Scar (Fullmetal Alchemist)
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Scar (スカー Sukā?, or 傷の男 Kizu no Otoko, translated as Scarred Man) is a character from the manga and anime series, Fullmetal Alchemist. His alias is derived from the prominent cross-shaped scar that decorates his brow; his real name has not been revealed. Scar is voiced by Ryotaro Okiayu in the original Japanese and by Dameon Clarke in the English dubbing.
[edit] In the Manga
In the manga, he shares many attributes with the anime version, except that he was the person who killed Winry's parents in cold blood, not Roy Mustang. The incident occurred as a result of his brother giving up his life and arm to save Scar's after he had been gravely wounded. Enraged by his brother's death at the hands of Amestrians, he goes on a rampage and kills the Rockbells, who were treating his injuries, and nearly everyone around him. He is portrayed as more relentless and ruthless in his vengeance, while the anime had him as a good man who was consumed by revenge for his people. He is also a highly skilled Warrior Priest, and seems to be physically larger, and more built, than his anime counterpart.
Scar is both a threat to the military and the Homunculi. While he targets primarily State Alchemists in the State military, his relentless quest threatens to destroy all of the Homunculi's precious alchemist human sacrifices. As such, they have made many attempts to kill him, albeit unsuccessfully.
Scar attacked the Elric brothers in Central, managing to destroy Edward's automail arm, and shattering Alphonse' armor as well, and is nearly caught by the military, but he escapes into the sewers. Lust, and Gluttony find him in the sewers and attack him. Unable to beat them, he blows up the sewer and is washed down the river. Hawkeye finds his bloodied coat and everyone assumes he's dead, but in reality he was being treated at an Ishbalan refugee camp. Yoki, who is also there, hires bounty hunters to capture him. He easily defeats the bounty hunters and leaves with Yoki, who finds Mei Chang lying on the streets out cold. When the Elric brothers try to beat him while capturing a homunculus, he is shot by Hawkeye. Just before Ed and Al beat him to the ground for killing Winry's parents, and some of the other state alchemists, Mei Chang saves him and uses alchemy to heal his wound. He agrees to help Mei find her pet panda out of pity because Mei's clan was also under threat of extinction as the Ishbalans were.
Scar and Mei Chang end up stumbling upon the Elric Brothers and Ling/Greed in the Homunculi lair, where Ed revealed to him the fact that Envy sparked the Ishbal rebellion. Scar demands an explanation for the act, vowing to send the Homunculi to Ishbala before declaring they deserve even less. Unlike the Elrics, Scar and Mei Chang are able to use their alchemy when in the lair, and Scar makes use of this to create a dust bomb to cover his handing over of Mei to Alphonse while he escapes on his own. As he escapes, he hears Dr. Marcoh's voice in Father's hideout. He finds the doctor, who asks Scar to kill him. Scar agrees to fulfill Marcoh's wish in return for the true story behind the Ishbal Massacre.
In chapter 60, the flashback of the Ishbalan extermination campaign finally reveals a secret to Scar's arm. His brother, who had been doing research on Rentanjutsu (alchemy from Xing) and Renkinjutsu (alchemy from Amestris) in order to help Ishbalans win against the Amestris army, showed Scar and other men the products of his work: two tattooed arms. He explained to Scar the three parts of alchemy (understanding, deconstruction, and reconstruction), and that the tattoos on the right arm cause deconstruction while the left arm causes reconstruction. The significance of this innovation was that Scar's brother could bypass the need for a transmutation circle. Even if Scar wanted to finally break Ishbalan teaching and perform transmutation alchemy, he cannot because the right arm (which is assumed to originally belong to his brother) is only designed for destroying.
After learning the truth behind his brother's research, Scar decides to spare Marcoh's life to help him learn more. He uses his right arm to partially destroy Marcoh's face, disfiguring the doctor's skin and thus giving him a disguise. Scar and his group make their way to the North where the secrets of his brother's research are hidden. Recently, Scar encounters Kimblee on a train, where they fight, and Scar injures Kimblee and forces him to escape.
