Tag: roy mustang

phantomrose96:

Okay, but I’d kill for more backstory on Roy’s childhood.
Arakawa gives us just this brief glimpse of his relationship with Madame
Christmas, but the implications have got me spinning. Like, you’re telling me
Roy was adopted and raised by this bar owner, who actually just uses the bar as
a cover to run a covert information gathering service by weaponzing the agency and sexuality of young women. Like hot damn that’s cool. We’re talking about
this army of 20-something-year-old women who make their living off undercover
missions, digging out Central’s darkest filthiest secrets, and they do this by
seducing the horny old men in charge of these operations. 

Like, I’m betting Roy
grew up with about two dozen older sisters, who’d sit by the mirror, applying
make-up in the dim fluorescent lighting of the bar’s backroom, chatting about
what embezzlers, what traffickers, what corrupt politicians they had “dates”
with that night. 8-year-old Roy sitting there on a barstool reluctantly doing
math homework and listening in on how “General Lucibella” has been cheating on
his wife for 6 months now and has shelled out 60,000 cenz in bribes to keep his
underlings quiet.

And even better—this influence is so
damn obvious in Roy’s character! I’ll bet every last penny I have that all
his “womanizing” tendencies directly stem from this—because Roy weaponizes his sexuality. He puts on
this air of being constantly flirtatious to divert suspicion from himself. Roy has built a mask for himself entirely focused on promiscuity–he doesn’t seem like an upstart, he’s just into power and rank because he’s a cocky tail-chaser. He constantly chats up
Olivier Armstrong after her transfer because (clearly) he’s got the hots for
her, and not at all because he’s quietly working out the details of a
military-wide coup meant to take out the homunculi. Hell, he even gets Grumman’s cooperation by having Madame Christmas contact him and passing it off as Grumman having an “interested lady caller”. And Roy pulls it off. He gets the homunculi running in circles, and does it entirely by acting like an oaf of a flirt.

Between his cover with “Elizabeth”,
his flirting with Olivier to pass on and gather dangerous information, and his
couple “dates” with the girls working under Madame Christmas to gather intel and confirm Selim’s lack of a proper history, Roy succeeds in
solidifying an entire military uprising, without the homunculi’s knowledge,
while being constantly watched.

The little bit we know about his childhood is so intrinsically linked to who he is as a tactition. It’s just so, so good and I want so, so much more of it.