.
Was Dante responsible for creating Martha and her squad? I think she's the only alchemist we've met who likely has the ability, had the opportunity, and had motive.
Ed digging up the bones of their mom :(
Brothers, withholding information from each other is not the smart thing to do :( You should also talk to each about what you are planning to do, otherwise stupid things happen like when Ed fought Sloth. I do like Ed going to Izumi again. Al goes to Tucker, noo, that cannot end well. Of course Tucker uses him. Tucker isn't really sane anymore, but still despicable.
I like Lust working with Ed. Mutual distrust but assistance. "Why do you want to be human?" "Why does Al want to be human?" I'm sorry Lust died – though actually she didn't die, she was just sealed (by Wrath, little brat), and iirc Greed got out of a seal like this after a hundred years. I'm sure an alchemist could break the seal earlier than that. Ed probably just forgot to check (tbf Envy did just kidnap Al.)
They finally killed Sloth (in a very poetic fashion.) I liked the look at how different homunculi deal very differently with the memories they get. I still wonder about how their creation: what would have happened to Wrath if Izumi hadn't given him back to the gate, and more critically to Sloth if Dante hadn't found her and fed her life stones? Would she never have regained human shape and eventually died?, that seems the most likely. But if the Elrics had fed her life stones and encouraged her to regain her memories, maybe she really could have become a substitute mom for them. That's kind of creepy to think about.
Roy accuses Douglass/Sloth in front of the Fuhrer and the generals to find out if the Fuhrer really is a homunculus and is then send on a suicide mission. Armstrong basically bullies his officers into staging a coup with his muscles, uh… In many cases I find his over-the-top flexing funny, but here there really is an important step missing. No wonder they have less support among the troops than they thought, they don't even have Roy and it must be very obvious.
So Roy accelerates his plan to depose the Fuhrer because he wants to avenge Hughes, giving up his chance to become Fuhrer in the process. A bit of a surprise, he seemed more ambitious and calculating than that early on. That was when he still had Hughes, Hughes was obviously more important to him than we saw so far. I would have liked it better if his motivation for attacking Bradley was "better to get rid of him asap" but at least it comes down to the same thing. It's a bit surprising because especially Al was always so adamant about revenge being a terrible idea and here Roy clearly doesn't care. Of course Riza stayed with him in Central. I liked Roy and Ed's sort-of-handshake, I can see where shippers are coming from.
Dante fights with alchemy like I always wondered why Ed would not, stone dragons and the like. Then she summons the gate and – WTF just happened? Ed landed on Earth, which is apparently on the other side of the gate? O.O That is extremely sudden. Did I miss any foreshadowing? Did Dante even know, how could she, she probably just wanted to send Hohenheim and him away. The homunculi don't seem to have many memories from inside the gate. The way I understand it, Amestris and Earth are the two sides of the gate, and the homunculi's origin is inside the gate, the black figures and that stuff.
If alchemy on Amestris really is powered by deaths on Earth, does alchemy become more powerful during times like the world wars or the plague?
Now that I think about it I did actually see spoilers for this stuff, but I put them out of my mind/definitely didn't think of them in this context.
(It's a pretty amazing set-up for crossovers actually, you can just put any world you want on the other side of the gate. You don't need to keep the parallels, and if you want you can even let Ed keep his alchemy, who knows how the gate works exactly.)
Dammit, I should know what that music is during the zeppelin assault on London. I looked it up and it's from Beethoven's Fifth, I should have recognized that. (Not the very beginning, that I definitely would have known.) At least LB would insist that I should have ^^
I just looked it up and there really were zeppelin bombings in London during WWI, I didn't know that.
Envy is the result of Hohenheim's attempt to bring back his and Dante's son, huh, interesting. I wonder when that happened, before or after they created the philosopher's stone? Hohenheim knows how to create the stone, why didn't he use it to make Envy human? Clearly back then he was willing to accept the cost. I wonder if he even knew about the homunculus or if Dante concealed it from him, though I'm not sure why she would have. Maybe she only found the homunculus after she and Hohenheim split.
Anyway, it adds a bit of a poetic element to Envy killing Ed once he comes back through the Gate (nooo!) and explains Envy's hate. Then he wants to kill all humans until only homunculi reign, he's taking it a bit far.
