#fmp anime

[fullmetal-generation]

This is a post about me liking Invisible Victory

HHHNNNNNNNNNNN

BUT WHAT GETS ME AT THE END is just that one stupid bandaid, the one Sousuke’s got over the corner of his mouth on the left. It’s from where he bit his lip in frustration after Leonard took Kaname. I have a lot of emotions about it. I also have a lot of emotions about Leonard and most of them are bad haha… (he’s such a spiteful little son of a bitch).

I’m not really treading any new ground here. I do think IV is a good adaptation. I liked that Sousuke didn’t have to taser Kaname to keep her KO’d and out of the way, but I really wished they’d kept the last thing she says to him before leaving. What did she say thought? No one knows, so I think it would have been kind of a cool scene animated but with no voice acting (if I remember correctly, Sousuke actually passed out after that in the novel, whoops). (My headcanon is that she said “go/live” like his mom did in Voice from the North.)

Actually now that I’ve sat on it, while I feel like Kaname’s general despair in the novel was probably more realistic, her clinging to just the barest shred of optimism & helping Sousuke in the anime set up for it to be even more painful when it didn’t work. Surprise! You two gave it your all and you STILL didn’t make it! No matter how hard they pushed, they weren’t escaping alive together. It’s one of those moments where I think the anime adapted the core emotion and theme of a scene even when they wrote it differently than in the novels.

ANOTHER thing I just thought of is that both of them surrendering isn’t a possibility, either. Not that either of them considered it. I don’t think Leonard would ever accept Sousuke, even if Sousuke stood there and said “You’re right and every point you make is true, let me join you.” Although that would be... kind of hilarious... likely outcomes are Leonard fake-accepting this and then just kind of passively sending Sousuke on some other mission far away to go die so he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty. Or maybe he’d have second thoughts and seriously consider it! Hmmm this is a theory for another post I think.

Finally, my last tracked on complaint about this episode is that the scene with Ono-D at the end doesn’t have as much kick to it if you haven’t seen Fumoffu, and even then, I feel like you probably have to read the novels (including the short stories) to get the full effect of how shocking it is that Ono-D of all people is chucking school supplies at Sousuke and threatening to punch his lights out.

I actually don’t have any real complaints about Burning One Man Force’s adaptation. I liked that they toned down the times where Nami was caught and threatened with sexual violence; that might technically be more realistic, but it was nice NOT to see it. I was kinda sad that they cut out Sousuke’s original excuse for wanting to participate in the illegal battles (he wanted $$$ to buy his prostitute girlfriend’s freedom, he said—anime has been known to cut lines like that out in general and FMP has done it a few times). I know him dragging himself behind cover to shoot Kurama in the stadium fight was more realistic… but I like that he climbed the damn ladder to do it in the anime. That was badass, Sousuke had an entire hole through his gut and he climbed the damn ladder for a surprise attack and then bled out on the floor hallucinating his girlfriend after memorizing the names of three Mexican cities. Love that for him :’ )

[fullmetal-generation]

Forgot this one

[fullmetal-generation]

These pics will always be a little crooked because I don’t want to flatten my books out TOO much and I don’t get paid to properly edit them, you know!

But I like sharing them. This is the fake cover of “AS Fan” in the anime guide book for the first season! A little sad it isn’t in color, but it has some cool design points about ASes and also the section where Sousuke talks about weapons. Those will probably show up eventually on here :3 I can’t dump all my content at once, tho.

[fullmetal-generation]

See how fresh that post is, kristina100000 posted it just this morning, what great timing.

[fullmetal-generation]

FMP Adaptation Thought #1

Having watched and rewatched Full Metal Panic multiple times this year (... and read and reread... and watched the Director’s Cut of Fighting Boy Meets Girl) I have lots of Thoughts (tm) about the anime adaptation as a whole. I realized that actually, the first season... is good. It’s not a perfect adaptation and some information that’s actually relevant gets left out, but it’s solid and there are a lot of things the anime did that I preferred to the novel.

First thing! The opening, which is 25% of why I didn’t like the Director’s Cut; the Director’s cut gives us some bonus footage of the novel’s prologue, where Kaname and Sousuke try to get printer paper from the teacher’s room and Sousuke sets off the sprinklers as cover, ruining the paper and infuriating Kaname, who wonders why she puts up with him but, oh yeah, it all happened a month ago...

