Olivier Mira Armstrong Quotes

An introduction that tells you the character's entire method in the first three sentences and then undercuts itself in the last. She refuses a letter of recommendation from her own brother on the grounds that she assesses people directly, which is a real position and one she keeps for the rest of the series: she promotes a soldier for competence in front of a superior officer, and she works out that the country is being run by monsters before any state alchemist does, by looking at what is actually in front of her. Then she finishes with a slogan. Only the strong survive is exactly the received opinion she has just said she disregards, printed on the wall of the fort she commands. The line is worth having because both halves are sincere. Briggs runs on a motto its commander would not accept from anybody else.

Quoted as if Arakawa wrote it, and she did not. The sentence is 2 Thessalonians 3:10 by way of a great deal of twentieth-century politics, and it arrived in Amestris carrying all of that with it. As characterization it is efficient shorthand: a fortress in the far north with a labor economy and no patience, and a commander who says the harshest available thing about her own soldiers. As a quotation it is borrowed authority. Nothing in the scene tests it, nobody at Briggs is unable to work, and the series never puts the principle in front of a case where it would bite, which is what would have made it interesting. Compare her introduction one episode earlier, which is her own thought and contains an actual contradiction worth chewing on. This is the one that circulates, because a slogan travels and a contradiction does not.