Fullmetal Alchemist Analysis (final)

The show does a very good job of tricking both the audience and the protagonist into thinking that Father is Hohenheim's monster. The final arc makes it more and more clear what he really is, but it's not until he takes on his "GodFather" form that it really becomes explicit text.

One of the traits Edward shares most strongly with Hohenheim, at least to begin with, is an overly large and fragile ego. A kind of pride that just can't get over wounds or disgraces. It's what kept Hohenheim from telling his human family about his first son, who he failed with such horrific results. It's what kept Edward determined to outdo, undo, or destroy everything that Hohenheim did to punish the latter for seemingly rejecting him. Hohenheim let Trisha die, so Edward became obsessed with wanting to bring her back. Hohenheim was a scholar, so Edward tried to become the bestest, most knowledgeable arcane sage ever. When he couldn't make Hohenheim's house his own, he burned it down. And then, if you look at some other details, things get even weirder.

Why did Edward grow out his hair the way he did?

Why is Edward so neurotic about his height? Why is that, specifically, a proxy for all his deeper perceived inadequacies?

The first thing that struck me about Hohenheim, when he finally appeared in person alongside other people for scale in "Father Before the Grave," is how surprisingly tall he was.

If it weren't for Alphonse and Winry keeping his ability to feel things like guilt and empathy strong, to hold his arm back when he loses himself in rage like he did with Shou Tucker, Edward's lust for power and aggrandizement would have probably started going in more extreme directions. And he has demonstrated a knack for getting people to follow his lead.

By the time Edward met his "Father," it really didn't have much to do with the person known as Van Hohenheim anymore.

...

My father, like most Americans of his age and skin color, bit the Trump hook and get reeled in deep. Not QAnon deep, thank fucking god, but not all that far short of it either. His path to Trumpism was at least a little different from most, though. For him, it started with Zionism, and none of the news channels besides Fox being willing to tell him what he wanted to hear about Israel and Palestine. That's how it first got its hooks in him. Simultaneously, my mother's degradation (which he refused to get proper help dealing with) and my little brother's consequent decline exhausted, traumatized, and embittered him, making him more receptive to people offering him easy outlets. He fell further in, and slowly started turning rancid in his outlook on immigrants, LGBT, and environmentalism.

Perfect timing. It wasn't long after he'd been suckered into the conservative rabbit hole that I moved to Israel and discovered how much I'd been lied to. It wasn't too much longer after that that I realized what I was sexually.

One of my sisters has ended up taking at least the same political trajectory as me (further than I have, honestly; she's the one working full time for a pro-Palestinian activist group). She's obviously had a much bumpier relationship with our father since then. But even she gets weirded out by how much I abjectly hate that man. It wasn't until much more recently that I had the self-awareness to realize it, but for my sister, our father's turn toward fascism was something between a misfortune, a frustration, and an embarrassment, like it probably was for most white Americans our age. For me, it was validation.

I saw my father again on the same family trip that reunited me with my little brother for the first time since he disappeared. He's a well meaning, bumbling old doofus, hard of hearing, starting to go slightly senile, and limping around on an arthritic hip he insisted didn't need treatment. He was an amazing and adoring babysitter for my niece and nephews, a tirelessly generous gift-giver, and had learned to shut his dumb mouth about politics when any of his children were within earshot.

I'm never going to forgive him for what happened with my mother and brother, and I think that's entirely fair and healthy of me. But I have weirder problems with him. Ones that have infinitely more to do with me than with him, no matter how much I try to project.

Back in my early twenties - the 2008-10 era or so - I came within millimeters of getting sucked into the proto-altright. Partly to cope with my chemical depression (I really had no business being in college, the way that I was. Barely graduated, with a second-rate degree and no real friends or academic contacts. Wanted to drop out and resume later, when I was mentally healthier. My father more or less bullied me into not doing it, for some well-meaning but not terribly rational reasons of his own. I think that's when this all really started with me and him, come to think of it). Partly to cope with what was gradually happening to my family back home. Partly because I'm really just not as smart or critically minded as I try to present myself as being. I wasn't there for my brother when I thought he needed me. I did much less than my sisters to help get my mother away from my father and into proper care, due to a combination of timing, location, and a shameful tendency to panic and shut down in those types of situations. I hated what I thought was my father more and more every year.

...

Like I said before, having something happen to a protagonist's younger sibling is a surefire way to grab me by the heartstrings. I came to identify with Edward Elric a lot during my watchthrough. Thing is, you can't identify with Edward without also feeling a kinship with his older brother. Part of the story's genius is in not revealing that caveat until it's too late and you've already bitten.

It almost reminds me of "Paradise Lost" in that way. The early chapters make you love Lucifer, even though you already know how the story is going to go. They make you root for him, to the point where - again, despite already knowing it's going to happen - you actually feel disappointed in him for doing what he eventually does. And it makes you examine yourself a little as you wonder if Lucifer really changed that much over the course of the story, or if the beginning just sold him in a way that appealed to some very unpleasant parts of yourself. FMA does the same thing, only - again, as with its Victor Frankenstein analogue - dividing the Luciferian archetype into multiple characters.