Suddenly Al can move again? Or was it just because of something Gluttony did. The last few episodes he had a damsel-in-distress role, I didn't like it much, at least he acts here. No surprise at all that he's willing to sacrifice the stone and himself to save Ed, nor that Ed shortly afterwards tries something similar. The question was never if the brothers would die for each other, it was always if they're willing to kill or do other terrible things for each other.
So Earth!Ed is dead now? Ed's soul landed in his body when Dante sent him through the gate, then he took the body back with him to Amestris and probably Earth!Ed's soul too, unless it was already destroyed when Ed inhabited that body or it got stuck in the gate. Earth!Ed's body then was killed by Envy, and with the stone Al managed to bring back Ed's soul from the gate and healed Earth!Ed's body. Ed then sacrifices that body and Al's memories to bring back Al's younger body (using Ishballan alchemy, interestingly), which accidentally/subconsciously sent himself to Earth – interestingly, in his body from Amestris, which apparently was still stored in the gate somehow? Anyway, when Al healed Ed with the stone he didn't think about Earth!Ed so I'm pretty sure he died there; we didn't even see him at the gate with Ed when Envy passed through. I wonder if Hohenheim mourns him.
Dante is killed by Gluttony, whose mind she destroyed because he mourned Lust. Fitting, in a way. Envy leaves for Earth to kill Hohenheim, Wrath lost his alchemy powers because Dante took away Ed's limbs because Wrath insisted on reviving Sloth (not sure why Wrath fixated on Sloth like that, but eh) and Ed asks Rose to take him to the surface to save him; that leaves Pride. The one homunculus Dante deliberately created as an experiment, so she could have an aging homunculus to pass as human. I wonder who she tried to revive to create Greed? Was that also just an experiment? I think Gluttony is the only homunculus whose origin we know nothing about, but even that makes sense, they can't know all the alchemists stupid enough to attempt human transmutation.
Anyway, Roy manages to kill Pride with a ton of luck. No idea why Pride would keep his own skull around instead of destroying it, sentiment?
There's also a battle with cyber!Archer vs. Izumi and Ross and others, but Riza manages to kill him.
Situation at the end of the series: Ed is on Earth, Munich in 1921 with Hohenheim, with bad automail, and he wants to research rockets because he thinks that outer space could have the answer to getting back to his world. (Cool idea actually.) Hohenheim is working with an Aryan extremist secret society.
Al is back in his ten-year-old body and lost all memories of the past four years, but he wants to study alchemy under Izumi again to try and bring Ed back. Izumi agrees, even though in the past trying to bring people back didn't work that well, to put it mildly. (Al got his body back, if that counts, still.)
Roy lost one eye, but is recovering with Riza's help. The military handed over power to "the old assembly." Winry is a mechanic, Scieszka is working for the military again, Rose and her kid are living in Risembool and hopefully Rose is recovering, Wrath got automail limbs and wandered off.
FINALLY at least Al takes equivalent exchange less literally, as a promise more than a reality for everyday life. Dante and even Izumi told them differently, but they didn't want to believe. So naïve, who assigns value for metaphysical things anyway, this annoyed me from the beginning of the series. Okay, they wanted to believe who works hard will be rewarded, but they can still do that without seeing it as a law of the world. I like it better as a promise, as Al says in the end.
To be honest my first reaction to the ending to the series, especially the parallel world stuff, was "wtf where did that come from what is it doing here." It definitely would have needed some more foreshadowing so it didn't come so completely out of left field to work better. (It might have been a bit tricky, but doable.) Fortunately then there is a movie that does good things with all the dangling threads.
Conqueror of Shamballa
Wow that was confusing in the beginning, during the first few minutes I had no idea what was going on. Al in the armor, but physicists and a nuclear bomb? Apparently it really was developed in Amestris, scary. Fortunately then it became clearer what was going on
To my surprise I liked the portrayal of Germany between the wars. The inflation, the racism, the bitterness about the treaty of Versailles,…
I wonder what Ed did in the past two years. He met Alfons and the other rocket scientists when they all studied with Professor Robert and now he and Alfons live together since Hohenheim disappeared. It appears he is still a student. Why isn't he working with the others? He and Alfons must be relatively well off if they have their own apartment and can afford not to flip out over a totaled car.
