Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E35: “He Who Would Swallow God” (part 1)

Pretty sure he already did swallow God, unless the visuals at the end of the previous episode were misleading. Well, let's have a look at the villain world full of corpses probably.


Start with a flashback, of pre-mishap Babby Ed and Babby Al going through their father's library and looking up the symbolism of the sun and moon in alchemy. In addition to the mind and soul, the self and the divine, they also represent masculinity and femininity. Combining them creates something better and more complete than the mortal state of being. Intersex people are gods, got it, we all already knew that. Repeat the last few seconds' worth of Giga-Father pulling down and absorbing Wog-Sothoth, then title screen. Not sure why the focus on gender at this point, when we've already seen other, similar systems of symbolism attached to the solar eclipse that amount to the same thing. Anyway.

The eclipse continues over the silent, lifeless land that was once called Amestris. On every street sidewalk and in every house, bodies lay still and slowly cool to room temperature. People we know. People we don't know. All dead in body, and probably worse than dead in spirit and mind. Then, in the center of it all, Father's five alchemist sacrifices slowly regain consciousness.

So, the people specifically labeled as human sacrifices are the only ones who *weren't* killed in the ritual? That seems weird. Especially given the much more literal way that the concept of sacrifice has been used throughout the story. These five were really used as sacrifices at all; just as components in a spiritual device to hold open the Gate. It makes me wonder if the author changed her mind on exactly how Father was planning to use them at some point during writing. Or, more charitably to Arakawa, if Father deliberately chose a misleading word for them to throw off potential spies. Anyway, they (and May) or literally the only humans within the macroglyph area to have not been turned into philosophers' stone and (possibly) burned away to nothing in Father's wrestling match with Wog.

They look around, and see the saddest, most pitiable thing in the entirety of Fullmetal Alchemist.

Father has won. He's removed all the limits and barriers that he's perceived as being around himself. He has unlimited knowledge and unlimited power with which to put it into practice. He can go anywhere. Do anything. In his own words, he is no longer bound by any man or any god in terms of what he can do and be.

Guess where he is, and what he's doing?

Sitting on his chair in his bunker.

He's reformed himself into an idealized version of young Hohenheim, at the age he was when the Dwarf was first summoned into the flask, sure. But given the shapeshifting abilities Father demonstrated in the preceding few episodes, that's not a demonstration of any new potential. He could have made himself look like this any time he felt like it. It's a completely superficial change in his behavior and presentation.

He spent his childhood working toward freedom, but he didn't know what to do with it when he got it. So he just kept on working. Any doubts he might have had about his goals and habits were removed from him, either centuries ago with Pleasure (who he dismissed as gluttony) or decades ago with Adversity (who he dismissed as wrath). Since the fall of Xerxes, the only thing really keeping him imprisoned has been the one thing he couldn't bring himself to confront.

He's gotten nothing out of this centuries-long apotheosis project. Nothing.

Edward is skeptical that Father has actually assimilated the entity humankind knows as God, but Hohenheim warns him that it's entirely possible. He just would need a huge amount of philosophers' stone to contain it, and the population of Amestris - around fifty million people, Mustang interjects - is just about enough. Just like Envy with her tiny philosophers' stone nucleus nonetheless being able to take control of much larger ones she latches onto, Father's new battery of fifty million or so is enough to let him hijack Wog-Sothoth.

Fifty million. Almost exactly one hundred times as many souls as he and Hohenheim each absorbed during the Fall of Xerxes. And that's just for the yoke he's placed around the neck of god, whose power is undoubtedly equivalent to many times that number's worth of souls.

...

It's a mind-boggling amount of power, when you break down the numbers and really think about it.

And yet, he STILL has nothing better to do than sit around in his office and gloat at whatever puny humans happen to be within earshot.

...

Unamused by Edward's skepticism, Father decides to be Frieza and conjures a miniature sun inside of his hand, while boasting about how not even the secrets of nuclear fusion are unknown to him now.

I wonder if anyone else in this world even knows what nuclear fusion is? Well, even if they don't, he's giving them a decent enough visual aid.