By Chapter 69, the four members of Scar's party (Scar, Yoki, Mei Chang, Marcoh) hole up in a cabin in the snowy region of Briggs. Marcoh and Mei Chan have recovered Scar's brother's journals, but the most important parts are in undecipherable ancient Ishbalan writing. Marcoh hopes that Scar, as a warrior priest, can understand them to help their research. Scar finds and knocks out two Briggs soldiers, then returns to the cabin with Yoki, telling his party that they need to move to a new hiding spot.
Although quite harsh and cruel, Scar has an affinity for cute animals just like Alphonse Elric.
In the compiled volumes of the manga, Arakawa draws her boss as a shadowy, angry version of Scar.
[edit] Anime
Scar is an Ishbalan, a religious people who take their name from the god they worship, Ishballa. In particular, the art of alchemy (known to Ishballans as the "Grand Arcanum") was considered one of the greatest taboos of Ishballan culture (as it implies that humans can better upon God's creations). Scar's elder brother Mattias broke this taboo by attempting the most dangerous form of alchemy, human transmutation, in an attempt to resurrect the deceased woman that both he and Scar had loved. As is the way of such things, the attempt failed (leading to the creation of the Homunculus, Lust), causing Mattias to lose his grip on sanity, and seek the legendary Philosopher's Stone, in hopes of successfully accomplishing his task. Realizing that the key ingredient in the forging of the stone was human lives, Mattias tattooed his body with the necessary transmutation symbols that would allow him to absorb lives and become a living Philosopher's Stone himself. The lives in question were those lost in a massacre of the Ishballan people by the State Military, but as Scar and his brother attempted to escape after the attack, they were pursued by State Alchemist Zolf J. Kimblee, who used his alchemic powers to give Scar his eponymous disfigurement, and to blow his right arm off his body. Mattias dispatched Kimblee by robbing him of the power-enhancing Red Stone he was wielding, and then fused his own right arm to Scar's body before dying. Due to the type of Transmutation Circle on his brother's arm, Scar has a partial Philosopher's Stone always ready to be used.
Mattias's right arm bore the symbols necessary for the first two portions of an alchemic transmutation - the understanding of an item's molecular composition, and the deconstruction of that matter (with the third step being the reconstruction of the matter into a new form). Unaware of this particular detail, Scar travelled to the city of Central, in hopes of using the information in the State Library to discover the nature of the symbols. His entry to the library barred, Scar clashed with young State Alchemist, Edward Elric, who inadvertently tore his shirt and exposed his arm, causing him to flee. Not long thereafter, while ruminating in an alleyway, Scar was approached by Nina Tucker, a young girl who had been turned into a chimera by her father, and discovered the power within his arm when he deconstructed her body, killing her out of mercy.
Now aware of the power he wielded, Scar embarked on a campaign of revenge against all State Alchemists over the course of the next three years, killing many by exploding their brains within their skulls. In tracking and killing the "Iron Blood Alchemist," Basque Grand, Scar crossed paths with Edward Elric (and his brother, Alphonse) once again, who attempted to prevent Scar from killing Tim Marcoh, another State Alchemist who had participated in the Ishbal Massacre. The fight was interrupted by Major Alex Louis Armstrong, who held off Scar long enough for Elric and his brother to escape, but it was a brief respite - Scar soon tracked them down, and shattered Edward's arm, and a large portion of Alphonse's body. Reminded by them of his relationship with own brother, Scar promised not to kill Alphonse (as he was not a State Alchemist), but before being able to kill Edward, Marcoh confronted him with an incomplete Philosopher's Stone, which Scar's arm absorbed (as per its purpose to absorb souls). Unaware that this was the purpose of his arm (and that it appeared to cause him pain as it was absorbed), a suffering Scar fled.
When the Elrics later broke into the military's Laboratory Five, to uncover the twisted alchemic experiments that had been conducted there, Scar followed them, saving Alphonse from serial killer Barry the Chopper and battling the Homunculi Lust and Gluttony. When Edward was presented by the Homunculi with the chance to obtain a Philosopher's Stone by killing the prisoners held within the laboratory, he refused, and, noting this act of nobility, Scar held back from killing him.
