Let’s Talk about Edward’s Disability
Automail - A Means to an End
So I’m noticing some misconceptions when it comes to Edward’s automail and I just wanted to clear things up for how the world works at the least for my individual take on Edward.
So the thing I need you to remember when dealing with my Edward is that he is disabled.
I know Edward can run and jump and flip and kick and do all of these amazing things.
That doesn’t stop him from being disabled.
Please also remember that Edward feels everything lopsided, as on the right side he can feel next to nothing from the entire length of his arm - shoulder to the tip of his fingers, and on the left side of his lower body he can feel next to nothing from the mid thigh all the way down to the tips of his toes.
I said next to because at the base or ports of his automail Edward can feel the connection of his nerves to the machine. That’s why he’s able to tell Winry that “his shoulder feels numb” in Star of Milos or one of the reasons during lab 5 he could identify that something was wrong with his shoulder.
However when it comes to Edward’s arm his sense of “feeling” relies heavily on weight. His right side has become dependent on knowing how much something weighs. Edward can’t feel what’s in his hand despite how it may appear. He really just has to trust the object is in his grip whether that be by sight. the sound of the metal gripping or by the weight of it that it adds to his shoulder.
Edward’s right shoulder and port are the running engine of his automail. If you’ll look at how it’s connected to his body, you’ll see that the port of his shoulder actually takes up a decent portion of his chest. It covers almost his entire right pectoral and moves into his right shoulder blade.
|| Please get used to these pictures I’m going to use them a lot. ||
Ed’s automail doesn’t just effect his arm - like series constantly pushes. He only lost his arm but in order to even be able to have an arm again he had to sacrifice even more of his body so it had a place to connect.
If you really look at him you’ll see all the scarring that occurred because of the surgery - surgery that is said to make a grown man scream out or cry in pain over.
Ed was 11 when they did this to his body. Look at his shoulder before the surgery.
It’s there. It’s all there. His chest was unharmed by Truth and so was his shoulder. He ONLY lost his arm, and the series like’s to push that fact but what it doesn’t push is the amount of alterations he had to have done to his growing pre-teen body in order to have that famous automail arm.
He has bolts grafted into his body - anchored right into his bones to keep that port on his body.
Three on his chest - two into his side and one into his collar bone
and three into his back - two into his side again and one into his shoulder blade.
I want you to right now - as you’re reading this - roll your shoulder slowly. Feel your shoulder blade? Edward’s got a bolt there. Do you feel your collarbone as you slowly drop your shoulder forward? Edward’s got a bolt there. Bolts drilled right into his bones.
His Automail hurts. Al says in the beginning of the series, that he wants to get Ed’s body fixed first because Edward’s automail is hard on his body.
The dub line is actually “No Brother, you first - that automail is so tough on you.”
It’s like this because as I said it’s been grafted into his skeletal structure.
So when Ed moves, it moves, but don’t forget that automail has no outside power source. it’s connected straight into his nervous system - each nerve, each and every nerve is anchored right into this machine that’s powered through the electrical pulses that come from those nerves. It regulates the power to the pneumatic actuators and electrical motors inside of it. Ed is it’s power source.
^ It looks like this under all that pretty plating after all ^
Basically, Edward’s brain is still firing the signals to move his right arm / hand - the lost limb(s) and left leg)) So his arm still moves as fluid as it would if it was still flesh and blood because his automail receives the signals sent out by his brain and when his nerves react, his arm amplifies the signals and does the motion his body was trying to tell the lost limb to do.
But it took rehabilitation to do this. Rehabilitation to be able to use his limbs in the first place - that was supposed to take a whole three years to complete and Edward cut down to one. I have no doubt that he pushed himself. He had to push himself. He had to push himself so ridiculously hard to get himself up to running condition - enough to be fighting his brother - in a year. I bet he tried to fight his brother in shorter than a year and I bet he was spitting blood just like Pinako said he would be.
So when I say Edward is in pain constantly, this is why. It’s not a hard pain. It’s nothing that drops him. No it’s like this constant ache that rests between his shoulder blades from his small frame trying to carry enough weight that it’s stopping him from growing.
Edward’s arm literally puts so much stress on his body it hasn’t been able to grow. His now teenage maturing body got stuck in a time loop basically because there was too much weight bringing it down. He carries that weight on his shoulder every day.
