Froborr, an online friend of mine with whom I liveblog MLP episodes every Saturday, wrote an epic analysis of FMA:B, analyzing it in the context of historical alchemic myths. He posted it piece by piece in the comments at Mark Watches while he was watching FMA:B, but once it was done, Froborr collated the whole thing on his own blog (which, as you may notice, is usually for pony analysis).

Just... read it. It's fascinating.

You may notice, in the comment section of Froborr's blog post, he and I discuss why FMA:B's one major misstep was shoving the Lior arc to episode 3 rather than opening with it... I mean, I realize they wanted to set themselves apart from the 2003 series, but yeesh, they did it in the worst possible way.