prillalar | FMA Episode 29

Curiouser and curiouser! So, this mystery kid is actually a demon? Or something similar? And if he's got Ed's arm and leg, might there be someone out there with Al's body? That wouldn't bode too well for Al.

The fact that the kid could transmute his own body with inanimate objects must be making Ed wild with curiosity. If it's just because the kid is a demon, then Ed might be out of luck.

Say, what if Al got his body back at the end of the series, but by then he was 15 or 16 and the body was the same 10 (11?) year old one that he lost. That would be troubling and weird. But it would also be weird to get back a body that had grown up without you. It might have changed quite a lot. (Maybe a few tattoos and piercings... *g*)

Episode 28 showed us a lot about where Ed and Al came from, the lesson they learned but failed to actually absorb about being part of the flow of life. So, my question is this:

Is Ed's journey to learn to accept this truth or to fight against it? Often, the hero's job is to fight against the accepted wisdom. But here I'm not sure. And alchemy seems such a flawed gift. Will he have to give up using it at all?

(BTW, this is not a request to learn spoilers! I am spoiler free; I don't even watch the previews of the next episode.)

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This is pure speculation, based on my sense of the culture FMA is coming out of, but I wouldn't be surprised if the manga moved in the direction of fighting wisdom/tradition/truth and the anime moved in the direction of accepting it. The *feel* I get is that the manga is geared more toward the boy audience, and those stories tend to do the successful-fight-against-overwhelming-odds thing. The feeling I get from the anime is that it's geared more toward a general audience, including adults, and those stories tend more often to adhere to the principle of "shou ga nai" (nothing to be done about it). So many of the traditional Japanese folktales and fairytales read, to a Western audience, like pointless and weirdly shaped tragedies. Very strong focus on poignance and resignation (in a positive sense). It feels like that anime is following that track.

That's a good insight, thank you. And it tracks with my own impressions of the anime and manga. I would like to see sweet Al restored in the end, but not Ed. Ed is more culpable and he seems to have more to learn than Al.

Ee, icon! <3

*cough* but anyway. I'm hideously behind in FMA (I can't use BitTorrent and I have no friends to give me CDs of it, ha ha) but I've been wondering about that as well.

My guess is that they'll fight the truth all the way to the end, because if they didn't, what kind of shounen story would that be? :) But seriously, in my experience long-running anime tends to go nowhere until the last few episodes, and then events start developing at a shocking rate as they go about tying up all the loose threads, so I can't really say for now.

I salute you for not watching the previews, too; I stopped watching them after they spoiled me for episode 6. Baah.

No BitTorrent? Yikes! I hope you figure out something soon.

in my experience long-running anime tends to go nowhere until the last few episodes, and then events start developing at a shocking rate as they go about tying up all the loose threads

Hee! Sounds like what happened with the X-Files.

But, yes, there really can't be much resolution until then. But whether the resolution is the acceptance or breaking of the truth, well, I guess we'll have to wait and see.

FMA Episode 29

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