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*flappy hands*
... so apparently I stopped reading the FMA manga right before things got good, eh?
I just mainlined vols. 6-10 tonight (up to the latest one the library had in stock), and
OMG OMG THE FIGHT WITH LUST WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THIS WAS SO AWESOME *_*
It's pretty rare for me to ship a couple who aren't an established couple in canon, but ever since the beginning of the series I've shipped Riza/Roy liek whoa (though my adoration is firmly rooted in their comrades-in-arms bond, and if they never do anything but save each other's lives for the rest of the series, I'll be a happy camper). The original anime gave me a bunch of happy little crumbs, but the manga is giving me GOLD.
The only part that fell a little flat for me was Riza giving up and deciding to die when she thought Roy was dead (and he was right to chew her out for that afterwards) but other than that, all I really have right now is SQUEE! FLAIL! SQUAIL! Code names and trust and worry and SHE'S dead and then HE'S dead and stabbings and explosions and PRESUMED DEAD WITH NOT-SO-DEAD LAST-MINUTE RESCUES I LOVE IT SO!
... oh, and I guess there was something in there about Ed, too, but I was distracted. XD
(I actually love all the characters in FMA, even most of the bad guys -- and was so delighted that Havoc and Maria survived, though I saw the Maria thing coming from pretty much the moment of her "death", and the Elrics and Winry will never not be adorable ... but OMG, pretty much the entirety of the fight between the Sins and Roy and his people in vols 9 & 10 mashed down my fan buttons SO HARD.)
I shall be off to get subsequent volumes as soon as I can! Please, please do not spoil me beyond vol. 10, which I think is about ep. 20 of Brotherhood (not that I've been looking up episode guides or anything XD ... though with one eye squeezed shut to avoid spoilers). FMA is a series that I really, really want to read unspoiled, because I love those "OMFGWTFBBQ" moments that Arakawa does so well.
Edit: Also, does anyone know of any good Riza gen or Riza/Roy (actually, Riza/anyone, come to think of it) that's not spoilery for post-vol. 10(ish) of the manga? Anything from the original animeverse (i.e. not Brotherhood) is also fine; I've seen all of that. I'm afraid to look up fic or vids for fear of spoilers, but I want more Riza like burning! (So to speak...)
I just mainlined vols. 6-10 tonight (up to the latest one the library had in stock), and
OMG OMG THE FIGHT WITH LUST WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THIS WAS SO AWESOME *_*
It's pretty rare for me to ship a couple who aren't an established couple in canon, but ever since the beginning of the series I've shipped Riza/Roy liek whoa (though my adoration is firmly rooted in their comrades-in-arms bond, and if they never do anything but save each other's lives for the rest of the series, I'll be a happy camper). The original anime gave me a bunch of happy little crumbs, but the manga is giving me GOLD.
The only part that fell a little flat for me was Riza giving up and deciding to die when she thought Roy was dead (and he was right to chew her out for that afterwards) but other than that, all I really have right now is SQUEE! FLAIL! SQUAIL! Code names and trust and worry and SHE'S dead and then HE'S dead and stabbings and explosions and PRESUMED DEAD WITH NOT-SO-DEAD LAST-MINUTE RESCUES I LOVE IT SO!
... oh, and I guess there was something in there about Ed, too, but I was distracted. XD
(I actually love all the characters in FMA, even most of the bad guys -- and was so delighted that Havoc and Maria survived, though I saw the Maria thing coming from pretty much the moment of her "death", and the Elrics and Winry will never not be adorable ... but OMG, pretty much the entirety of the fight between the Sins and Roy and his people in vols 9 & 10 mashed down my fan buttons SO HARD.)
I shall be off to get subsequent volumes as soon as I can! Please, please do not spoil me beyond vol. 10, which I think is about ep. 20 of Brotherhood (not that I've been looking up episode guides or anything XD ... though with one eye squeezed shut to avoid spoilers). FMA is a series that I really, really want to read unspoiled, because I love those "OMFGWTFBBQ" moments that Arakawa does so well.
Edit: Also, does anyone know of any good Riza gen or Riza/Roy (actually, Riza/anyone, come to think of it) that's not spoilery for post-vol. 10(ish) of the manga? Anything from the original animeverse (i.e. not Brotherhood) is also fine; I've seen all of that. I'm afraid to look up fic or vids for fear of spoilers, but I want more Riza like burning! (So to speak...)
