With the wide­spread suc­cess of Full­metal Alchemist, its man­gaka Hiromu Arakawa seems to be seek­ing to broaden the fan­dom by fur­ther increas­ing its appeal to fringe sup­port­ers of the FMA fran­chise — prob­a­bly aim­ing mostly at those fans who nor­mally do not read or watch Shounen but were nev­er­the­less caught up by the intrigue of the Full­metal universe.

Both the two new spin­off series announced will be joint col­lab­o­ra­tion projects: the par­ody 4koma Full­metal Otaku, writ­ten in con­junc­tion with Tat­suhiko Taki­moto (Wel­come to the NHK) and illus­trated by Arakawa her­self; as well as the political/military drama light novel The Flame of Amestris, which will be co-authored by Hiroyuki Morioka (Crest/Banner of the Stars).

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As a hob­by­ist world­forger, Lelangiric’s post and Eternal’s con­tin­u­a­tion on how the mechanics/setting of anime tends to fall short of expec­ta­tions actu­ally ticks me off a lit­tle bit. Not quite because of their view­points, but because mod­ern Japan­ese ani­ma­tion, and much of recent scifi/fantasy in gen­eral, are a rather poor gauge on mea­sur­ing the lit­er­ary val­ues of set­ting cre­ativ­ity. But then, that’s also par­tially our fault as the viewers…

Expo­si­tion start: acti­vate lec­ture mode! (and who remem­bers this old yet remark­able anime?)

By and most in today’s series, we don’t have ‘set­ting’. More pre­cisely, we have a very much watered down ver­sion of ‘set­ting’ which is far bet­ter enti­tled ‘premise’. The dif­fer­ence between these two? A set­ting attempts to round out the details behind all the pri­mary con­cepts and mechan­ics it intro­duce. It goes beyond just those two ini­tial lines of con­cep­tual expla­na­tions and seeks to reflect the cast’s under­stand­ing of their World to the audi­ence, with­out inhi­bi­tions or con­ve­nient cutouts. On the other hand, a premise is a set of con­cepts and mechan­ics sim­ply handed to the audi­ence with min­i­mum scrutiny, and the viewer is expected to accept it in order to make the story work. ‘Premises’ can be upgraded to ‘set­ting’ through sto­ry­telling, but with­out intri­cate detail­ing and/or in-depth analy­sis, it will always remain what is it: merely a premise, a set of ideas and foun­da­tions, not a World.

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