Fullmetal Edchemist

So, as it’s roughly explained, the state alchemist program is a kind of “recruit potential human sacrifices” mechanism, with a side-order of “brute strength for the army”. But basically, the state alchemist title is mostly about being a researcher–given people like Shou Tucker exist, and given that the only requirement to stay a state alchemist is to submit a yearly report of your research that says “look I’m still being a useful scientist”.

So far, so far this is sensible, yeah? Father and the delightful children from down the lane are running a recruitment program for potential human sacrifices. So sure–butter them up! Give them lots of money, get them buddy-buddy with the government, and give them endless resources for research. It’s be pretty easy to trick a state alchemist in that position to open the portal if Sugar DaddyBradley is nudging them to do it.

And I’m still willing to go with this logic for the whole “draft the state alchemists into war” move. They make it pretty clear that was something of a last-ditch effort. And the blood transmutation circle around Amestris was an absolute necessity for Father’s plan. So the risk of a few state alchemists dying or resigning from your Potential Sacrifice Pool is worth it for the completion of the circle.

Now. To get to my fucking thought. 

Edward fucking Elric. This fucking fight-me 12 year old troglodyte shows up to the exam and performs circle-less transmutation in front of mother fucking Bradley, demonstrating to one of the seven Actual Fucking Homunculi that he’d already opened the portal. Ed was literally prepped as a human sacrifice before he showed up to Central. A fully set human sacrifice showed up at the homunculi’s door, said “hey look what I can do!”, proved he’d opened the mother fucking portal already, and said “hey yeah hire me”. Human sacrifice, free shipping, no assembly required, handcuffs not included!

They could have just tossed Ed into a shoebox and kept him there until the Promised Day. They wouldn’t even need to make up an excuse he attacked the f u  c k i n g president. That’s fucking treason babey. He’s 12, he’s an orphan, he’s from a rural town in buttfuck nowhere, he’s literally the easiest person alive to disappear. They could have arrested him for assassination crimes, kept him in gay baby jail, and just popped him out for the Promised Day

What do they do instead?! “Oh lmao this kid’s great. Let’s give him infinite money, no supervision, no governmental responsibilities, access to all our secret resources, and toss him on a train to who-the-fuck-knows-where-land”

They fucking did that

And like? They then had the audacity to be concerned when Edward “Fight Me” Elric almost got himself killed about 293 times. Just an endless game of “I thought u were watching him” from one homunculus to another when Ed fucking absconds half-way across the globe to go entice some other hostile entity into murdering him to death. That’s the whole series. Every arc is Ed baiting death while the homunculi are in the background like “:/ wish he wouldn’t do that”

This only gets worse when you consider they later learned Al opened the portal too because really?? These two stab-happy globe-trotting public menaces are 40% of your final evil plan for godhood. 40%. Almost half. You couldn’t fucking set aside a cardboard box to keep these idiots in?

Father didn’t baby-gate Ed because humans are like ants to him and he had no concept of how thoroughly Ed and co. could fuck his shit up

Father and the Hot Topic Brigade didn’t lock Ed up because they recognized the unbridled chaotic 12-year-old energy compressed into such a small vessel and they understood no jail cell on earth would reliably hold this thing

Fuhrer Eye Patch saw Edward “Catch these Hands” Elric and thought oh. He’s gonna cause problems.

But. You can’t look me in the eyes and tell me that Brad the Pissed Off didn’t also anticipate Roy “Don’t Mind Me Just a Manwhore Passing Through” Mustang causing problems at some point.

The solution? Give Elric to Mustang. The Human Blowtorch is going to spend so much time chasing and corraling the 6th grader who can turn his arm into a sword at will that it will be impossible for him to cause problems for CopyofHohenheim.exe.

FMA:B Episode 30 vs. Episode 53 || for @bisexualwinry

that fucking show that i hate

In the Japanese version of Fullmetal Alchemist, the antagonists are named after the seven deadly sins, in English. As in, rather than the Japanese word, "Greed" is still Greed in the original.

Because loan words from English are often pretty "cool", as with your Spanish and French example.

But this presents a problem, because, to give them a bit of flair, the antagonists are sometimes given a proper Japanese adjective along with their name, to make a sort of title of sorts.

"Greedy Greed"

The italicized part would be a Japanese adjective, and the bolded part is an English loanword. This is fine in Japanese, but would be totally nonsense in an English translation.

After all, it's common sense to keep the names the same, duh, and obviously the whole point of what you're doing is to translate the Japanese.

