Application
Player Name: Christy
Player LJ: tsunderes
Email and/or AIM: evybay@gmail.com / Chiisuchi @ AIM
Timezone: EST
Other Characters: Lucifer (The Sandman), Diva (Blood+), Excalibur (Soul Eater), Poison Ivy (DANANA BATMAN), Akari Mizunashi (ARIA), Horo (Spice & Wolf), and Dr. Gregory House (House, M.D.)
Character: Dante
Series/Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Deviance: 1+
Age: Around 400, looks to be in her early 20s
Gender: Female
Species: Human
Canon Used:
Anime only! Obviously, since Dante doesn't appear in the manga at all. I'm taking her from about episode 45, but in event terms, right after she met Hohenheim and sent him to the other side, but before any of the homunculi have left the mansion to kick some ass.
Appearance:
Dante's true appearance has long since been discarded. However, this body is that of a young woman named Lyra. Lyra is of average height and build, with straight-cut, short hair. She has dark brown hair, and her eyes are violet, as all of Dante's forms are. Dante is also rotting, quite literally. However, the rot is always covered with clothing and its smell is obscured by perfume.
Picture! She wears more modest clothes than this, though.
Psychology:
Really, Dante lives a dual life. After all, she can't be an awful, cold bitch to everyone and expect to get the results she wants.
So, on one side, Dante's mask is that of an intelligent, idealistic, and kind young woman. Dante will help those in need with her alchemy, and she seeks peace and equality to help the people. She's the kind of person that will bandage a wound for a person whether they like it or not, or even lead a group of people if she needs to. This Dante is a normal young woman who is leading people for a cause and helping any that cross her path.
However, this is vastly different from the real Dante. Dante is a cold, indifferent, and completely focused person. She is not sadistic, like many villains, and prefers to not get her hands dirty with her work, which is why her homunculi are so important to her. She sees no value in human life, and is willing to sacrifice as many people as necessary so that she can continue to live.
Because of that, Dante's biggest fear is death. She has lived for 400 years by transferring her soul, not to live longer, necessarily, but to avoid death. They sound like the same thing, but it's not. Dante has no desire for immortality, but merely refuses to die. It sounds weird, but it's a very human fear! I mean, everyone is afraid of death, Dante just kicks this up a notch.
You could also say that there's quite a bit of irony in Dante's name, since she herself embodies many of the seven deadly sins for which she names the homunculi, with the exception of perhaps gluttony. She is a very proud woman, and with good reason. Dante is very intelligent and skilled at alchemy (and, arguably, is the best alchemist there is). She refuses to be insulted, and has a short temper when her pride is at stake, and will lash out rather violently. By banishing you to another dimension. Oh, Dante. Which shows wrath quite well. She is, for the most part, even-tempered, but when she is angered, she's a very dangerous woman. Though, she may not lash out physically, she will absolutely torment the person that has wronged her using her manipulative powers. I mean, she crushed all of Edward's personal beliefs within five minutes.
She is also a whore. I mean lustful. I mean, seriously, she commented that she wanted sleep with Edward in Rose's body. Mind you, Edward is Hohenheim's son. That might be part of the reason, but still. Dante also makes the lesbian moves on Rose a few times. She's equal opportunity, I guess. Dante is also an envious person, since she never really let go of her love for Hohenheim, or perhaps just an attachment to him. She probably took a very sick pleasure in controlling the homunculus with Trisha's face, since Trisha "stole" Hohenheim away from her, and likely even envies the Elric brothers for their family's relationship, even if she won't admit it. The slothful nature is pretty easily exemplified by her lavish living conditions, and her obvious distaste for getting her own hands dirty, using her homunculi as pawns instead. And greed, well, that's pretty obvious.
While most alchemists function with the philosophy of equivalent exchange as a law of the universe, meaning every action has a reaction, and there's a price to pay for everything, Dante does not. Or, at least, not in the same way that most others do. She is bitter to the world, and thinks that while this holds true for many situations, it does not hold for all of them. Thus, the idea that an equal price must be paid for a result does not hold the same truth in her mind as it does for Edward's. This probably helps her justify her very brutally cruel methods, since Dante is still very human, though she is cold and considers herself superior to them.
