History Headscratchers / FullmetalAlchemist

[[folder: Why not use Hohenheim [[spoiler: to get Al's body?]]]]

[[Folder: Why the taboo?]]

[[/Folder]]

Father needs three critical things for his grand plan. A big ass circle, some bloody crests and five people who have met truth. One and two he accomplishes easily (the northern one seems really late into the 400 year plan but let's assume he can only go at the rate Sloth can dig the tunnel). But the so called sacrifices he's really lacking in. He doesn't even have the full five come the day he was preparing for for centuries! This is a massive glaring oversight in the scheme, he easily could have been thwarted if any of the sacrifices decided to get out of Dodge that week. This also becomes way more baffling when we consider that Father basically invented Alchemy and has been steering Amestris's development since the country's inception. It really makes one wonder, why the hell is human transmutation a taboo anyway? If I were father I'd be encouraging Alchemists to pursue human transmutation. Let them know about the whole sacrifice something and you can use Alchemy without a transmutation circle. I don't think it would result in less people than the grand total of three he managed to gather with his "Make it illegal and relie on some rebel souls to try their hand at it anyway." The closest explanation we get from that one army guy is that it's illegal purely to stop the creation of immortal armies, but that hardly seems like something father would be afraid of. Especially when it's shown how the military is entirely incapable of actually controlling the dolls they made.

* Hohenheim [[spoiler: dies not that long after the fight with Father]], and he almost definitely knew this was going to happen, so why couldn't Ed use him to [[spoiler: transmute Al's body?]]. Ed obviously doesn't want anyone else to die on his watch, but since [[spoiler: Hohenheim's death was certain and soon-to-come]] why didn't he even try to insist to be used in the transmuation? [[spoiler: I mean, dying just slightly before he was meant to wouldn't have changed much, right?]]

** It's been implied that Wrath can dodge bullets because he can predict when they're coming with his Eye, even if he wasn't aware of the shooter before (kinda stretching it here. It was mentioned somewhere that the Führer had survived "hailstorm after hailstorm of bullets on the battlefield during his service" or something like that). Now, I don't know what a ''Sharingan'' does ether, but mostly I'm just wondering how dodging those bullets was so different from chapter 99's conclusion.

** "After his father was murdered, Selim was too young to take command. So...we faked his own death. We also didn't want to cause trouble for the new Fuhrer, since we knew factions would want to make him a puppet"...So, 90% the truth!

* How did Pride stay alive -according to Hirakawa- for 400 years without anyone noticing? I would understand if he kept out of the public eye, but he is the fuhrer's son. Wouldn't have Mrs. Bradley- after even just a couple of years notice that her adopted son didn't grow? And even if the adoption was recent (which would be bullshit, like what, adopted 4 weeks before the start of the series- intime), he was still in the public eye- they pull out some pictures of him still young, from fifty years before, how could no one have noticed that? Btw, not sure about the picture thing.

** Greedling was created the same way as Wrath, but he submitted to his Stone, which seems to have made the integration go smoother. Greed was expecting a fight, remember? Wrath, on the other hand, mentions that the souls in his Stone burned themselves out until there was only one left, and he doesn't know if that is his original soul or a different one. Because he only has one soul, he only has one life. Only having one soul also seems to be the reason why his body ages, although it DOES still age slower than it should; note that while he looks to be in his 40's at most now, [[spoiler: when he died, his body immediately aged substantially, to what a 60+ year old man should reasonably look like]]. This next part gets into fanwank territory, but it's likely that Father never gave him any more souls after he was made, the way he could for the other homonculi, because he needed him to continue to age rather than being eternally youthful like the other homonculi. If the fuhrer suddenly became immortal, people would be asking questions about that. Wrath has to be able to age and die.

** We actually get to something that DOES bother me: Manga Wrath and manga Pride. Okay, manga Pride KIND OF works, but manga Wrath is a COMPLETE asspull. The only time he's really foreshadowed is when he's shaking at Hughes's funeral, and even then, it doesn't feel right that he was "just angry." He rarely ever acts angry, and while he keeps bitching about his age, he pulls atheletic feats no other homunculus in the manga or anime have ever demonstrated. In short, the anime's take on the [[spoiler: Fuhrer]] just works better.

