Merry Christmas, dear reader! I'm taking a brief blogging hiatus for Christmas, and I'll be back to publishing on techy topics after New Years! May God bless you and your family this joyous season. May your travels be safe, and your New Year prosperous.

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What's that? You're still here? Looking for a little reading to while away a bored fifteen minutes between parties?

In that case, I present an essay I wrote on Facebook close to a decade ago. It's a very silly comparison of one of favorite books, and one of my favorite manga. Enjoy!

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As a lover of Japanese Animation (anime) I find myself in a strange minority opinion with regard to Fullmetal Alchemist. For those of you not in the know, let me summarize. Surveys conducted in both Japan and the United States have concluded that Fullmetal Alchemist is the single most beloved television anime series of all time. It is a grand epic tale of brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric, whose lives were changed forever when they tried to resurrect their deceased mother by using a forbidden alchemic ritual. The ritual went horribly wrong, leaving Edward mutilated and destroying Alphonse’s body entirely. Now, Alphonse only survives because Edward was able to bind his soul into a suit of armor. The brothers have taken to roaming the land in search of the philosopher’s stone, a legendary source of ultimate alchemic power which might allow them to restore their bodies. The story is far bigger than just the two of them, however, and their search for the stone gradually pulls them in to a grand conspiracy involving an ancient evil, the quest for eternal life, and the fate of the world.

Why , then, do I find myself with mixed feelings about this show? In short, it is because the Fullmetal Alchemist anime is based on the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, which is among my favorite written stories of all time. Fullmetal Alchemist the manga contains everything above and more: A story filled with numerous loveable characters, horrifying villains, tear-jerking sorrow, side-splitting comedy, breath-taking action, and true brotherhood standing tall against all the adversities the world can throw against it. It is offers surprising insights in its moral quandaries, and contains not a single wasted panel in its expanse of nearly Five Thousand illustrated pages.

Under most circumstances, I would love a well-made adaption of such a story. And I wouldn’t demand a one hundred percent faithful adaption either. I enjoyed the recent Sherlock Holmes film which I thought stood on its own two feet as a separate work from its source material, a respectful reinterpretation rather than an adaption. But the Fullmetal Alchemist anime finds itself as a hybrid between being a faithful adaption and a total reinterpretation, and the result just feels uncanny.

Here’s a hypothetical example. Do you remember how BBC adapted Pride and Prejudice, one of the most beloved books of all time, into a 6-episode miniseries? It is one of the most faithful adaptions of a book that can be made, with dialog taken almost line-by-line from the source material. It is also, in the opinion of me and many others, one of the best creations available on film, and it stands proudly beside the book, neither letting down its source nor replacing it.

But suppose the adaption had been done just a little differently. Suppose it still had the same cast, with Colin Firth as Mr Darcy, the heartthrob of two centuries, and all the others. And suppose that you could indeed watch the first two or so of the six episodes and be almost convinced that it was a similarly faithful adaption of the book. But now suppose that if you looked carefully, most of the characters and sometimes the tone of the story are just a little off. Lizzie is exactly the same as we know her, but Mr. Darcy, even though he has most of the same lines, sometimes gives them for different reasons, for it turns out as the story progresses that he is at heart a free and adventurous spirit who finds himself stifled by aristocratic society. Jane is her taciturn self in public, but is prone to hysterical, sobbing emotional breakdowns at home. Mr. Bingley is at times surprisingly immature, so that that our spider senses predict that there is a clichéd boy-to-man subplot in store for him. Furthermore, after those first two episodes, the plot strangely diverges. It contains many events taken from the book, but it also spends an inordinate amount of time on side plots, such as Caroline Bingley’s desperate, hopeless infatuation with Mr. Darcy, an extended flashback to Mr. Bennett’s sad past when his uncaring family and the pressures of society forced him to leave the girl of his dreams and marry the dreary, idiotic Mrs. Bennet, and Mr. Darcy’s unlikely friendship with a plucky London street urchin named Tuppenceworth. Towards the last third, the plot diverges entirely, as Lizzie, Mr. Darcy, and Mr. Bingley are forced to fight together to thwart an evil plan to kidnap Tuppenceworth and sell him to the coal mines, which turns out to be only one cog in an intricate conspiracy between Caroline Bingley and Mr Collins, with the final intention of forcing Mr. Darcy to marry Caroline Bingley and deliver the Duberg estate forever after into the clutches of Mr. Collins. It finally ends with evil defeated and Mr. Bingley having learned the power of believing in himself, but also with a note of sorrow, for Mr. Darcy is called away to captain a frigate in his Majesty’s Navy in the war against Napoleon. The story ends on a bittersweet note with Lizzie and Mr Darcy kissing goodbye on the dock, with the sunset and Mr. Darcy’s ship in the background, and the two of them swearing that someday, whatever the obstacles, they will surely be reunited.

