bugzattack replied to your post âTbh, my biggest issue with Brotherhood- aside from just âsuch-and-such...â
In hindsight, I think one of the strengths of the 2003 anime was that they were more willing to workshop/mess with the joke's structure to make it flow better from page to animation and lead to a punchline. Whereas FMAB tried to copy/paste humor from page to screen with little thought to the experience of reading v. watching. The results fall flat and/or were distracting and cut for time.
Yup, also true. Static, on the page, read-at-your-own-pace comics are a very different medium from real time media like anime, which is partly how Arakawa could fit so many jokes in- a lot of them were offhand little comments in the background from various characters, something that you canât do in an anime unless you actually take the time to have them say those lines out loud, which doesnât really have the same effect tbh.
I think what Brotherhood should have done is kept some jokes from the manga, while also (like you described) adding in new or modified jokes that work better with an animated format. In fact I would have absolutely loved hearing new jokes! But I canât actually think of any jokes from Brotherhood that werenât in the manga, so thatâs too bad...