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@heinkelfingerguns
I reread your team Greed time skip anthology allll the time and me and my gf started her first ever watch of fmab. She was devastated when Greed died and im so hype to be able to share it with her when we’re further along
Ahhh how fun!! I love hearing fun stories like that, thanks for sharing! (Hopefully your gf will fare better with greed death The Sequel but if not greedling's nonsense will hopefully make up for some of the pain there XD)
redo of an old thing from 2020 :] happy fma day!
reading the FMA webtoon
on the first watch through you really wonder why Father bothered creating Bradley - why go through the trouble of altering a human, who will still age and lacks the incredibly powerful regenerative properties of the fully artificial homunculi?
and then you start to think about it and the other homunculi (i guess with the exception of Pride) are really quite incompetent. Greed basically fucked off and outright disavowed Father, Sloth and Gluttony are both, uh, not intelligent enough to be used for anything requiring something beyond brute strength, and Lust and Envy, well...
i mean Lust is handing out philosopher's stones to incompetents willy nilly to get her job done, she tries to honeypot Havoc and isn't even successful, and then she leaks a ton of information to Mustang in her final confrontation with him and then leaves him alive to cauterize his wound and go kill her.
Envy, i mean Envy manages to kill Hughes at a good time and plays an important role at points, but dear lord, someone with that level of shapeshifting ability and they barely even get any useful info? ever? and the one time they try their hand at scheming and try to frame someone for Hughes' death, it's such a transparent ploy that basically everyone sees through it immediately. there's even a bit in the webtoon and the original manga (omitted from the show) where Pride has to tell them not to use Gluttony and cause a massive incident. a shapeshifter with zero sense of discretion!
and Pride, Pride doesn't fuck around, but much like Father is pretty uninterested in the day-to-day work, and of course his powers come with limits that make him less suitable than the others for certain tasks.
the selection process + training Bradley went through, his attitude towards the work - they produced an agent for Father that is fundamentally a lot more capable than everyone else on the team. Bradley much more credibly and subtly puts the heroes off the scent in the beginning (undone, of course, by Lust and Envy bumbling), mows his way through Greed's forces without allowing any information leaks, keeps everyone in the dark about his true loyalties for quite a bit longer than you'd expect, and just generally proves a far more credible and tenacious foe than the other homunculi (Pride, again, excepted), all while running the country.
and the other Homunculi and Father all... don't really seem aware of this? like logically you'd put him in charge, of Lust and Envy and Gluttony at the very least. but since he's human and younger than the rest of them it seems like he's basically the junior member? but if he's in charge of Lust and Envy, it kinda feels like Father would just win - their fuckups are what put everything into motion.
casts an especially interesting light on where the webtoon is at the current moment (right after Lust's death) - Bradley follows Mustang in but intentionally keeps further reinforcements from joining him, waits and listens in the background, and then lets everyone live. he's one of the fastest fuckers in the whole story and you're telling me he couldn't have caught up with Mustang before Lust got crisped? no way. 100%, he had to have let that happen, and i bet he left Mustang alive in the hopes that the same thing would happen to Envy.
My understanding is that the aging is an intended feature, not an unnecessary byproduct. They want someone who can convincingly imitate a human over a long period of time, and humans age. Although come to think of it Envy could mimic aging.
One thing I always thought was interesting is that Bradley, more than any of the other homunculi, even more than Pride, is always making a big deal about how he's superior to humans, how they're disgusting creatures who are barely sentient and he's above that, et cetera. My theory is that this is because the case for him being human is much stronger than for the other homunculi. You see something like this historically, many of the great nationalist figures themselves had nationality that was somehow doubtful or borderline.
(reblogging from prev b/c I think this is interesting Bradley character analysis and want to save it, but actually replying to OP):
he's one of the fastest fuckers in the whole story and you're telling me he couldn't have caught up with Mustang before Lust got crisped? no way. 100%, he had to have let that happen, and i bet he left Mustang alive in the hopes that the same thing would happen to Envy.
There *is* another reason to leave Mustang alive (they want him as a Promised Day sacrifice), and IIRC the moment you're reacting to is meant to foreshadow that reveal. The reader are supposed to wonder "why did he leave Roy alive there" (both Roy and Envy lampshade it in the next few chapters in case you didn't get it the first time) then about a dozen chapters later we get the answer (post-Gluttony's-stomach-adventure, Bradley takes the Elrics + Roy up to his office, explains the entire Promised Day plan, and holds Winry + Mustang's team hostage against their compliance).
There's some parts of the overall plot that rely on the villains jobbing it (ymmv on whether these feel like interesting character flaws or plot holes), but this part feels very neatly done to me :P
Also I think this dovetails well with your theory -- after all, the whole State Alchemist program was intended to find/produce sacrifice candidates. Why did they focus on Roy in particular? Probably because Bradley told them he was the best candidate!
