Sins of the Father (FMAB:S2E14 analysis)

Content warning for depressing philosophical horror again.

I really wish that they'd given The Doom That Came To Xerxes an entire episode to itself. Or even a two-parter, honestly. The story's condensing created so many ambiguities that I'm not sure were intentional. Ambiguities give me more to talk about, but I really would like to know what the authorial intent behind some of them was in this case. Did this get more time and detail in the manga? I really need to find time to read the damned manga already.

There are so many ways to interpret what I just saw. Not all of which are mutually exclusive. I'll tackle them in no particular order.


Father As Antihero

To start with one of the threads I first pulled at during the review: the English VA plays Mike/Father as a fairly static character, and comes across as a fast-talking diabolical tempter all the way through. Maybe that's how Arakawa intended it, but it's most definitely not how the Japanese voice sells it. At the start of the Xerxian flashback, he sounds like he's talking in his sleep, peering out in glimpses from some sort of trance and just barely coming to terms with the environment around him. The next time he speaks, during the windowsill scene, he sounds much more coherent and even, much more humanlike, like he's started to adapt to his new state and form a real identity. It's only when he's consulted by the king about immortality that he starts sounding conniving and duplicitous. I find this progression much more compelling. Not only because it's less static, but also because it makes sense for a being torn from the font of all knowledge to start out confused and meandering before developing enough new memories to pave over the holes, and - most importantly - because it just makes him that much more of a nuanced and complicated villain.

This is why I wish we got to see more of how he changed over time, and how his relationship with Hohenheim evolved in the time between their first meeting and the destruction of Xerxes. How much did he change over those ten to fifteen or so years? How much did he respect Hohenheim by the end, if he ever did at all? WAS he actually expecting Hohenheim to be appreciative of what he did at the end, or was his cheeriness really just really dedicated mockery? I feel like the glimpses we got don't provide enough context for me to answer these questions with any degree of certainty.

Here's the main thing that makes me feel that Mike wasn't just pure evil all along: why did he help Hohenheim? For vicarious empowerment, obviously, but was it really just that? Helping Hohenheim advance himself in society didn't further any other scheme or plot. The long con he played on the alchemist and King Peter didn't require Hohenheim to rise above his beginning station, and we saw no sign of him having had an earlier Hohenheim-centric plot that he discarded in favor of this one. True, he needed Hohenheim to be with him on that one spot in the ritual room when the spell was cast, but how easy would it have been for him to invent a bullshit reason for his blood donor to be called to the room?

So, I think he really was trying to help him at the beginning. And he may or may not have still been trying to help him at the end, even when his primary motives were selfish ones.

That's something I wish the story had been clearer about. What it did do very clearly, though, is show how "Father" came to be. The little Mike Wazowski vortex was just the blank slate he was painted over. In his original state - while he lacked empathy and held mortals in some level of contempt as per his Wogish nature - he didn't really want anything. He just seemed kind of bored. It was only after he asked Hohenheim if he wanted to rise above his lowly station that he expressed any desire to do so himself. And that followed with every step of his development until the end. In the windowsill conversation, Hohenheim not only reinforced what was probably his preconception about individual human lives not mattering, but also gave him the idea that improving one's status means having children. That idea may have struck Mike as almost heretical at first (hence his overly acerbic reaction to the thought), but I think that might have been when he first realized he was envious of humans, despite them being puny mortals and him being a literal demigod. So, he later had children, and he made them call him "Father." Then, of course, there was his reaction to King Peter's discontent with even the immense wealth and power he already had, which...man, this merits its own entire mini-essay.

The king of Xerxes is a really important character, despite him being such a pitiful chump. I'd almost say that he was another of Father's "parents," along with Hohenheim, the alchemist, and Wog-Sothoth. When Mike was introduced to King Peter, he saw the alchemist - the man who held absolute power over him - threaten to murder him just for not speaking politely enough to the king. Mike looked at the world outside his flask and wished he could be part of it, and shortly afterward he was introduced to the master of that world, and had his own inferior status ground in as hard as it possibly could be. This, to him, was the ultimate image of freedom and empowerment. So, naturally, he tried to become more like him. He came to want the things that King Peter wanted. Three hundred years later, immortality and unstoppable magical power still aren't enough for Father, because contentment with any amount of success and power just isn't part of the ideal he was taught. And, of course, the very first thing he did after wiping out Xerxes was putting on the king's royal robes.

Centuries later, he's still cosplaying the King of Xerxes. And it's not just the costume either.

