Father Quotes

2 quotes from Fullmetal Alchemist, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.

The dwarf in the flask. Emptied one country to get a body and farmed another for centuries to get a god, and describes the whole procedure in the vocabulary of parenthood.

“Greed. You are both my son and a piece of my soul... So why would you betray your loving father?”

The family vocabulary is not a metaphor, which is the whole horror of the sentence. Father produced the homunculi by extracting his own sins and giving them bodies, so son and piece of my soul are two accurate descriptions of a single manufacturing step. It sounds like a wounded parent because parenthood is the only grammar available for what he actually did, and the series never lets him find another one.

Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.

“But why?! I just wanted to understand... this world's knowledge! I wanted to experience it, free! I just wanted to be FREE! FREE TO KNOW!”

The finale hands its architect a sympathetic motive in his final seconds and it is the weakest passage in an otherwise disciplined ending. Everything shown of him is appetite with a procedure attached: Xerxes emptied of every soul in it, Amestris farmed for centuries as a transmutation circle. A late claim about curiosity does not reframe that, it apologises for it, and the desire is asserted at full volume rather than demonstrated anywhere in the preceding sixty episodes.

Read Father's story from the start

Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.

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