branchandroot

Welcome to my pages on Fullmetal Alchemist.

These pages are based on and refer to only the anime version.

It was the anime that caught and held my attention; the manga has a nice enough (and significantly different) plot, but it leaves me rather cold. Some of the theories and conclusions discussed here may well also apply to the manga, but I have not drawn on any of the manga source material to make them.

Historical Parallels is actually an essay that I wrote two years or so ago, upon finally finishing up watching the series. A slightly different version of it was linked at Scimitar Smile. It deals with the historical sources Arakawa may have drawn on to create Amestris, particularly the history of Germany.

Names is a list of as many place and person names in FMA as appear to have verifiable sources in alchemy or religion or WWII, or, for that matter, anything else that looked interesting.

Alchemy and Symbols looks at the symbols and themes that appear to have been drawn from historical alchemy, and what they may mean.

The Gate is a bit of hypothesizing about what the Gate may be, based on what we see in the anime. This deliberately leaves out of account all the indications that have developed in the manga, which I consider a completely different universe, given the way the entire second half of the anime was written.

A note on sources

In many cases, when only basic information was needed for a citation, I have directed readers to Wikipedia. I have tried to select only articles that provided proper citations for what they say, but my readers should please remember that Wikipedia is not rigorously peer-reviewed, and that anyone can write or edit articles in it. The scholarship of Wikipedia is, in general, as reliable as any to be found on the web at large--but that is, in many ways, damning with faint praise. If you are curious about any of the history or philosophy mentioned in these pages, I strongly recommend a visit to your nearest university library and a chat with a reference librarian, who can help you find more rigorously researched and reviewed sources.

Links

For fandom activity, I recommend starting with fm_alchemist and working your way out from there.

One of the older, and more selective, fic archives is Scimitar Smile.

I actively dis-recommend the Wikipedia entries for anything character related; they're full of unwarranted assumptions, sloppy analysis and careless mixing of continua. If you want an episode guide, however, it's a good place to look.

For reasonably accurate basic information, try the Anime Indepth FMA site. For a longer-standing collection of info, try Fullmetal-alchemist.com. Both sites are cognizant of the distinction between anime and manga and are reasonably careful about having sources for their information.

For production details, like who wrote the script and who the seiyuu were, check Anime-Source.