Greedy Greed. You cannot call him that.

You can't go 1-to-1. To keep the [concept of coolness], you have to identify what made the original cool, and then recreate it in the new language.

And here, we have a foreign word, and a native word, both meaning the same thing, paired together to give an antagonist a cool sounding title. So how do we do that in English.

Well, the seven deadly sins, being Christian and Catholic and all, have fancy names in Latin. Or well, they just sound fancy in English, because Latin was the language of intellectuals for a long long time.

And in fact, while we also have the word "greed", English has a fancier sounding word that means the same thing, but whose etymology comes from the fancy Latin. That might give a similar cool-loanword feeling, right?

Let's try it.

"Greed the Avaricious"

Source: Fullmetal Alchemist Hagane no Renkinjutsushi 鋼の錬金術師

Actually the author of FMA did a ton of research into historical western alchemy. The whole law of equivalent exchange is a real alchemical concept from hermetica, and one that sir Issac Newton expounded into the law of thermodynamics.

The elrics dad, Van Hoenhiem, is based on a real alchemist named Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hoenhiem. At one point Pride even references the real alchemists name.

It is probably no accident that Ed’s color scheme is black, white, and red. The three main stages of alchemy are names the nigredo, the albedo, and the rubedo. Nigredo, the black stage, is when the matter of the Stone “dies” and putrefies, representing spiritual death. Albedo, the white stage, is when the matter of the Stone is washed, boiled, and turns to vapor, which condenses back into water, and the cycle repeats. This represents spiritual ascension and unification with the divine. Finally, during the rubedo, this “volatile” matter becomes “fixed,” crystallizing into the Philosopher’s Stone. Ed also has gold hair and eyes, which is fairly self-explanatory. Gold is a metaphor for the state of spiritual perfection.

The “Flamel” symbol of a serpent nailed to a cross that’s on the back of Ed’s coat, painted on Al’s pauldron, and tattooed on Izumi’s chest is the “crucified serpent,” which actually does come from Nicolas Flamel. It represents the completion of the Great Work, the union of the fixed and volatile, the mercurial serpent physically nailed down to the cross with its four arms representing the Four Elements (with Quintessence in the center) and the reconciliation of polarities. It also demonstrates the death and mortification of the old body that is necessary for the Philosopher’s Stone to be reborn:

The wings at the top of FMA’s “Flamel” is probably meant to represent Mercury’s Caduceus, and maybe also the resurrection of the snake. The crown references the “King” that is a metaphor for the Philosopher’s Stone. The Flamel symbol also bears resemblance to the Staff of Asclepius, which represents medicine in the real world.

Another example is the “Green Lion” on the flag of Amestris that acts a symbol of the military and is referenced a few other times:

In real alchemy, the “Green Lion” is a symbol of antimony ore and represents the Philosopher’s Stone in its “imperfect” state, before it’s been purified. The Green Lion eats the Sun (representing perfection and Gold), causing a solar eclipse, representing the nigredo (death), the first stage of the Great Work. Amestris was created for almost exactly that reason, and it is far from “purified,” with corruption running deep into its core.

The image of the lion eating the sun appears in the show, when Ed and Ling are in Gluttony’s stomach:

There’s also the transmutation circle itself, which looks so realistic, I actually thought it was real when I first saw it online:

Here’s a real magic circle:

Real magic circles are from ceremonial magic, not alchemy, but the text around the outside of the Human Transmutation Circle does reference alchemy. The “peacock’s feathers,” the spotted panther and the green lion (as previously mentioned), the progression of black, gray, white, and red, all are metaphors for chemical reactions that are supposed to take place in an ideal alchemical procedure.

Some of the more complicated transmutation circles that appear throughout the show are also based on real designs from manuscripts. There’s this design on the wall of the Fifth Laboratory:

Here we see the Sun and Moon (more on that in a minute) and three symbols of Mercury, which represent their unification. This looked very realistic, so I did some searching and this is what I found:

It’s not exactly the same, but it’s clearly an image from an alchemical manuscript, and it’s very similar.

The designs on Ed and Al’s doors are real. The design on Ed’s door is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life as depicted by Robert Fludd in his seventeenth-century book Utriusque Cosmi:

The design on Al’s door comes from an alchemical manuscript called The Marrow of Alchemy by George Ripley (as in, the Ripley Scroll). It depicts the alchemical process:

I haven’t managed to find where the design on Mustang’s gate comes from, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that one was real, too.

