You can usually tell how long someone has been into anime by their memories of Fullmetal Alchemist. The first anime series came out in 2003, while the manga was still early in its 2001-2010 run, while Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood began airing in 2009 and was praised for being far more faithful to Hiromu Arakawa’s manga. For all its praise – and it deserves much of it – I still can’t shake the feeling that the second anime series was a tipping point for the industry. To me, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood sapped a lot of creativity out of the anime that followed.

That sounds harsh, but don’t go running to the comments to shout at me just yet. Instead, hear me out on how Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, despite being a very good anime, was very bad for anime in general.
Anime hit a bit of a Western boom in the early 2000s and was getting a lot more mainstream exposure thanks to two programming blocks on Cartoon Network – Toonami and Adult Swim. During this time, anime studios were picking up the rights to shows that were still early in their manga run to adapt. Series like Fullmetal Alchemist, Bleach, and Trigun had only been serialized for a few years when their anime began to air, forcing the producers to make some narrative choices to maintain production.

While Bleach and Naruto chose to stick to the manga’s story and pad their un out with filler, Fullmetal Alchemist and Trigun both took a different approach. Instead, they created an entirely different story with the setting and characters that their manga had established. While this obstinately makes them “worse” adaptations, I think it makes them better shows. Even if they aren’t technically faithful to the source material, they were at least different. As the years have given me distance from these shows, I've grown to appreciate the fact that they were different.

What Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood did was show the demand for faithful adaptations of manga, something that became the norm in the years that followed. Now, it might seem counterintuitive to say that I’d prefer a slightly less faithful adaptation – that is the point of an adaptation, right? – but there is something to be said about an anime bringing something new to the table. If I want to see a panel-for-panel remake of the manga, why wouldn’t I just read the manga? It isn’t like it is hard now, with multiple apps turning up to satisfy the demand for hungry readers in recent years.

The thing that was missing in anime, in my opinion as someone who has a minor obsession with it, became the flair of creativity from studios. Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood created an expectation that anime wouldn’t diverge from the source material, but the best scenes from series like Dan Da Dan were where the studio could do something different. If they hadn’t had the freedom to fill in the gaps in the Acro Silky’s backstory, episode seven wouldn’t have wrecked us the way it did.

Is it entirely fair to lay blame for this trend on Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood? Not really, but it feels like an inflection point where studios weren’t judged just by how entertaining an anime was but by how closely they followed the manga. I miss the days when I didn’t know how a show would end years before it did simply because the manga was over. I long to pick up a manga after watching an anime and feel like I’m having a totally new experience. Eventually, even series like Sailor Moon got remakes to bring them more inline with what the manga presented and some of the weird quirkiness of the original was lost.

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood is a great anime that deserves a lot of praise, but it also represents a change in the anime industry that I don’t think was necessarily a good thing. Maybe it is because I was always a fan of the bittersweet ending of the original anime, but I miss when anime studios could give me something that defied my expectations.

Want to know what's coming up next in pop culture? Check out Popverse's guides to:

• Upcoming movies
• Upcoming TV shows
• Upcoming comics
• Upcoming games
• Upcoming fiction books
• Upcoming comic conventions