Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E32: “Sacrifices”

Time to fmib my fmab again today to make up for not doing it more than a week ago! Where last we left off, eleventh hour supporting antagonist Dr. Goldtooth sacrificed five of his kung-fu Hitler zombies to activate a teleportation effect built into Central's layout, warping every spontaneous caster within the perimeter through the Antechamber of Truth and (presumably) into a holding cell in Father's lair. That's all of the targets except Mustang, I believe.


Speaking of Mustang, the first scene of this episode, after the OP, has Mustang demanding that Dr. Goldtooth tell him what happened to Edward, and Dr. Goldtooth - still protected by his remaining handful of kung-fu Hitler zombies, responds thusly.

Well, with that phrasing it sounds less like he sent them to Father and more like he just skipped the middleman and tossed them straight to the Antechamber of Truth. Although...I don't think he'd have had to sacrifice five of his own minions just in order to sacrifice someone else at longer range, so yeah, teleportation is more likely regardless of how ominously he describes it. When Edward beamed himself, Envy, and Ling out of Gluttony's stomach dimension, Envy had to give Edward a couple of Xerxians to pay the toll. Why Dr. Goldtooth spent actual minions that he needs to hold off other attackers when he could have just used protostone (they seem to have made plenty of the stuff down here), I'm not sure, but that's apparently what he did.

So yeah, Izumi, Edward, and Alphonse are probably in Father's prison cells now. Probably.

Back on the surface, activating the city-glyph has produced a visible alchemy-lightning effect that the combatants and citizens all take alarm at. All, that is, except for the two transhumans dueling atop the command center's inner wall. Neither of them can afford to be distracted, even by something like that.

Even wounded and bereft of his super eye (which...okay, the show was NEVER really that specific about what that eye can and can't do, so it's hard for me to know exactly how much trouble its loss is causing for him), Wrath remains a highly dangerous opponent. However, he's no longer the single deadliest close quarters fighter in the known world. Leed is slowly but surely gaining the upper hand. Eventually, they end up breaking through a wall and falling into a reservoir. Leed just barely clinging to the wall over the water by his armored claws, Wrath hanging onto his foot and not letting himself be kicked off. It looks like they're about to both fall in, when Ninjette gets up from where she was kneeling over her grandfather's corpse and grabs Leed by the hand. To their chagrin.

I'm going to have to side with Leed on this one. An underwater wrestling match is probably going to favor Leed much more than the previous battleground. Wrath is bleeding heavily. Leed is armored and has deadly claws. I'm not sure if either of them need to breathe, but there's more evidence suggesting Leed not needing to than Wrath (the Ultimate Shield completely covers his face, and we've seen them use it without Ling's body suffocating).

Honestly, I feel like if Leed had had a few more seconds to think about this situation, they might have decided to let go of the wall on purpose.

Ninjette's automail arm is starting to bleed from its attachment point, due to not being up to carrying two men's weight on its own. Seriously, Ninjette, let go, Leed's got this. Instead of letting go, she calls for help from the pair of surviving Briggs soldiers who are still watching the proceedings with frightened bewilderment. One of them comes over to shoot Wrath off of Leed's foot. Wrath throws his broken sword at the guy and kills him before he can. Congratulations Ninjette, you just got a man pointlessly killed. Wrath takes a bullet just as he's throwing the broken blade though, at least, and ends up plummeting into the reservoir alone, letting Leed climb back up.

Leed doesn't dive in after him to confirm the kill. I'm starting to think that Ling is hydrophobic or something. Or that Leed is much more vulnerable to drowning than I'd have thought. Possibly both. Anyway, they seem to just be hoping that Wrath won't stealthily climb out and slip deeper into the facility to murder the Armstrongs and their troops.

...okay, he might not actually be capable of pulling that off in his current state, but still, it's not a risk I'd want to take.

Ling takes control of Leed, and rushes to the dead body of Graninja in the hopes of somehow saving him. It's not looking doable. He starts calling out for a medical alchemist. Surely, there's got to be one around, isn't this country supposed to be known for its alchemists? He even has some high-grade philosopher's stone right here inside his body, and he'll let anyone who knows how to use it use it in order to save his loyal bodyguard. No response. Amestris has plenty of alchemists, but none of them are around and available.