For a long time now, I've wondered why Father was bothering to build a country to fill his macroglyph's area. Does the spell really care that all the lives sacrificed are citizens of the same ephemeral mortal polity? Wouldn't it have been easier to just make sure that towns or cities get built in the right spots by whichever countries already control them, then have Sloth dig underneath them and blow them up at the appropriate times himself? I was starting to think that this is just one of those fridge logic things that the author didn't think of and you need to pointedly ignore, but now I believe otherwise. Being free and having the things he wanted means sitting on a throne in the center of a thriving kingdom. And, free, powerful, non-victim people sacrifice the kingdoms that they rule for personal benefit. It has nothing to do with the ritual's requirements, and everything to do with Father having been shaped by his traumatic origins.

Here's the crowning irony, though. I've entertained the idea of Father occasionally leaving his bunker and tooling around Amestris in human guise, but that's never been actively hinted at. Whenever we've seen him in modern times, he's been in his dingy, enclosed throne room, leaving only very briefly into the hall just outside to recover Gluttony that one time. Perhaps he's been overusing his vast power supply, explaining why he's so pale and faded looking compared to Hohenheim when they looked identical to start with. Is he unable to survive for long without his machines and contraptions anymore? Has he really just locked himself in a small room while people live their lives going where they please all around him? Maybe it's not even a matter of him having overused his batteries to the point of frailty. Maybe it's that, even if he hated it, spending his entire formative years locked in that flask turned it into a comfort zone for him. It became his nature, even if he rages and struggles against it. Part of him is still stuck in that bottle, and maybe it always will be.

There's so many more details to this as well. In Xerxes, slaves were not given names, and they were used for biological experiments. Exactly the system Father recreated to produce Wrath and to transform Slicer and Chopper. Xerxes' royal palace and outer city boundaries were both surrounded by impressively tall, pale white stone walls. Central and its command center have the same aesthetic, even though it makes less sense in modern times than it did in pre-gunpowder ones (though to be fair, technology might not have changed much yet by the time of those fortifications being built. Still, the aesthetic and style he chose for them are pretty close). Etc.

He also seems to be repeating some of King Peter's own mistakes, including the very ones that Father exploited against him himself. That vulnerability to people telling him what he wants to hear. That willful blindness to the possibility of his sycophants secretly plotting against him. Wrath, Mustang, and Armstrong are taking Father for exactly the same ride he took King Peter on.

Back on the topic of ambiguity though, all of the above is just one possible interpretation of Father, choosing to read him as a human-ish antagonist with relatable motives and flaws. I can see plenty of others.


Father As The Ghost of Xerxes

Many times throughout this Let's Watch, I've changed my mind about what subgenre Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood best fits into. At first, I thought it was a dark fantasy reskin of your traditional dystopian novel. It still is partly that, but after it started getting more existential it stopped being primarily that. When what I thought were self-replicating haemunculi were revealed to be the main antagonist at the halfway point, I thought this was a dark fantasy spin on the robot uprising subgenre. That seemed to fit pretty well, especially given some of the Sins defying their kin and (in Greed 1.0's case) actually siding with humanity against them. That's been a staple of the genre since at least Terminator. But as it got more into the nature of philosopher's stone and how it's made rather than the artificial intelligence aspect, it stopped really being that either.

This episode was where it hit me. Fullmetal Alchemist is a haunted house story, only blown up to an entire country.

The details are all really well-trodded genre conventions when you start looking for them. A mysterious suicide. The new residents acting strangely, like bits of the old suicide victim's personality are infecting them. The episode where the villains are properly introduced and Father is revealed is called "Those Who Lurk Underground." Who are the people in the ground, in most contexts? When Ling first set foot in Central, we saw him standing on a rooftop with a troubled expression murmuring about how there's something weird about this country. Isn't that basically what the psychically sensitive character always says when they first enter the haunted house?

Often, the stakes of a ghost movie are the ghost possessing someone and forcing them to repeat its own death. A lingering suicide, waiting for someone to perform it again.

The original haemunculus mythology is mostly a separate thing from the philosopher's stone myths. There was some intersection (naturally, it was Paracelsus, aka Hohenheim, who mentioned that one could potentially use philosopher's stone as a less messy substitute for the usual "materials" in creating a homunculus), but by and large these were two different alchemist legends. FMA actually kept things that way, ultimately. It's just that Arakawa introduced the idea that soylent philostone is people, which means that the baddies really stopped being alchemical constructs and started being the living dead long before the events of the pilot.

