>>280937994 (OP)The fact that so many books still name FMA as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" battle shonen ever only tells you how far anime still is from becoming a serious art. Seinen chads have long recognized that the greatest series of all times are Berserk and Oyasumi Punpun, who were not the most famous or profitable or best sellers of their times, let alone of all times. Mecha chads rank the highly controversial Evangelion over animanga series who were highly popular in courts around Japan. Shonen critics are still blinded by commercial success. FMA and its "adaptation" Brotherhood sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Seinen critics grow up reading a lot of seinen of the past, mecha critics grow up reading a lot of mecha of the past. Battle shonen fags are often totally ignorant of the shonen of the past, they barely know the best sellers. No wonder they will think that FMA did anything worthy of being saved. In a sense, the FMA are emblematic of the status of animanga criticism as a whole: too much attention paid to commercial phenomena (be it Dragon Ball or Sailor Moon) and too little to the merits of real artists.. If a major distributor or studio picks up an artist or a show who is as stereotyped as can be but launches her or him worldwide, your average shonen fag will waste rivers of ink on her or him. This is the sad status of battle shonen criticism: shonen critics are basically publicists working for major magazines, distributors and bookstores.
FMA sold a lot of volumes not because it was the greatest manga or anime of all time but simply because it was easy to sell to the masses: it had no difficult content, it had no technical innovations, it had no creative depth. They wrote a bunch of shallow action scenes and peddled a lot of slave morality.
