Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E35: “He Who Would Swallow God” (part 2)

The battle continues as it was, with Hohenheim expending his own batteries to neutralize Father's attacks on the other party members while they keep hitting him with blunt force, explosions, flechettes, everything they know how to attack with. Father clearly *doesn't* have any ability to draw on Wog-Sothoth for energy, and only a very limited one to draw on it for knowledge. Even aside from the alchemists having more firepower than they did before, Father is just not displaying any of the tactical cunning and versatility that he did before. At some point, Izumi accidentally hits the machinery that raises the incinerator out of the floor, and Leed (who, like Pride, I totally forgot was still in the room) tells Father that he's owed him this for nearly a year now before tipping it over and dousing Father in the same burning solvent he used to execute Greed 1.0.

The way Leed quipped while doing that, it seems like he remembers. I'm guessing he's been working on recovering memories over the last couple months, with this being one of them.

And, with that, Father retreats. He raises himself up on a rapidly-extending column of reshaped lava stuff, and flies up through the broken ceiling. Passed where the chimaeras and Hawkeye are trying to explain who and what they even are to a squad of panicked soldiers who have just discovered them. Passed where Ninjette is binding Scar's wounds and wondering over the jar of protostone that Dr. Goldtooth dropped earlier (if Brothar's glyph did what I think it does, then this might be the only jar of raw philostone of any grade left in the world!). Up through the hole he and Hohenheim accidentally blasted through the Command Center's roof, and then down onto his feet in the courtyard, in direct sunlight and in full view of the dazed soldiers.

They made him go outside. Not just upstairs to the conference room, actually outside. Like, where there's fresh air and stuff. He must be absolutely fuming over this.

Before the soldiers can even fully register the arrival of the slightly battered Young Nordic Jesus lookalike who just launched himself out of the nearby roof, he releases a crackle of red lightning, and the soldiers drop dead. In his hand, Father now holds a tiny, sand grain-sized chunk of philosophers' stone.

Well, that HAS to be something new he gained from Wog-Sothoth. Based on the number of soldiers he just harvested and the tiny size of the resulting crystal, that isn't protostone. That's the high-grade, extra-concentrated stuff. He no longer needs a macroglyph, or any glyph at all, to harvest souls.

...or....actually, IS that new? Pride somehow absorbed Kimblee, so I'm guessing Father could probably do that too. Granted, Father now seems to be doing it just with a glance, and doing it to sizable numbers of people at once, rather than having to engulf and slowly siphon out the soul.

Hmm. I wonder if maybe it's always just been a question of energy-efficiency? Doing what Pride did to Kimblee is a net loss (or at least, a net neutral) of energy, due to the difficulty of tearing out a soul by hand. Thus, there's no point in doing it most of the time. Pride absorbing Gluttony was an exception due to Gluttony having much more to harvest for the same (or only slightly greater) cost. Using the incinerator makes the process more efficient still, but still not as good as it could be.

That would explain why Father was bothering with protostone research all this time. Absorbing more souls piecemeal was never a problem, it just wasn't metabolically efficient. I'll also conclude that his ability to spontaneous-cast the human-to-philostone transmutation is indeed a new technique he's pulling from the akashic record.

So. His plan seems to be to just dash around Amestris absorbing souls in person until he has enough to stabilize his hold on Wog again.

...is this what the final arc of Worm was inspired by? The silent, impassive, half-naked golden Jesus figure flying around murdering everyone while the good guys chase after him using complicated and not-very-well-explained spells to wear him down? I think this might have inspired the final arc of Worm.

The sacrifices-plus-May-and-Leed prepare to give chase to the best of their ability. But then, Pride remembers that he exists and grabs Edward with his tentacles. He's not trying to kill, or even injure. Just grab. Huh?

And, for some reason, instead of ganging up on the severely weakened and decaying Pride and taking him out in seconds so that they can pursue Father together at full strength, the others ask Edward if he thinks he can handle this alone. Edward says yes. And then the others just rise up after Father on columns of their own.

-_-

What.

Why?

As if to rub in how stupid this is, they even pause during their ascent when they see Sig, the Armstrongs, and the chimaeras+Hawkeye on one of the levels and have a fairly protracted conversation as they drop the blinded Mustang off with the others and exchange sappy greetings and reunions.

They had time for this, but not to help Edward against Pride? Really?

Hawkeye is conscious again. She reacts in shock and horror when told that Mustang is blind, but quickly switches back to her customary aggravation when he tries to probe her about the status of her own injuries and deflect entirely from his.

Yeah yeah, that's very sweet and all, but why are you all just standing around watching it instead of helping Edward?

I feel like we're slipping into generic shonen logic here. Which is something FMA has certainly done before, but not usually this egregiously.

Meanwhile, Leed finds Scar, Ninjette, and Wrath's corpse. Ninjette is happy to see Ling, of course, but Greed is completely in control right now, and he brushes her off. He's much more interested in Wrath, who he is surprised to see dead. He looks a little petulant, as if he'd been hoping to land the killing blow. His commentary, likewise.

