Alex Louis Armstrong Quotes

Again is the word doing the work. Armstrong broke down during the Ishval war, refused to go on with it, and was branded a coward (CBR's account of the character); in episode 16 Mustang still refers to having called him soft. The soldiers shouting at him to run from Sloth are offering the exit Ishval once handed him, and he turns it down. He has not become the other kind of soldier to do it. What he refused at Ishval was pointless brutality, and Sloth is a homunculus sent to kill his sister, the general standing beside him, who told her troops an episode earlier that her brother had trained himself too well to die that way. The oath does not repudiate what he did at Ishval. It narrows it. He will walk away from a massacre and will not walk away from a fight, and the series lets him keep both halves.

In the first episode he strips off his shirt in a hospital room, the brothers scream, and Edward orders him out. The gag is doing structural work. Armstrong arrives before the words State Alchemist carry any weight, and arrives as a joke. By episode 4 he is the one explaining, soberly, that people have not forgotten what State Alchemists did in the Ishvalan war. Comedy first costs the series nothing and buys it a great deal later. A man introduced as pure exhibition can turn out to have broken down at Ishval without it reading as a twist, because the exhibition was always enthusiasm aimed at somebody else's wellbeing. His idea of treatment is to show up, loudly, whether or not he was invited. That same instinct, better aimed, is what keeps him in the fight against Sloth fifty-four episodes later.