fullmetal alchemist brotherhood vs. the original manga

xing-side:

mirrortemple:

pros: improves a lot of weak points in the manga (removes jokes in bad taste and fixes scenes that could’ve been handled better) and is overall a better experience

cons:

roystache

So funny story about this

FMAB began airing at the same time as the manga was playing out its final act, and despite the large initial time gap, the anime still caught up and came dangerously close to overtaking the manga. How close? The final chapter of the manga was released a mere two weeks before the finale episode of FMAB aired. Of course, FMAB was made for the express purpose of portraying the manga start to finish, so there was no danger of it diverging its plot course, but this meant that for the sake of making sure the manga was finished before the anime AND that the anime kept airing faithful content without breaks in its schedule, two things happened:

1) Hiromu Arakawa started churning out chapters that were about twice as long as normal (the final chapter, chapter 108, was over 100 pages long) 

2) the animators had to work from Arakawa’s drafts of the last few chapters to produce the last few episodes.

They worked from her drafts. Which not only can partly explain some of the differences between the two finales, but also implies that Moustache Roy might have originally been in those drafts.

Please imagine Hiromu Arakawa hemming and hawing over giving Roy a moustache… and then ultimately deciding last minute NO SCREW THAT ITS UGLY after the animators had already put it into the anime version of the epilogue. 

Or alternatively, imagine it having supposed to be a joke of hers all along, that was unfortunately taken seriously by the animators. whoops.