Also, speaking of blazing hot things, that lighting is doing him a lot of favors. Young Hohenheim would have been a serious looker if he'd had the free time and caloric intake to lift. Father's dour, miserable expression and persistent creepy old man voice kind of ruin it for himself, though.

He asks them if they think he should go ahead and remove the vacuum shielding layer around that handheld star and let it fry them now. I'm not sure what answer he wants to hear from them, or whether he would listen to it either way. What *would* he do after killing them? Does he know? Honestly, this feels to me like he's stalling for time. Occupying himself with this petty Bond Villain stuff to forestall the question of what the hell he does with himself now.

...

I made that low-effort "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" allusion at the end of the previous episode, but the specifics of this new situation actually reminds me much more of those of that story. Like AM, Father has nothing to do with all his unlimited power except bully a small group of captives. He can't kill them, because he doesn't know what to do without them. They're the latest version of his self-imposed flask.

...

Before the conversation (or whatever) can continue, Father abruptly trembles, and a weird light effect flashes around him. Hohenheim, looking like he's both relieved and furious, tells Father that this is the Plan B he's spent the last decade working on.

Since leaving home, Hohenheim has been seeding his own philostone matrix across Amestris. That's what we saw him doing back in "Family Portrait," when he recited the names of some of his body's constituents and let them wriggle into the soil. Presumably, using Father's own macroglyph against him. Or wait...actually, no, not the macroglyph. Hohenheim has actually been straying a little further out beyond the periphery of that, setting up a bigger pattern that outsizes it. And, apparently, he positioned the philostone caches perfectly to use the lunar umbra of this eclipse as a connecting circle between the points.

...given the eccentricities of Earth's orbit, the moon's orbit, and the Milankovitch cycles, Hohenheim must have spent almost as much time doing math as he did traveling the continent. Then again, with Xerxes' affinity for alchemy, I'm guessing Hohenheim probably has a good number of astronomers and mathematicians inside of him. He may have just organized a research team to figure out the precise coordinates while he moved in the right general directions.

That's both extremely silly, and sort of, weirdly, very badass.

We flash to some desolate wilderness spots around Amestris and its neighboring countries. A succession of voices, communicating along the lines of the shadow and the matrix within it, saying that now is the time that they can act.

In his office, Father's body flashes and twitches harder, and the miniature sun in his hand dies out. The lunar umbra glows red with philostone lightning, forming a glyph that I don't think we've seen before.

In effect, it seems to be a slightly more advanced version of the philostone-breaker spell that Dr. Marcoh used against Envy. Rather than just dispersing any philosophers' stone within the area into free ghosts who disappear back to the afterlife (assuming this world has one. I assume its a "be absorbed by the Eye of Wog and become one with the universe again" sort of deal, if so. Or maybe just get absorbed into the planetsoul via the ki energy system. Either way), this one returns souls to their bodies, assuming that both are within the area. Father loses all fifty million of his new acquisitions, leaving him only with what he had before.

...

You know, if he had spent the last couple of minutes expanding his consciousness out into the universe or flying around the world or something, he would have completely avoided this. Either he'd have sensed Hohenheim's philostone matrix and ruined it, or he'd have just removed himself from the area of effect.

"Use it or lose it" has never been so literal.

...

The end credits song "Rain" plays as, appropriately, a literal rain of flaming red souls fall back across Amestris, and people start getting back up. In Dublith, a baby in its stroller starts crying, as its mother gets back to her feet beside it. In Central, loyalist and dissident soldiers alike look at each other haggardly, unable to remember what it is exactly they were fighting about in the wake of what just happened to them. In Resembool, Winry, Pinako, and friends wake up, asking each other what the hell they experienced a second ago.

I hope Pinako didn't break anything when she fell down.

...actually, one character we pointedly DON'T see being revived is whatsername, the gun-leg girl from Rush Valley from that bad filler episode. When Father harvested the souls, we saw that she was in the middle of fixing a rooftop. Yeeeeaaaah.