I like Alfons. I don't doubt that at first Ed noticed him because of his similarity to Al, but later they genuinely became friends. Ed was a genius with alchemy, I'm not surprised that he's good with physics too, even though it looks like Alfons is the more practically oriented researcher between the two of them. Alfons even puts up with Ed's tales of Amestris, even though he doesn't like that Ed seems to see Earth as less real.
Alfons is working for Nazis because he wants to achieve something with his life and they give him the opportunity. He believes in the stab-in-the-back-myth, but he has no problem with Ed inviting a Romani woman to live with them. He's not a bad person, he's just a slightly naïve patriot who desperately wants to make a difference and leave a legacy and chooses to ignore the bigger picture and consequences, I liked that. In the end he sends Ed back to Amestris and it costs him his life. (There must be fic where he survives, right?)
At first I was surprised, but then Hughes as a Nazi was actually great. Instead of Ishballa the big war in his life was WWI, the army he's a part of is not a brutal victorious conqueror but was humiliated and defeated, the "foreigners" are not scattered refugees but seemingly everywhere and his friends/media blame them for the defeat. Hughes is looking for a man to follow and make the country great again, only in this world instead of Roy Mustang he found Adolf Hitler. Unfortunate.
Fuhrer Bradley on Earth is Fritz Lang! I only found out who exactly he was supposed to be when checking afterwards and that made it even better. Fritz Lang directed Metropolis, a movie that includes robots built to look like dead people, heh. Even though Fritz Lang was Jewish his wife actually was said to have Nazi sympathies, interesting (though she later denied it.)
I also liked Noah. The Thule society wanted her from the beginning, even though if she hadn't met Ed she wouldn't have been half as useful to them, their luck. Hopefully she'll find a home one day – maybe she'll join Earth!Scar and Earth!Lust's group, I don't think she would be happy traveling with the Elrics all the time.
Envy arrived on Earth as a dragon to fight off the creatures inside the gate, but because Earth doesn't have alchemy he can't turn back. Hah! Somehow his captured body enables the Thule Society to activate the gate to invade Amestris. On the one hand his capture is bad luck for him, on the other hand he does eventually get to kill Hohenheim, which is what he wanted.
Meanwhile on Amestris Al still hasn't recovered his memories, that must be strange for him. Mentally he's about twelve now, though it looks like his body might be seventeen. And apparently he dreams he's Earth!Alfons sometimes? Weird. With his coat and hair he looks quite similar to Ed, must be weird for people who knew Ed. He also apparently can control suits of armor by splitting his soul up and attaching it to them – how did he even find that out? Splitting his soul seems a bit different from simply attaching it places, maybe I'm just extra worried because I recently read a fic where Voldemort was mostly called the soul-splitter.
At least it enables Ed and Al to confirm that the respective other is still alive. Hug <3 Not knowing must have been terrible for Ed especially.
Izumi died :( It was to be expected, but still. Wrath almost seems like a normal boy though. He had two years to grow, without other homunculi around and with human contact, and presumably also without more life stones. I don't think we ever saw his special homunculus ability, except his alchemy which he no longer has. Could he almost become a real boy? He sacrifices himself (and Gluttony, who became a monster) so that Al can bring his brother back and doesn't have to kill himself to do it. Why do I suddenly almost kind of like Wrath.
Al opening the portal means the Thule Society can send their warships through to attack Central – poor Al. Way to spoil the reunion, Eckhart. But the brothers can still work together and put things right, yes! Winry is carrying around Ed's new automail because she always believed he would come back, aww.
Finally Roy is back! Did he really sulk for almost two years? Granted he did see some traumatic things, and the last time he had Hughes and a goal to work towards. He lost Hughes, he lost/partially achieved his goal and succeeded in getting revenge for Hughes, and what now. (Havoc implies "it's not the lieutenant he's waiting for" – Ed? I didn't get the impression they were that close. Something else?) This makes me think I might have misjudged him a bit during most of the series, underestimated how traumatized he was/overestimating how well he was coping, or how he was coping. Thinking back, I can buy that interpretation, though it makes me wonder how much Riza knew.
He comes back when he feels needed again, to defend Central. Just at the right moment to see Ed (I liked that he also believed Ed was alive) and allow Al to follow Ed to Earth, nice timing. Plus luck, Al had a few seconds at the most to come up with that plan.