A horrified expression comes over his face as he realizes what's just happened.

Then, to rub it in even harder, one of Wrath's own soldiers who'd been dragging his wounded body up along one of the access hallways now gets a clean shot at Leed while everyone is distracted, and shoots him right in the head. He regenerates the wound in seconds, while Graninja remains dead.

While it isn't explicitly stated, the implication for the audience is clear.

Ling has never lost an underling in the line of duty before. At least, not while he himself was present.

That poor idiot thought he could be emperor of a huge, internally fractious nation like Xing without any of his loyalists having to die for him.

Wrath and Ling had a brief verbal spar about the nature of leadership during their first encounter in "Backs In the Distance." Now, in their final battle, Wrath proved himself the martial loser, but the philosophical victor. The kind of king that Ling believes in and aspires to be doesn't exist, never has existed, and never CAN exist unless the nature of reality itself changes. A king who always leads from the front, always puts himself in front of his subjects, is a dead king. Even if he becomes bulletproof like Ling has, he can't be everywhere at once, and he can't do everything himself, and the people he delegates to these tasks will not be protected. No matter how much he cares. No matter how noble his intentions are.

In order to be a dictator, you need to be willing to sacrifice your own people for yourself. Becoming emperor means abandoning the motivations he had for wanting to become emperor.

How this interacts with Ling's overall ethical system, with its extreme ingroup-outgroup dichotomy, is...well, he's freezing up in horror and despair as it all collapses. Apathy and callousness toward the outgroup won't always let you protect the ingroup. All the cognitive dissonance and selective empathy required for his flavor of tribalism is crashing down on him like the Fist of Wog on an overconfident necromancer.

A few meters away, Hook is dying as well. His own comrades in arms are easing his passing as best they can, and assuring him that he made his death count by landing the first solid hit on Wrath that left him open to the subsequent attacks. Ling watches, and realizes that this is the best he can do himself as well. Just try to ensure that deaths are meaningful rather than meaningless.

...

Well, there is an alternative to that in the world of the story, I guess. But constant mass-production of protostone wouldn't be sustainable even if you found it morally acceptable.

...

On a brighter note, that's two named minor character's whose plot armor has finally given out and reminded us that there are real stakes in this conflict. I knew I liked you for a reason, Wrath, even if at this point it doesn't seem like it's the same reason I previously thought.

On that topic, I really am wondering what would happen if they confronted Wrath with Queen now. It doesn't seem likely that Wrath's apparent second thoughts and institutional sabotage are ever going to get a payoff at this point. At the same time though, there's pretty much no way to read scenes like him telling Mustang and Hawkeye his personal secrets (including his genuine affection for his wife) apropos of nothing, him letting Mustang and Edward off with a warning despite them practically telling him in as many words that they're going to keep fighting Father, and his warnings and underhanded threats from Pride besides his loyalty wavering. I don't even know what the point of that scene with him and Hawkeye in his office, or the lamp post conversation with him and Pride, would have been if not to establish this.

There's something going on there. Maybe not what I thought up until these last couple of episodes (if he really did want to be free of Father, now would have been the perfect time to act on it), but something.

I'm really, REALLY curious to see what would happen if they had Queen try to talk him down. I hope that'll happen before the end. It feels like a scene like that was being pretty heavily built up to for a pretty long time. Well, it could still happen. He obviously isn't actually dead, if we're not being shown the body.

Well, moving on for now! The Briggs soldiers manning the entryway turrets finally run out of ammo, and are forced to switch to their handheld rifles. The Central troops who were regrouped by Wrath's return to the city are starting to make progress now, despite the literal dozens of their own dead they have to walk over in the wake of the turret massacre.

It's pretty clear what the message here is, and how Leed is supposed to act on it. Ensure that the deaths that occurred actually do have meaning, and prevent as many others as they can as best as they can. With his dying breath, Hook instructs them in as many words to do this. If they feel any sort of debt of gratitude to the men - Ling's own and Amestrian - who just died helping them deal with Wrath, then they'll go defend the entry ramp.