I think tonally, this isn’t the best place to start. The anime’s first season went a different route, first showing Kaname half-asleep muttering Whispered knowledge before her chicken alarm clock goes off. It has that one weird background music with the chanting that’s kind of a baffling choice compared to the rest of the soundtrack, but it’s an excellent place to start because

a) It shows us that Kaname does have something strange about her, but is probably unaware of it. The scene does a pan around her apartment, showing the photos she has of her and her family, there’s some footage of the neighborhood; it’s all really normal scenery superimposed with Kaname’s sleep-muttering about black technology.

b) it saves the humor for later, which I  think makes everything funnier.

Scene two is the Mithril member rescuing Mira from the Soviet base and Sousuke rescuing her. This is one of my favorite scenes in the series, and although there are things I like about the novel version, I actually prefer the anime. (The description in the novel of the M9 kneeling in front of Mira like a knight in front of a tattered princess always gets me--also from Mira’s eyes, Sousuke’s uniform and headgear look ninja-like, which is a neat pair up with the Arbalest also being described as looking like a ninja later.)

(Bonus: this scene has my favorite song on the soundtrack, but it’s only used in this scene for some reason T_T)

The biggest change between the novel and the anime is that Sousuke doesn’t talk to Mira until he approaches her. In the novel, he speaks to her from the AS, and when he gets out, she asks him about his dead comrade and if it makes him sad (he says “I don’t know”). The guy that rescued Mira gets a little less screen time in the anime.

I prefer that Sousuke doesn’t talk to Mira until absolutely necessary. Both methods (the novel’s conversation and the anime’s lack of any dialogue) convey that Sousuke, having just taken down a Hind with the M9, is excellent at that part of the job, but has little idea how to interact with other people. The switch from showing it in his reaction to Mira’s question to whether he’s sad about his dead comrade to him just not having a clear reaction to it at all. Mao and Kurz’s clips of banter in the background assure Mira they’re here to rescue her, Sousuke knows he didn’t step on her and she didn’t get hit with shrapnel or anything, so he doesn’t see a reason to say anything.

It makes Sousuke look really cool. And then knocks him a peg down by having him clearly unprepared for regular high school life, and knocks him straight off the ladder when he actually arrives at school and is a total disaster.

Sousuke and Kaname sort of share the protagonist role, but Sousuke is the true protagonist in the end, so I think it’s best to follow him looking cool and heroic in the beginning and then watch as he hilariously bumbles his way through his mission to protect Kaname.

And even though Kaname’s scene at the very beginning is short, it makes her seem kind of mysterious, and her cute apartment gives absolutely zero hints as to what a raging tsundere she is, so if you’re watching for the first time, you’re probably as shocked as Kurz when she starts chewing Kyouko out for setting her up on a blind date.

The prologue scene is shown at the end of the arc in the anime, which I think is a perfect fit. There’s no reason to frame the entirety of Fight Boy Meets Girl as a flashback. I don’t think it hurts, I just think the anime did a really excellent job of the set up and then the DC wasted time with the prologue and cut out some other stuff that I liked T^T

I wrote all this and realized dang, this is long and I have lots of thoughts about the entire series & the anime adaptation! So I’ll make more posts on it later. I just really like the TV anime’s opening, it’s so good. Gonzo did pretty alright on that.

[fullmetal-generation]

DAMN NAMI, I’M SORRY, YOU WEREN’T EVEN CLOSE. This is at the point in the novel where he’s forgetting what Kaname’s face looks like AND YET…

Then again, he literally set off from Jindai thinking Mithril was entirely destroyed and intended on rescuing Kaname from the organization that decimated them ON HIS OWN. He was just gonna. Do that. I don’t think saving the world is every anything more than a bonus on this kid’s journey, he just really, REALLY wanted to take Kaname back home and absolutely nothing on the planet was going to stop him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Now that’s romance!

[fullmetal-generation]

Really important photo set.

[1-5 are Fumoffu, 6-7 are the first manga, the one drawn by Tateo Retsu, 8 is FanRibi, 9 is Invisible Victory]

[fullmetal-generation]

He… put the pillows back on the couch after Nami left…

(Nami is nice, Kaname would have used the chair.)