“It's just so lovely! The smell of oil, the hum of the ball bearings, the rugged yet amazingly beautiful form created through anatomical engineering! Ahh, how wonderful you are... my automail!”
Winry Rockbell Quotes
2 quotes from Fullmetal Alchemist, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
The engineer the plot depends on. Introduced rhapsodising about ball bearings, and the series never walks it back, which is why her hold on the story stays material rather than romantic.
“You'd be lost without me, Alchemy Freak.”
It would be easy to read this as banter between childhood friends, and it is that. It is also a supplier reminding a client of a dependency that the plot never lets him escape: the arm fails at inconvenient moments, and when it does, the story stops until she is available. Whatever the series is doing with these two emotionally, it keeps her leverage material, which is a more interesting foundation than most shonen gives the girl from home.
Read Winry Rockbell'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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Her first substantial scene is a rhapsody about ball bearings and the series never walks it back. In most shonen the childhood friend who maintains the hero's prosthetic would be a support role with a running gag attached; here the maintenance is a trade with its own vocabulary, and the enthusiasm is the characterisation rather than the joke. Everything Winry does later, up to and including the surgery scenes, is this scene taken seriously.