The Case for 9.24: Why Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Is Quietly Underrated, Even at the Top of MyAnimeList

Brotherhood's decade at the top of MAL has paradoxically made it underrated — treated as a default rather than the structurally rigorous shonen it actually is.

Brotherhood is the most underdiscussed #1 anime in the medium. Sitting at the top of MyAnimeList since 2009 has made it a recommendation reflex rather than a critical object — the show people hand newcomers and then stop thinking about. That reflex hides what the Promised Day arc actually accomplishes, and it's why Anime Codex lands at 9.24.

Is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Good Enough to Justify Its Reputation, or Just Comfortable?

The discourse around Brotherhood has calcified into two unhelpful positions. The first treats its MAL standing as self-evident proof of quality — Brotherhood is good because Brotherhood is #1, a circular logic that dodges the actual work of evaluation. The second, increasingly loud on Reddit and in YouTube video essays, frames the 2003 adaptation as the "thinking person's FMA," casting Brotherhood as the crowd-pleaser that traded thematic ambiguity for shonen tidiness. Both readings flatten the show.

Anime Codex departs from the first by refusing to take the ranking as argument. We depart from the second by noting that the 2003-versus-Brotherhood debate almost always collapses into a preference for tone — Bones-via-Mizushima's existential pessimism versus Bones-via-Irie's structural completeness — and rarely engages with what Brotherhood does at the level of plot architecture, which is where it dominates. The 9.24 is not a victory lap. It's a score with specific load-bearing elements, and most of the weight sits on story (9.5) and cultural impact (9.5), not on the criteria fans tend to argue about.

The Promised Day Is Doing Almost All the Heavy Lifting

The story criterion scores a 9.5, and the Promised Day arc — roughly episodes 54 through 62 — is the single strongest sequence of plotting in modern shonen television. What makes it remarkable is not the scale, though the scale is considerable; it's the convergence. Mustang's coup against Central Command, Olivier Armstrong's infiltration, Hohenheim's countermove against Father's nationwide transmutation circle, Scar's deployment of the reverse circle, May Chang's alkahestry, and the Elrics' direct confrontation with Father all braid together across the same forty-eight-hour diegetic window. Each thread was planted episodes — sometimes dozens of episodes — earlier. Hiromu Arakawa's manga laid the groundwork; Shou Aikawa's series composition holds the convergence together without fumbling a single payoff.

This is what adapting a finished manga buys you, and it's why the Ishvalan War flashbacks in episodes 30 and 31 hit so hard. The show knows, when it shows you Mustang and Hughes as young soldiers, exactly how it intends to cash in that knowledge during the coup. Compare this to almost any other long-form shonen — even Hunter x Hunter, with its denser thematic ambition, doesn't achieve this kind of multi-front choreography because Togashi was still writing. Brotherhood's plotting is the rare case where "faithful adaptation" describes a structural advantage rather than a creative limitation.

The opening ten episodes remain the show's real story weakness. Nina Tucker's arc, devastating in the 2003 version's slower handling, gets compressed into episode 4 with the assumption that the audience already knows the beats. It works, but barely, and it works on borrowed weight.

Scar's Arc Is the Best Redemption Track in Shonen

Character scores 9.4, and the show earns most of that through one figure: Scar. His evolution from Ishvalan revenge-killer of State Alchemists to reluctant northern ally during the Briggs and Kanama arcs is the most morally serious redemption arc shonen has produced. The show refuses to absolve him. He still killed Winry's parents. Winry, when she finally confronts him, does not forgive him — she withholds revenge, which is not the same thing, and Brotherhood is careful enough to know the difference. His final-arc partnership with Mustang, the man whose Ishvalan war crimes created him, lands because neither man pretends the debt has been settled.

Edward's arc — arrogant prodigy to someone who renounces alchemy entirely to retrieve Alphonse — is the more obvious throughline, and the renunciation in episode 63 inverts Equivalent Exchange in a way the show has been building toward since episode 1. Greed-in-Ling, particularly his death scene with Ling weeping inside their shared body, is the kind of character beat most shonen wouldn't risk. The weak spots are real: Olivier Armstrong arrives at Briggs as a fully-formed ice queen and exits the series essentially unchanged, and Father, for all his conceptual weight as the desire to escape humanity, never quite reaches the personal menace of a villain like Johan Liebert or even his own son Pride.

Themes Land Because the Show Lets Them Cost Something

Themes score 9.0 — the lowest of the high-scoring criteria, but still strong, and the reason is that Brotherhood is willing to put weight behind its ideas. Equivalent Exchange is not just a magic system; it's the show's moral architecture, and the show interrogates it. Ed's final transmutation, where he offers his own Gate of Truth — the very thing that made him an alchemist — to retrieve Al, doesn't just resolve the plot. It refutes the brothers' entire opening premise. What they tried to do to their mother was wrong not because alchemy failed but because the exchange they offered was insufficient, and only at the end does Ed grasp what an equivalent price actually looks like.

The Ishvalan genocide treatment, Hughes' murder in episode 10, and Mustang's torture of Envy in episode 54 — where Hawkeye has to physically stop him from crossing into atrocity — give the show real moral seriousness. The 9.0 rather than higher reflects that the late series occasionally tips into didactic monologue. The "one is all, all is one" lessons, the "stand up and walk" refrains — these work better as visual beats than as the speeches they sometimes become.

The Steelman: Animation as the Ceiling

The strongest case against the 9.24 is animation, where Brotherhood scores 8.7 — its lowest mark, and fairly so. Bones maintains remarkable consistency across 64 episodes, and the standout sequences are real: Mustang versus Lust in episode 19 is among the best-directed fight scenes of the decade, and the Greed-Ling fights have genuine kinetic identity. But Yasuhiro Irie's direction is functional rather than distinctive. Place any random mid-series episode next to contemporary work from Kyoto Animation, or even Bones' own later Mob Psycho 100, and Brotherhood reads as competent, not visionary. There are no signature animator showcases here, no equivalent of Yutaka Nakamura cuts that you remember as cuts.

This is where critics arguing for 8.5-range scores have their best ground. The rubric weights animation meaningfully but not overwhelmingly for shonen, where story and character carry more, and Brotherhood's structural rigor and Scar-tier character work more than compensate. A show that pulls 9.5s in story and cultural impact (9.5 — a decade-plus atop MAL, the template for every "complete adaptation" remake conversation since) does not need to also be a sakuga vehicle.

Brotherhood at 9.24 is not the consensus pick disguised as a critical pick. It is a show whose plotting at the macro level — the Promised Day convergence, the Ishvalan flashbacks redeeming earlier setup, the Scar arc holding a moral line most shonen would compromise — earns the score on grounds the fan discourse has stopped articulating. The MAL ranking is right, accidentally. The argument for why is what's been missing.