Wooooooo~

[nekokoban]

Today, my father and I discovered the use of our digital camera -- its purpose, it seems, is to be around to take embarrassing photos of my mother, lying on the couch with ground-up cucumber on her face. XD Really, now. XD

Anyway, my LJ paid account expires today. Thank you again, jyuu_chan for buying me the two months♥♥♥♥♥♥ I will miss the extra iconage, I admit, but at least I still have my penguins♥♥ I had fun with my time, and now I'll say goodbye to the paid world~~~ XD

Also, downloaded and just finished watching Fullmetal Alchemist episode 43.

Now, I gotta admit -- I know a lot of people who were sort of "meh" for a large chunk in the middle, and while I was sort of like that, I mostly wasn't. This is seriously, in my opinion, one of the best stories I've seen in a long time, and there's just something nice about a quasi-wartime story that has its lighter moments, but doesn't actually shy away from the whole GOOD PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS, and vice-versa. I love how Ed is portrayed as a very failiable and sometimes weak human being, while still being strong enough to have survived his own horrible mistakes and still come out fighting for it.

Now, pretty much from the beginning -- my friends who've been in the fandom with me a long time -- I've had this peculiar fascination for the Elric parents, Hoenheim in particular. I've just watched episode 43, and he seems like a genuinely good guy -- a bit absent-minded, a bit out of date and goofy, but a good guy. This isn't someone you could picture deliberately leaving his wife and two young sons and then ignoring letters talking about Trisha's illness. The fact that he had to ask Winry how long Trisha's been dead indicates that there's a good chance those letters Ed and Al sent actually never reached him.

At the same time, Winry is probably Al's age, a year younger than Ed. The fact that Hoenheim keeps mistaking her for her mother, and the things the Ouroborous have implied about "that guy" -- and from Envy's rant, I'd say it's pretty damn obvious he's talking about Hoenheim -- you've got to wonder. Is the nice-guy thing a facade, that he's using to lull his sons into a false sense of security and into trusting him (though I wonder, truly, if Ed even can at this point) -- or was he, like Ed and Al, a good person who made some horrible mistakes, though perhaps on a grander scale?

The manga, at this point, has all but said that Hoenheim is the "Father" of the Ouroborous, and what we've seen of him isn't pleasant at all. In the manga, just from what I've seen, he comes across as a cold and calculating sort, with no mercy or kindness. He appears to be the kind of man Ed expects him to be -- an uncaring bastard who abandoned his family without a second thought.

At this point, we don't really know what Hoenheim's motives are, in either the anime or the manga. It could very well turn out that the pleasant attitude is just a mask, and that he's no different from his manga-self, under the surface. The manga-self could have some kind of noble ideal backing him -- one of my theories was perhaps that Hoenheim knew Trisha was ill (in the anime, at least, they say she must have been sick a very long time and hid the pain for years), and left to find the Philosopher's Stone to create a cure for her, and was corrupted by the search along the way.

Of course, there are vague implications here and there that Hoenheim is MUCH older than a human could be (like Dante, in the anime; if she ressurected Greed, but Greed's been sealed over a hundred years -- it lends to curiousity, how the two stories should intersect and tie together). I know in the manga, at least, there are still some theories that Hoenheim will be Pride, the last of the Ouroborous, and given how old the Ouroborus are implied to be, this could very well be the case.

The beautiful thing is the not knowing, though -- I want to know, I sure as well would love to have the secrets explained and the rationlizations given. I'd like Hoenheim to be a nice guy -- it's too late for him to give back anything to his sons, but at least there's the comfort of knowing he isn't evil. But I like the concept of him as a sick and twisted bastard, too, an "evil" character with selfish motives. (Because one can argue that in FMA there's no truly evil character; I'd say Envy comes the closest, but I also think Envy's bugfuck nuts, which doesn't excuse, but at least explains his attitude.)