One more thing I want to draw attention to is this dialogue between child-Ed and child-Al in ”He Who Would Swallow God.”

Edward: “The Sun is male, representing masculinity.” Alphonse: “The Moon is female, representing femininity.” Edward: “When the Sun and the Moon overlap, then the two genders become one.” Alphonse: “In other words, the union represents a perfect being.”

The Sun and Moon are kind of a big deal in alchemy, and they are associated with maleness and femaleness respectively. Their role in real alchemy is as the metaphorical “parents” of the androgynous Philosopher’s Stone, the perfect being:

The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its nurse. The father of all perfection in the whole world is here.

—The Emerald Tablet

Through the “chemical wedding” of the Sun and Moon (sulfur and mercury), the Philosopher’s Stone is produced. I actually didn’t consider that a solar eclipse might be a symbol of the chemical wedding, until Ed and Al explicitly pointed it out in that episode. That’s not what an eclipse traditionally represents in alchemy (that’s the Green Lion swallowing the sun, the nigredo and dark night of the soul that follows the first chemical wedding), but I still think it makes sense. 

(An image of the Chemical Wedding itself actually appears on the door to the exam room in the 2003 anime.)

Alchemy in FMA mostly doesn’t resemble real alchemy beyond those references. Real alchemy isn’t equivalent exchange — changing something into something else of equal value — but rather, metamorphosing something into a more improved version of itself. Theoretically, this would be turning “lead” into “gold,” the most base form of metal into the most perfect form of metal (as was believed). But real alchemy isn’t about chemicals, and it never really was. Real alchemy is a spiritual process, meant to transmute the soul from its “base” human state into a “perfect” spiritual state. The way to do this is to separate out the “subtle” from the “gross,” i.e. the higher spiritual self from the mundane and earthly human self, and then joining them back together so that the spiritual self purifies the mundane self. This is summarized by the Latin phrase “solve et coagula,” to dissolve and to congeal, or alternately, to separate and to bring together. FMA parallels this with its two parts of alchemy being deconstruction (solve) and reconstruction (coagula). Therefore, the character whose goals and motivations come the closest to those of real alchemists is… believe it or not… Father.

What Father wants, or at least what he says he wants, is knowledge. He wants all the knowledge in the universe. That’s what most occultists want, actually. Most occultists want to either merge with or become alike to God, although they all have different theories and methods of doing that. In FMA, the Philosopher’s Stone is an alchemical catalyst powered by human souls, but in real life, the Philosopher’s Stone is (long story short) a metaphor for the perfect being that Father wants to become. The real Philosopher’s Stone is a being that is a perfect balance of male and female, sun and moon, dark and light, human and divine. It is therefore whole and complete. As I understand it, a person who has become the Philosopher’s Stone can, theoretically, have the power and knowledge of a god whilst still being able to live on earth as a human.

By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you. Its force is above all force, for it vanquishes every subtle thing and penetrates every solid thing. So was the world created.

—The Emerald Tablet

Father’s “perfect” form is a perverse version of this ideal.

(This form gives me some very confusing emotions.)

“As above, so below” is the Hermetic Principle of Correspondence, the closest thing to a real Law of Equivalent Exchange — it is the idea that the Macrocosm (God, the Universe, Truth) reflects the microcosm (humanity), and that by affecting one, you affect the other. The goal of the alchemist is to become the Philosopher’s Stone, the place where Human and Divine meet and become one thing.

I can’t believe it took me until now to see “As above, so below” represented here. Even the episode’s title makes that obvious! But despite that blatant symbolism, there is no healthy convergence of divine and human here. Many occultists believe in something called “ego death,” which I used to think meant losing one’s individuality, which sounded a lot like being trapped in a homunculus with a torrent of other screaming souls. Only now, after watching this show, do I understand what “ego death” really means. This scene is pure ego on Father’s part:

HEAR ME GOD! I DEMAND YOU ANSWER THE CRY OF MY SOUL! COME TO ME! JOIN ME! YES, I WILL NO LONGER BE BOUND TO YOU OR YOUR CONSEQUENCES! I’LL FORCE YOU DOWN TO THIS EARTH AND INTO MY BOWELS! YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO BE ABSORBED!

—”Eye of Heaven, Gateway of Earth.”