So what happens afterwards? When the invaders are defeated and he isn't needed anymore again? Maybe Riza and the others can convince him that they need him to rebuild Central, maybe that brief taste of still being useful is enough to convince him to give up his isolation and get back to work. That would be nice.
Al has his memories back! Nice. I'm really glad he got them back, he and Ed would have lost so much. Ed chose exile on Earth over a reunion with his brother for the safety of Amestris, but then Al chose to leave Amestris to join him. Brothers <3 They are growing up.
Now Ed says Al and he should stop only looking at their own goals and get involved with the wider world, and first they will track down the uranium bomb from Amestris. It must have been lost somehow, otherwise it would have been used in the November uprising, or maybe the version without alchemy wasn't ready yet. That in the end they travel somewhere else must mean they managed to close the portal, otherwise they wouldn't leave. I wonder if they managed to kill Envy, or if he's still alive and trapped there.
If that physicist from Amestris who created the bomb – Gustavsson? – got to Earth by trying human transmutation, it might happen again or have happened to others…
(Someone has written Ed and Al as part of the WWII-resistance, right?)
I don't think I'm going to read the manga/watch FMA:B right now, I'm a bit worried I'd get the 'verses confused and for the moment I'm still not done thinking about this one. (Also I should finish canon review for Yuletide…)
I'll have two of my wisdom teeth removed later today. I'm not nervous about the surgery itself, but I'm a bit apprehensive about how I'll feel afterwards and for how long. I bet talking about FMA would be a good distraction :)
(This took me three days to write up because I kept thinking of new things to add.)
Ed + Al vs. Roy + Armstrong, nice, though if Al had dared to perform alchemy I'm pretty sure it would have ended differently. Hah, Roy being pissed they didn't ask for his help after Liore. It's understandable once you know that the Fuhrer is a homunculus, which Roy didn't know because Al didn't tell him. Communication!
The Elrics' dad came back! Interesting. He even recognized Al immediately, though it's very likely Pinako just told him. Ugh, it must feel terrible for Ed to feel like Al is choosing their dad over him, even temporarily. Ed is angrier at Hohenheim for leaving. We later learn he did have a good reason, I just wonder if he told Trisha about it. If he did, fine, if he didn't he's still an ass. If he did, why wouldn't Trisha just have told her sons that Hohenheim was looking for a cure for his illness? Maybe she didn't realize how angry Ed was and didn't want to worry them.
The Elrics find out that Hughes is dead, ouch. Winry admits she was wrong about Roy and Ed says he now hates him. No matter how much growing up Ed has had to do, he is still a teenager, temporary fits of anger are natural. (Btw he looks cute with his hair down.)
So Dante is wearing Lyra! That is why Lyra was transmuting without circles, makes sense. Why did Ed smell Lyra rotting, but not Dante? Maybe Dante had too much perfume in her house.
Was Dante responsible for creating Martha and her squad? I think she's the only alchemist we've met who likely has the ability, had the opportunity, and had motive.
Ed digging up the bones of their mom :(
Brothers, withholding information from each other is not the smart thing to do :( You should also talk to each about what you are planning to do, otherwise stupid things happen like when Ed fought Sloth. I do like Ed going to Izumi again. Al goes to Tucker, noo, that cannot end well. Of course Tucker uses him. Tucker isn't really sane anymore, but still despicable.
I like Lust working with Ed. Mutual distrust but assistance. "Why do you want to be human?" "Why does Al want to be human?" I'm sorry Lust died – though actually she didn't die, she was just sealed (by Wrath, little brat), and iirc Greed got out of a seal like this after a hundred years. I'm sure an alchemist could break the seal earlier than that. Ed probably just forgot to check (tbf Envy did just kidnap Al.)
They finally killed Sloth (in a very poetic fashion.) I liked the look at how different homunculi deal very differently with the memories they get. I still wonder about how their creation: what would have happened to Wrath if Izumi hadn't given him back to the gate, and more critically to Sloth if Dante hadn't found her and fed her life stones? Would she never have regained human shape and eventually died?, that seems the most likely. But if the Elrics had fed her life stones and encouraged her to regain her memories, maybe she really could have become a substitute mom for them. That's kind of creepy to think about.
