Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Hey... Am I dying now...? For real...? What is dying like...? Such a pain... to think about it... but such a pain... living too...”
Sloth Quotes
2 quotes from Fullmetal Alchemist, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read the character analysis and its source limits
The homunculus written as comic relief, who complains that everything is too much trouble while digging a circular tunnel around an entire country. He is the only one of the seven for whom the sin he is named after turns out to be a diagnosis rather than an appetite.
“Yes...I am...the fastest homunculus.”
The whole Sloth joke is that he can barely be bothered to move: in episode 34 he surfaces muttering that digging the hole is a bother, and after a tank shell to the face his answer is to get right back to work digging. Episode 52 turns the joke inside out without dropping it. He has just told Olivier and Alex Armstrong that dying is a bother and fighting all-out a worse one; then he kills two soldiers and charges past so fast that Alex sees only a blur. The speed is not the contradiction it looks like. A few lines later he states his plan, which is to kill them quickly and then sleep, and the logic closes: if effort is the enemy, the shortest fight is the cheapest one. Olivier reads the flaw immediately. He is too fast to steer himself, and so the sin shows up a second time, in his aim. A creature built to avoid effort will not spend any on correcting course.
About Sloth
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Around Fullmetal Alchemist
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Read Sloth's story from the start
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The joke about Sloth is that he complains, and this is where the joke turns out to have been the character. Everything he says in the series is a variation on it being too much trouble, delivered while digging a circular tunnel around an entire country, which is the largest single labor anyone in the series performs. Nobody treats that as a contradiction because he is written as comic relief. Here he asks what dying is like and gets no answer, and then applies the same verdict to both states in the same breath. That is not a punchline. It is a being who was made for one task, given just enough interiority to notice that he never chose it, and who arrives at indifference between continuing and stopping because neither was ever his to pick. The homunculi are each named for a sin. He is the only one for whom the sin turns out to be a diagnosis.