People are weird about food

Lois remarked on a book she'd read, today, The Diet Myth by Paul Campos. She included a quote I thought was right on the money:

The weight loss industry exploits cultural anxieties about fat to sell its customers products that don't work, over and over again, by convincing those customers that it is *they* who are defective. The failure of these products is ascribed to the moral weakness of those who purchase them, thus allowing the cycle to go on indefinitely. But the situation is more complex than this. It takes a great deal of cultural distortion to cause normal market mechanisms to break down so completely (blaming your customers for the catastrophic failure of your products isn't usually considered a sound business practice.)

The obesity myth thrives in contemporary America because America is an eating-disordered culture. Moreover, the prime symptoms of this situation -- our increasing rates of "overweight", bulimia, and anorexia -- are also symptoms of, and have become metaphors for, a broader set of cultural anxieties...

And it's dreadfully true. The diet industry is more pernicious than the tobacco companies, not least because of all the other industries that have formed themselves around this bizarre notion that humans should be skinny. US culture has astonishingly unhealthy standards of "beauty", and I believe they tie directly into the equally unhealthy sedentary culture. After all, if it's obvious on the face of it that one is never going to look like the models/actors/athletes/etc. without truly heroic and life-busting measures, and probably not even then, why bother trying at all? The lack of a sensible or sane target and body-image promotes apathy, and the lack of results from the "diets" does the same. The results of random negative stimulus are well proven.

FMA: Brotherhood, premier

*contemplative* I am unsure quite what I think.

The visual style is very similar but more… flexible? It definitely partakes more of the manga Arakawa-version superdeformed style, which I’m not really partial to. I’ll have to see if the animated style really takes with me or not. The detail of the motion is definitely a plus, though.

I can get used to Miki doing Musting. He and Ohkawa both have that flex to their voicing of Mustang, so there’s a reasonable continuity. The one major difference touches on the one thing I’m very unsure of, though.

The characters aren’t as sharp. At least in this pilot episode, neither Ed nor Roy have the edge that the first series provided. A big part of that is the script; there’s just more slapstick going on. And I loved that edge, it was probably the thing that topped the list of “why I totally love this show”.

So, while I think it will be absolutely fascinating to see the manga storyline animated (supposing that is the goal), I don’t know if I will be as wildly in love with this second series as I was the first. I will hope otherwise, but we shall just have to see.