Lol. Lot of that feeling going around in this room.

Back down in the ruined Sin Inc inner sanctum, Pride curses Greed for his betrayal, and for throwing away his honor as a haemunculus like this. Can he hear Leed from all the way down here? I guess he can. Edward, who Pride is still grappling with his tentacles, tells Pride that he doesn't think a lapdog like him is really in a position to lecture anyone about dignity.

Pride batters Edward around a little at this, but Edward keeps pushing that verbal button. Pride tells him that it's only natural for him to serve his father and family, his greater self. Edward asks him why, if its natural for the different parts of the whole to protect each other as a share of the self, did Father just fly away and leave the clearly dying Pride to fend for himself surrounded by enemies.

This is NOT the same situation Pride defended earlier, when he ate Gluttony. There's no conservation of "self" here. Father does not see his children as parts of himself, at least primarily. He created them to remove parts of himself that he didn't like, and he only accepts them back in when he has to for pragmatic reasons. He doesn't value them. He can't value them. Because the part of himself that allowed him to value them is standing right here wrestling with Edward.

Of course, Edward pointing that out hits one of Pride's own blind spots. Admitting to a flaw in his greater self's designs is very, very difficult and painful for a being forged from self-love. This, in addition to him simply being the strongest, is probably why Father had him act as second in command; of all the Sins, Pride is the one least capable of disobedience. So, when confronted with this, he just freaks out at Edward and tells him to stop projecting human psychology onto superior beings like haemunculi.

Funny. Pride was totally willing to engage with Edward on that topic up until Edward drew a conclusion Pride didn't want to hear.

In his rage, Pride removes the hand he's been using to cover part of his face, and reveals just how far the deterioration has gotten.

Not sure if it's supposed to look as silly as it does, though. Feels like a visual that just doesn't adapt well from manga to anime. Ah well.​

Pride then exclaims that with his "container" falling away in the wake of whatever Wogdat took from him, he'll need to attach himself to a new one. Okay, looks like we're getting confirmation on Pride having been an experiment in how to keep a woggish life form alive outside of a specific vessel! Then Pride says something that really needed some more setup in order to land.

Apparently, he can use a human body to replace his pseudo-human shell. Or maybe the child body he's been walking around in actually used to be a living human child that Father hollowed out for him, I guess? Or, no, seemingly not that. Pride says that in order for his new body to not reject him, it'll need to be as similar as possible to Hohenheim's. Um...okay? Why wasn't that a problem for Wrath or Leed, then? I'm confused. Anyway, the long and short of it is that he's planning to take over Edward's body and leave his old shell to crumble. Because that's a thing he can do apparently.

Okayyyyy?

He manages to subdue Edward and draw him in, arms and legs bound at his sides. Why did everyone else leave Edward to fight Pride alone, again? Before Pride can do whatever his latest asspull power allows him to do though, he seizes up. From inside of his philosophers' stone battery, Kimblee paralyzes him.

Um. SPEAKING OF ASSPULLS.

I'm sorry. I don't buy this.

Pride asks him how the hell he was able to keep his individuality and ability to act while pressed up among these thousands of other wailing souls. That's a very good question. Why was Kimblee able to do this when literally none of the other millions of souls to be assimilated by a haemunculus could? Kimblee replies that the screams of anguish are just a lullaby to him.

So, being a psychopath gives you the power to keep your sanity inside a philosopher's stone. Brilliant. I love it. Not.

And...okay, even if Kimblee was somehow able to act inside of Pride's battery without needing extensive treatment and attention like what Hohenheim did for his souls, how the hell is ONE INDIVIDUAL SOUL supposed to have paralyzed Pride?

How has this never happened before?

Yeah. This is just stupid.

When asked why he's sabotaging him, Kimblee explains that he thought it was dumb that Pride would want to move into a human body when he supposedly thinks his kind are so much better than humans. Because of this, he now favors Edward over Pride. Apparently, Kimblee missed the minor detail of practically half the Sins being some form of parasites on human bodies, and *all* of them being made up of human souls on the inside anyway. No no, according to him what Pride is doing now crosses a line that all that other stuff didn't.

Well, as stupid as Kimblee's resurgence here is as a concept, at least he's still acting in-character. Truly, the greatest philosopher of his time.

So, while Pride is being (somehow) paralyzed by the (somehow) active ghost of Kimblee, Edward breaks free of his tentacles, charges him, and hits him with some kind of touch-transmutation.

Looks a lot like Scar's disintegrate, which Edward has used a couple of times in the past. That'll probably finish Pride off at this...

Or...no. No, this is apparently ANOTHER thing that desperately needed to be established beforehand and wasn't.

Edward is projecting his own soul into Pride's battery and attacking him from within it.

...