Alternately, I've been thinking about this too damn much. XD But I freaking LOVE this series, man, and next week's episode is 「光のホーエンヘイム」 which just makes me excited because we're gonna learn MORE yay and eek what's going to happen NEXT and DUDE, what's going to happen to Lust? O___O

It's great, man. Love this show. XD

Comments

[harukami]

This is SO true, and I hadn't even taken Cornello's role as a religious figure to heart -- even if he was a crazy bastard planning on taking the place over, he'd clearly had enough religious training to *pass* as this guy, and I have to wonder if the partial stone hadn't driven him to that as well, with your theory that the stones corrupt -- I mean, Cornello is a religious figure but he's gone nuts, what's his name the Koyasu character is at a level of obsession over Lust I'd say isn't healthy (but then, he's a Koyasu character), and... I'm having trouble thinking of others beyond Magwar (Who we know had the goal of restoring the city but was going about it in a pretty assheaded way). Marcoh worked with the red stone a LOT, but he kept it in glass containers when he wasn't, so possibly he protected himself from it a little -- and there's no proof that SOME of his paranoia wasn't caused by that (when people really ARE out to get you, it's hard to tell how much might be disorder and how much is just natural response.) On that note, Kimberly was fucked up, as was Basque Grahn, though they were to START -- but while Roy and Armstrong also used the stones, we know they didn't LIKE doing it, which means I can project that they probably took them off/didn't use them at every possible opportunity. (and it was only one night of wearing it for them, iirc.)

That was an entirely off topic ramble as my brain sprang off along your theory, and I've totally forgotten where I was, so I'm just gonna move onto the next part? XD Oh wait, right, yeah, Cornello the religious figure -- Agreed, and didn't think of that at ALL.

[nods] I had hints Scar's brother was castrated when I saw the white scarring that scene we saw him naked, but I think it gave us biiig proof with the bloody pants and... yeah. That's so symbolic... off topic again (my mind jumped from "I wonder what body parts the people who raised the other sins are missing!), but I wonder who tried to raise the other sins. They're probably dead by now, but.. (And on that note -- what did DANTE lose? She created a homunculus, so she has to have FAILED at human transmutation, but...)

[nods] You're right about lust -- I mean, I think the SIN of lust is supposed to be, like gluttony, about *over*-indulging... but fact is that it's been condemned by so many religious figures that it's ended up being that the NATURAL impulse of lust is condemned as a sin. And so... Yeah, I DO find that humanizing of lust VERY very symbolic and interesting -- actually, you know what always struck me as weird? Lust is the only sin we ever see wearing an outfit that's not her sin!Outfit. She wears this white peasant dress (and it doesn't look like it's OVER her outfit) when talking to Magwar. I took screencaps if you want them.

BAH. You do TOO notice things, and you said so many things here that I hadn't even THOUGHT about, so... [NOOGIES] And thank YOU for the debate!

[nekokoban]

I mean, given that Cornello was the first "villain" of the series (introduced even before the Sins), it may be that he simply wasn't given the sort of depth that the other "villains" later got -- but it could very well be the whole corruption of power thing we've seen time and again in the series, Yoki, at Yousewell, Hakuro to an extent -- even, in some ways, Ed and Roy, who've all changed and done some unpleasant things because of the power they have. (Less Al, because Al, as we pointed out before, was willing to NOT have his body restored if it meant sacrificing people, even though he, like his brother, probably has the capacity to transmute the Stone out of prisoners.) Uh, anyway -- it could be anything like, say, the Crusades or a harken to the dark ages, where corruption of the church existed, Cornello wanting to take over the country to ostensibly spread the rightness of his religious beliefs. Add on the Koyasu character (I want to say Luciferas, but I suspect that's because I was rereading Haunted Junction manga recently, and that was the name of a powerful character in that, haha XD) desperately wanting a cure for the fossil plague, Magwar wanting to revive his city (and likely fill his coffers) -- ALL of these men directly handled the stone; Marcoh, as far as we can see, only directly handled it for a short while, from when Ed broke the vial to when it got absorbed into Scar. (And, you know, Scar.) Going beyond that -- well, we don't know where/how Armstrong wore his enhancer, or Grahn, but we can very likely guess that Armstrong wore his somewhere on his knuckle guards, and Roy, we see, wears it on a ring over his gloves. Neither of these would have much, if any, direct contact with the skin -- Kimberly, though, we see has a necklace, which he could very easily have been handling or wearing under his shirt until air from the explosions yanked it out.

