“The Military Festival” begins with the soldiers of the Amestris army debating who would win if Ed and Mustang ever fought. They’re like anime fans arguing over which of their favorite characters are the strongest, and they soon get an answer.
To satisfy the curiosity among the ranks, Ed and Mustang are ordered to put on a public match for the men. The opponents’ mutual friend Lt. Colonel Maes Hughes serves as announcer. Ed spends most of the fight running away from Mustang’s explosive, finger-snapping Flame Alchemy, while Roy — effortlessly winning — drops some battlefield wisdom. (“An angry soldier fights blind,” he warns the choleric Ed.)
Ed briefly gets an upper hand when he creates a decoy and slices Mustang’s “ignition cloth” right hand glove — only for Mustang to reveal his left glove has a Flame Alchemy transmutation circle too. Victory: Mustang. A comically-injured Ed is ultimately carried away in a stretcher by Al, but Mustang is the real loser because he has to clean up the destroyed battlefield. The chapter ends with Hughes back in HQ, sipping tea, and dropping one last bit of wisdom: “A soldier should know when to retreat.”
“Fullmetal vs Flame” adapts the battle faithfully, both the action and the farce of it. Both this chapter and episode use a “Gilligan cut” of Mustang asserting there’s no way Führer Bradley will allow this fight — then an instant transition to him cheerily approving it.
When Hughes introduces Roy and then Ed to the crowd, they both get booed — Mustang because other soldiers resent him for quickly climbing the ranks (and stealing many of their girlfriends along the way), Ed because the soldiers have no respect for a short teenager, even one who is an alchemy prodigy. When Ed is running away from Mustang’s fire bombs, the anime scores the scene not with a dramatic battle tune, but Benny Hill-esque slapstick music.
To fill out the runtime, “Fullmetal vs Flame” throws in two other bonus comedy chapters. The episode’s B-plot, about Sergeant Fuery trying to get a stray dog a home, comes from chapter “Dog of the Military,” the origin story of Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye’s dog Black Hayate (Japanese for “Hurricane”). That results in one of the episode’s most famous (and funniest) scenes, where the cold Mustang swoops up Hayate and exuberantly declares “I love dogs!”
That’s not Mustang’s only silly moment in the episode. He also declares that, once he’s Führer of Amestris, he’ll mandate that all female officers wear “tiny miniskirts!” This gets him an eye-roll from Hawkeye and the undying loyalty of Lieutenant Havoc.
Bones
This is adapted from a non-canonical four-panel chapter (“omake”), “The Ambitious Alchemist.” The joke is that Mustang’s hallowed goal in reforming the country is changing the military dress code to favor the lecherous, and this is the lofty ideal that makes his team so loyal to him.
Viz Media
Yes, “Fullmetal vs Flame” hews on the funnier side, but it’s not just a gag episode. The series uses the episode to bridge story arcs and further Ed and Roy’s characterizations.
