And this is the point where Brotherhood becomes completely different from the original series. There were a few similarities here and there, like Greed’s henchmen getting mercilessly slaughtered and King Bradley having a son, but the differences by far outweighed the similarities here. To start with, it’s Bradley of all people who goes after Greed and brings him in. He’s definitely shown to be much more than the nice grandpa that the first series turned him into.

And ZOMG, instead of being Pride, he’s Wrath! The first series really scrambled around with the definition of homunculus, didn’t they? Sloth also turned out to be just about the complete opposite of the Sloth in the first series. And really, it does make much more sense this way. I always wondered why Ed and Al’s mother, of all possible people, would be called Sloth. That just leaves the question of where Pride went, seeing as the other homunculi never mentioned him (or her), while they did mention the absent Sloth. Also, why did their master this time look like a grown up version of Hohenheim? Did he suddenly age fifty years since he saw Ed and Al for the last time or something?

The thing that I’m most curious about right now is how different the homunculi actually are, especially when they start developing. Quite a few of them actually devolved in the original series: Lust became sympathetic, Gluttony became crazy, Pride became much less careful, Envy became obsessed with getting revenge on Hohenheim and Wrath… he just became more and more emo as the series went on, it seems (at least, if my memory isn’t mistaken, which it has been for quite a few times with this series…). I really wonder what kind of path the original manga went into in terms of their development.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Excellent fight and finally we get to the point where the two stories completely diverge

So yeah, I was a bit lazy today so this post is a tad on the late side, apologies for that (*glares at Julian*). In any case, this was a pretty silly episode, but again it added so much to the series. First of all we see the introduction to two new characters, who both have their parallels in Touch: the annoying guy who keeps pestering one of the females and the captain of the boxing club. The differences here are that the annoying guy happens to be Azuma’s brother, and is bugging Ichiyou instead of Aoba. Aoba on her turn gets bugged by the boxing guy, who pretty much is the complete opposite of Harada in terms of personality.

Another parallel with Touch is the way that the baseball matches are built up: it’s his first year in high school, and instead of getting an early shot at getting to Koushien, Kou isn’t involved at all with this tournament and instead is in the middle of summer camp in order to get his skills at the correct level. Azuma at the same time fails to get to Koushien in this episode, which makes his desire to get there even bigger. I must say that this episode did a good job of subtly showing his frustrations. He’s never been a guy to openly show his emotions, so he just takes them out on some unfortunate baseballs at the Tsukishima batting center.

And so this episode also took place in the local pool for a while. It was pretty amusing, and this is actually a good example of how there can be much more to fanservice. From the outside this might seem like yet another pool episode, but this also gave the creators the opportunity to show how the characters are not just mentally starting to mature, but also physically: they’re not the naive children they were at the beginning of this series anymore. The ED showed this even more, and I believe that it was exactly for this purpose that they made the characters look very mature. It may even be what they’re eventually going to look like, when Kou is in his third year.

And by the way, I also loved how Momiji kept driving the annoying guys away from her sisters. She doesn’t appear often, but she’s such an adorable character when she does.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Excellent pool episode with very amusing chemistry between the characters.