I'm guessing the net results of the eclipse's macro-alchemical events will be high triple or low quadruple digit deaths. Housefires, car crashes, old people with fragile bones, etc. Still a hell of a lot better than the alternative, of course. Hell, you could make a moral argument for that many deaths being worth it to prevent just ONE person from being turned into philostone, depending on how long they'd keep suffering in that state before Father used them up.

Speaking of being used up, I wonder if Hohenheim's deposits were completely expended by doing that? Are those Xerxians all dead now, or can he still recover them from the soils he planted them in? That's a question for later, of course. For now, Father might have lost his divinity just a minute after achieving it, but he was an overwhelmingly powerful foe even before that, and they just really, really, REALLY pissed him off.

On his throne, Father convulses and chokes, smoke pouring from the now slightly battered and disfigured-looking Young Hohenheim form he's adopted. Meanwhile, Hohenheim explains to the others that with his "yoke" taken away, Father's grip on the godhead will become unstable at best.

So he does still have SOME kind of grasp on Wog-Sothoth then, even if he won't be able to keep it up for long. So he may still be somewhat more powerful than before. If not in terms of raw energy supply, then at least in his access to alchemical knowledge that lets him make better use of his preexisting battery. On the other hand, there's been no comment either way about what Father's multitasking ability is like at this point, and if wrestling with Wog is taking up part of his attention it might still be a net debuff from how dangerous he was an episode ago.

Still, the important thing is that he's now at least theoretically fightable.

Even stunned and distracted, Father wins initiative. Screaming almost incoherently about how he'll just build another macroglyph and consume a hundred million or a billion souls next time, he lurches out of his chair. Edward and Alphonse start to cast something, but he does his alchemy-suppression trick, and their transmutations fail. He still has that philostone matrix of his own in place that he can use to block geothermal catalytic energy, right. Father then shoots an...I'm not sure what it's supposed to be, but it looks a lot like those dark energy missiles from Half Life...at Hohenheim. Hohenheim deflects it, sending it blasting a shaft up through the ceiling, past a startled Scar and Wrath, and into the sky.

...huh, seeing Wrath makes me wonder. Was he briefly reabsorbed by Father as well?

......actually, come to think of it, he and Scar were both standing directly over the ritual site when it happened. So, they - and the chimaeras and Hawkeye in the crater between the two levels - might have actually been spared altogether, given that the macroglyph's effected and safe zones are two dimensionally bound. Yeah. I think they all actually were unaffected.

Well, after his OSIPR alt fire attack fails, Father just loses his shit entirely and shoots a big, ongoing energy beam at the group. May has been setting up an alkahestric defense glyph around their feet, and it can't stand up to Father's death laser for more than a second or two, but it gives Hohenheim time to interpose himself and start using his own philostone supply to neutralize the attack.

Father seems to be confident that Hohenheim's batteries will run out before his own do. I'm not sure I'd make that gamble if I were him. Maybe he's using some new information he's pulling from the Akashic Record to create a hyperefficient beam weapon that he knows Hohenheim will have to expend energy much faster in order to counter. Or, less charitably to Father, he's just not thinking clearly anymore at all.

Hohenheim keeps repelling/absorbing the beam. Father evidently being too salty/distracted to think of anything trickier. Edward desperately wonders aloud what's taking Scar so long. Erm...what's taking Scar so long to do what, I wonder? I don't think Ed knows that he's fighting Wrath, and I don't know how much of a difference the outcome of that would make for the Father situation.

Cut to upstairs, where the Duel of the Nameless continues. Have they been fighting through the whole nationwide transmutation thing? Well, if that didn't stop them, no wonder the errant OSIPR blast barely merited a startled glance. Scar is making heavy use of his new alchemy along with his tried-and-true martial arts and disintegrator array to keep pace with the injured Wrath. Wrath furiously asks him how it can be that an Ishvallan monk is using alchemy. Isn't that supposed to be an affront to his religion? Has he abandoned his god, perhaps due to said god's failure to intervene in the genocide of his people? Scar doesn't credit any of this with a response; he just keeps fighting. Wrath isn't saying anything of substance in light of all that Scar has seen and learned over the course of the show.

