That was the most perfect ending I love this stupid anime with its themes of loyalty and love, also I cried again. Very good
you know, it occurs to me that given the chimeras we see later on in the series, Shou Tucker really was an all-around incompetent, shitty alchemist. Wrath must have had a real good chuckle over granting him a license for his "groundbreaking" work.
Spoiler Well, I mean Father's group did have access to Philosopher's Stones, which kind of gave them an edge.
True, but were philosopher’s stones used in the making of all the chimeras? The wolf chimeras in the Star of Milos movie, anyway, though idk if that’s canonical.
I don't think it's really ever really gone into. At least some of the alchemists working for Father knew how to make philosopher's stones, but beyond hints of experimentation their exact activities remain a mystery, partially because of mysterious fires and partially because Edward didn't really want to wander down that path.
it would make sense if Father had repressed chimera-related research throughout the history of Amestris because he wanted to keep that knowledge to himself, like how it was with human transmutation (or maybe it just got repressed because it was related to human transmutation, so it would be difficult to research one without researching the other). It would also make sense for a philosopher's stone to be required to make one. The first chimera we saw in the series was made with a philosopher's stone by that priest dude in Lior, so maybe it's meant to be implied that they're necessary from there on out? idk.
I'm guessing that like most philosopher's stone-related stuff, it's possible to do it without a stone, but the cost is really high, which is why Tucker might have been considered impressive for being able to do it at all.
He might have also been considered impressive because anyone who understands how chimeras are made knew what he'd have had to do in order to get one that talks, and it initially looked like he was just sufficiently ruthless and had a decent understanding of the alchemy required to make a functioning chimera. But then his first result died, and he faffed around for years in a way that sort of showed that he got that first result because of desperation. Ruthlessness is useful for Father and his minions. Desperation isn't, because it's much less predictable in terms of what it will make someone do. Spoiler And the faffing about showed that Tucker was stupid, too, or at least too stubborn to try alternatives - because I suspect that if he'd tried figuring out a way to get human test subjects, or even cadavers, instead of trying to get a sapient chimera that didn't include human elements? He wouldn't have been on such thin ice to begin with. But instead, he kept trying to figure out how to make a sapient chimera without using human elements, despite the evidence clearly showing that it just wasn't possible. Turning his daughter into a chimera, in a way that utterly lacked any plausible deniability, was just the last straw; I suspect that what had happened to his wife was actually an open secret among the State Alchemists, but no one had enough proof to make it worth trying to make an issue out of it. Because hey, maybe his wife really did run off! But Nina and Alexander wouldn't have, and if they had, he should have been looking for them.
Yeah, there's a good chance that the various State Alchemists were really not that big a deal in Father's schemes, and so were mostly around in case he needed someone to do some minor alchemy that wasn't worth spending his Inner Circle alchemists' time on, rather than because they were actually impressive as alchemists per se. Ruthless people like Kimblee could be useful as informed agents; the rest were somewhere between tools and distractions.
It probably wasn’t that open, or Roy wouldn’t have introduced the Elrics to him. Maybe just among certain more in-the-know circles of alchemists, like the ones who made all those Philosopher’s Stones? ...if your experiment fails in an embarrassing way, all your colleagues call you Shou Tucker for a week I assumed it was primarily a recruitment drive to find the sorts of powerful and amoral alchemists who’d be willing to spend their nine-to-five doing human sacrifice rituals, with the bonus of providing a lot of high powered attack dogs for when you need to carve a bloody crest somewhere
I think I probably missed a bit between "how I depict this in my head" and "explaining it to other people", yeah, sorry. I don't mean "open secret" as in "everyone except Ed and Al totally knew that Shou Tucker turned his wife into a chimera", I mean more "most everyone who knew the story really strongly suspected but there wasn't any proof, so all anyone could do at the time was just watch him closely and hope they were wrong". (Plus, Mustang did have a tendency to point Ed at problems and hope he'd either solve them or make them too obvious for the government to get away with not stepping in and dealing with it. I could absolutely see him going "okay, if I'm wrong - and I hope to god I am - then the guy's got a good library that the Elrics can use and they can use him as an example of what not to do in terms of getting negative attention and why being able to politic at least a bit is important. If I'm right, hopefully we'll be able to get the kid out of there before shit goes really bad." There's no universe where I can see Mustang deliberately putting a kid in danger if he had a choice in the matter.) Same. That's why I think one of the reasons why Tucker was on thin ice is because he wasn't showing sufficient ruthlessness and amorality. And just as bad, he was showing that he wasn't able to step back and re-evaluate his process when it obviously wasn't doing what he wanted it to. Kimblee was horrible in a lot of ways, but he wasn't going to beat his head against a wall trying things that he knew hadn't worked the first six times.
so a couple years ago, i started watching FMA:B. partway through, i stopped watching and read the manga. then i finished watching FMA:B, and then i started watching 03 FMA. because of this, when and where some of the events happen occasionally get mixed up. (also because of this i basically saw the damn Shou Tucker episode 3 times in quick succession, which. GOD.) recently, i went back to FMA:B and i was trying to find the Youswell coal mine episode, the one where they dupe Yoki. i was going through the list of episodes on netflix, like "am i just not seeing it? does it have a weird title?" NOPE! THERE IS NO YOUSWELL EPISODE OF FMA:B! they skip that part and just allude to it when Yoki shows up later! but i was SURE i remembered watching it as part of FMA:B. i love media with multiple interpretations-- i love Sherlock Holmes, for example, and i've always enjoyed comparing and contrasting the various takes on the stories and the characters. but in this case apparently i consumed it all so close together that the various canons are tangled up in my head.
