Short Synopsis: Anne gets ‘distracted’ when she accompanies Bert as he sets out to find a job.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
This episode took away a lot of my doubts for this series. So yeah, it’s going to be less realistic than such epics as Anne of Green Gables, Perrine or Porfy, but the writers do have a great feel for the characters. This episode was SO typical of Anne.

The episode starts out as Anne is wondering what her parents would have looked like (there were no pictures back then, were there? And even if there were, Anne’s aunt doesn’t look like the type to save these pictures), as she starts talking to Rokimba (that’s how I’ll spell that cat’s name for now) about how her parents would live in a small house, and have a romantic moment together as Walter suggests Anne’s name to his wife, holding a small Anne in her arms. In the meantime, Rokimba walks away without Anne even noticing, and so she gets made fun of again by Horace and Edward.

At that point, Joanne starts getting impatient and calls Anne back. Without realizing that Anne’s already there, she starts talking about how Walter also used to be like Anne, and how he always had these wings on his back with which he’d fly away in his own world. Being the kid she is, when Anne hears this she takes this literally, and now she genuinely believes that her father had wings on his back. ^^;

Bertha (Anne’s mother) meanwhile was calm and quiet, and always read books after Anne was born. We also learn that Joanne decided not to tell Anne about her parents because it’ll just be unnecessary information. Anne is just there to help her out, and remembering her parents doesn’t fit in that picture and it looks like she also doesn’t like remembering the days of her childhood either. It’s too late though, because Anne is already thinking of lots of possible romantic scenarios in which her father might have played with his ‘wings’.

Joanne then proceeds to wake up and yell at Bert because he was supposed to look out for a job that day again, while all he does is sleep. When he readies his carriage, Joanne sends Anne along with him because it’s obvious that he’s going to end up just drinking away otherwise. The scene in which they rode in the carriage reminds me of the start of Anne of Green Gables, in which Anne was also rambling on and on towards Matthew.

Bert then tells her that he might not have met Walter, but he did know that he once was a teacher (and here we have another reason why Anne would end up liking studying so much), and how he taught at a cute little school in a forest (or that was what it sounded like, I might have missed the exact name for it), which of course gets Anne fired up even more.

When Bert arrives at the office that’s supposed to give him a chance for a job, he finds out that the one he was supposed to was away. He then runs into his friend and they run off to start drinking, and so he orders Anne to stay where she is until he gets back. Anne then sees that as a chance to explore the town a bit in order to find the school at which Walter used to teach. She asks random passers-by for directions, but quickly gets distracted by other pretty things and she gets lost.

She then runs into someone who was a good acquaintance of Bertha and who we’re probably going to see again in a few episodes. This time though, she simply gives Anne directions to where she needs to go to and she does find the house in the end. Johanna meanwhile is not exactly pleased with how both Bert and Anne haven’t turned up, she’s tired and has a headache, but she has to work hard since Bert refuses to get a job. She then notes how she doesn’t like to think back to the past out of jealousy: Bertha and Walter were a very happy couple together, and yet she ended up with an idiot as Bert. It pains her to think back at how happy she could have ended up.

When Anne finally gets back, it’s already dark, but Bert is still waiting for her at that point. He doesn’t scold her, but just tells her to get on the carriage (obviously she’s scolded plenty enough by Johanna).

It’s interesting how people like Bert and Johanna completely shatter the boundaries of good and evil, and this again is typical of nearly all WMT-series (apart from Ie Naki Ko Remi, of course). While it’s easy to simply call Bert pure evil, he’s simply someone who hates his own wife. He’s still an ass because he refuses to help her out, but at the same time he doesn’t antagonize Anne and actually seems to like her. But since neither Johanna nor Bert is willing to make up and get along, the gap between the two of them is only going to grow bigger, and this is probably going to end up with the two of them separating, causing Anne to move into a next family in which she’s going to get even more busy.

In the meantime, the bit about Anne taking Johanna’s proverb felt really nostalgic. When I was a kid I also used to take proverbs way too seriously. Anne really feels like a real little girl at times like these.

It’s also awesome to see that it’s been less than three weeks and we already have a fansub! I posted the link at the shoutbox, and it would be completely awesome if this Underwater group would persist until the end.

Short Synopsis: The Lior-Episode.
Episode Rating: 6,5/10 (Lacking, but that was to be expected)
So yeah, with this you can consider Natsu no Arashi dropped and FMA picked up. Just don’t think that I’m going to sing continuous praises for this one though; be sure to expect me to whine about this series a lot during the beginning episodes. It took me three attempts before I managed to get through those very dull first thirteen episodes of the original series. Because of that, this episode was the fourth time I had to sit through the Lior-story, so yeah: it did get on my nerves.