This isn’t a genuine attempt to understand God, this is just an inferiority-superiority complex. Father doesn’t care to understand anything about God. All he cares about is himself, and acquiring power for himself. Power is all he’s after, to assuage his inferiority complex. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting power (e.g. Mustang), but godlike power to command the universe is a byproduct of having properly completed the alchemical process and become the Philosopher’s Stone. It is not the end in and of itself. “Ego” isn’t having a sense of self, it’s the inability to understand the spiritual. It’s viewing everything in a mundane lens, having all your motivations be ultimately small and petty, no matter how grand the spectacle. It’s wanting power or glory or whatnot just to make yourself feel better, but not having the self-awareness to actually admit that. The first stage of the alchemical process is nigredo, death — watching your old self die away so that it can be reborn as a better version of itself. Father never understands this, and The Truth says as much.

The Truth is a personification of the Hermetic Principle of Mentalism:

Who am I? One name you might have for me is The World. Or you might call me The Universe. Or perhaps “God.” Or perhaps “The Truth.” I am All, and I am One. So of course, this also means that I am you.

That’s basically it right there. God is All. All is God.

The reason why the Homunculus never grew beyond his days in the flask is because, despite wanting to acquire knowledge, he never actually learned anything. Trying to drag God down to Earth is sheer hubris, not because Earth is too far beneath it, but for the opposite reason — it can come down to Earth whenever it likes. It is everywhere and everything. And the Homunculus never did any of the introspective work needed to find God within himself. He tried to separate out (solve) his perceived “flaws” (the Seven Deadly Sins, i.e. the other homunculi) but did not reintegrate them back into himself (coagula), thus only completing half the alchemical process. He is neither human, nor divine, he only steals Hohenheim’s human shape and Truth’s divine power. He never broadened his thinking or improved himself mentally/spiritually, and thus can’t become alike to God. He never became more than what he is, the dwarf in the flask, and thus his Gate is blank.

Edward, by contrast, loses almost everything in attempting human transmutation (nigredo), and then accepts his own humanity at the gate of Truth (albedo), losing the ability to perform alchemy but becoming a better version of himself (rubedo) — thus, completing the alchemical process. In the end, he’s free, which is all Father wanted to be. He acknowledges that you don’t have to use alchemy or whatnot to become more than you are, because who you are is enough.

He’s a fan favorite character and I enjoy him a lot too, but I think fundamentally he’s a character who has to die. His role in the narrative is to haunt it.

I might be even more of a weirdo because I enjoy his manga characterization over his Brotherhood or ‘03 portrayal, but I love the idea of Hughes being someone the Elric brothers barely know - someone we, the audience, barely see.

Until he dies.

Because suddenly he’s everywhere. He was Roy’s friend and Armstrong’s superior officer and Winry’s acquaintance and Elicia’s father - and he was the soldier both Ed and Al knew, but didn’t actually know, that got killed because of them anyway.

In the manga Winry stays at Hughes’ place, but Ed and Al enter his house for the first time after they found out he died. For them, it’s not about losing a friend (though I am sure they liked him just fine) because that story is already Roy’s - for them it’s about realizing that this plot they’ve involved themselves in kills people that aren’t actually directly involved at all to begin with. It makes sense for their allies and friends and loved-ones to be targeted by the antagonists - but a soldier who mostly joined in because he was at the right (or wrong) place at the right (wrong) time? That’s not supposed to happen. And that’s what makes Hughes’ death so hard on them.

(and poor Elicia - abandoned children without their fathers were always a weakness of Ed’s)

But Roy? Yeah… he suffers. From the moment of Hughes’ dead on, Roy is haunted by it. By him. His best friend follows him everywhere. We see it in the way Roy only involves himself in the plot because Hughes figured something out and Roy is desperate for answers. He hunts down the homunculi to save this country, sure, but mostly so he can burn his best friend’s murderer to the ground. When Riza talks about winning against the Führer and their military dictatorship, she talks about all of them, not a hint of revenge coloring her vision - but Roy? It is telling that it isn’t a greater ideal that makes him torture Envy, but the agony of his best friend’s death.

The thing that almost breaks Roy is Maes.

No.

It’s Maes’ memory haunting the narrative.

And isn’t that beautiful?

The tragedy of it all, the horror, and the realization that Roy Mustang never really recovered from the War, that his friends are the only think keeping him in one piece, the fact that Roy Mustang is a Hero and a Monster and a fallible human capable of love.

Maes Hughes has to die to remind all of us of what Roy Mustang is capable of: love, loyalty, devotion…. and the slaughter and torture of numerous people.