Specifically, he tells him that he needs to keep the enemy from reaching "our queen."

Heh, I was actually wondering about that. I previously mused that the Armstrongs seem to have been - if not actual royalty - at least a powerful noble house in whatever feudal kingdom their region of central Amestris used to be part of. It seems that, assuming Hook isn't just being cheeky here, Olivierre is acutely aware of her family history and may be planning to style herself as a return to the old monarchy over however much of post-Father Amestris she's able to bite off.

I really am curious about how things will go for the country in the wake of all this. Apparently Arakawa is working on some kind of twenty year anniversary project for FMA, and I'm interested to see if she'll touch on any of that.

Coronation prospects of Her Majesty Queen Olivierre I aside, Leed does as the dying Hook asks, and enters the ramp tunnel. They ride a tram platform down, which I'm surprised still works after the tank incident, and immediately shows what they've learned as he addresses the enemy troops while deploying Greed's armor. They don't want to kill more people. They would prefer it if everyone turned and abandoned the assault right now, before they're forced to. All while repelling bullets off of their graphene-plated body.

As the fire intensifies, Leed covers their face as well, becoming fully indestructible by conventional weapons, reaches the enemy force, and attacks.

This fight scene is almost a perfect mirror of Wrath's ascent up this same tunnel in "The Return of the Fuhrer." Again, a lone superhuman takes the ramp from a force of common soldiers. However, where Wrath was frenzies, aggressive, and never holding still, Leed pauses after every renewed lunge, giving the enemy time to reconsider and flee. Most of them don't, but some do. Rather than causing extensive damage to the structure like Wrath did, Leed simply dodges or tanks it when the soldiers fire explosive shells at them, and their own weapons cause the tunnel to finally collapse entirely, killing more of them than Leed themselves did. Leed then steps out of the burning rubble that was once the Command Center's entryway, and once again gives the arrayed beseigers a chance to see his invulnerability and flee before he's forced to use it against them. Once again, some do, but most don't.

They've both come such a long way from where they started. Ling used to only care about his own clan, and screw anyone else. Greed used to only care about people who he considered "property," and screw anyone else. They still ended up killing a lot of people in this battle, but whenever their face is visible you can see how much they regret it, and hear the urgency in their voice as they repeatedly tell the enemies to run.

They're not clinging to any illusions about the value of some human life over other human life, nor are they trying to do the impossible. They're adopting a new position that holds up much better to Wrath's argument than either of their old ones.

I think that henceforth they will seek to be a leader rather than a ruler.

Hook dies, living just long enough to see that the Command Center has no been definitively taken and the Central forces withdrawn again with Leed defending the structure and no more inspiring commands coming from Wrath. Around the city, citizens remain huddled in their homes, watching the smoke rise ever higher over the Command Center and wondering what the hell that giant alchemy-flash all over the city a few minutes ago was. We see parents trying to distract their children by having them look away from the smoke and toward the eclipse that they've been looking forward to seeing; it'll happen in just a few minutes now.

It all comes down to whether or not Mustang gets captured, then. Father's got all four of the others where he wants them, thanks to Hohenheim's failed attack and Dr. Goldtooth's teleport spell using the city-glyph. It's just Mustang who's not in place.

In the stairwell leading down to Sin Inc executive headquarters, the Armstrongs and Sig try to figure out what the hell just happened to Izumi. Alex recalls what the Elric brothers told him about the Eye of Truth and the black tentacles that pull soul-transmuters into it, but he can't say why this might have happened to Izumi here and now. As they try to figure it out and Sig seems about to panic, Olivierre gets a radio communique telling her that they've successfully defended the Command Center, but at great cost. The soldier reports that Hook and most of his squad died with honor, along with at least one of their Xingese allies, and that they managed to inflict a mortal wound on Wrath before knocking him into the reservoir.

Hearing this last part, the Armstrongs' prisoner insists that this is impossible; Wrath wouldn't go down that easily.

For a moment it looks like he's about to give them actionable intelligence about Wrath's defensive capabilities, but then he just starts raving about how it's impossible for Wrath to die because he's the bestest and most awesomest warrior that their lord and savior ever created, and Olivierre breaks his nose.