Personally, I believe his arm has to weight something close to 20 - 25 lbs with his leg weighing about the same. But then like I said, this is for my own personal take on him. I personally believe that his automail adds about another 50lbs to his body weight - making him a firm 160 - 170 lbs.
(His own body has to be a decent weight considering all the flips and jumps and kicks and stuff he can do because he has to have a lot of muscle on his body to be able to jump high enough to kick his 7′3″ armored brother in the face. Ed alone probably weighs 110 /120 lbs even at 4′11″. )
Now when we you look at this leg, you can see that it’s still partly there.
His automail only comes up to mid-thigh / just above the knee. So he didn’t even lose the whole thing, but he did lose enough that it puts pressure on his hip / pelvis to move it. This port however is different from the shoulder port in the fact it houses the main support rod of the leg in a different way but it’s still bolted into his body.
The thing you see in the top picture is the outer plating that protects the port, where as this is the actual place of connection and it is attached into Edward’s leg with one large bolt driven into each side. They have to be large in this case, and heavily reinforced because these bolts don’t just keep the port in place and the leg attached to his body but they also have to be weight bearing. If the bolts in this port snap - not only does it break the port’s connection and Edward loses his leg taking him down with it - but he’ll feel those bolts snap inside of his leg and they could cause more internal damage that might prevent him from having an automail leg in the first place.
Also as I said in the sections about his arm, I personally believe that each piece of his automail weighs around 25lbs - so that means his exceptionally small frame is trying to move something with that kind of weight. It strains his pelvis leaving him with sore hips and he has to readjust himself a lot to find the most comfortable position for him to set for long periods (or if he’s been on it a lot - for him to set at all.)
But that weight is also where the lopsided feeling I mentioned comes into play. Edward naturally ( at this point) has more strength in his right shoulder and left hip due to having to move these solid pieces of steel around for years and years.
But all and all, it’s set up much like his arm in the way that it turns the firing of messages to his lost leg into energy and instructions for his automail. He just has to train his body constantly to keep himself in proper shape in order to be able to move it.
On that subject. I have mentioned in other headcanons / things about Edward that the boy suffers from mass pain during rain or thunderstorms.
Now this is mentioned in the manga / brotherhood, when he goes out with Pinako to dig up the grave of the thing he transmuted - and he ends up on his knees, throwing up he’s in so much pain. And that’s just a heavy rain storm.
Now while I think this has something to do with the fact that he just has old injuries and old injuries hurt in weather changes, whether they’re broken bones or what not, I also think this has something to do with the fact that he rushed his rehabilitation by two years. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of it didn’t heal correctly so it lead to him having extremely painful reactions during poor weather or extreme cold. So when thunderstorms roll around the the barometric pressure in the air changes he wants to throw up from the pressure it puts on the ports in his body - the bolts in his body.
Automail does not change that Edward is a double amputee. When poor weather hits, he would have adverse reactions regardless - but with so much metal in his body and his nerves literally connected to a machine that picks up the smallest reactions out of them - thunderstorms and heavy weather just destroys him.
Edward has also woken from a nightmare during a storm and the first thing he did was hug his leg and declare “It hurts.”
In no way, shape or form does Ed’s automail give him a magical pain free cure to fix all of his problems. Honestly, it made it so he was a complete person again and he could function mostly independently. It gave him him hands-free alchemy but it also gave him a ton of new problems.
I know people rag on Al for ‘mothering’ him throughout the series, but honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a lot more than just “You’re sleeping with your tummy out.” It’s probably holding his hair back when he can’t stop puking, and making sure he stays in bed when he’s so dizzy from pain he falls over. Al has probably carried him countless times - conscious or unconscious. I wouldn’t be surprised if Al has also had to go in Ed’s place or call in Ed’s place to refuse summons from Mustang - lightly explaining things like ‘He’s not feeling well’ or coming up with every other reason he can so no one else knows how bad it is. Because Al knows that would destroy him. He knows his brother is trying to be as strong as he possibly can for this - for them - for him so he’d never let anyone know just exactly what that automail does to Edward.
Because it does a lot more than just give him an arm and a leg.
Edit:: You can read Part 2 now here.
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