Alphonse Elric
Alphonse Elric is a male anime and manga character who features in Fullmetal Alchemist.
Contents |
Biography
Alphonse Elric (Japanese: アルフォンス・エルリック Hepburn: Arufonsu Erurikku) was a male human born the son of Trisha Elric (トリシャ・エルリック, Torisha Erurikku) and Van Hohenheim of Resembool in the winter of 1899 where he later had an older brother named Edward Elric. During his formative years, his father was noted to had left the family home for unknown reasons leaving Edward with his brother and their mother. The three Elrics lived in peace in the rural village and the boys began displaying a remarkable talent for alchemy at a young age, much to the joyful astonishment of their mother. However, early in the year 1904, Trisha contracted an illness that had been spreading in the area and died, leaving her two sons orphaned. Alphonse, devastated by the loss of his mother, began to fear that he and his brother would not be able to survive without her, but twisted hope returned to the boy's heart when Edward vowed that the two of them would find a way to bring their dear mother back to life with the power of alchemy.
Alphonse and Edward spent the next few years living on their own in the Elric family home, supported by their close childhood friend Winry Rockbell and her grandmother Pinako, while pursuing the alchemical knowledge necessary for their planned resurrection. Although they had gained a great deal of information and comprehension regarding the extended basics of the craft, before long it became apparent to the young prodigies that there was only so far they could go while being self-taught. In a stroke of good fortune, Resembool was visited by an exceptionally skilled alchemist named Izumi Curtis who, after some persuasion, agreed to take the Elric brothers on as her apprentices provided they pass a preliminary test. She brought the boys to Yock Island near the town of Dublith in the southern region, where she informed them that they were to survive for one full month without alchemy. If, at the end of their ordeal, they could correctly explain the concept "One is All and All is One", they would begin their training under her wing.
While there, the brothers discovered self-reliance and gained new abilities and insights relevant to living in the world under their own power from having to forage and hunt for food as well as fend off periodic attacks from Mason, an employee at the Curtises' butcher shop who had disguised himself as a masked wild man at Izumi's behest. Coming to understand together that, as humans, they are but a small part of the world and universe as a whole, but that the world and universe cannot exist without a collective of small parts, the boys were able to fully comprehend Izumi's riddle by the time she returned and, as such, the Elric brothers were subjected to Izumi's intensive alchemy and martial arts training for the next five months, growing significantly in both mind and body and gaining a great deal of alchemical knowledge before returning to Resembool. Though instructed specifically by Izumi to understand that death is an irreversible part of the flow of the world and that acceptance of such is important to the "One is All, All is One" concept, the boys dove headlong into their plan to resurrect their mother upon their homecoming, having advanced their knowledge while abroad and discovered the basics to a forbidden practice called Human Transmutation.
Devising a Human Transmutation Circle, amassing the elemental ingredients for an adult human body and offering their own blood as soul and biological data, the boys initiated the Human Transmutation secretly in their home. Unfortunately, the Human Transmutation resulted in a Rebound; Alphonse and Edward were pulled into The Gate. Encountering the mysterious being called Truth, Alphonse was forced into the stream of the Gate's vast alchemical knowledge and forced to witness as the Truth stripped him of his physical body as toll for crossing into God's domain. Returned to the human dimension, Alphonse's errant soul attached itself to the soulless, inhuman creature that had resulted from the failed transmutation as it struggled futilely to survive. Incapable of sustaining life, the grotesque body died, allowing Alphonse's soul to once again wander toward the other side.
Elric arrived at the desert frontier town of Reole alongside his older brother Edward Elric, traveling incognito to investigate a series of highly publicised miracles performed by a local religious leader named Father Cornello. While sitting indoors at a local cafe and listening to a radio broadcast praising the sun god Leto, Alphonse Elric accidentally shattered a mechanical radio set while attempting to adjust the delicate internal dial with his heavy, metallic hand. He quietly stood by while Edward Elric used transmutational energy to repair the broken device, a display of skill that immediately caused the civilian shopkeeper to assume Alphonse Elric was the legendary, state-sanctioned Fullmetal Alchemist due to his imposing, armored proportions. Alphonse Elric corrected the shopkeeper's mistaken assumption by revealing that the title actually belonged to his much smaller older brother, and he subsequently recounted the foundational tragedy of their youth to a local girl named Rose. In his early childhood, following the death of his mother Trisha Elric from a terminal illness, Alphonse Elric and his brother actively broke the ultimate taboo of alchemy by attempting a forbidden human transmutation ritual to bring her back to life. The complex alchemical reaction failed catastrophically, and as a physical consequence of violating the law of equivalent exchange, Alphonse Elric had his entire physical body completely stripped away and consumed by the void. Desperate to save his younger sibling, Edward Elric sacrificed his own right arm to anchor Alphonse Elric's wandering soul back to the living world, binding his consciousness permanently into a hollow, massive suit of European steel plate armor with a hand-drawn blood seal. After sharing this history, Alphonse Elric and his brother confronted Father Cornello inside his temple, observing the priest bypass standard scientific limitations to manifest matter out of nothing. Recognizing that the priest was utilizing a legendary artifact known as the Philosopher's Stone to ignore equivalent exchange, Alphonse Elric actively prepared for combat alongside his brother to secure the stone and restore their original human bodies.
