timepiececlock | FMA dub episode 50

Episode 50 discussion, page 10: the exact page on the AS boards where people blow their tops. Aahhh, I remember that viewing experience. There was screaming and freaking out galore.

Fantastic performance with the dub, just like the last few episodes. My only sadness is that Ed's line "Don't fuck with me!" was changed to something a little more tv-safe. Will it be on the DVD, one hopes?

To my great pleasure, they didn't cut out either of the two really bloody scenes in this episode, the one with Wrath and the one at the end. I'd been wondering how they were going to handle it considering you simply CAN'T edit those scenes out and expect the episode's events to make sense, and AS had edited things weaker than that before. I guess by the time they got this far they just threw their hands in the air and said "Aw, screw it! This show's too gorey to fix. We'll just have to play it as is."

Ooh, and a very amusing/traumatic link: Click here only if you've seen episode 50 and need to scream. This is the spoiler of all spoilers. Well, the second-best spoiler of all spoilers cause nothing tops alternate universe zepplins.

EDIT: This is either the best or worst FMA shirt I've ever seen.

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geglash: Okay, okay, here's my theory: Ed isn't dead. Can't possibly be. No way in hell. The show will think up some slippery sh*t to get him out of it................

........and everyone will live happily ever after (except f*cking Envy, he'll drown in a pool of lava) and eat lollipops and snuggle puppies and la la la la la.....*curls into fetal position*.............la la la la la la la la la la la.........
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"pool of lava" is so nicely original and graphic.

WARNING! Spoilers for episode 51/finale in the comments below!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

rashaka.livejournal.com

Glad you didn't spoil yourself with the comments! Yay!

All I keep saying to myself is: There's a movie; Ed is in it.

I know. When it originally aired all we knew about the movie was a single promo picture of Ed in older clothes and with a pony tail. No other characters, no context, NOTHING. Just a single character image.

We thought, so naively, "Okay, well, characters are dropping like flies, but at least Ed is safe. SOMEONE is going to survive the night!"

And then... ED DIES! And we're all taken aback, screaming "NO! ED WAS SAFE! THERE WAS A MOVIE PICTURE! ED WAS SAFE!"

Mucho trauma abounds.

And so now, despite my steadfast resolve to see the series through watching dub only, I am now d/ling the episode 51 sub, followed directly by the movie.

Aah. Well, I'd say you should've watched everything from episode 43 onward in subs, so at least you'd be used to the voices. Paku Romi, who did Ed's Japanese voice, BREAKS MY HEART.

And then there's Hawkeye screaming. Followed directly by the MOST EVIL SCENE CUT-AWAY OF ALL TELEVISION SCENE CUT-AWAYS.

I cried.
Then I yelled at the computer.
Then I cried again.
God, I love this show.

YES. I'm getting a kind of vicarious thrill out of watching you guys experience this for the first time. Now you understand why fansub watchers everywhere "have a collective orgasm" (as someone on my flist called it) at the mere mention of FMA. BECAUSE IT IS SO UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME. IT'S AWESOMENESS IS TOO AWESOME FOR YOUR HEART TO TAKE.

From:

donna-c-punk.livejournal.com

YES. I'm getting a kind of vicarious thrill out of watching you guys experience this for the first time. Now you understand why fansub watchers everywhere "have a collective orgasm" (as someone on my flist called it) at the mere mention of FMA. BECAUSE IT IS SO UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME. IT'S AWESOMENESS IS TOO AWESOME FOR YOUR HEART TO TAKE.

Don't mean to jump into this, but I know of one dub watcher who didn't react this way to Episode 50 and she feels the show spiraled into utter confusion and unbelievability after it.

From:

rashaka.livejournal.com

Exception that proves the rule!

((I can come up with these all day. :wink: You'll just have to endure my fangirling because trust me the end, if it is in sight, is like 5 years in the distance.))

From:

donna-c-punk.livejournal.com

Oh, I wasn't trying to rain on your fangirling. It was just weird jumping onto my Friends List today and seeing a post about Episode 50 that wasn't glowing. I haven't seen the end of the show since it initially aired. Or maybe a week after it did, because I watched most of the show within the span of three days between 50 and 51, so for me, it's a bunch of, "What did happen during that episode?". :)

You'll just have to endure my fangirling because trust me the end, if it is in sight, is like 5 years in the distance.

Only if you can endure my fangirling over the manga. Cuz at the rate that's going, it's gonna fuckin' KILL ME! lol.

From:

rashaka.livejournal.com

I intend to read the manga some day, if only because it's gotten more and more glowing reviews the further along it goes. It used to be that people who watched the anime first thought it was better than the manga, and vice versa. But it seems at some point the manga gets so good that even those who loved the anime first come to love the manga equally (or in your case more, as I've heard you say/type before).

Or maybe a week after it did, because I watched most of the show within the span of three days between 50 and 51, so for me, it's a bunch of, "What did happen during that episode?".