Roy accuses Douglass/Sloth in front of the Fuhrer and the generals to find out if the Fuhrer really is a homunculus and is then send on a suicide mission. Armstrong basically bullies his officers into staging a coup with his muscles, uh… In many cases I find his over-the-top flexing funny, but here there really is an important step missing. No wonder they have less support among the troops than they thought, they don't even have Roy and it must be very obvious.
So Roy accelerates his plan to depose the Fuhrer because he wants to avenge Hughes, giving up his chance to become Fuhrer in the process. A bit of a surprise, he seemed more ambitious and calculating than that early on. That was when he still had Hughes, Hughes was obviously more important to him than we saw so far. I would have liked it better if his motivation for attacking Bradley was "better to get rid of him asap" but at least it comes down to the same thing. It's a bit surprising because especially Al was always so adamant about revenge being a terrible idea and here Roy clearly doesn't care. Of course Riza stayed with him in Central. I liked Roy and Ed's sort-of-handshake, I can see where shippers are coming from.
Dante fights with alchemy like I always wondered why Ed would not, stone dragons and the like. Then she summons the gate and – WTF just happened? Ed landed on Earth, which is apparently on the other side of the gate? O.O That is extremely sudden. Did I miss any foreshadowing? Did Dante even know, how could she, she probably just wanted to send Hohenheim and him away. The homunculi don't seem to have many memories from inside the gate. The way I understand it, Amestris and Earth are the two sides of the gate, and the homunculi's origin is inside the gate, the black figures and that stuff.
If alchemy on Amestris really is powered by deaths on Earth, does alchemy become more powerful during times like the world wars or the plague?
Now that I think about it I did actually see spoilers for this stuff, but I put them out of my mind/definitely didn't think of them in this context.
(It's a pretty amazing set-up for crossovers actually, you can just put any world you want on the other side of the gate. You don't need to keep the parallels, and if you want you can even let Ed keep his alchemy, who knows how the gate works exactly.)
Dammit, I should know what that music is during the zeppelin assault on London. I looked it up and it's from Beethoven's Fifth, I should have recognized that. (Not the very beginning, that I definitely would have known.) At least LB would insist that I should have ^^
I just looked it up and there really were zeppelin bombings in London during WWI, I didn't know that.
Envy is the result of Hohenheim's attempt to bring back his and Dante's son, huh, interesting. I wonder when that happened, before or after they created the philosopher's stone? Hohenheim knows how to create the stone, why didn't he use it to make Envy human? Clearly back then he was willing to accept the cost. I wonder if he even knew about the homunculus or if Dante concealed it from him, though I'm not sure why she would have. Maybe she only found the homunculus after she and Hohenheim split.
Anyway, it adds a bit of a poetic element to Envy killing Ed once he comes back through the Gate (nooo!) and explains Envy's hate. Then he wants to kill all humans until only homunculi reign, he's taking it a bit far.
Suddenly Al can move again? Or was it just because of something Gluttony did. The last few episodes he had a damsel-in-distress role, I didn't like it much, at least he acts here. No surprise at all that he's willing to sacrifice the stone and himself to save Ed, nor that Ed shortly afterwards tries something similar. The question was never if the brothers would die for each other, it was always if they're willing to kill or do other terrible things for each other.
So Earth!Ed is dead now? Ed's soul landed in his body when Dante sent him through the gate, then he took the body back with him to Amestris and probably Earth!Ed's soul too, unless it was already destroyed when Ed inhabited that body or it got stuck in the gate. Earth!Ed's body then was killed by Envy, and with the stone Al managed to bring back Ed's soul from the gate and healed Earth!Ed's body. Ed then sacrifices that body and Al's memories to bring back Al's younger body (using Ishballan alchemy, interestingly), which accidentally/subconsciously sent himself to Earth – interestingly, in his body from Amestris, which apparently was still stored in the gate somehow? Anyway, when Al healed Ed with the stone he didn't think about Earth!Ed so I'm pretty sure he died there; we didn't even see him at the gate with Ed when Envy passed through. I wonder if Hohenheim mourns him.
