User blog comment:Karl Marx and the Anons/Great job with wiki/@comment-1618178-20130724043001

Thank you so much for the compliments! We really had a lot of effort to make this wikia what it is!

I would say the key to make such a wikia is having such a good team of regular contributors and a staff that really cared for FMA enough to really look into it and don't take "random info" seriously. We have been always very interested in making FMA fans get to REALLY know FMA and all things that came with it and that inspired the series, with the most "independent" and "un-fan-biased-info" as possible, with real backgound and sources for every and all topics in the wikia.

At least in my case, I made it a serious deal in doing my homework and really research FMA and Arakawa: read EVERY interview that I could put my hands on, - and I've read every manga she ever published -  and really get to know her and her ways and "ideas"... and all that hard work paid off very well, both in such compliments and in becoming a reference when it comes to "Arakawa" in Brazil. It's a true honor to be considered like that!

As for how I got to know FMA, it was back in 2004, when I first heard about FMA 1 (anime) and watched it. And, though I thought it had a amazing premise to it, I didn't think the series lived up to all it could have been and, in discovering that it wasn't the "original story", it all made sense to me and made me take interest in the original manga and I just fell in love with Hiromu Arakawa, who has become, every since, my all time favorite mangaka. The values she puts in her work echoes my own moral and values and I feel e very deep connection with what she tries to convey, in terms of life meanings, achievements, difficulties, enduring hard times and finding fun and comedy out in life... And her references in mythology and philosophy are also very close to my heart.

And if I would ask her something it would be exactly that: which books she took some inspirations for FMA from and if it was any of those I'm familiar with.

As for the questions, I think there are some mysteries in FMA, but not as many as people usually like to put on. Some people just like to make things up and try to put their hopes and "version of things" as the cannon, but it doesn't always match the info that we've adquired from Arakawa herself.

Such things as a relationship between Al and May and between Mustang and Riza are as close to "cannon" as something undeclared could get (though, in the second case, Arakawa puts an "?" on the actual persue of such relationship on purpose, both for the sake of coherence of the series - since they're both military and bound to the laws of that job - and to have a little fun in having people "second guessing"), others, like the sexual orientation of Jerso has no fact to back it up whatsoever, others ARE cannon and most people don't know about, such as Roy becoming Führer in the future... and others can be infered, such as info about the gate and the eye of god, which most probably, was taken from the tradition and ancient writtings of real world Alchemy itself, that cover such topics frequently.