Nursing injuries from this encounter, Scar returned to the refugee camp occupied by the remaining Ishbalans, only for it to be attacked by mercenaries posing as the State Military. Scar escaped with two children and an Ishbalan elder, and promptly ran into Alphonse once again, who was at the time separated from his brother after a disagreement. The younger of the children, Rick, was then captured by the mercenaries, and Alphonse and Edward reached an uneasy truce with Scar to work together and rescue him.
Through further study, Scar eventually came to realize the true nature of his arm as an incomplete Philosopher's Stone, containing the souls of all those who had died during the Ishbal Massacre. Concluding that he needed the stone to stop the action of the State Military, he decided to finish what his brother had started, and travelled to the war-torn desert city of Lior and inscribed a transmutation cicle around the city itself by dragging a rock throughout its streets. Learning of his presence there, the State Military arrived in force, along with the Elrics, who feared that he planned to sacrifice all the inhabitants of Lior to create the stone. Once again, Edward and Scar battled, with Edward repeatedly transmuting the matter of his mechanical arm to prevent Scar from deconstructing it. The subsequent arrival and defeat of Lust delayed the fight, which was then halted by the arrival of Rose and Lyra (though it was actually Dante), prompting the revelation that Scar, in actuality, intended to safely evacuate the inhabitants of Lior and use the invading military as his sacrifices instead. He also managed to clear Lust's thoughts on her past human life, and admits that he loved Lust's human form; he also claims to have loved his brother, but hated him for his negligence and ignorance.
Zolf Kimblee led a small army of chimeras into lior, and with the evacuation nearly complete, Scar and Alphonse engaged him in combat, only for Scar to have his left arm be transformed by Kimblee's alchemy into a living bomb. Scar sacrificed his own arm, deconstructing it off of his own body, to prevent it from exploding, and blasted a hole in Kimblee's chest. Kimblee, however, proved able to cling onto life long enough to transmute Alphonse's body into explosive material. To save him, Scar transmuted his remaining arm, and all the power and souls within it, into Alphonse's armoured body. Finally, Scar took Kimblee's dead body (though it's hard to imagine how he did without any arms) into the sight of the military amassed around the city, prompting them to attack. Suffering bullet wounds in protecting Lust, Scar used the last of his strength to complete and activate the transmutation circle around the city, dying as the transmutation took place, and the Philosopher's Stone was completed - within Alphonse. (Though there is arguement - however small - that Scar survived.)
In the movie sequel, Conqueror of Shamballa, a parallel universe version of Scar is seen near the end driving a truck with Gypsies next to an alternate version of Lust, probably suggesting they developed a relationship in our world.
[edit] Alchemy
Scar's alchemy is activated solely by his right arm's transmutation circle. Instead of transmuting what he comes in contact with, he decomposes it into individual elements, completely obliterating the object. This happens in both the anime and manga.
Techniques:
- Decomposition: Scar uses his right arm to transmute an object (or living being) and stops at the second step, decomposition, to break the object down into pieces.
| Fullmetal Alchemist | |
|---|---|
| Common characters: | Edward Elric • Alphonse Elric • Roy Mustang • Maes Hughes • Winry Rockbell • Scar • Izumi Curtis • Hohenheim • Minor characters of Fullmetal Alchemist |
| Anime-only characters: | Dante • State Military • Homunculi • Minor anime characters |
| Manga-only characters: | Father • State Military • Homunculi • Ling Yao • Minor manga characters |
| Media: | Anime (Episode list • Voice casts) • Manga • OVAs • Conqueror of Shamballa • Video games (characters) • Trading cards |
| Items/Concepts: | Alchemy • Automail • Chimera • Equivalent Exchange • Gate of Alchemy • Philosopher's Stone • State Alchemist • Transmutation circle |
| Locations: | Amestris • Ishbal • Lab 5 • Lior |