** If anything, what doesn't work in the anime is him as Pride. The manga version of Pride fits the description much better; while King Bradley is simply a fuhrer that has more to do with hatred and cold heartedness, [[spoiler: "Selim Bradley"]] is a very old entity that takes pride in his work and is very loyal to Father, looking down on practically everyone else except his creator [[spoiler: and his adoptive mother]] on the grounds that they are inferior to him. You don't get so much "pride" from King Bradley.

** The final episode of the Brotherhood anime averts this particular problem. [[spoiler: Roy says "someone else needs it more. I'll use it after him.", and the scene cuts to Havoc's shop...]] AFatherToHisMen to the end, [[spoiler:Fuhrer]] Mustang.

* Against the mannequins, Edward resorts to melee, despite the power of his combat alchemy. Mustang adheres to form, nuking the room. But when they advance to the Fuhrer-candidates, it's melee time for both, with Mustang not flaming the candidates or the gold-toothed alchemist.

[[folder:Blind Fuhrer]]

* Exactly how does being blind stop you from being Fuhrer? Is this some kind of obscure clause in the Amestris Constitution or something? You don't need to be able to see to be a ruler, its not exactly a front lines position.
** Being Fuhrer is not just about fighting. It's kind of important to see any paper work you have to do as Fuhrer, you know, among other things.

** I always figured Mustang didn't get the Fuhrer position because he wasn't high enough rank, not because he was blind. He is still a colonel while Grumman was a general.

** The new Fuhrer makes it pretty clear that the military's keeping a close eye on Selim just in case any Pride traits resurface, but at that point it seemed like he was a normal boy. My guess would be that he lost his Homunculus powers when Ed... did whatever it was that he did to Pride in their fight. It looked like he destroyed Pride's stone, so no HealingFactor, but I'll admit to being confused how Pride's still alive if his stone is gone.

* Just one big question. [[spoiler: How the hell did the gold-toothed doctor side with the homunculi!? There's got to be some kind of explanation for that! Well, maybe not when it comes to Kimblee, but still.]]

in the beginning of Fullmetal Alchemist, the narration poses the question about what the value of a human soul is, but the question is never answered throughout the show. yet we see very often that [[spoiler: the Philosopher Stones can create things seemingly out of nothing, because they're made from human souls]], so there's clearly a conversion value going on there. yet the series never answers how much gold, iron or dirt a single human soul converts to

** Only having one soul means Wrath ages like a more-or-less normal human and has no HealingFactor. His badassery comes from his Ultimate Eye, which allows him to scan his surroundings and always make the best move in combat, and a lifetime of training. Keep in mind that FMA is a series rife with CharlesAtlasSuperpowers.

** I think the best place to look for the answer might be to [[spoilers: Cornello's own use of a stone. Using what was probably a low quality stone fitted for his task he really wasn't able to create much out of thin air. A few firearms, his own body augmentations and a chimera along with whatever he used beforehand to get people to believe his connection with some divine entity. We can assume a good way to do this would have been to create the church itself out of thin air. Mass and volume is probably the only criteria for how much material you can create, composition being irrelevant. Tim Marcoh created quite a few stones while working at Laboratory 5, using death row prisoners and captured Ishvalans. We might be able to assume Amestris used the death penalty fairly leniently compared to what we might consider average. Even then, one prison can probably only produce maybe thirty or forty souls every year or so, and that might still be too many even if they were also taking prisoners who died "mysteriously" while imprisoned. Primarily using Ishvalans, Marcoh was able to create quite a few stones until he eventually ran away in disgust, even taking a few imperfect ones with him. So the "average" stone might contain maybe two or three dozen souls, this number simply being my assumption. If we assume they were even willing to give Cornello one of these, the conversion of a couple dozen souls to raw materials doesn't seem to be more than a couple buildings at most.]]

** Cars don't have batteries?
** Actually, it could have something to do with the nerves in the body. The nervous system sends electrical impulses to the muscles in your body, sort of similar to the way a wall socket sends electricity through a lamp cord to a light bulb. All they would have to do is make wires in the automail that are replicas of the real nerves in a human arm and connect them to the real nerves and insulate them against the automail's outer shell as well as water. This is really improbable that this would ever work as a mishap could injure the automail recipient, but to be fair, the body does send electrical impulses to nerves in limbs even after they have been amputated, hence "ghost limbs" or people feeling pain in their missing legs. Hopefully, this makes sense to anyone who reads it.