The worst is probably the fact that Envy's real face looks like Hoenheim. I've seen this one remarked upon by various other people, with two fudged explanations: 1) Hohenheim tended to choose bodies with the same general physical type or 2) Envy chose a face that looked like the Hohenheim Ed knew, since freaking out Ed was really the point of the face. But I tend to agree that this was just a good old continuity mistake.
I worried less about the gate issues that you note, largely because the gate itself is such a vortex of worldbuilding handwavy-ness in the first place. We know so little about how it works--especially given that what we do know mostly comes from an entirely unreliable narrator, Hohenheim--that it's hard to argue that it breaks its own logic. With English!Ed, I couldn't figure out if we were suppose to think he was identical to Ed or simply similar enough that Ed's spirit, having been thrown through the gate, was attracted to it. With the gate, I think I'm probably too used to the conventions of fantasy: the idea that time can run differently on both sides of something like the gate doesn't phase me after having read things like the Narnia books, with the wardrobe. (And the idea of time running differently in different places goes all the way back to those folk tales of people lured into hills by fairies and coming out to find that eighty years have passed.)
As for the alchemy running on death thing: is it actually said that acts of alchemy *cause* deaths on the other side of the gate? Because Ed didn't consciously kill the boy to power his alchemy; the English boy was already dying due to the zeppelin crash and Ed used the death to get back to his own world. In other words, are the alchemists tapping into a power that's already there--because people on the other side of the gate are always going to be dying of natural or historical causes anyway--or are they indeed, like the various makers of the Philosopher's Stone, causing deaths of individuals who would have lived longer without the interference of alchemists? I didn't think that was made clear, but perhaps I just missed it. And either way, I think alchemy is still a morally dubious pursuit, but there are degrees of evilness.
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Date: 2005-08-22 06:06 pm (UTC)I've seen this one remarked upon by various other people, with two fudged explanations: 1) Hohenheim tended to choose bodies with the same general physical type or 2) Envy chose a face that looked like the Hohenheim Ed knew, since freaking out Ed was really the point of the face. But I tend to agree that this was just a good old continuity mistake.
I worried less about the gate issues that you note, largely because the gate itself is such a vortex of worldbuilding handwavy-ness in the first place. We know so little about how it works--especially given that what we do know mostly comes from an entirely unreliable narrator, Hohenheim--that it's hard to argue that it breaks its own logic. With English!Ed, I couldn't figure out if we were suppose to think he was identical to Ed or simply similar enough that Ed's spirit, having been thrown through the gate, was attracted to it. With the gate, I think I'm probably too used to the conventions of fantasy: the idea that time can run differently on both sides of something like the gate doesn't phase me after having read things like the Narnia books, with the wardrobe. (And the idea of time running differently in different places goes all the way back to those folk tales of people lured into hills by fairies and coming out to find that eighty years have passed.)
As for the alchemy running on death thing: is it actually said that acts of alchemy *cause* deaths on the other side of the gate? Because Ed didn't consciously kill the boy to power his alchemy; the English boy was already dying due to the zeppelin crash and Ed used the death to get back to his own world. In other words, are the alchemists tapping into a power that's already there--because people on the other side of the gate are always going to be dying of natural or historical causes anyway--or are they indeed, like the various makers of the Philosopher's Stone, causing deaths of individuals who would have lived longer without the interference of alchemists? I didn't think that was made clear, but perhaps I just missed it. And either way, I think alchemy is still a morally dubious pursuit, but there are degrees of evilness.