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I do really love Fullmetal Alchemist and recommend it. The series takes a little while to start bringing in the plot twists and emotional scenes, but wow, once it does, it really delivers!
Another manga you might want to try is Planetes -- it's a near-future, realistic sci-fi series, and the visual style is more like Western comics than a lot of what gets translated and exported, so it might be a good gateway manga. :D (One thing I find frustrating about manga, or rather I should say the manga translation industry, is that most of the ones that get picked up outside of Japan, at least here in the US, are the actiony, pop-culture-ish ones, which tend to be really frenetic and abstracted and are probably not nearly as appealing to people outside the Western anime-fan crowd as the more visually quiet and slice-of-life titles. I recently downloaded scanslations of one called "Otoyomegatari", set along the Silk Road, which looks absolutely gorgeous -- check out (http://precur.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/otoyomegatari1.jpg) the art (http://www.mydailymanga.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/otoyomegatari-chapter-1-01.png) -- but most of what you find on the shelves here is basically teenagers in spandex, same as American comics.)
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The advantage of the b/w is that they're quite inexpensive, once I converted the yen into euro. (postage is freakishly expensive to make up for it.)
Well, I found a streaming site for FMA - Brotherhood with subtitles. I usually watch tv while drawing so I'm missing a lot but even so I rather liked the first one. Enough to want to check out the next one anyway, so that's good. I really *have* to start watching japanese tv.
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If you don't mind me asking: where? :)
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hxxp://animephase.com/category/full-metal-alchemist-brotherhood/
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Haha, I went back to this post after watching the first two dozen eps of brotherhood, and see that your reaction to that episode was exactly the same as mine.
I was plodding through the first couple eps, valiantly trying to understand a thing of what were saying, and suddenly going, "hm, who's that dark-haired guy, he's interesting." :)
I like the mythology and everything (though I couldn't care less about all the epic battle scenes), but for me Roy and his loyal band are so far the most interesting part of the series. Unfortunately the problem with supporting characters is that they never get as much screen time as I'd like.
How does it work, though: I understand that ep 19 of brotherhood = vol. 10 of the manga. And the manga is up to vol. 45? But why is everybody talking about chapter 100-104, are those = vol. 44? So confusing. At least someone explained to me why there are two anime series with apparently conflicting canon...
Anyway, all this anime-watching has been really helping me with my Japanese. I never would've thought to notice and improvement after a mere week, but it's actually working. This is so cool!
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Hee! That is exactly what happened to me; I was pretty indifferent to the manga for the first little while (actually, I'm not sure if I would've kept reading if I hadn't been at a point in my life when I was reading tons of manga -- this was 2003 or so) and then ... Roy happened. :D Roy and his little group are by far the most interesting part of the series to me; I like the others (this is one of those series where I really don't dislike anyone, except the characters who are supposed to be unlikable, and even they have their moments) but Roy and his team are where my heart is. (Riza! ♥)
How does it work, though: I understand that ep 19 of brotherhood = vol. 10 of the manga. And the manga is up to vol. 45? But why is everybody talking about chapter 100-104, are those = vol. 44? So confusing. At least someone explained to me why there are two anime series with apparently conflicting canon...
Aha! Easy question to answer. :) The manga is being serialized in chapters in a monthly magazine in Japan (as most manga are), and each of the books collects several individual chapters into one volume. So 104 is the latest chapter (which I may have, er, downloaded *g*), and the books are up to, I think, vol. 24 or so.
And I'm impressed that you're watching it in Japanese -- without subtitles, I'm guessing? I've actually picked up some extremely limited Japanese just from watching anime (though I realize that the way people talk in anime has about as much to do with the way people in RL speak Japanese as learning English from sci-fi *g*) but there is no way I know enough to make much of it without the subs.