WHEN THE HELL DID EDWARD LEARN TO DO THAT?

One thing FMA has historically been very good about is showing the Elric brothers' powers growing through experience. Edward learns new tricks by puzzling out the theory behind them onscreen, or copying them from opponents who we see him fight. Where the hell is THIS coming from?

The closest thing I can think of to foreshadowing for this was when Edward used his own soul-energy to partially heal himself when he got impaled by that piece of railing in the Baschool mine. That's the closest precedent, but it isn't nearly close enough to what he's doing here.

People have been telling me that the last few issues of the FMA manga were badly rushed and compressed. My own research on the subject supports this. I don't think the consequences of this were ever anywhere NEAR as blatant as they are in this Edward vs. Pride duel.

...

So, while ghost-Kimblee just sort of fades back into the multitude, ghost-Edward tears through the shoggoth material and...finds a little ghost-Selim inside of it. Which he grabs and pulls on.

Zoom back out to physical-Edward pressing his automail arm into physical-Pride's face. Pride crumbles. Shadow tentacles vaporizing, and humanoid shell turning to ash just like the other Sins did when killed.

Edward opens his fist, and finds that he's holding something inside of it.

Oooookay.

...

It's a good thing that this show inspired me to do a little but of reading on alchemy and occultism on my own. If I hadn't done that, I would have absolutely no goddamned idea what any of this is supposed to mean.

What Edward is holding there is called a homuncule. Some of the Greek philosophers thought that sperm cells contained intact, microscopic fetuses inside of themselves, which would grow into normal-sized babies if allowed to gestate in a uterus.

Some variations of the homunculus recipe found in the Book of the Cow and later alchemical writings posit that the creation process would require a sample of the creator's semen, rather than just his blood. The idea being that you can isolate a naturally occurring homuncule and stimulate its growth into a magical miniature clone. The alleged powers and divine knowledge of a homunculus were, according to these versions, supposed to come from the purity of the soul derived straight from God without it being sullied by human pregnancy. The logic behind this is connected to some weird Gnostic beliefs, as well as some (really misogynistic) inferences from the biblical Adam and Eve myth about women causing men to be cut off from the divine.

So. I guess the reason Pride is so different from his siblings is because he's inspired by a slightly different version of the source mythology. I guess its possible that the other Sins also each had a homuncule inside of the philostone battery inside of the organic construct, but I don't think so. I'm thinking back to Envy, who had something *similar* to this going on, and recalling that she had a philostone core inside of what could have been her (very inhuman) homuncule true form. I guess that teeny, tiny little crystal could have had an even tinier baby inside of it, but again, I don't think so.

I do have a fairly strong theory as to why Pride has this composition, and what Edward actually did right now when he removed the homuncule from the surrounding soul-construct. But it's going to have to wait for my final review of the series; there's a bit more contextualizing information in the next couple of episodes.

So, I'm able to more-or-less make sense of this, but the story did NOT make it easy, and its failure to explain how Edward knew how to do this - or even how he learned that this was even something that could be attempted - is extremely hard to forgive. Combine that with all the musclehead logic shit that preceded it, with the one-on-one-duel-for-no-good-reasons and Kimblee using his fan favorite powers to break the rules of the setting to have one last evil-but-honorable-minor-shonen-villain moment, and...well, it's a bad scene.

I'll temper all that by saying that Edward doing what he did to Pride here is very important to the themes of the story. This had to happen. But it should have had a lot more groundwork done beforehand, and the narrative surrounding it didn't need to be as dumb and contrived. Edward didn't *need* to be dueling Pride on his own for this to happen (and even if he did, there were much better ways to justify it. Including bad ways. Even a bad reason would have been better than no reason). The fight choreography didn't *need* for Pride to be getting the upper hand until Kimblee used his psychopath ubermensch powers to paralyze him from inside. So, this is a good story beat, it just had terrible execution.

...

After staring in disbelief at Pride's true form, Edward takes off his cape, sets it down on the floor, and wraps the homuncule in it. Telling it he'll be back for it once the battle is finished. He leaves, wondering aloud how he's going to explain this to Queen. Behind him, the microfetus wriggles, sucks its thumb, and weakly whispers a word.

End episode.

Extreme highs and extreme lows.

Most of what I want to say about this episode would be better left for my final review. In terms of its flaws, though, I'll say this: Fullmetal Alchemist generally does a good job of managing to be both a cerebral philosophical journey AND a dumb punchy-man shounen series at the same time. Sometimes it leans more heavily in one direction, sometimes in the other. Occasionally, the two things that it's trying to be come into conflict, to the story's detriment.

This final battle is leaning HARD into the dumb punchy-man aspect. Seriously, the second half of this episode could have almost been a DBZ or JJBA fight sequence, aside from a few details and dialogue bits. At the same time, the story is also trying to hold onto the smart threads as it brings them to their conclusion, and it just...clashes. It clashes really badly.