[LunarMoon]

Sorry for the long delay in the response. A slew of projects, exams, and a few extra errands kept me busy, but now that I have some time to breath, it’s time to get back into the discussion.

Originally Posted by Kirarakim

No really they are not. I consume a lot of fiction in many different mediums & tragic tones are just as common as uplifting ones. In fact killing off characters for shock value seems to be a new norm in fiction.

I'm just not seeing it, though that may have to do with the fact that I've oversaturated myself with American media over the last two years. You may have a point with Japanese media, though. I decided to scan through my MAL and counted a 12 to 9 ratios in terms of endings that were happy to bittersweet or depressing. Of course, I've gone out of my way to avoid harem anime and moe shows such as K-ON and Squid Girl, so I'm not sure about how the ratio would add up with the large influx of those over the last few years.

Originally Posted by wisteria233

And now you show that you don't know the meaning of words you are using When someone says that something is childish then they are calling it immature, it has nothing to do with mood or themes of a series, but rather how it approaches it. All of the examples you listed aren't childish series at all as each and everyone of them approaches their themes with a sense of maturity, and even then a series being childish isn't a bad thing. What makes a series bad is the story itself.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. –C.S. Lewis

This is what I was getting at. The idea of using the word “childish” as a form of deprecation irks me, since it implies an obsession with “being very grown up”. If you mean “mindless” or “gimmicky” than it’s just within my pet peeve to use those words, since the other implies more about the speaker than it necessarily does about the topic. Basically, it’s this obsession with watching something, because it’s “mature” that bothers me, though kudos for giving points to Lewis Carol.

You know what its no use using the spoiler for 2003 series because of its age.

It's easy to place spoiler tags on this forum, so I tend to do so for just about anything. If this were Gamefaqs, where you have to skip multiple lines in order to prevent yourself from posting a spoiler than I wouldn't bother with it, but here it's so convenient that I might as well do so. Even though the series is old, it doesn't mean that everyone's seen it. I know a lot of people in their twenties who have yet to see the Godfather and the vast majority of other old movies, though they've been out for half a century or more. It just depends on when you get around to seeing something.

Anyway, the following is my assessment of the series after watching it, and isn't really a direct response to anyone. It's pretty long so I decided to place it into spoiler tags to seperate the content. I mentioned that I was unimpressed by Brotherhood. That's largely due to the hype I had coming into it; I just can't see it as a #2 series, or as better than the 2003 anime.

Spoiler for Assessment of FMA Brotherhood:

Reading under the spoiler tags tempted me to go ahead and finish the series. As many of the other critics noted, it really hits its stride during the conclusion, created some actual pathos, and developed a few of the characters more than they had been developed in the first anime. Kimbley became more than a cackling psycho, Greed, in an interesting twist, actually obtained main character status, providing him with all of the development that this entails, Al became less overshadowed by his brother than in 2003, and we were allowed to see more to Scar than the angry serial killer, seeking revenge for the war in Ishval. That said, the first anime provided us with better character development for Lust, a more compelling motivation for Envy, a villain with more relatable motivations, and an arguably more applicable theme, cleverly built up throughout the span of the series. That last point, combined with the fact that the first anime was able to engross me at the half-way point, while the Brotherhood took 40 episodes, is why I ultimately need to provide more of a nod to the first anime.

About Brotherhood’s theme, by the way. Upon seeing the last few episodes, I’m going to have to disagree with Kirakim on what it is. “Trusting people” is definitely a prominent theme, and one that I already mentioned I believed to have been done too often before, but the actual theme of Brotherhood seems to be, “Sacrifices are necessary. You can’t gain anything without losing something first. Although, if you can endure that pain, and walk away from it, you’ll find that you’ll now have a heart strong enough to overcome any obstacle”, which is of course the final line of the series. And this is where the “arguable” part comes in. I sacrificed absolutely nothing to be born into a 1st world country, to obtain my initial socioeconomic rank, or to be provided with the set of talents, intellectual, or physical assets that I was born with. 2003, seemed more nuanced in its thematic set-up in that it actually acknowledged this. And it wasn’t all “lol grimdark” about it, either. As Hohenheim, himself, put it, there’s nothing he could have given to be blessed with the family that he had.

None of this is an issue if you just watch Brotherhood as entertainment, which is what I strongly advise. As long as you don’t buy into the hype about it being the “pinnacle of anime” then you can easily enjoy it, as I did after a while, for what it is: an above average, if enthralling, action anime with some great character development and drama thrown in. Brotherhood is placed as #2 on the MAL list. If you constructed a list of the best films or of the best novels, what would make it into the top ten? The Godfather? Citizen Kane? Perhaps George Orwell’s 1984? It’s kind of like the copies of Action Comic that I buy every month or the other superhero comics that I pick up every week. They’re extremely entertaining stuff, but I’m not going to pretend that they’re the next Lawrence of Arabia or even the second coming of It’s A Wonderful Life. They’re great for what they are. Above average, sometimes even below average, action books that, nonetheless, pale in comparison to Watchmen or the various indie comics that I’ve never bothered to read. But I’m not going to sit down with a literature major and argue that they’re the pinnacle of the medium, either.

Something like Grave of the Fireflies? That’s an anime that I could introduce to a literature major in the same way that I’d hand someone who hates superhero comics a copy of Watchmen. It’s a memoir of the author’s experience amidst the Tokyo fire bombings and what he wished could have occurred due to an extreme sense of survivor’s guilt. In that regard, it’s art in its purest form: a communication of the author’s most profound emotions to the audience. Every once in a while, the thought that the Japanese have a nationalistic complex about World War II, in which they narrate their suffering without acknowledging the atrocities that the military committed during the period, makes me cynical. Then, as silly as it may sound, I recall Grave of the Firefly, and remember that regardless of the actions of the government, that innocent civilians suffered, and that the amount of sympathy that should be provided for people has nothing to do with their country of citizenship, the actions of their governing body, or the time period in which they were born, as something such as Grave of the Firefly could have taken place in Vietnam, Nanking, Nuremberg, or London, and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. That’s staying power and what separates “entertaining art” from “great art”. They make the audience think about ideas that they may otherwise be adverse to.