They also get confirmation that the haemunculus Greed played an instrumental role in turning the tide back in their favor, and that even now he and his Xingese host are standing guard over the main entrance. That gets General Beardo babbling and n-n-nani'ing again through his broken nose, insisting that it's impossible that the Good Gentleman's children would ever turn against him.

...

I wonder how much damage Greed 1.0 could have done to Father's military cult just by making sure the generals knew about him. His rogue status must have been serious paranoia fuel for Father for pretty much the entire time he was in hiding.

Come to think of it, what WAS Greed 1.0 planning to do, in the longrun? He almost certainly knew what his "family" were planning to do to Amestris, and he notably *didn't* take the opportunity to leave the country's planned final borders.

Hmm. Those chimaeras he rescued seemed like pretty recent acquisitions. Maybe he was planning to stick around and scavenge as many of Father's creations as possible before absconding at the last minute? That would certainly be in character for Greed.

...

The others shut General Beardo up with warning glares, and then Olivierre declares that she's glad Hook and the others died honorably, and that rather than mourning them they need to press on, find Izumi, and help deal with el Papi. Oof, good luck with that second one. They continue their descent.

Further underground, meanwhile, Edward, Izumi, and Alphonse materialize in Father's office. Edward and Izumi are trying to figure out how the hell that happened. Alphonse, unfortunately, seems to have had another fit of being dead; being sent through the Gate and brought in closer proximity with his body likely triggered this. Just as Edward starts to figure out that Father must have done something to bring his "sacrifices" to himself for the eclipse, the demigod in question makes his presence known in his full, unmasked glory.

When I say "glory," by the wayu, I'm being very, very facetious. Wog-Sothoth itself might be a giant scary eye with tentacles. The dwarf's original form and Pride's shadow appendages are likewise monstrous and shoggoth-y, but they have a certain alien elegance to them. I wouldn't go so far as to say beautiful, or even grand, but the rippling tentacles of shadow and the blur of eyes and mouths look dignified. This, on the other hand, is how Father looks when he approaches them with Hohenheim in "hand:"

Even ignoring the pot-belly (since it's at least partly being caused by Hohenheim's torso being stuck through it), just...he looks ridiculous. Like a man in an ill-fitting shoggoth costume. Ugly and scary, sure, but moreso just stupid, like some little kid's drawing of a boogeyman.

I don't think this is remotely accidental on the part of the illustrator. Four hundred years ago, he was a god brought to earth by man. Now, he's a man wearing a shitty god costume.

As below, so above.

Hohenheim, whose head is sticking out of Father's hip, weakly apologizes to his other sons and their teacher for his failure. Edward asks him what the hell this edgy Mr. Oogie Boogie reskin is supposed to be, and is understandably stunned when Hohenheim explains that this is Father without his Father form.

Meanwhile, Father muses to himself that the fifth sacrifice must still be undergoing preparation, and then shuts Hohenheim up by sucking his head back into his own mass before he can tell Edward and Izumi anything too important. He then assures Hohenheim that he's still going to take back all those Xerxians just as soon as he has a way of preventing more Trojan Horse shenanigans, and sarcastically bids the others welcome to his palace.

Father is acting differently than he did before. All gloating and mocking like this. I wonder. Did Hohenheim actually damage his personality as well as his humanoid appearance, with that soul attack? Or is this change more psychological? Like, he always had a "doth protest too much" vibe when he was going on about how he's purged himself of human pettiness and vice. Maybe, ironically, it was easier for him to pretend that this was actually the case while he was wearing the face of his own father figure and surrounding himself in royal robes and holy-looking white light.

...

Metafictionally, I feel like this is also saying something about religion.

The actual God portrayed in Fullmetal Alchemist is basically Lovecraft's Yog-Sothoth with very minimal alterations. Impersonal. Unrelatable. Unhelpful, but not actively harmful as long as you don't go poking at it, and even then it's the more humanlike outer extensions of it - the higher souls, or wogdats - that do the actual dickery.

