Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood surely is ironic.
oh the beautiful irony.
In fact this show should be called FullIrony Alchemist.
ok look i love this post but i have 2 big problems with it. one is that mustang isn’t a womanizer – he has the persona of a womanizer, in order to get ahead at his job but keep a low profile while he does it, but other people have written meta about that and done a better job than me so i’m not gonna get into that. what i DO wanna get into is greed’s death, because a lot of people seem to misread his death (just like this.)
yes, his death was partially because he was absorbed for his philosopher’s stone. but i think people miss out on the rest of it: he sacrificed himself. his last action wasn’t greed, it was selflessness.
at the very end, ling was the one holding him in. greed wasn’t fighting back; he was willing to be absorbed, because he had a plan to weaken father. he knew this plan would likely kill him. ling didn’t know about the plan, so ling was trying to hold onto him, and greed lied to him in order to get him to let go. then he shouted out “now, lan fan!” and lan fan chopped father’s arm off, separating greed and ling forever. this implies that they planned this before hand, maybe as a last resort, but it was planned. greed was going to sacrifice himself so that ling (and his other new friends) would be safe.
i think there is certainly irony in greed’s death, but it comes from the fact that he willingly allowed it. his act of selflessness was what led to his death, not the greed of another person.
the element of irony in Lust’s death is complicated by a few factors, i think, including firstly that she died first before the pattern was set up, but more importantly that her relationship to her name-sin was different from those of the other homunculi.
unlike her brothers, there’s no evidence she’s herself particularly susceptible to the impulse she’s named for. which can in Doylistic terms be largely attributed to Arakawa following an existing sexist set of types for depicting the Seven Deadly Sins, but in-setting we can take as indicating that acquiring a human body did not make Flask Homunculus particularly horny, or at least not particularly inclined to aim that at anyone. (ace villain mood possibly lmao.)
instead the self-element he expelled for the concept of Lust seems to revolve mainly around the capacity to be sexually wanted and objectified by others.
when Lust dies, it’s directly because of the casual murder attempt she made on someone she’d weaponized her desirability against, in the attempt to manipulate his feelings for information. it’s because she stabbed her disposable fake boyfriend.
she doesn’t die because of what she is, or because she went up against Roy Mustang, or because she underestimated humans, or because of her father’s plans, or anything like that.
Lust dies because she does not respect the way people care about each other, doesn’t understand it, regards human relationships in zero-sum terms and affection as something to exploit.
Lust dies because while she didn’t love Havoc, not in the most infinitesimal degree, somebody did.