Dante is killed by Gluttony, whose mind she destroyed because he mourned Lust. Fitting, in a way. Envy leaves for Earth to kill Hohenheim, Wrath lost his alchemy powers because Dante took away Ed's limbs because Wrath insisted on reviving Sloth (not sure why Wrath fixated on Sloth like that, but eh) and Ed asks Rose to take him to the surface to save him; that leaves Pride. The one homunculus Dante deliberately created as an experiment, so she could have an aging homunculus to pass as human. I wonder who she tried to revive to create Greed? Was that also just an experiment? I think Gluttony is the only homunculus whose origin we know nothing about, but even that makes sense, they can't know all the alchemists stupid enough to attempt human transmutation.
Anyway, Roy manages to kill Pride with a ton of luck. No idea why Pride would keep his own skull around instead of destroying it, sentiment?
There's also a battle with cyber!Archer vs. Izumi and Ross and others, but Riza manages to kill him.
Situation at the end of the series: Ed is on Earth, Munich in 1921 with Hohenheim, with bad automail, and he wants to research rockets because he thinks that outer space could have the answer to getting back to his world. (Cool idea actually.) Hohenheim is working with an Aryan extremist secret society.
Al is back in his ten-year-old body and lost all memories of the past four years, but he wants to study alchemy under Izumi again to try and bring Ed back. Izumi agrees, even though in the past trying to bring people back didn't work that well, to put it mildly. (Al got his body back, if that counts, still.)
Roy lost one eye, but is recovering with Riza's help. The military handed over power to "the old assembly." Winry is a mechanic, Scieszka is working for the military again, Rose and her kid are living in Risembool and hopefully Rose is recovering, Wrath got automail limbs and wandered off.
FINALLY at least Al takes equivalent exchange less literally, as a promise more than a reality for everyday life. Dante and even Izumi told them differently, but they didn't want to believe. So naïve, who assigns value for metaphysical things anyway, this annoyed me from the beginning of the series. Okay, they wanted to believe who works hard will be rewarded, but they can still do that without seeing it as a law of the world. I like it better as a promise, as Al says in the end.
To be honest my first reaction to the ending to the series, especially the parallel world stuff, was "wtf where did that come from what is it doing here." It definitely would have needed some more foreshadowing so it didn't come so completely out of left field to work better. (It might have been a bit tricky, but doable.) Fortunately then there is a movie that does good things with all the dangling threads.
Conqueror of Shamballa
Wow that was confusing in the beginning, during the first few minutes I had no idea what was going on. Al in the armor, but physicists and a nuclear bomb? Apparently it really was developed in Amestris, scary. Fortunately then it became clearer what was going on
To my surprise I liked the portrayal of Germany between the wars. The inflation, the racism, the bitterness about the treaty of Versailles,…
I wonder what Ed did in the past two years. He met Alfons and the other rocket scientists when they all studied with Professor Robert and now he and Alfons live together since Hohenheim disappeared. It appears he is still a student. Why isn't he working with the others? He and Alfons must be relatively well off if they have their own apartment and can afford not to flip out over a totaled car.
I like Alfons. I don't doubt that at first Ed noticed him because of his similarity to Al, but later they genuinely became friends. Ed was a genius with alchemy, I'm not surprised that he's good with physics too, even though it looks like Alfons is the more practically oriented researcher between the two of them. Alfons even puts up with Ed's tales of Amestris, even though he doesn't like that Ed seems to see Earth as less real.
Alfons is working for Nazis because he wants to achieve something with his life and they give him the opportunity. He believes in the stab-in-the-back-myth, but he has no problem with Ed inviting a Romani woman to live with them. He's not a bad person, he's just a slightly naïve patriot who desperately wants to make a difference and leave a legacy and chooses to ignore the bigger picture and consequences, I liked that. In the end he sends Ed back to Amestris and it costs him his life. (There must be fic where he survives, right?)
At first I was surprised, but then Hughes as a Nazi was actually great. Instead of Ishballa the big war in his life was WWI, the army he's a part of is not a brutal victorious conqueror but was humiliated and defeated, the "foreigners" are not scattered refugees but seemingly everywhere and his friends/media blame them for the defeat. Hughes is looking for a man to follow and make the country great again, only in this world instead of Roy Mustang he found Adolf Hitler. Unfortunate.
Fuhrer Bradley on Earth is Fritz Lang! I only found out who exactly he was supposed to be when checking afterwards and that made it even better. Fritz Lang directed Metropolis, a movie that includes robots built to look like dead people, heh. Even though Fritz Lang was Jewish his wife actually was said to have Nazi sympathies, interesting (though she later denied it.)