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*nodnod* Yes... the mini-arc between eps 11-19, starting with Hughes' death (which *really* affected me even though I'd only been half-paying attention until then) and the framing of Lieutenant Ross and Roy killing her (and I was rather concerned about that because I thought that it might be a fakeout but what if not, he was so ambiguous until this point and while I like my heroes morally ambiguous I don't like them *that* dark) and then of course ending with the epic fight and why the hell are there no post-ep fics? I mean, we got a hero who gets impaled by claws, left for dying, ends up using his fire magic to cauterize his own wounds, heroically staggers after the bad guy and kills her and saves his friends, and only then falls flat on his face... I mean, if this was SGA fandom there would've been about 300 episode tag fics popping up. :D
Um. Anyway, so far that has been my favorite part. I'm currently somewhere around ep 33.
And I'm impressed that you're watching it in Japanese -- without subtitles, I'm guessing?
Heavens, no, there are subtitles. But I try not to rely on them all the time. Mostly because the plan is to watch while I'm drawing and the tv is behind me and I'm starting to get whiplash. Right now I'm watching all available eps through, because I want to know where the story is going. I figure, once I know the basic plot I can go back to mainly listening when I rewatch it.
In the beginning I didn't understand a word. Which was really frustrating. They were just talking so fast. Then after a while I noticed that I could make out single words. Now I can make out entire sentences even without reading the subtitles, but it's still not enough to follow the plot. I'm missing quite a bit of vocabulary, too.
(though I realize that the way people talk in anime has about as much to do with the way people in RL speak Japanese as learning English from sci-fi *g*)
Actually learning English from sci-fi works really well... *fondly thinks back of Star Trek addiction in her teen years* :) I mean, okay, you got vocab like 'flux capacitor' and 'dilithium matrix' but essentially they talk like we do. The problem is the darn Manga. Vol.1 of the Manga just got here... I started to read and it's harder to understand than the anime. Gah. I read the first two pages and barely understood a word. A couple years ago I read Prisoner of Azkaban in Japanese - granted, I had the English version lying next it but still, it was easier than any Manga I'd tried. Maybe because in Manga you got nothing but dialogue, and colloquial dialogue at that. It's like they don't bother with grammar at all!
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*hee* I KNOW! You'd think it would be total fangirl bait.
Hughes' death was such a blow. There's more of him in the original anime, I think; he dies around episode 25. *wail* I really love how his death is about the farthest possible thing from a throwaway death, though, because it continues to motivate Roy and to be regularly referred to. Actually, one thing I love in general about the series is how she (the author) deals with the consequences of what she inflicts on her characters; she doesn't magically fix them (even though there IS magic!) and they are quite obviously carrying around the psychic scars of all the things that have happened to them. (In the manga, Roy actually cut a transmutation circle into his skin in that battle with Lust -- I think in the anime they had him draw it in blood -- and in the manga, you continue to see the scars whenever they show his hand, for chapters and chapters ... I think eventually it healed, but I loved the continuity there.)
I'm just now starting to poke around in the fic; I'd been trying to avoid it earlier for fear of spoilers. I remember from my earlier forays into the fandom that it seems like it used to be dominated by Roy/Ed slash (not my cup of tea). I'm not really getting that impression this time around, though; either that or I've just gotten better at seeking out the sort of thing that I want to read (and the tags at Archive Of Our Own are really awesome for that!). I ought to have enough to do a recs post sometime soon.
A couple years ago I read Prisoner of Azkaban in Japanese - granted, I had the English version lying next it but still, it was easier than any Manga I'd tried. Maybe because in Manga you got nothing but dialogue, and colloquial dialogue at that. It's like they don't bother with grammar at all!
That's really interesting! I would have kinda thought it'd work the other way since with manga, you have the pictures to help ...
Back when I was into manga in a major way, which was about '99 and the early '00s, there really wasn't that much of it translated, at least not the ones I wanted to read. I ended up buying a lot of my books from Japan and struggling to get the gist of it with a kanji dictionary and a vague (... very very VERY vague) understanding of Japanese grammar. I certainly couldn't have done a translation; it was the best I could do to get a general understanding of each scene from the art and what words I could read. Now that I'm getting back into it a little, it's kind of wince-inducing to discover how little of it I can still remember and understand.
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They do so in the anime too. I only noticed it when I was watching some of the later episodes, where you can still see faint traces of the scars on his hand.
I'm just now starting to poke around in the fic; I'd been trying to avoid it earlier for fear of spoilers. I remember from my earlier forays into the fandom that it seems like it used to be dominated by Roy/Ed slash (not my cup of tea).
