Tag: fullmetal alchemist

500 Words on Alphonse Elric

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Compassion for self and compassion for others grow together and are connected; this means that men finding and recuperating the lost parts of themselves will heal everyone. – Nora Samaran

We don’t get to choose the Grand Themes that move us, and for better and (without question) for worse, the dark cycle of pain, abuse and dysfunction and its light counterpart of growth, healing, and transformation is one of mine. Fullmetal Alchemist is a dear favorite of mine for this reason, and particularly one character, the sad, sweet, and immensely strong Alphonse Elric.

Edward Elric is the Fullmetal Alchemist, the youngest certified State Alchemist in history, and the show is his and follows his adventures. Edward is brilliant, heroic, egotistic, idealistic, quick to anger, loyal, and a perfectionist. Alphonse is gentle, cautious, kind, and equally brilliant. I’m sure there are fans out there who watch because they admire Edward, but I believe sincerely, if pigheadedly, that those of us who Really Get The Show may have compassion for Edward, but could only love Alphonse.

For those who haven’t watched the show, here’s a brief set-up: Alphonse and Edward were alchemical prodigies that tried to bring their mother back to life with magic. They failed, and in the process Edward (the elder brother) lost an arm and a leg, and Alphonse lost his body. Alphonse’s soul was bonded to a suit of armor, and now the brothers wander from town to town developing their skill as alchemists in order to bring Alphonse’s body back to him.

There’s meaningful recurring joke in FMA: whenever the Elric brothers come to a new town, everybody assumes that Alphonse is the elder brother, the Fullmetal Alchemist. Edward is very sensitive, and erupts into rage. I find the interaction telling, and tragic, because despite Edward’s offense that his younger brother is perceived as being older than he is, Alphonse has become more mature than he is. Alphonse’s loss is simply greater, and whereas Edward maintains fanatical focus on mastering the arts of human transfiguration, Alphonse maintains an ambivalent attitude towards the idea of getting his body back, and the price for the knowledge to be able to do so.

Alphonse clearly feels the absence of his body. He is uncomfortable being so large. He is uncomfortable being hollow. Whenever his body is violated, even innocently as by a cat, he reacts with panic. And yet the irony of his appearance and of his relationship to the experiment that maimed him is that he has done his healing, and he lives with his armor down. His brother has never been able to forgive himself, and he lives with his armor up, always.

Edward still believes that his mistake was a technical one, that if he had succeeded in bringing their mother back to life, that there would be no tragedy in their life. Alphonse knows differently, and his awareness, which he is never quite able to communicate with his brother, that there are ruptures too large for magic to undo, makes him the moral center of the show, and in the end, the Elric brother worth watching.

The Month in Review: TV and Music

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Despite my infrequent updating, November and December of 2010 were the most successful months that Mouth of the Beast has ever had. The blog has now passed 20,000 pageviews. Thank you for visiting!

I don’t actually know that you’re all men,and it’s been more than a year.

December flew by this year due to the combination of an unusually busy finals week and the fast-paced holiday season. Still, I managed to watch, read and listen to quite a few things.

TV is what I’ve paid the least attention to this break. Just after Thanksgiving, I finally finished the fifth season of The Wire, which killed my appetite for TV dramas. I did watch the third season of In Treatment, which I liked immensely through about the middle of the season, then lost interest in. I don’t think I’ll go back and watch the first two seasons. In other kinds of TV, I enjoyed the first season of Darker than Black, an (English dubbed) anime series available through Netflix. It was a worthy contender in my ongoing quest to find a series that can stand with Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which is my favorite anime series and my favorite animated show, period. Less worthy, but also good was Fullmetal Alchemist, which I somehow hadn’t seen before. The only series that I’ve watched over the break has been season two of Parks and Recreation. Many of my friends like P&R, but I’m having a hard time getting in to it. It’s an awkward hybrid between realistic, observational office humor (à la vintage The Office) and absurd wacky hijinks humor that I get really tired of. Part of my problem with the show is that I really don’t like Amy Poehler, I find her really annoying and not funny. I am enjoying Rashida Jones, Aubrey Plaza and (in small doses, because the show leans on him way too hard) Aziz Ansari.

I haven’t been listening to much classical music–I usually give my ears a break after finals. One new work that I’ve enjoyed very much is William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony from 1934. Dawson was an important arranger of spirituals and one of the preeminent black composers of his time, but I love the symphony for the gorgeous orchestration and colors. Another piece that I’ve been trying to grapple with is Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Times. Messiaen is one of the composers that I’ve constantly revisited over the last three years because I always feel like I’m gaining a new appreciation for what his music does, even while not completely understanding it.

I’ve been catching up with a bunch of my favorite pop artists this break, as well as discovering or re-discovering new artists. The most random rediscovery has been Fleetwood Mac’s album Tusk. I’m not familiar with much of their other music, so it might be that all of their music is like this, but this album is a great blend of tight harmonies, heterogeneous song styles, 80’s production, and these little musical details that I seem to discover again every time I listen to the album. After taking a break of three or four years, I started listening to the music of Owen Pallett, formerly Final Fantasy. I discovered him around the same time as I started listening to Andrew Bird, but I have always thought that Pallett was the better songwriter. Bird’s songs always seem like novelty songs, even though his musicianship and arrangement skills are better than that (I should confess that one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to was an Andrew Bird concert). Pallett has continued to push himself, and his 2010 album Heartland is really interesting and really good. Another band that I’ve been looking back on is The National. Boxer is one of my favorite albums, and I’ve been trying to listen to their two other critically acclaimed albums, Alligator and High Violet.

I’ve spent a lot of time the past few weeks grappling with two enormous, deeply interesting albums, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Sufjan Steven’s The Age of Adz. I don’t think these albums are that dissimilar, and they’re interesting in similar ways. Sufjan’s album was surprising, and perhaps upsetting, so some people because it incorporated a lot of electronic elements and seemed to turn it’s back completely on the formula that made him popular through the album Illinoise (although this turn in his music was not surprising to anyone who heard “You Are The Blood” on last year’s compilation album Dark Was the Night). Even more, by using T-Painesque Auto-Tune, he seems to be poking a stick at those of his fans who use “Auto-Tune” as a shorthand for the moral decay of modern music that Sufjan’s bardic banjo-and-flutes music was supposed to be a corrective against. Still, the differences between Illinoise and Age of Adz are more superficial than aesthetic, and I think any fans put off by the glitchy noise are going to misremember their opinion of the album in 10 years. I feel pretty unqualified to write anything about Kanye’s album, as I don’t listen to much rap, nor have I heard his other albums (except the near omnipresent “Stronger”). Still, I’m critiquing the album mostly as pop music. Although it’s not as dramatic a stylistic shift as the Sufjan album, MBDTF is a rejection of a formula as well, something that I only began to appreciate after listening to his 2007 album Graduation. There’s no trace of the good-natured cockiness of “Good Life” or “Champion.” Instead, everything–from the album’s unwieldy title to its obscene and weird cover to the filthy Chris Rock routine at the end of “Blame Game”–seems calculated to dare listeners to pull away. And like the Sufjan album, it’s polished, it’s catchy as hell, and it’s great.