Through this lens, Father's imitation of all of Xerxian society's worst traits and personal reenactment of its last king's career is less a story of an abused child emulating its abusers, and more about the lingering of old evils never confronted. Father took all of Xerxes at its worst into himself, and he became Xerxes at its worst. A million angry ghosts frozen in their last moment of dying anguish, lashing out at the living and adding them to their number. All screaming and roaring and gnashing their teeth from behind the face of one of Xerxian society's most abused and exploited slaves; an eternal reminder of their collective guilt.

That's not to say that every agonized face gibbering and crying in Father and Hohenheim's gelatinous veins is guilty, of course. But ghost stories are rarely fair, and FMA has been making it abundantly clear that one shouldn't look for natural justice or expect anything like fairness or consideration from the Powers That Be. This also leads back into the story's political dimensions. We've all seen a million and one arguments about, for instance, how complicit the average working Joe in Berlin was in Nazi atrocities. The silent majority who did nothing to change things. The segment of the population that objected, but wasn't willing to put their own lives on the line. Etc. The fall of Xerxes could only happen because it had an all powerful tyrannical king, a population determined to think the best of him, and an army willing to massacre its own civilians on command without looking into why. Most of the individuals were innocent of active wrongdoing, but in aggregate they made up a system that performed unspeakable evil, and now they've been literally melted down and fused together into a walking, talking atrocity-maximizer.

Ghost stories (and horror stories in general) usually play on society's guilty conscience. Look outside your window, and ask yourself if the society you live in is really much better than Xerxes. Should you be doing more about it? I know I sure as hell should. Just by living as you are, are you turning one of the wheels of atrocity? I'm probably turning six or seven just by sitting on my ass under my air conditioner and using this computer to type on, gritting my teeth and bearing it as my government uses the taxes I pay on these reviews to bomb elementary schools and displace entire cultures. Maybe I belong in the same kind of hell as the historical Joe Berlin, or the fictional Joe Xerxes.

FMA's politics have started looking questionable to me in the wake of "Daydream," but "The Dwarf in the Flask" seems much more in line with how I'd been reading it up until then. Authoritarianism is a cannibalistic monster that will eat everything that submits to it, no matter how much or how little it promises them beforehand. It's literally an evil ghost, and countries that turn fascist are analogous to a horror movie character who's been possessed.


Father As Eldrich Abomination. It's Always Lovecraft With You, Leila, Isn't It? Seriously, Will You Stop Linking Everything To Cosmic Horror?

No I won't, fuck you.

Getting away from the philosopher's stone part of Father's composition and going back to his (strongly implied, at the very least) first origins brings us back to the topic of dystheism. The ease of this interpretation is why I'm not that disapproving of Mike's English VA. I've been talking a lot about how much Father picked up from the people and events outside of his old flask, and there's still the complementary question of how much he was already like that before.

That Wogdat-ish grin of his during the transmutation scene. The way he sat in front of the palace entrance and talked at the disbelieving Hohenheim in such a close visual mirror of Edward meeting his own Truth phantom. "Everything is just raw ingredients for everything else" is the law of nature, and the mind behind those laws is where the haemunculus was called from, using an alchemical process that put that very principle to work in its use of a slave's blood. Father was shaped by Xerxes. Perhaps he also copied the more positive, likably human, traits from his surroundings; his desire for family and company, twisted though the reasoning behind it was. His seemingly genuine desire to improve Hohenheim's lot in life, whether or not he still cared about that by the time he was plotting Xerxes' fall. But the callousness, the nihilism, that stuff might well have been the starting point. That was likely the blank slate that everything else was painted on however well or poorly it fit, the state of nature before it was built into an ordered system.

Given the very blatant parallels with Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and the only slightly more obtuse ones with "At the Mountains of Madness," identifying FMA's tentacle-and-eye-covered god with the Cthulhu Mythos' tentacle-and-eye-covered god is kind of unavoidable. And now a wizard is combining the essence of that nature red in tooth and claw godhead with human substance to create an entity that ends up going on a rampage and trying to eat everything. "The Dunwich Horror," though Hohenheim at least faired better than Lavinia Whateley (well, at least arguably).

FMA is also doing Lovecraft's thing where he twists Christian imagery or concepts into cosmic horror. There was already a very bittersweet inverted Christ thing going on with Greed 1.0's execution. Now Father's own origins reveal him to be an entity from beyond the gate who is now made entirely of human blood and incarnated human souls. He's all god and all man. Another inverted Christ figure, though this time its not his relationship with the god-character that's being inverted like with Greed, but his relationship with humanity.