Finally, Wrath manages to knock Scar down and pin him. Just as he's saying that he's amused that Scar has finally realized that there is no God worthy of the title and raising his broken-but-still-sharp sword for a killing blow, the lunar umbra starts to recede, and sunlight suddenly comes streaming down the shaft that the deflected Half Life Missile created. The light hits the sword and reflects brightly, blinding Wrath's one remaining eye for the fraction of a second Scar needs.

Heh. I wouldn't take this of evidence of providence, given the ample firsthand proof we've had of Wog-Sothoth being a purely reactive entity. But still, the irony of it is amusing, and the symbolism still works for me. An apathetic or nonexistent god means that anyone can get fucked over by random coincidence. It's not something you can claim to be on your side even as you extoll its truth and the virtues of believing in it.

Unfortunately, Wrath manages to catch a bit of broken sword in his mouth and push it into Scar's torso before collapsing. They fall together.

...wait, are Wrath's arms missing?

Weird. How did that happen? It looked like Scar hit him with a disintegrate, not something sharp. Weird interplay of Scar's attack with Wrath's human/haemunculus hybrid metabolism, maybe?

Bleeding heavily out the everything, skin flaking in transmutation grid-pattern, Wrath weakly murmurs that while he still doesn't believe in anything worth calling God, whatever forces there are that govern the universe appear to have not ended up favoring him. He sounds disappointed about this, but not greatly so. He hadn't been planning to live past today anyway, at this point. There's a sound of footsteps, and Ninjette enters the room. Looks like she came straight here after waking up from being dead.

She asks Wrath if he has any last words before she avenges her grandfather. He has none. She asks him if he's sure about that? Nothing for his wife, even? Voice failing, he tells her not to insult him with a question like that. Queen knew, every day of their marriage, that he was a man of action and that there was a chance he wouldn't return home one day. He lived every day like it was his last, and told her everything he wanted her to know up front. Part of the reason he loves her is because he knows that she can abide by that.

As he speaks, his dying body ages twenty years before Scar and Ninjette's eyes.

I'll take that as low-key confirmation of my reading that Wrath wasn't just a human, as far as his body and its workings were concerned. He had some kind of life energy distribution system that worked like his siblings', even if it wasn't nearly as powerful and his day-to-day biology weren't as dependent on it. This may also have something to do with why his forearms fell off at the elbows when Scar zapped him.

As he dies, he chuckles that she wasted her chance at revenge by asking stupid questions instead of killing him. His final words are that, while he never had any choices in what he did with his life, living among humans at least made it somewhat enjoyable. With that, his skin turns completely into Transmutation Flakes and he stops moving.

Damn. They probably could have turned him, if they'd had a chance to start working on it earlier and leveraged his wife's influence. Ah well.

Scar, though badly wounded and weak with blood loss himself at this point, instructs Ninjette to help him over to Dr. Goldtooth's circle in the center of the room.

She points out that the circle has been ruined by rubble and blood splatters, but Scar assures her that that doesn't matter. He's not planning to use that specific glyph to heal himself or anything. He just knows that it's in the center of the room, which in turn is in the center of the city-glyph, which in turn is in the center of the macroglyph.

Oh, I see.

...what is Brothar's macroglyph variant even going to do, if not what Hohenheim's already did? Well, seemingly something that Edward is impatiently anxious for.

Ninjette helps Scar into position. He takes a moment to address both himself and his dead brother aloud. He still hates Amestris, and Amestrians. He's sure he always will, and he has no regrets or shame in this. And yet, he is about to help it, and them. Whatever that means, for himself, his people, and the world at large, it's what must be done. What course he, himself, will take after this day, he does not know.

He places his hands on the floor, and Amestris is engulfed in transmutation lightning for the third time within fifteen minutes. The glyphs the Ishvallans and Dr. Marcoh have been planting around the city activate along the preexisting lines of Father's city-glyph, and then reverberate out to the secret additions they've spent the last few months making to the macroglyph itself.

