Fullmetal Alchemist 23

Hiromu Arakawa – Viz – 2010 – 26 volumes

I like this series a lot. An awful lot. But holy crap, this war stuff is really dragging on and on and on. I know it’s getting close to the end, but the fact I’ve got three more volumes of fighting and a thousand characters for the storyline to jump between makes me not look forward to the end. You know, if Al got his body back, it would make this a lot more tolerable. When will that happen again? Grr.

So. Lots of fights with homunculi this volume. Ed and Al versus Pride, the Armstrong siblings versus Sloth, and Mustang and company versus Envy. Greed is still wandering around too, but no fights with him just yet. The Envy fight at the end of the volume stole the show, since he was one of the first homunculi introduced and there was backstory and things got heated between him and Mustang, literally and figuratively. Mustang showed up about two-thirds of the way through the volume and literally wiped out everything that Al, Ed, and the others were fighting, which was a great reminder of how scary powerful he is.

But even with the awesome fight between Envy and Mustang, there was just so much talking. They stop it near the end and just lecture Mustang. Then Envy lectures everybody. Then everybody lectures Envy. In the end, nobody really kills anybody. This is to be expected in a series that takes the moral high ground, and I do appreciate that, but after reading this and a volume of Blade of the Immortal together, I just get so tired of everybody whining about the cost of human life while waging bloody wars. The war in Fullmetal Alchemist is more or less inevitable, so it’s expected that a lot of this agonizing about the cost will happen. It is a theme of the series, after all, that the genocide of the Ishbalans still haunts the soldiers. But still. In a fight between Mustang and a homunculus, I just didn’t want to hear it.

All the same, it was a RADICAL fight. Totally worth the wait, and Envy really knows how to take a bow.

The fight with the Armstrongs and Sloth is still underway, and is made more interesting by a sudden increase in Sloth’s powers and the fact that they have to dodge soldiers that were told to shoot them on site. It’s good, and made even better by Alex’s grandstanding.

I want to like the fight with Pride at the beginning of the volume. But nothing really happens, save to Kimblee, who was only really… I mean, why is he even in the story? He just… steps in as a threat, without a whole lot to tie him to the other characters, and then this happens. Why? Why, Kimblee? Also, as much as I love seeing Ed and Al go all out in an alchemist fight, Pride just isn’t that exciting. He’s too smug. Bah.

Obviously I still like it, or I wouldn’t care so much about all the little things, but I do wish the story moved a little faster. I want to see Al’s body!