Now, let’s carry this hypothetical a little farther. Suppose that this miniseries became an international runaway hit, reaching a far larger audience than the book ever could. It was lauded by fans and critics alike. The only real exception would be small group who loved Jane Austen when she was still underground. Suppose, then, that partly to milk more money out of the Pride and Prejudice phenomenon and also partly responding to criticism from the Jane Austen fans, BBC went back about five years later, got the original cast together again, and actually made the Pride and Prejudice mini-series we now know and love. And it was met with scorn by both critics and audiences. The essence of their reviews would be that it is pointless having a remake when the original was so good, that it is uninteresting watching the same events for the first third, that it leaves out all the cool side stories and things like Mr. Bennett’s background which made the characters feel alive, and that it is inexcusable to leave fan-favorite Tuppenceworth out of the story.

I doubt I would be able to enjoy this imaginary Pride and Prejudice adaption, for the same reasons I have trouble enjoying the Fullmetal Alchemist anime. The plot would feel hackneyed. I would see gaping seams between material taken from the book and material added by the BBC writers. I would feel that it diluted Austen’s original plot and characters with Hollywood clichés, and replaced much of the genuine emotion of the original with cheap angst. But most of all, I would find it uncanny watching these characters who inhabit the same bodies as the Jane Austen originals, who speak the same lines, but who have fundamentally different souls.

But at the same time, I would be surprised that I found myself as being such a minority opinion. It would be perplexing that so many people, many of them clearly people of excellent taste albeit not having read the original book, found so much to love. I would be forced to stop and ask myself, is there something I’m missing here? Is it just that the glory of the original is so intense that even this dim reflection has so much power? Or is there something more? Could it be that this show really does have artistic merit on the level of the original, and I’m just unable to accept it because I’m too attached to the original and its interpretation of the story? It would seem that most fans, after watching this adaption, find the original story uncanny for the exact same reasons that I found the new story uncanny, like we imprint on which whichever version we see first.

This is my quandary with the Fullmetal Alchemist anime. The original Fullmetal Alchemist is a serialized comic which is currently nearing completion. But at the time the anime was created the comic had completed only the first act of its four-act plot. So what the creators of the anime ended up doing was hashing together a significantly different story. They took most of the events and (sort of) the same characters from that first act of the manga, and pieced them together along with additional material and characters to form the first roughly two-thirds of its story. The remaining third is entirely original material. Now, one hand, I admire their audacity in trying something like this. The typical approach when running into this situation while adapting a serial manga is either to directly adapt the extant material and then patch on a barely satisfying conclusion, or to create multiple seasons of side stories and irrelevant plot arcs to give the manga creator more time to advance his plot. But on the other hand, the final result seems to me every bit as strange, and with all the same problems, as that hypothetical Pride and Prejudice adaption. BUT, on the other hand (three hands) given the enormous popularity of the anime, particularly among people who have either never read the manga or not read it until after seeing the anime, I can’t help thinking there’s something I’m missing.

Epilogue: I still stand by this, almost ten years later. I'm pleased to note that in the intervening years, it seems like Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood (The alternative adaption I alluded to above, made a few years later, which follows the plot of the manga) has grown past the initial audience skepticism to become generally recognized as the canonical animated adaption of the story. I recommend checking it out. It helps that it has that rare English dub which truly captures the music of English