[LunarMoon]

Originally Posted by Kirarakim

And that's fine but Brotherhood & the Manga has it's own message. No it's not the same as the original FMA series but that doesn't make it any less deep or meaningful. The FMA Manga and Brotherhood as an extension has a hopeful message about relying on one another, seeing the best in things, and finding meaning even from a painful experience. Yes Brotherhood's ending was overall a happy ending but this doesn't negate its meaning.

The theme of "relying on others" and the general idea surrounding "the power of friendship" is so common in Saturday Morning cartoons that Brotherhood can hardly say to have made that theme its own; it is the obligatory shonen theme, actually done better in shonen fighters such as One Piece. It's been done gracefully, before in a "You Are Not Alone" scene, but Brotherhood didn't really stand out in that regard.

So only tragic series have depth & emotional resonance? Give me a break!

I hear that a lot, but it's usually, ironically enough, used to argue that a happier series (like FMA Brotherhood) is better simply because it's happier and that another series is inferior because it's "angsty". No, tragic series don't inherently have depth but judging from the huge amount of people who use that argument and the related one that I mentioned, you'd think that including any elements of tragedy makes a series instantly inferior.

If you like sad & tragic endings that's fine but I am tired of people acting like sad=deep and happy=cliche. There are just as many sad endings in anime as there are happy ones. In fact I would say tragic endings are even more common in anime.

It would seem difficult to become tired of something when it's the norm to say the exact opposite. At least, in this day age, it seems far more common to disregard a work because it's depressing rather than to disregard one because it's happy. That's why we have "Hollywood Endings", and why bittersweet conclusions in films will typically be changed into happily ever after sequences, so that the audience will give it a chance.

Originally Posted by Endless Twilight

Wow. That was one of the most painfully sophomoric posts I've read in recent memory. No wonder you favour the 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist anime and find the likes of Grave of the Fireflies to be the pinnacle of the medium if you sincerely believe depictions of tragedy contain inherent artistic value regardless of their actual execution.

I never said anything about tragedy being inherently better than a work that is happy. I said that there’s an oversaturation of happy works and that the fact that the original series decided not to take that route doesn’t mean that its inferior, since if anything it makes it more refreshingly original. If you had taken time to argue your point logically rather than to throw out a collection of ad hominem attacks at me, then you would have deciphered that.