There's also a dead ringer for the anthropomorphic personal God that most people worship, specifically as He's portrayed in the Abrahamic traditions. The solemn (except when he's not) bearded man in the white robes issuing forth commandments and judgements from his throne, awe-inspiring and terrible.

But if you try to dissect that personal God character, questioning His decisions and looking at His actions and motivations with a critical eye (which Hohenheim very specifically did, in as many words, before performing the soul infection that removed Father's skin), that stern and perfect heavenly father falls apart at the seams, and this is what you find yourself looking at. A childish, temperamental lunatic who is both comically unworthy of the role he's trying to fill, and insecure about it. A "divine" character who looks like a man pretending to not be a man, and who embodies his believers' worst and most atavistic traits despite their attempts to project their best and loftiest ones onto him.

...

Cut back to Dr. Goldtooth, who expresses disappointment that Mustang is still in front of him. Apparently he was under the impression that Mustang had already seen beyond the Gate. For some reason. He blames the "idiots upstairs" for this problem, but the fault pretty clearly lays either with him or with the haemunculi for not filling him in properly.

So, he says, they're going to have to do some extra last minute preparations. He orders the zombies to restrain the trio without killing them. He only has five or six of them left at this point, so I feel like he's being awfully overconfident, but...then Riza's pistol jams and they win. Scar, Mustang, and Hawkeye are all restrained and have blades to their throats.

Okay that's kind of dumb. Sure, the good guys lost Edward, but the bad guys lost...what, at least two or three zombies, plus the five that Dr. Goldtooth sacrificed? And then things end that quickly and anticlimactically?

I feel like this would have been improved if enemy reinforcements had arrived right then. Say, a couple of Dr. Goldtooth's assistants that we saw working under him in Wrath's backstory sequence, or even just a pack of monstrous chimaeras like the ones Father used as guards.

Or hell, have Pride show up! Even if he has somewhere else to be in the near future, I doubt it would mess with the timeline too badly if he quickly intervened here. Especially considering that the tunnels they're in are technically part of the macroglyph, so he could theoretically shoot one of h appendages over here at warp speed from wherever he currently is around Central. That would do it easily!

Oh well.

Dr. Goldtooth tells Mustang that he needs him to perform human transmutation now, so that he can be used as a sacrifice. Mustang tells him that that sounds really appealing, but he's unfortunately going to have to decline. Dr. Goldtooth tells him that come on, there must be soooomeone he's willing to try to bring back from the dead. Maybe a family member? A lover? How about the Hughes guy that he apparently liked a lot? Mustang just looks at him like he's lost his mind (which, to be fair, I'm pretty sure he did long before the time of the series). So, he then orders the zombies to slit Hawkeye's throat.

Damn, Mustang must really be getting sick of finding his supporting cast in his refrigerator.

Dr. Goldtooth tells him that he'd better start now, before Hawkeye finishes drowning in her own blood. Um...I thought transmuting a *living* human didn't violate the taboo? It has to involve moving a soul from place to place, no? Medical alchemy is already a thing, and medical alkahestry is already much more of one. Also, does Mustang even know how to attempt human transmutation?

Oh, okay, I see now. He's not asking Mustang to transmute Hawkeye's neck back together, he's just using her as leverage. He announces that he is a very skilled medical alchemist, and that he even has a vial of protostone on hand that he can use to heal just about any injury. If Mustang does the thing, Dr. Goldtooth himself will save Hawkeye's life.

If he had a jar of protostone on hand, why did he need to sacrifice his minions to pay the toll for the Gate teleportation thing? Especially while in combat against enemies who had already proven capable of killing at least a few of said minions, and couldn't have known that he could really afford to lose five more?

...come to think of it, this is yet another problem that could have been more elegantly solved by having Pride intervene. We've seen that you can use the core of a living Sin as a "normal" philostone, at least if it lets you. In addition to turning the battle into a one sided one against the good guys, Pride could also give Dr. Goldtooth permission to use his own battery to heal Hawkeye if needed. So, the doctor didn't have any protostone on him when he sacrificed his minions before, which is why he needed to do that, but now he does thanks to Pride.

Yeah, that really would have made this scene make more sense. On multiple levels.