I browsed a bit on fanfiction.net and a lot of it seems to be Roy/Ed. Also, a lot of it seems to be not very well-written but well, that's partly ffn. And partly me being spoiled by SGA fandom. (I enjoyed my foray into FMA fic but tonight I'm really looking forward to that SGA AU you rec'd the other day!)
... speaking of, I don't have any Riza fic but I spent two nights reading a rather enjoyable bit of Roy-whump which I found during my otherwise unsucessful search for post-ep fic for ep 19. It's a 83,000 word gen ensemble fic, Altered Perception (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4298613/1/Altered_Perception). It comes with angst galore, but I'd say it's in tone with the show... I mean, this is one very angsty show. ;) I have no idea where it's placed in canon - probably during the first anime. Riza is in it but not as much as I'd have liked. There is more Roy&Ed/Havoc/Hughes, but that stuff was actually really interesting. (And strictly gen! When it comes to yaoi I'm very much 'do not want' right now.) But I really like Ed in this, all the characters in fact.
I like the others (this is one of those series where I really don't dislike anyone, except the characters who are supposed to be unlikable, and even they have their moments)
I was gonna say 'me either' but I just realized that I really don't like Hohenheim. Weirdly enough I've just been starting to wonder whether I have a problem with father figures in fiction... during the hate-of-fictional-women debate I was trying to think of characters I have a knee-jerk dislike of, and remembered that that is very much the case for Gibbs' mentor on NCIS as well as Dad Winchester on SPN, and I can't even say why. I find it just weird because my own Dad is a really cool guy and I'm grateful for that. Maybe just coincidence.
Anyway, I don't know if we're supposed to dislike Hohenheim; he's a pretty shady figure - I have no clue what his gig is - and he left his little boys. Maybe it'll become clearer in the next eps. (My most recent one 35 - up in the north - was pretty cool!)
[eta: eh, I just noticed a little tidbit about him that I completely overlooked on first viewing... that's what you get for not paying enough attention...]
I ended up buying a lot of my books from Japan and struggling to get the gist of it with a kanji dictionary and a vague (... very very VERY vague) understanding of Japanese grammar. I certainly couldn't have done a translation; it was the best I could do to get a general understanding of each scene from the art and what words I could read.
Wow, that's impressive. I mean, I know the grammar and even so I have just a general understanding. /o\ Though it's getting easier to understand after a while, I notice.
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I was gonna say 'me either' but I just realized that I really don't like Hohenheim. Weirdly enough I've just been starting to wonder whether I have a problem with father figures in fiction... during the hate-of-fictional-women debate I was trying to think of characters I have a knee-jerk dislike of, and remembered that that is very much the case for Gibbs' mentor on NCIS as well as Dad Winchester on SPN, and I can't even say why.
Hee! You know, now that you bring it up, while I wouldn't go so far as to say I dislike Hohenheim, at best I'm kinda indifferent to him. Ditto for John Winchester on SPN! I think my problem in John's case, specifically - and this may also be true of Hohenheim - is that an absent father-figure is much better for the main characters' ability to solve their problems on their own. (See also: Dumbledore in Harry Potter.) Once a powerful, wise mentor character is introduced, they almost have to be killed off (Obi-Wan Kenobi, say ... or John Winchester) or they just kinda hang around solving the main characters' problems for them.
I don't think I had that problem with Gibbs' mentor because he typically caused more problems than he solved. *g* For me, I don't think it's the mentor/father-figure type that bothers me so much as the fact that I'm just not really all that fond of well-adjusted characters in general, especially if it goes hand-in-hand with being super-powerful, or extremely competent in the main characters' field. I like characters who are slightly messed-up, and while I can certainly jump on board the character-love bandwagon for someone who actually is an emotionally healthy person (in fact, there are a few characters that I like just because of that, since, in the sort of thing I typically watch, they tend to be islands of sanity in the midst of chaos *g*), they become a really hard sell for me if they're also ridiculously badass at the same time.
(Though I just realized as I typed the above that John Winchester is a TERRIBLE example of a well-adjusted individual, isn't he? But he definitely provides an emotional pivot for the boys, as well as falling into the "too competent for his own good" category -- I felt like it was a mistake for the show to bring him into the middle of the action as quickly as they did, and I thought that killing him off was really the best thing they could have done with that character at that point.)