Full Metal Alchemist

Saturday, 26 November 2005 T: 11 03

I have completed my first series of Anime – Full Metal Alchemist. It is a series which is very much unlike Naruto and Bleach. The latter two are fundamentally and simplistically revolving around the need for perseverance and the power of love and friendship. Full Metal Alchemist do include them, yet the award winning anime also very much focus on philosophy and perhaps ask the questions many are and will continue to search for.

I slept at 4 to complete the last several episodes of Full Metal last night, in order to feel that sense of completion. Yet upon finishing that last episode, that feeling of hollowness, of emptiness is still there. Maybe because it wasn’t a ‘happily ever ending’ after all.

I seem never to get tired of that cliché ‘happily ever after ending’. Maybe it’s just that sense of deprivation of such perfection in this world. I long for perfection, I seek for it, and I’ll never attain it in reality. Perhaps it’s always it’s such TV shows, be it those Chinese serials, movies or anime, with such endings that grant me the glimmer of hope that perfection can exist. This hope and wish is very much wrongly placed, false and baseless. Yet is it not this hope that often grants me that encouragement to go on, in pursuit of that almost impossible dreams and fantasies?

Will there be a ‘happily ever after’ in my life, in this world we termed real and tangible? Can my dreams be fulfilled? In my dreams they will be. Perhaps dreams are never meant to be, if not they won’t be called ‘dreams’ in the first place…

Like several other movies and shows, the ending of Full Metal cruelly and brutally pounds home that fact that what we seek will not be what we get. Putting in hard work may not at all have its results. The same love may provide unequal happiness in the lives of others. This is all limited by our abilities and our psychologies, somehow already pre-set right from the beginning. There will be no equivalent trade in this world after all.



p.s. watch it, it is an excellent anime.