I also liked Noah. The Thule society wanted her from the beginning, even though if she hadn't met Ed she wouldn't have been half as useful to them, their luck. Hopefully she'll find a home one day – maybe she'll join Earth!Scar and Earth!Lust's group, I don't think she would be happy traveling with the Elrics all the time.
Envy arrived on Earth as a dragon to fight off the creatures inside the gate, but because Earth doesn't have alchemy he can't turn back. Hah! Somehow his captured body enables the Thule Society to activate the gate to invade Amestris. On the one hand his capture is bad luck for him, on the other hand he does eventually get to kill Hohenheim, which is what he wanted.
Meanwhile on Amestris Al still hasn't recovered his memories, that must be strange for him. Mentally he's about twelve now, though it looks like his body might be seventeen. And apparently he dreams he's Earth!Alfons sometimes? Weird. With his coat and hair he looks quite similar to Ed, must be weird for people who knew Ed. He also apparently can control suits of armor by splitting his soul up and attaching it to them – how did he even find that out? Splitting his soul seems a bit different from simply attaching it places, maybe I'm just extra worried because I recently read a fic where Voldemort was mostly called the soul-splitter.
At least it enables Ed and Al to confirm that the respective other is still alive. Hug <3 Not knowing must have been terrible for Ed especially.
Izumi died :( It was to be expected, but still. Wrath almost seems like a normal boy though. He had two years to grow, without other homunculi around and with human contact, and presumably also without more life stones. I don't think we ever saw his special homunculus ability, except his alchemy which he no longer has. Could he almost become a real boy? He sacrifices himself (and Gluttony, who became a monster) so that Al can bring his brother back and doesn't have to kill himself to do it. Why do I suddenly almost kind of like Wrath.
Al opening the portal means the Thule Society can send their warships through to attack Central – poor Al. Way to spoil the reunion, Eckhart. But the brothers can still work together and put things right, yes! Winry is carrying around Ed's new automail because she always believed he would come back, aww.
Finally Roy is back! Did he really sulk for almost two years? Granted he did see some traumatic things, and the last time he had Hughes and a goal to work towards. He lost Hughes, he lost/partially achieved his goal and succeeded in getting revenge for Hughes, and what now. (Havoc implies "it's not the lieutenant he's waiting for" – Ed? I didn't get the impression they were that close. Something else?) This makes me think I might have misjudged him a bit during most of the series, underestimated how traumatized he was/overestimating how well he was coping, or how he was coping. Thinking back, I can buy that interpretation, though it makes me wonder how much Riza knew.
He comes back when he feels needed again, to defend Central. Just at the right moment to see Ed (I liked that he also believed Ed was alive) and allow Al to follow Ed to Earth, nice timing. Plus luck, Al had a few seconds at the most to come up with that plan.
So what happens afterwards? When the invaders are defeated and he isn't needed anymore again? Maybe Riza and the others can convince him that they need him to rebuild Central, maybe that brief taste of still being useful is enough to convince him to give up his isolation and get back to work. That would be nice.
Al has his memories back! Nice. I'm really glad he got them back, he and Ed would have lost so much. Ed chose exile on Earth over a reunion with his brother for the safety of Amestris, but then Al chose to leave Amestris to join him. Brothers <3 They are growing up.
Now Ed says Al and he should stop only looking at their own goals and get involved with the wider world, and first they will track down the uranium bomb from Amestris. It must have been lost somehow, otherwise it would have been used in the November uprising, or maybe the version without alchemy wasn't ready yet. That in the end they travel somewhere else must mean they managed to close the portal, otherwise they wouldn't leave. I wonder if they managed to kill Envy, or if he's still alive and trapped there.
If that physicist from Amestris who created the bomb – Gustavsson? – got to Earth by trying human transmutation, it might happen again or have happened to others…
(Someone has written Ed and Al as part of the WWII-resistance, right?)
I don't think I'm going to read the manga/watch FMA:B right now, I'm a bit worried I'd get the 'verses confused and for the moment I'm still not done thinking about this one. (Also I should finish canon review for Yuletide…)
I'll have two of my wisdom teeth removed later today. I'm not nervous about the surgery itself, but I'm a bit apprehensive about how I'll feel afterwards and for how long. I bet talking about FMA would be a good distraction :)