When it comes to personality rather than physicality, the "all man" part seems to be the addition of ego into the concoction. If Mike was unhappy being kept in a bottle and screamed at by a noxious old alchemist, you'd think he would want to return through the Gates of Truth and be reabsorbed into Wog-Sothoth. If I were to try and combine this cosmic horror reading with the otherwise oppositional antihero reading, I'd say that the acquisition of an ego, a humanlike sense of self and desire for personal gratification, was the moment that he stopped being Mike and started being Father.

It's been at least strongly implied that Father is trying to create his own universe and become a new "supreme being" or something like that. If he's still homesick, but his acquisition of human ego and sense of self has made him unwilling to be subsumed back into something bigger, then this goal is perfectly logical. In fact, it might be the only logical goal for a being with that set of motivations. He wants to be God again, but he doesn't want to lose his independence, so he'll have to find a way to grow himself into a new God.

Whatever the case, a lot of haemunculus myths have the creature acting as a vehicle for divine revelation, or being, itself, a divine revelation. In FMA, that Xerxian alchemist was looking for cosmic knowledge when he conjured the dwarf in the flask. And he found it. He saw the face of god, and learned the true nature of the universe. He's still seeing it and learning it. Along with all of his countrymen. Forever.


Father As Literary Foil

One of the best things about Father is how he's a foil to almost every one of the protagonists. He kissed up to a strongman dictator in the hopes of betraying and deposing him, but also came to resemble the thing that resented, like Mustang. He risked everything for power and gave himself over to a philosopher's stone rebirth, like Ling. He was taken from his natural environment by force and has spent his life since then lashing out at the group responsible, like Scar. He was sealed in a vessel he felt trapped in and spent years trying to escape, like Alphonse. He hides his weaknesses with venom and bombast, like Edward. Like both of the brothers, he's defined in large part by his immersion into a world he wasn't really prepared for and how he had to adapt. And of course, depending on just how deep his spiritual connection with Hohenheim is, the two of them may literally just be different components of the same person.

The biggest parallel is in the adaptation's title. He's linked through an entanglement of body and soul to his "brother," just like Ed and Al. Father and Hohenheim learned so much, derived so much, developed so much in response to one another, they're almost mutual creators. The alchemist named Hohenheim is only an alchemist because of Father's lessons, and only named Hohenheim because Father called him that. The haemunculus was born from Hohenheim's blood, gained its freedom by taking on Hohenheim's shape, and copied at least many of its future desires from Hohenheim's own hopes and dreams (in a distorted and perverted form). In the end, during the final scene of the Xerxes segment, Father refers to Hohenheim as his brother in blood.

Honestly though, I think "Fatherhood" might have been at least as appropriate a subtitle as "Brotherhood" for thsi show. The big parallel between Team Elric and Team Haemunculus is that each are a group of siblings with a difficult, love/hate relationship with their respective fathers. If you focus on Edward as the closest thing the story has to a single main protagonist, this relationship is particularly important. Especially in the context of shonen manga conventions. There's Edward's father, the man who loves him but couldn't show it, who meant the best but failed to act on it. And then there's The Father, the untouchable evil god-monster who is responsible for the two of them having been separated. In a medium targeted at teenaged boys, I can see how this would really strike a chord. One of the hardest parts of growing up is learning just how flawed your parents are and dealing with the mistakes they've made while still trying to love them. Father is the dragon guarding the tower. Hohenheim is the treasure within. Edward started the story wanting to get away from his father, and searching for the philosopher's stone. It turns out he really can't do only one of those things.

That said, I have mixed feelings about shonen's approach to daddy issues as a whole that kind of force me to look at FMA with more scrutiny. Shonen is really weirdly accepting and forgiving of deadbeat dads. FMA justifies it much better than most, but when viewed as part of a larger trend it starts to look like fairly toxic advice. Not all fathers deserve to be forgiven and accepted back into their children's lives, and when every other story goes out of its way to justify their deadbeat-ness...well, yeah.


Fullmetal Alchemist may or may not end up on my favorite stories shortlist. It's done a lot right, but it's also done quite a bit wrong, and the final episodes could easily make or break it. I won't know until I've finished. Regardless of the rest of the story though, Father is going to stick with me in a way that barely any other fictional characters have. He's so multifaceted, he works on so many levels, he interacts with the rest of the story in such rich and intriguing ways. He's the perfect villain.