OOC Information
NAME; skarme
AGE; 19
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED; N/A

IC Information
CHARACTER NAME; Edward Elric
AGE; 15
CANON; Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
CANON POINT; Post episode 43, as he passes out after sealing up his wound.
FAMILY TYPES; Metal Empire, Nightmare Soldiers, Dark Area, Dragon's Roar

APPEARANCE;
Ed is lean and short for his age even with thick-soled boots on, but deceptively wiry. His hair is long, blond and thick, with a messy fringe parted in the centre that frames his face and often a single antenna-like strand that pokes up from just above his forehead. He normally ties his hair back, and it's usually in a fishtail braid, but sometimes he's seen with a regular ponytail instead. His eyes are a fairly striking gold. He has a few trademark items of clothing, notably a red duster with a large black flamel printed on the back and a pair of white gloves; aside from these, he gravitates towards black and white clothes. His outfits tend to do a good job of covering up his right arm and left leg, which are actually advanced prosthetics (called automail for their passing resemblance to old-fashioned armour).

PERSONALITY;
Meeting Edward for the first time, you'd probably come away thinking he was an arrogant sod with a cynical streak wider than he is short, and you'd be right. Brash, sarcastic, irritable, prone to violent outbursts on little to no provocation, ridiculously impulsive and brusque to the point that other people are generally forced to apologise for his lack of filtering, Ed is not a person who tends to make friends in a hurry - or leave remotely good impressions on anyone else, even when he isn't being explicitly anti-authoritarian. He breaks the teen shounen protagonist mould by genuinely being as intelligent as he likes to claim, rashness aside - not to mention both perceptive and quick on the uptake in addition to his book smarts - but not quite enough to support the size of his inflated ego. In a nutshell, he's a jerk. However, it's also true that he's been tossed around by the universe for much of his life, and turned out a nicer person than you might expect for it.

If there's one thing that defines him, it's not a personality trait so much as an idea - alchemy's Principle of Equivalent Exchange, which states that in order to obtain anything you must sacrifice something of equal value. Ed ended up squarely on the wrong side of this principle once, when he and his younger brother Alphonse attempted to resurrect their dead mother without realising the cost, and has taken it very seriously since then; as an older sibling, he's always had a strong sense of responsibility and obligation, but that incident really cemented it as a fundamental part of his character. He's even extended the principle into a philosophy of sorts, which he does his best to live by and which eventually becomes the overarching message of the series: there's no getting around the pain of living, but it does all have a meaning, and if you pay for the mistakes you make, you can overcome anything and earn your own happiness.

With a worldview like this, bloody-minded stubbornness becomes a positive quality, so it's just as well that Ed has bottomless reserves of the stuff. In fact, with him being as intensely goal-driven as he is, his worldview and his stubbornness fuel each other. When Ed decides he's going to do something, come hell or high water he will do it, even if it means restructuring his life around it and pushing the boundaries of the plausible - this determination is what led him to swallow his pride and join his country's state military at the improbable age of twelve, all to take advantage of their resources and chase a possibly mythical way to return his and his brother's bodies to normal. Moreover, if things don't turn out well, they are his mess to clean up, and nobody else's. This outlook gets him into more trouble than it gets him out of, but that has never stopped him, and he's quite likely to treat any attempts at dissuading him from it as personal insults.

The only thing that can sometimes cause said determination to waver stems from the same sense of obligation, funnily enough: Ed is much kinder than he'd like to think. If he meets someone he thinks needs his aid in some way, he might gripe about it or rationalise it away as something other than altruism - tact isn't his strong point, as he's well aware, and he favours the tough love approach of getting people to "stand on their own feet" if it's an option - but he'll do it more often than not. On the other hand, failing to help people is something he finds difficult to live with, regardless of extenuating circumstances - and that definitely goes for his own failures as well, because although his approach to life is one of moving forward wherever possible, his abovementioned philosophy encourages him to remember his regrets and make up for them later rather than leave them behind.

As could be expected, said regrets figure heavily into his backstory. Possibly the most influential ones, and ones which handily showcase both sides of his sense of responsibility, are his issues with his parents. For a start, "parent" would be more accurate for most of his formative years - his father Hohenheim left to travel the country when Ed and Al were small children, and Ed has yet to forgive him for what he sees as the man flat out abandoning his mother, to the point that even ten years later he refuses to acknowledge Hohenheim as a father. His relationship with his loving and devoted mother had no such problems, but after her death several years later from an epidemic sweeping their hometown, it was his hidden sensitivity that drove him to attempt the taboo, incredibly complicated (and, as he would eventually discover, doomed from the start) task of bringing her back to life, unwittingly repeating his and Al's alchemy teacher's own mistake. Earning him two bloodily amputated limbs and the loss of his little brother's body, this failed human transmutation - originally Ed's idea, which didn't particularly help his guilt complex - was the catalyst for his development from just another precocious brat to the jaded hero he is in the present day.

