“Will you sit in that chair wallowing in self-pity, or will you stand up and seize the chance the military can give you?”
Roy Mustang Quotes
2 quotes from Fullmetal Alchemist, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Yeah, I'm fine... except... it's a terrible day for rain.”
Hawkeye answers the lie correctly at first, noting the clear sky, then looks at him again and corrects herself, and that small reversal is the entire exchange. She understands immediately that the weather is a stand-in, and she decides the fiction serves him better than the fact would. What follows from it is measurable across the rest of the season. Mustang files his grief under work, transfers to Central, and converts the investigation into a campaign, which is what sorrow looks like once it has been promoted into jurisdiction. The man who could not say the plain word at a funeral keeps choosing escalation over mourning, and the show prices every choice. The lie held. It was expensive.
Read Roy Mustang'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.
Find Fullmetal Alchemist on Amazon
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Links on this page are affiliate links, which cost you nothing extra. They never influence what appears on this site or what the commentary says about it.
Detached from its scene, this is motivational-poster language, all posture and forward motion, and it has been coasting on that borrowed gravity ever since. The setting is less inspiring. Mustang says it days after two boys destroyed themselves trying to resurrect their mother, one missing two limbs, and the opportunity on offer is enlistment in the army that leveled Ishval. He is recruiting grieving children into the institution that will spend the rest of the story using them. The scene survives honesty because the show frames it honestly too: Hawkeye's quiet correction, that they choose their own path, is where the moral weight actually sits. The poster version loses her entirely, and she was the point.