I feel like this day almost has to have some sort of longterm environmental impacts. Both here and in Xerxes, we saw that the true philosophers' stone creation spell caused some weird cloud deformations and weather anomalies. With THREE of these fool-sized megaspells going off in quick succession, I'm expecting nothing short of random antigravity zones and five-headed babies plaguing Amestris and its surroundings for the next century.

In the room underneath Scar's, Edward, Alphonse, and Izumi all start casting. Hitting Father with stone and metal projectiles from every direction at once, breaking his concentration and finally ending his death laser autofire.

Pride is still just standing around just barely holding himself together. I forgot he was even still in the room, heh.​

Ohhhhh, I see. It destroyed the philostone caches he's been seeding around the macroglyph. Brothar's invention was basically just a scaled-up version of the attack Dr. Marcoh used on Envy, or something along those lines. Rather than returning souls into their bodies if said bodies are available, it just unmakes philostone and releases them into the void or whatever.

I'm not sure if that can kill haemunculi. Envy was sort of a weird case, due to how she was put together. In any case, Father (and Pride) are in the center, which is probably safe for them just like it was safe for the humans during Father's ritual. But, I'm guessing that any raw philosopher's stone outside of the central perimeter and inside of the macroglyph boundaries is now gone. That would include both the bits that Hohenheim planted, and the system that Father uses to dampen catalytic energy.

Scar explains to Ninjette that Brothar's research into alchemy, alkahestry, and the differences between them, he noticed that there was something really weird going on with Amestrian alchemy. When they drew upon tectonic energy to catalyze their transmutations, something seemed to be regulating the flow. Something that did not appear to exist at all in the desert east of Ishval. Further research into this phenomenon led him to discover the macroglyph, and to devise his countermeasure to it.

From Scar's explanation, it's not clear if this is actually destroying philosophers' stone in the inscribed area, or just shutting down whatever spells it is currently being used to maintain. In either case, Father can no longer suppress alchemy in the country.

In fact, it now appears that Amestrian-style alchemy has more raw power than it did before, thanks to the free flow of tidal energy. Up until now, it seemed like alkahestry was just superior all around thanks to its range and biological applications, but nope! Western alchemy compensates by being able to throw more energy around, it just had some local blockage preventing people from fully capitalizing on that.

...

This does raise some worldbuilding questions. Surely, some Amestrian alchemists must have traveled outside of the circle and noticed that it was easier to transmute there.

I wonder if Father's spin doctors had a phony explanation for this, about local geothermal hotspots or something. That's actually something that lends itself to nationalistic propaganda, come to think of it. "Even with our geological handicaps, the glorious Amestrian spirit has mastered alchemy in a way that our fat and lazy neighbors never did."

On a more unambiguously positive note, I'm glad that Scar, Marcoh, and the Elric brothers' efforts in discovering and deciphering Brothar's notes still got to be relevant. Hohenheim's countermeasure made perfect in-universe sense, but it would have de-protagonized the others and turned Hohenheim into a deus ex machina as I'd feared might happen if that were the end of it. The way it's playing out now, neither of their efforts would have succeeded without the other; if it were just Hohenheim's counter-macroglyph, Father would have killed them all and probably destroyed Amestris out of spite after being foiled. If it were just Brothar's, no amount of freed-up alchemy would have made a different against GodFather.

...

With Father's attention divided between the battle and his unstable Wog situation, and multiple spontaneous casters hitting him with the full force of their newly unshackled alchemy, it seems like they might be able to wear him down. Hohenheim dances around the room, using his own energy to block and negate Father's attacks while the others just keep shooting.

It looks like whatever Father's new body is made out of, it isn't impervious-to-blunt-force-trauma philostone. He's actually expending energy of his own to protect himself from Edward, Alphonse, May, and Izumi's attacks.

Did he actually put himself in a flesh body to be superficially more like the father he never had? What an idiot.


I'll finish this episode next time. There's a lot happening in it.