Thankfully, Brotherhood handled it better than the original series did: it condensed everything effectively to only one episode and it still managed to show the most important things of this arc. What I’m hoping for with this series is the Glass Mask effect: the original Glass Mask series of 1984 was utterly terrible, but the 2005-remake, which adapted the exact same manga chapters and took nearly the exact same amount of time somehow made the exact same story awesome. While this episode wasn’t exactly good, I do have to admit that the first few episodes are a major improvement on their counterparts in the original series.

My only fear is that the creators may be trying to rush through the first chapters a bit too quickly. Rose and the priest for example, were just as dull as I remembered them, but what I really liked in this episode is how the chemistry between the characters is much more enjoyable: especially Ed and Al are now much more interesting to watch, and I wonder whether the creators can keep this up. One of the major flaws of the original series was that the creators wanted to show off Ed’s l33t-powers a bit too badly. While the radio in this episode was cute, in the subsequent arcs, whenever Ed and Al arrived in a new town, there was always some sort of Timmy that fell in some sort of well that happened to be near Ed so that he could show everyone how awesome his powers are by saving him. I’m interested to see how Brotherhood is going to avoid this.

Also, there’s one part I didn’t get about this episode, so perhaps the manga readers can fill this in for me: how exactly did the priest know exactly that Ed and Al performed human transmutation? I mean, there are other ways in which people can lose limbs, aren’t there? If Ed didn’t happen to live near a very good artificial limb creator (or whatever they’re called), he’d still be limp at this point, and I’m not sure why a body-less armor immediately means a failed human transmutation either. I mean, in the original series, none of the other people who transmuted brought whatever soul they sacrificed back into an armor, did they?

So yeah; I like Full Metal Alchemist, but just not the beginning. I believe that the turning point for me was the arrival of Armstrong, so until that point you can pretty much expect me to be rather negative on this series. Brotherhood really improved the chemistry between the characters, but the plot right now still is preachy and uninteresting.

Short Synopsis: Kou gets invited to substitute in a local baseball team.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Oh this show is SO good. It may be one of the dark horses of the season, but in three episodes it has already done what most series can’t even do in twice that amount. Don’t get fooled off by the simplistic character-designs, because as a series focusing on middle- and high-school kids it does so many things right. This episode again had such a wonderful combination between subtle humour and drama, slice of life, character-development. There are already so many different characters, and yet all of them feel different with their own personalities.

And even though the character-designs are simplistic and leave out a lot of details, they still feel realistic: the school is filled with all different kinds and shapes of people of which a surprising amount is obese (really: finally after Real Drive we finally have another show that realizes that not everyone has the perfect body). What I also like is the people like the captain of Aoba’s baseball team: usually in anime these guys are the evil punks, who do evil stuff because they’re evil, or they’re especially that exaggerated to make fun of these stereotypes, but this guy feels nothing like that: he’s just a regular middle schooler with a tough physique.

As for the main character, it was of course obvious that he was going to be very talented at baseball, but the writers gave him quite an interesting back-story for it. Like Touch, he never went to join the baseball club in middle school, but unlike Touch this was because of a fight that broke out when he attempted to join it three years before. Instead, he just kept practicing by himself because his parents were involved with baseball anyway. It makes sense: the past three episodes have really shown that he’s a carefree guy who doesn’t like to get into trouble, and yet at the same time you can see how he’s still affected by something that happened three years ago. I don’t recall having seen anyone cry about Wakaba’s death, but you can see its influence very subtly in all of the characters that she hung out with when she was still alive.

Short Synopsis: Wellkin’s first mission as the commander of Squad 7.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Now this is more like it. Now that we’ve arrived at the real meat of the story, I’ve gotten a lot more interested in this series. The idiot siblings thankfully don’t play a major part in this show at all and Welkin’s strategies are actually quite interesting and creative. I’m also glad that Alicia got herself an interesting position as vice-chief of Squad 7: it’s going to allow her to grow as a character, and also prevent her from screwing up completely because Welkin will be there.

This episode also introduced some of the major side-characters of this series, most notably Largo Potter and Brigitte Stark. I liked how the two of them brought a bit of conflict into this episode, in which they weren’t that convinced by a commander who came fresh out of university. I also wonder where all of the hatred for the ‘darksen’ comes from. Is it mere nationalism (understandable in times of war, of course), or were the darksen people once notorious for something they did.

Still, this series is going to have to continue to bring in these interesting situations, because at this point it’s just oh so tempting to fill the rest of the show with random battles every episode until the final boss has to be faced in episode 25. Especially the character-development for the side-characters has the potential to just stop completely after this episode.