Barry the Chopper Quotes

Barry wants Alphonse to perform the frightened reaction his reputation has failed to produce. The boy has never heard of the infamous killer, so Barry proposes another reason to be impressed: the missing body inside his armor. Al removes his own helmet. Barry responds with precisely the alarm he had been coaching, then adds an insult. There is an easy defense of the reaction. Living with an unusual condition does not mean expecting to encounter it in someone else; surprise can be sincere. The problem is the hierarchy Barry tries to preserve through that surprise. His own condition is supposed to make him fearsome, while Al's makes him a freak. Al's answer calls the remark impolite, bringing the encounter down from supernatural horror to ordinary manners. He does not need to deny that their bodies are strange. He denies Barry the privilege of deciding that the same strangeness grants one person stature and costs another person respect.

Falman proposes tracking down the researchers who put Barry's soul into armor. Barry says they have already been consumed in making Philosopher's Stones. The murderer is useful here because he knows what happened inside an operation the investigators are trying to reconstruct. When Mustang asks about an officer killed in a phone booth, Barry checks the crime against his own preferred method. Mustang drops that question after the distinction about chopping. The exchange is funny because Barry treats a murder inquiry as a matter of recognizing professional style, with no corresponding sign of remorse. It would give him too much credit to read cooperation as rehabilitation. A witness can provide valuable information while retaining the habits of thought that made him dangerous. What the line establishes most clearly is how narrowly Barry understands the question he has been asked.

Barry describes enjoying murder, then cuts Edward's shoulder while explaining why everyone supposedly shares the appetite. His example is warfare: people with morals can kill brutally once society permits it. Permission becomes desire without an argument connecting the two. That substitution does the work of the speech. Barry starts with something he says he saw State Alchemists do, passes through the conditions under which killing is allowed, and arrives at a claim about what every person secretly wants. The widening claim makes his private enjoyment seem ordinary. Edward's refusal to understand becomes a failure to admit human nature rather than a refusal of Barry's choices. The attack accompanying the explanation matters because Barry is not conducting a detached inquiry. He is giving his victim a theory that dissolves the distinction between them. The story does not need to prove every soldier innocent of pleasure in violence to expose the leap: authority to kill and appetite for killing are different questions.