#he's also an expert alchemist -- more likely to survive seeing the Gate? -- and easy to blackmail#but the same could be said of Alex Louis Armstrong
Hey yall I had a fuckin thought
So, as it’s roughly explained, the state alchemist program is a kind of “recruit potential human sacrifices” mechanism, with a side-order of “brute strength for the army”. But basically, the state alchemist title is mostly about being a researcher–given people like Shou Tucker exist, and given that the only requirement to stay a state alchemist is to submit a yearly report of your research that says “look I’m still being a useful scientist”.
So far, so far this is sensible, yeah? Father and the delightful children from down the lane are running a recruitment program for potential human sacrifices. So sure–butter them up! Give them lots of money, get them buddy-buddy with the government, and give them endless resources for research. It’s be pretty easy to trick a state alchemist in that position to open the portal if Sugar DaddyBradley is nudging them to do it.
And I’m still willing to go with this logic for the whole “draft the state alchemists into war” move. They make it pretty clear that was something of a last-ditch effort. And the blood transmutation circle around Amestris was an absolute necessity for Father’s plan. So the risk of a few state alchemists dying or resigning from your Potential Sacrifice Pool is worth it for the completion of the circle.
Now. To get to my fucking thought.
Edward fucking Elric. This fucking fight-me 12 year old troglodyte shows up to the exam and performs circle-less transmutation in front of mother fucking Bradley, demonstrating to one of the seven Actual Fucking Homunculi that he’d already opened the portal. Ed was literally prepped as a human sacrifice before he showed up to Central. A fully set human sacrifice showed up at the homunculi’s door, said “hey look what I can do!”, proved he’d opened the mother fucking portal already, and said “hey yeah hire me”. Human sacrifice, free shipping, no assembly required, handcuffs not included!
They could have just tossed Ed into a shoebox and kept him there until the Promised Day. They wouldn’t even need to make up an excuse he attacked the f u c k i n g president. That’s fucking treason babey. He’s 12, he’s an orphan, he’s from a rural town in buttfuck nowhere, he’s literally the easiest person alive to disappear. They could have arrested him for assassination crimes, kept him in gay baby jail, and just popped him out for the Promised Day
What do they do instead?! “Oh lmao this kid’s great. Let’s give him infinite money, no supervision, no governmental responsibilities, access to all our secret resources, and toss him on a train to who-the-fuck-knows-where-land”
They fucking did that
And like? They then had the audacity to be concerned when Edward “Fight Me” Elric almost got himself killed about 293 times. Just an endless game of “I thought u were watching him” from one homunculus to another when Ed fucking absconds half-way across the globe to go entice some other hostile entity into murdering him to death. That’s the whole series. Every arc is Ed baiting death while the homunculi are in the background like “:/ wish he wouldn’t do that”
This only gets worse when you consider they later learned Al opened the portal too because really?? These two stab-happy globe-trotting public menaces are 40% of your final evil plan for godhood. 40%. Almost half. You couldn’t fucking set aside a cardboard box to keep these idiots in?
We all knew Father was terrible at planning when we learned his thousands-of-years-in-the-making-plan involved him procrastinating until the last five minutes to get his last sacrifice, while he was?? playing chess in his fucking basement, I guess. But it’s like every time I think about it like really think about it I find 7 more reasons Father was a fucking shit idiot moron, king of the stupid fucking idiot club, flesh and blood founder of seven other established dumbasses, all living in their idiot hovel under central, just giving random dumbass 12 year olds infinite money, j u s t b e c a u s e.
People in the replies trying to explain Father’s actions fall into one of three categories
Father didn’t baby-gate Ed because humans are like ants to him and he had no concept of how thoroughly Ed and co. could fuck his shit up
Father and the Hot Topic Brigade didn’t lock Ed up because they recognized the unbridled chaotic 12-year-old energy compressed into such a small vessel and they understood no jail cell on earth would reliably hold this thing
Father and his sin-sonas didn’t put Ed in a box because locking Ed away in their lair would mean dealing with Edward Elric day-in and day-out in their own home for the next four years and frankly even godhood isn’t worth certain flavors of hell.
I have another possibility.
Fuhrer Eye Patch saw Edward “Catch these Hands” Elric and thought oh. He’s gonna cause problems.
But. You can’t look me in the eyes and tell me that Brad the Pissed Off didn’t also anticipate Roy “Don’t Mind Me Just a Manwhore Passing Through” Mustang causing problems at some point.
The solution? Give Elric to Mustang. The Human Blowtorch is going to spend so much time chasing and corraling the 6th grader who can turn his arm into a sword at will that it will be impossible for him to cause problems for CopyofHohenheim.exe.