[laughs] My friends and I didn't make the castration connection at first, though there was a LOT of "uhhh ... wow, wonder how HE tans himself" comments going on when he wandered out naked and with that large white patch. XD And you know, given my theory about Dante = Lila? And how Dante being alivecan't match with her raising Greed, who's been sealed for over a hundred years? It could very well be she lost something so important in the original body she switched her awareness -- in essence, the ORIGINAL Dante would be missing something related to raising Greed, but because of the theory of her soul-hopping, these NEW bodies she's hosted in obviously are not missing whatever it was. Does that make sense?

[nods] I mean, okay, the hallmark of the "Sin" outfit seems to be black, with the red circles with their 'veins' going down arms or other limbs. We've finally seen Sloth in her outfit (which looks very similiar to Lust's, by the by), but -- we know Greed wears something completely unrelated to that, and anime!Pride (though that's probably as much out of necessity, being who/what he is) -- but, yeah. Lust has worn other things -- and when she goes to meet Marcoh, she's wearing that fur-lined coat, and then I want to say she was wearing other stuff when she was working with the Koyasu character, though I forget what. XD;

It's interesting, damnit. I really want to see how it'll pan out with her -- she remembers a lot of herself, now (she even asks Scar a few pointed questions about her past life), and it's obviously weakening her, which the Sins can't seem to allow at this point -- I really want to know how it'll gooooooo. ToT

[harukami]

[nods] Considering how IMPORTANT Liore and even Cornello is LATER in the series, I don't think it's irrelevant. I mean, I actually don't much 'like' Ed's actions in those episodes (I think they make sense with Ed's CHARACTER, but I think they're more harmful than 'good' actions) -- because Ed's essentially trying to get the stone as a selfish measure. ("I don't care one bit about military order!") Al makes the excuse that he thinks Ed did it for Roze -- but I think if Ed DID do it for Roze it's because his beliefs clashed with hers and he wanted her to see it HIS way, if that makes sense. (like, "You're being duped! And you're okay with being duped! I'm going to open your eyes so you can't deny it any more! You can take it from there.") There IS this corruption of power feeling from those episodes, and not just on Cornello's side, I think. This is Ed BEFORE he realizes the level of sacrifice -- but people will still die from how rashly and wildly he wanted the stone.

(I think the Koyasu character had a two-syllable name. >_< Can't remember it, though.) And you're right- I mean, of course ROy needs the gloves, since he's got his spark-array on it, but Yikes. The gloves might well be a shield as well as a weapon in that case. [thinks] Huh. It works disturbingly well.

[laughs at the tan thing] See, I almost thought that, but it was so distinct, and SCAR's scar went white, so I thought...yeah. XD And, oh yeah, you mentioned the Dante thing! (Though if *I* were the god of Alchemy, i'd be cheesed and think that was cheating a bit.) It makes sense with the NAME Dante, though, as the guide through the underworld -- The name is *inherantly* referring to someone who passes through death without touching it.

About the hallmark sin outfit -- Doesn't Greed's 'real' form (the monstrous one) also have the 'vein' markings? And Lust's -- when she's wearing th efur coat, she has her sin outfit on underneath (you can see her gloves and stuff), and with the Koyasu character, she DOES juts wear the sin outfit (I know, because Cyth remarked on it when we watched that episode, so I watched for it) XD but... I'm pretty sure she's not wearing the sin outfit under the one in Magwar's mines and I'm ont sure why that stands out to me ,because she's still definately the sin there. XD

It IS interesting [flails] I WANT 41!!!