FMA Rules!

I've been steadily increasing the number of anime and manga in my repertoire.
I've gotten hooked on a number of them.
And yet my favorite series remains one of the very first I ever read: Fullmetal Alchemist. The manga, and the Brotherhood anime.
I've read it and seen it several times.
IT is also the only manga that I bought almost entirely new for the whole series. Usually I raid used book stores...

I've been thinking about what makes FMA so awesome. Besides the fact that it's one of the things that originally got me hooked on anime/manga (hey, there's plenty of sentimental value there. For me, that's hard to shake).

Checked around for some other opinions too, to see how ideas compared.

First of all, FMA has great characters. Which is always an extremely important thing.
Ling makes me laugh so much. And Ed and Al are also great.


The development of the world and the system of alchemy is fantastic too.

Also emotion. FMA is a series that can leave you laughing, crying, or gasping with horror within a couple chapters.
Phew. Awesome.


But one thing that, at least to me, makes it stick out from other anime/manga is the timeline.

I'm going to use some other popular series for comparison.
Inuyasha. I enjoyed the first part of this series. I don't know how many volumes there are in the series. It kept my interest up through volume 16. Everything after that was just limping along, dragging out as far as it could go.
This partly has to do with the way manga is serialized, I think. There doesn't seem much encouragement to make the story neat and enclosed, like a book or movie might be. It's more like a TV show, which can go on long after it has ceased to be interesting.
There's plenty of other anime/manga that follow this, but I use Inuyasha because I quite like the beginning. I'm not really into Bleach (though I gave it a really long try), and I haven't gotten into any of the other hyper-long series.

Fullmetal Alchemist does not drag on and on and on. It goes through the story, and it concludes when it is timely for it to conclude. It might be a bit longer than it could be, but whatever.

And another thing I love, everyone in FMA is important. Even the sleazy mine guy in one of the first chapters? Yep. In the end, he's important.
I really really love it when things tie together.

So, go read FMA! It's awesome~