The point where the plot starts to twist is also the point where the show suddenly decides to reveal its incredibly ridiculous geography - sort of Wheel of Time meets Europa meets a toddler with a crayon. The show takes place in a pentagonal Germany analogue divided into pretty sectors, bordered by a huge eastern desert that keeps the China analogue with its ninjas and special eastern alchemists at bay. The Russia analogue is to the northeast, and the two other countries bordering are unnamed but I would guess to be British and French. So you've got this very strange WWII vibe going on, with a holocaust having already occurred, and then a militaristic nation led by a Fuhrer-King who's charismatic and pleasant and infinitely terrifying. The implications are a bit vague to me.
In this series you have all seven homunculi, and while none of them have that lovely human backstory they all have a lot of character - the ones that aren't completely mindless psychopaths, that is. The rest all have brilliant personalities, and the whole lot of them are engaged in a conspiracy of pants-wetting grandeur, the kind where the extermination of an entire race is listed as Step 6, Subcolumn C and everything just sort of gets worse from there.
The basic themes of FMA are still there, the execution wholly different. The show is still about human struggle, about seeking truth and the problems of finding it, the horrors of war and how totally sweet-ass personifications of seven deadly sins can be. Also, if you have a taste for magic with weird rules and interesting derivations - which I do - this is pretty much the show for you.
I'm hoping it all comes together - FMA's first ending was messy, but powerful, and if Brotherhoods ends up being the opposite I'll be exceptionally disappointed.
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