What King Grumpy Pants didn’t anticipate was the two youngest state alchemists in history going hey, we cause a lot of problems separately, but imagine the chaos we could wreak if we joined forces!
Hey yall I had a fuckin thought
So, as it’s roughly explained, the state alchemist program is a kind of “recruit potential human sacrifices” mechanism, with a side-order of “brute strength for the army”. But basically, the state alchemist title is mostly about being a researcher–given people like Shou Tucker exist, and given that the only requirement to stay a state alchemist is to submit a yearly report of your research that says “look I’m still being a useful scientist”.
So far, so far this is sensible, yeah? Father and the delightful children from down the lane are running a recruitment program for potential human sacrifices. So sure–butter them up! Give them lots of money, get them buddy-buddy with the government, and give them endless resources for research. It’s be pretty easy to trick a state alchemist in that position to open the portal if Sugar DaddyBradley is nudging them to do it.
And I’m still willing to go with this logic for the whole “draft the state alchemists into war” move. They make it pretty clear that was something of a last-ditch effort. And the blood transmutation circle around Amestris was an absolute necessity for Father’s plan. So the risk of a few state alchemists dying or resigning from your Potential Sacrifice Pool is worth it for the completion of the circle.
Now. To get to my fucking thought.
Edward fucking Elric. This fucking fight-me 12 year old troglodyte shows up to the exam and performs circle-less transmutation in front of mother fucking Bradley, demonstrating to one of the seven Actual Fucking Homunculi that he’d already opened the portal. Ed was literally prepped as a human sacrifice before he showed up to Central. A fully set human sacrifice showed up at the homunculi’s door, said “hey look what I can do!”, proved he’d opened the mother fucking portal already, and said “hey yeah hire me”. Human sacrifice, free shipping, no assembly required, handcuffs not included!
They could have just tossed Ed into a shoebox and kept him there until the Promised Day. They wouldn’t even need to make up an excuse he attacked the f u c k i n g president. That’s fucking treason babey. He’s 12, he’s an orphan, he’s from a rural town in buttfuck nowhere, he’s literally the easiest person alive to disappear. They could have arrested him for assassination crimes, kept him in gay baby jail, and just popped him out for the Promised Day
What do they do instead?! “Oh lmao this kid’s great. Let’s give him infinite money, no supervision, no governmental responsibilities, access to all our secret resources, and toss him on a train to who-the-fuck-knows-where-land”
They fucking did that
And like? They then had the audacity to be concerned when Edward “Fight Me” Elric almost got himself killed about 293 times. Just an endless game of “I thought u were watching him” from one homunculus to another when Ed fucking absconds half-way across the globe to go entice some other hostile entity into murdering him to death. That’s the whole series. Every arc is Ed baiting death while the homunculi are in the background like “:/ wish he wouldn’t do that”
This only gets worse when you consider they later learned Al opened the portal too because really?? These two stab-happy globe-trotting public menaces are 40% of your final evil plan for godhood. 40%. Almost half. You couldn’t fucking set aside a cardboard box to keep these idiots in?
We all knew Father was terrible at planning when we learned his thousands-of-years-in-the-making-plan involved him procrastinating until the last five minutes to get his last sacrifice, while he was?? playing chess in his fucking basement, I guess. But it’s like every time I think about it like really think about it I find 7 more reasons Father was a fucking shit idiot moron, king of the stupid fucking idiot club, flesh and blood founder of seven other established dumbasses, all living in their idiot hovel under central, just giving random dumbass 12 year olds infinite money, j u s t b e c a u s e.
Instead of continuing through the five stages of grief I’ve decided to just stop at stage one
a moment of tranquility
curiosity
I always forget about October 3rd until it IS October 3rd when I see the entire FMA fandom going crazy. That beeing said, all I have for this year is some last minute doodles that ended up being a day late anyway :/
I stg I need to mark down this stupid date in my calendar >:[
*EXCEEDINGLY FRUSTRATED GRUMBLE*
Deleting my dating apps to find love the old fashioned way (cross a desert with a tiny panda to a foreign country in search of immortality, fall in love with the idea of a guy, meet him, hate his guts, and fall for his brother who is a soul bonded to a suit of armor)
Losing my mind at this
fullmetal alchemist
kid who’s met god voice: no im agnostic
would you consider alphonse elric to be sarcastic
yes
no
#like. he IS. to me #but someone disagreed with me and it's been long enough that i can't recall for sure how much this is shown in canon #and also 03 vs mangahood (person has only seen 03 which i think al comes off as more earnest in????? idk)
Yeah that fully explains it. Like none of the things in this post happen in '03
Edward Elric should’ve been on Reddit. It would not fix him but it would make him funnier
If I have to read Frederick the Great’s personal coffee recipe with my own eyes, so do you