...although, it still wouldn't solve the problem of Mustang not necessarily knowing how to attempt human transmutation. That's also a serious issue. We've seen him transmute a human skeleton and a bunch of pig meat into a dummy-corpse before, and it was implied that any halfway decent alchemist could do that, but I feel like attempting to create a person with a soul probably requires slightly more research and know-how.

He has the zombies drag the dying Hawkeye into the glyph he drew before, and tells Mustang that time is ticking. Hawkeye whispers for him not to do it. Scar doesn't say anything (I like to think he's busy thinking about how to find a way to sneakily get his disintegrator hand onto one of the zombies restraining him, and prioritizing that above everything else).

Of course, if Mustang does as he's instructed, that's not actually going to "save" Hawkeye. It'll just make things worse for her, because she'll get turned into a philosopher's stone alone with everyone else in Amestris instead of getting the relative mercy of a normal death.

But, Mustang finally, reluctantly, sweatily says yes.

Maybe he's got a trick up his sleeve, maybe he's being genuine.

...come to think of it, given how loyal Dr. Goldtooth seems to be, why doesn't he just volunteer to be a fifth sacrifice himself? Is he still laboring under the delusion that Father will reward him with immortality instead of eating him along with everyone else? I guess he probably is. Which means Kimblee is the one, single alchemist who is actually crazy enough to keep working for Father despite not believing he'll be rewarded or even spared. I guess it would be unlikely for more than one of those to exist.

Anyway, on that cliff-hanging note, end episode.


In terms of quality, I'd say this was a very good episode of FMA:B. Ling's character arc finally reaching its payoff was great stuff, especially in how it highlighted the similarity between his old ethos and Greed's own. I guess there's a reason Leed is able to work so harmoniously when they can agree on their goals...

...

...

HAH.

I just remembered complaining about how Ling and Greed's back-to-back introductions back in season one felt redundant, because of how similar their goals and methods were. I still maintain that it would have been better if something else happened between those two things to break up the repetitiveness, but the similarity itself existed for a reason. Well played, Arakawa.

Well, back to what I was talking about. Leed's material here provided a satisfying ending to Ling's arc, and also closed the loop on Greed's long-running rivalry with Wrath (this was their third fight throughout the series!) by finding a winning move against him both tactically and philosophically: allow other people to have agency instead of making yourself their "owner." Or, to view it through the lens of Ling's own rivalry with Wrath, their "ruler." Also, that answer to Wrath's own solo rampage through the tunnel was amazing on both the technical and thematic levels. I also think this might be starting to lead into the ultimate thesis of the work as a whole - its answer to the Hard Truth question - but I'll wait before going into that.

If that had been the whole episode, this would have been a great one instead of just a very good one. The minor direction issues with the reservoir set piece bring it down slightly. The much more baffling problems with the Dr. Goldtooth scene bring it down considerably more. Neither of those were terrible scenes, but they were a lot weaker than the Leed-centric stuff. Especially the logistical issues surrounding the Goldtooth sequence. Between those and the doctor's own relative lack of spotlighting until now (not even a name), that whole sequence is starting to feel like a bit of an asspull.

Also, I don't like the damseling of Hawkeye. It's been happening more and more often as the series continues. Early on, she and Mustang more or less took turns rescuing each other. At this point, her handling is no different from any shounen faux-action-girl written by any hackey mangaka. Come to think of it, that's true with other female characters as well. Early on, we had Izumi rescuing Edward from Greed, Hawkeye rescuing Alphonse from Scar, etc, alongside men protecting women. But then, as we move onward, it increasingly becomes Ninjette who gets damseled while Graninja gets to make heroic rescues or sacrifices, Olivierre who gets grabbed by Sloth and Alex who punches him off of her, etc, with almost none of the reverse. The balance between Mustang and Hawkeye is just the most obvious example of the trend, due to those two interacting most frequently. I think I'd attribute this to publishing scramble, with the author falling back on shlocky learned habits. Just like the other typical shounen-contrivance complaints I've made more frequently after the series' midpoint.

Still, the quality of Leed's material is right up there with the best that FMA as a series has to offer so far. The other scenes would have had to be a LOT worse than they are in order to outweigh the merits of that.