The series being what it is, however, he has no shortage of other regrets. Less than a year before his given canon point, he and Al met and befriended a little girl called Nina, but were unable to save her from getting horrifically fused with her dog by her mad State Alchemist father, and then murdered by a serial killer before they had a chance to even try returning her to normal. Shortly following that, as they were just beginning to dip their toes into the villainous conspiracy surrounding their country's entire history, they shared their information with Lt. Colonel Hughes, a friend of theirs in the military - however, Hughes being the intelligence expert that neither of them were, he used that information to uncover more of the conspiracy than its perpetrators were happy with, and was silenced for his efforts. Ed blames himself for both deaths, which like the fallout of his human transmutation impressed on him the limitations of humans in general and alchemy in particular, and carries them with him as primary motivators long after he stops acting torn up about them.

For what it's worth, he didn't spend an huge amount of time acting torn up in either instance, and indeed Ed doesn't do it much on the whole. It would be understandable in the face of continuing trauma and bad luck like this for most people to break down one way or another, and in a less optimistic alternate continuity it happens to Ed as well, but in this one he rarely has time for brooding. On the contrary, he's remarkably capable of acting loud and cranky to the point of goofy even in relatively dire situations.

In true shounen tradition, the family and friends who keep him firmly grounded regardless of his quirks and excesses are probably the most prominent reason why. The obvious one is Alphonse himself: superficially the brothers have little in common, Al being cool-headed, well-spoken and in touch with his feelings where Ed is decidedly none of those things, but they share the same sense of responsibility, and Ed can count on Al's perspective to keep him focused on what matters. When his little brother is around, Ed's capacity for teamwork and protectiveness come to the forefront - a little while ago, Ed even tried to sacrifice his own life for Al's, and only realised what a shortsighted idea that was after the fact when Al called him out on it. It's impossible to overstate how close they are. Another of his anchors would be Winry, a childhood friend and the other person he trusts more than anyone else in the universe; she's often the person who beats sense into him about what he finds most important when Al is unwilling or unavailable, and would happily follow him into a dangerous mission despite not being any form of combatant just to prove to him that he doesn't need to do things alone. More subtly, his superior officer Colonel Mustang also brings out some of his better qualities; Mustang's smug and all-round insufferable disposition (along with Ed's) means they frequently butt heads, but after he repeatedly demonstrated that he did have his priorities straight following Hughes' murder, Ed grew to respect him in his own way, and in the process learnt what it might look like to go too far in the pursuit of revenge.

Ultimately, then, Ed can be described as a fairly straightforwardly heroic person; experienced as he is at hiding his nobler side behind a rough and obnoxious exterior, in a high stakes situation it will almost always shine through.

HISTORY; Wiki link! I'll just note that the section on the 2003 anime further down should be totally ignored.

SAMPLES
FIRST PERSON; Thread links 1 and 2; let me know if this isn't enough!

THIRD PERSON;
The pebble sits motionless in the middle of the gravel in front of them, by all appearances completely at ease with its place in the universe.

"...Was that what's supposed to happen?" Ed's partner eventually asks.

"Does it look like that's what's supposed to happen?" Ed snaps, without looking up at her.

Once again, he claps his hands together (just a little reshaping, far from complicated, come on) and presses them to the ground next to the pebble. Once again, there's no flash of light or rush of energy - for the briefest of moments he's uncertain, but no, the wind ruffling his hair is just the same breeze they've been sitting in since they first came into this park. It doesn't even look like a failed transmutation.

Ed runs a hand through his hair, frustrated. Something isn't right here. This place does have volcanoes - he saw one of them from the roof, didn't he? So the problem can't be a lack of energy. But if the question is what else could possibly get in the way of his alchemy, there's only one answer that readily comes to mind, and if that's the case...

He's jerked back to whatever passes for reality around here by a yawn from his partner. "Well, I did tell you," she says, sounding a bit too smug for his liking. "Not that I'm an expert, but the Digital World is made of data, not... whatever you were talking about. I was just saying."

"That could mean anything," he says shortly. "Even where I'm from. Life comes down to genetic information plus information about the soul. Everything we see is the byproduct of some chemical reaction - that's data in a sense, too. When you're looking for a needle in a haystack, you don't start by hauling another twenty haystacks into the barn."

"Where you're from, maybe." She folds her stubby arms. "But how do you know that what we call data here is the same as what you're thinking of? You don't. You don't even know for sure it's a needle you're looking for."

Ed glowers indignantly for a second. But... is it really that far-fetched an idea, come to think? All the things he's seen on his travels in the past few years since he set out from the shell of his old house, thinking his own experience was all he needed in order to move forward... No, whether he likes it or not, he's out of his depth. There's no point letting something as dumb as prior knowledge cheat him out of a potential lead.

With a sigh, he gets to his feet. "Maybe," he says, taking a moment to dust his coat off. "Whatever. Guess it's back to Plan A."

"So you are off to find a library? Alright." The Digimon begins to sidle towards the nearest bench. Hope springs eternal. "I really am sorry I couldn't help. Honest. It's been a long day. Just give me a call if you need me. I won't be going anywhere."

"Yeah, a library," says Ed, ignoring the rest. "Or just anything that could point us in the right direction, since you can't. An entire city like this, there's gotta be somewhere we can -"

He breaks off mid-sentence, glances to his side, and reaches across equally nonchalantly to grab his partner by the scruff of her neck. "Not so fast there, chief," he says levelly, at least by his standards. "You're coming with me too. I need all the help I can get."

After all, an alchemist seeks the truth. He can hardly expect that to be easier here, literally a world away from everything he's ever known. He'll just have to face it head-on, the way he always has.