Speaking of "Paradise Lost," here's an interesting twist that FMA puts on traditional western demonology. In most of the Abrahamic religions, Satan causes the fall of mankind. In Fullmetal Alchemist, mankind causes the fall of Satan. It's a really vivid representation of the Hermetic worldview. As below, so above. And...there's always that connection between what we call God, and the paternal archetype.


The Answer

Life is atrocity. An ongoing crime committed by the universe against itself. How can anyone think about the way reality works and still be comfortable with being alive?

Early on in its run, the show uses at least two parables for the moral cost of existence. The souls burning in the philosophers' stones to fuel the lives of the aurelians, and the victims of the Amestrian regime being ground under the system that most of the cast lives within. In the former case, Greed refused to aid in the production of more philosopher's stone. In the latter, Alex Armstrong stood down and refused to take part in the Ishval genocide. Greed was promptly melted down and reabsorbed by Father, who was then free to replace him with a more compliant version. Alex was sent home from the war and the genocide continued without him, not a single Ishvallan having been saved by his principled stand. In both cases, it's made very clear that refusing to play doesn't help anyone.

Much later in the story, Armstrong and the resurrected Greed defy their world again, but this time they don't do so by retreating from it. And this time, a hell of a lot more comes of it.

"Stop angsting and go punch evil in the face" is a perfectly good message when the evil you're dealing with is a bunch of homunculi or soldiers who have faces to punch. It's harder to take it outside of the parables and apply it to the more fundamental moral problem poised in "All Is One, One Is All."

The series' ending, while not nearly as saccharine as it feels like Bones Studio wanted it to be, is a fairly optimistic one. Things aren't good, but they're a little less bad than they were at series' start. Amestris is a little less shit, at least for now. Xing is a little less shit, at least for now. The souls in at least MOST of the remaining stones are suffering less than they were before. It might be a very small change in the grand scheme of things, or even just the medium-scale scheme of things, but it's better than no change at all. Suffering has been, even just by a tiny increment, reduced. If the conscientious objectors hadn't stayed in the game and acted, things would have stayed the same at best and in all likelihood gotten much worse. But let's bring the scale down to a more personal level. What's a more personal example of abstention leading to bad outcomes that happened in the story? And, which character has the most heavyhandedly telegraphed "redemption" narrative markers?

Hohenheim's redemption arc isn't really clear on the surface. Earlier in "The Other Side of the Gateway," when he stood on Father's last scorch mark and realized he'd never managed to muster the heart and humility to admit his error to the homunculus and apologize to its face, it seemed like Hohenheim had missed his chance to be redeemed for his greatest sin. He helped clean up its fallout, devoting much of his centuries-long life to easing the suffering of the other Xerxians and stopping Father from causing even more harm, but he never actually confronted his own role in what happened. But, by the end of the episode, he seems contented whereas before he was crying in abject misery at the mere suggestion that he was someone to be admired. What changed? And, what does it have to do with Trisha Elric's grave?

...

I swore I would never have children. I'm a flawed human, and not qualified to unilaterally grant myself total power over an extremely fragile sentient being who never consented to be created.

My fiance wanted to have them. I told her no. We can maybe adopt one, but never produce one ourselves. She wasn't happy with this. Getting on there in age herself, not much time left. She always wanted to have her own children, ever since she was a child herself.

She tried telling me that she wanted there to be more Leila Hanns running around. No thought has ever horrified me more than that one did at the time.

...

Edward's role in the final battle was botched, no two ways about it. In my episode reviews I kind of thought out loud about how it could have been improved, but I think that even a perfect execution of that fight would have felt kind of perfunctory (which is still better than being fucking stupid, but still). Genre conventions demand that the hero be the one to land the killing blow on the villain. Some of this particular story's thematics also benefit from Edward personally striking down his foil, but a lot more of them say that Edward's real job in the final battle was elsewhere.

The execution of this one also had significant room for improvement, and it would have benefited from more climactic placement, but it still worked for me at least.

He may not have realized it at the time, but this was the moment when Edward really did succeed where his father had failed. That's how Trisha helped Hohenheim atone for his first great misdeed. Not that Hohenheim made it easy for her or anything.

...

The Truth, or God, of Fullmetal Alchemist is an emergent property of the universe's information flow, not a creator of the universe. It's not something you can blame for the way things are; it IS the way things are. It is the one who is all.

But, it is also the all in one.

...

Maybe the world can never be good. Short of rewriting the laws of physics themselves, I don't really think that there's anything that could do that. But, it can always be made just slightly less bad than it is right now. But that means we'll have to keep being better to continue making it so. We can't do that if we don't have children or if our children aren't better than us. That's the answer to the hard truth. That's how we can beat god.

My paternal grandfather died before I was born. From what I can gather though, he succeeded at producing a child who grew up to be a better person than him. I like to think that my father succeeded as well, though I'm a little too close to the situation to make an objective assessment. I have had a responsibility placed on me.

She tested positive seven weeks before my writing this.

...

Like I said at the beginning of this article, FMA:B hit so close to home for me on so many levels that I can't be sure how much of this is actually in the story and how much I'm projecting onto it. Maybe Arakawa herself would be completely baffled by most of what I've written here.

I can only speak for myself. And, for me, despite its many flaws and missteps, Fullmetal Alchemist was literally a life-changing story. Moreso than any other I've ever been told, and probably more than any I ever will be.