Overview
Personality and attributes
In appearance, Alphonse Elric was an exceptionally tall, heavily built humanoid figure existing entirely as a massive, hollow suit of steel plate armor. His exterior consisted of interconnected, silver-grey metal plates featuring exceptionally broad shoulders, rounded spaulders adorned with sharp metal spikes, and thick, reinforced pauldrons connected by heavy leather straps. His helmet featured a unique, vertical visor slit that glowed with a faint, ghostly white light from within, flanked by a pair of long, downward-pointing metal fangs along the jawline and a prominent, single horn protruding directly from his forehead plate. A small, decorative white plume or tassel emerged from a diamond-shaped socket located at the very peak of his helmet. To the public eye, his outward physical appearance was that of a terrifying, fully matured warrior clad in ancient, heavy battle gear, which stood in stark visual contrast to his polite demeanor and youthful vocal tone. Behind his chest armor, the interior of the suit was completely empty and contained no organic matter, possessing only a single, intricate alchemical blood seal drawn in human blood on the inner surface of the upper spine plate, which functioned as the sole metaphysical anchor keeping his soul attached to the metal. As a result of the alchemy accident, he came to survive by having his soul placed within a large gunmetal-colored steel armor body that stood taller than most humans. Due to his appearance, people often mistook him for being the Fullmetal Alchemist and Al had to correct them that it was actually his brother Edward.
Al was shown to have the opposite disposition to his brother Edward where he was shown to be a calm and passive individual. Al was kindhearted, notably compassionate and patient almost to a fault, acting often out of protective selflessness for his loved ones, new friends and sometimes even toward his enemies. Having had his psychological growth stunted at the age of ten due to loss of his physical body, Alphonse retains a childlike purity in the face of all his encountered horrors; however, despite his age, he has always displayed a significantly higher level of maturity than Edward. Though Al is as passionate as his brother, he has remarked that his anger takes longer to spark and jokes that he is always beaten to the punch by Edward's outbursts.
Powers and abilities
Alphonse Elric was born a member of the human race where he was a highly gifted, naturally intelligent alchemist capable of manipulating the atomic structure of physical matter through scientific transmutation. Elric was a human who came to learn rudimentary alchemical theory alongside his brother Edward whilst studying their father's notes.
Following the loss of his biological form, his soul was alchemically bound to a suit of steel armor, granting him an artificial physiology that provided immense superhuman durability and complete immunity to standard mortal vulnerabilities. He possessed massive physical strength in his metallic limbs, enabling him to lift heavy materials, break through solid physical structures, and withstand heavy blunt force trauma without sustaining physical damage or experiencing internal injuries. Because his form was entirely inorganic and hollow, he felt no physical pain, did not require air to breathe, and was entirely incapable of sleeping, eating food, or experiencing the biological sensation of physical touch. He was a highly competent hand-to-hand combatant who could efficiently coordinate his massive physical weight and armor plating to engage hostile forces, relying on his structural resilience to act as a defensive shield for his allies during active alchemical conflicts.
The pair later came to apprentice themselves under the master alchemist Izumi Curtis whose training philosophy stemmed o the belief that, "to train the spirit, first train the body." As a result, Al had trained his body through regular workouts and sparring making him a particularly competent hand-to-hand fighter. This was to the extent that he was able to hold his own against armed opponents and even skilled martial artists.
Similar to his brother, he used alchemy to augment his offensive and defensive capabilities by crafting weapons for melee strikes and altering his surroundings to gain an advantage over his foe.
Notes
- Alphonse Elric was created by Hiromu Arakawa where he featured in the setting of the Fullmetal Alchemist universe.
In other media
Television
Films
Video games
Appearances
- Fullmetal Alchemist:
- Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood:
External Links
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