You know, it's so interesting to me sometimes how much that can make the difference in how/why you love a series. I watched 1-15 at a convention marathon, then watched 16-25 in a few days, then took a month off to recover and let

octopedingenue catch up, then watched 25-43 in a rush of head-splodey-ness. After that it was watching them one week at a time for the last 8 episodes. Consequently I blurred a lot of my memory of stuff in the 30s, but have very clear memory of stuff from 41-onward. Rewatching in dub has actually been the first time rewatching for some of these episodes, and I'm remembering a lot I'd forgotten.

It was just weird jumping onto my Friends List today and seeing a post about Episode 50 that wasn't glowing.

After the end I read a lot of fan reviews, and some of them made the complaint of "too confusing" or "muddled", and a few people outright hated it, but that reaction was so different from mine I was almost puzzled by it. Yeah, the last few episodes were dense and fast, but I felt like I understood 90% of it as it happened, and 95% of it on second viewing. What was "muddled" to someone was "intense and complex" to me, I suppose. ::shrug:: I've long ago given up trying to break down those arguments; for me the last two episodes were pretty close to perfect for what I wanted and what I needed from this show.

From:

donna-c-punk.livejournal.com

I can't even pinpoint where the manga grabbed me the way it has. It might've been when I did the entire readthrough a few months ago, because as much as the first few volumes felt similar to the anime, it wasn't. What struck me at the very beginning was characterization. In several not so minor ways, Ed and Al are different characters than they are in the anime, and I never picked up on that until I started from Volume 1, Page 1. All I know is that I live for this point of the month, when the raw for the newest chapter is released. The last four months have been driving me insane, I wish it wasn't a once a month thing because I'm dyin' to know what Arakawa's planning!

Rewatching in dub has actually been the first time rewatching for some of these episodes, and I'm remembering a lot I'd forgotten.

If I didn't dislike what I've heard of the dub voices, I might've rewatched it on AS. I've watched, um, three and a half eps of the dub and .... yeah. I saw the episode where they met Dante (back in the mining town), one with Greed (when he and Ed got into a knockdown dragout), parts of some episode with Izumi and a portion of another.

From:

rashaka.livejournal.com

I liked the dub so-so for the first half of the series, really liked it for the last 20 episodes, and have absolutely loved it for the last four episodes. By now all of the main actors are well-entrenched in their characters, and it shows in the quality. Plus it feels like the writers went over the scripts with the finest comb they would get their hands on, so the scripts have gotten consistantly better over time. Still, there were a lot of things I liked about the dub early on, and the number of thigns I disliked was comparatively small, when looking at other series.

What's interesting about the script though is that some conversations are actually funnier in the dub (episode 15, 37 [believe it or not!]), whereas other times the Japanese is a lot funnier (Ed impersonating Roy in episode 13, Barry the Chopper in episode 21)

I ended up liking the side character's voices more than the main character. Al I loved and Roy I loved, but I had to get used to Hughes, and both Riza and Greed have been alright though not initially what I expected. Dante's voice is evil but forgettable. The only dub VAs I loved from the outset were Scar, Lust, Tucker, and Izumi. The others I took varying degrees to acclimate myself too, but those four felt perfect right from the start.

Ed has taken the longest for me to like, and actually I only really appreciated him in the last few episodes. His actor does excellent in Ed's London confrontation with Hohenheim; English Ed has always been better angry than soft-spoken or normal-voiced. He almost always sounded too old for a 15-16 year old boy. I think it actually helps dub-wise that Ed seems older in the second season-- his wardrobe changes and the animation design of his face changes slightly, so he looks very different in episode 48 than he did in episode 14. In conjunction with his character development that forces him to grow up, his a-little-too-old voice works better in the latter episodes.

He can't scream though. Which is this weird thing I *loathe* about dubs. Why won't the dubbing studios let male actors scream in a dub? In the Japanese there's an ear-splitting shriek of total agony; in the dub there's this groaning shout of unhappiness/pain. They'll let them shout, but not scream. I've seen this in so many series and it bugs the crap out of me.

From:

donna-c-punk.livejournal.com

I'm sure I've told you this more than once, but I've only come across one dub I thought surpassed the Japanese - Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Too bad the show wasn't exactly my thing, I could've watched that in dub as happily as Japanese.

I can't get far into a dub, unfortunately. People think I don't try to give them a chance but they just kill me sometimes. I have to confess that the worst dub I've ever heard was Hellsing's. I know the characters are actually SUPPOSED to be English - well in the case of Walter, Seras and Integral - but hearing them with these cheesy accents was painful. What made Witch Hunter Robin's horrible was that you knew it was supposed to take place in Japan, the characters were Japanese, but here they are speaking in these overacted English voices. And they did overact in the WHR dub. Badly.

While the dubs I watched back in the 80s are worse than those I've seen today, they're what turned me off of anime for so many years. Whenever I hear them, I can't help but cringe 99% of the time. I always feel like I'm an elitist when I say that, too.