Other Skills/Abilities:
Dante's most notable skill is her great prowess in alchemy. For more on alchemy, check out the reality section, but basically, it allows her to deconstruct a material and reconstruct it as she wishes. So given a base material, she can transform it into something else, such as lead to gold or the ground into a big spear. Virtually, she can do anything except revive the dead.
First of all, the most important concept in Fullmetal Alchemist is that of alchemy. It is unlike alchemy as we know it, in that it uses intricate circles, called transmutation circles, rather than being the father of modern chemistry. Edward explains it best himself, so I'll just quote him: "Alchemy is the science of understanding the structure of matter, breaking it down, and reconstructing it as something else. It can even make gold from lead. But Alchemy is a science and so it must follow the natural law. To create, something of equal value must be lost. That is the principle of Equivalent Exchange." There's a lot of philosophy about Equivalent Exchange that Dante doesn't necessarily agree with, but for alchemy, that is the absolute law. So, if you have the right materials and you're an alchemist, you can create anything you can imagine. There are only two exceptions to what alchemy can do. The first is a law imposed by the government, that an alchemist may not transmute anything into gold (though it is possible), and the second is an absolute taboo in alchemy.
You cannot revive the dead. This is the taboo that the series centers around. The Elric brothers tried to use alchemy to revive their mother, and the price they had to pay was Alphonse's entire body and Edward's leg. Edward was able to call back Alphonse's soul to bond it to a suit of armor, but at the cost of his arm. Yet, what they created was not human. This is the results of human transmutation. When an alchemist attempts to revive the dead, they are unsuccessful, and they lose body parts as part of the cost.
Along with that, Dante is a very intelligent woman! Obviously, she's awesome at alchemy.
Other Weaknesses:
Dante is, though some people say otherwise, human! She is prone to normal human illnesses, injuries, death, et cetera. As an addition, her body is rotting. Oops, lol. But that's not so much a weakness as a fact of her life. It doesn't make her any weaker.
History:
Dante was not always known as Dante. Her original name was Mary. Hohenheim and Mary met when he had been ill with a fever, and Mary was the nurse tending to him. They fell in love, and were wed, and Hohenheim taught Mary the alchemy that he practiced. They lived in the time where Christianity was the primary religion, and if they were caught, they would be hanged. In addition, Hohenheim was much older than Mary, but they wed in love anyways. Their love eventually faded, and Mary gradualy became more bitter, but they had a child together. The child was named Roland Armonde Theobald von Hohenheim.
Eventually, three important things happened to Mary that we know about. For one, likely early in Roland's life, Mary and Hohenheim together used their city to create a Philosopher's Stone. The city was buried underground to hide the evidence, and Hohenheim, weakened to the point of death from the transmutation. Mary, in desperation, killed the nearby servant and transfered Hohenheim's soul into this body to save him. It worked, and they lived on. However, in Roland's late teens or early twenties, Roland died of mercury poisoning. It's likely that this was intentional, on Mary's part, because overcome by grief, Hohenheim attempted to revive Roland, but left shortly after, leaving Mary and the creature.
Mary, in an attempt to perhaps lure her husband back, fed the creature the stones in hope that it would become Roland. It did, in a sense, but it wasn't human, and capable of transforming into other people. Mary had taken a liking to the Inferno of The Divine Comedy, so she decided to name this creature "Envy" as well as take the name "Dante" for herself.
Later (though how much later is unknown), Dante had a lover that somehow died. In her grief, she also attempted to revive him, but recieved the same result. Still, she fed this creature the incomplete stones that she had, thus creating Greed.
Throughout the 400 years of her life, it's implied that Dante took care of the homunculi that were created, raising them all (since apparently, there was more than one Lust and Sloth), but Envy, Greed, and Gluttony are the only ones that Dante herself created. Gluttony's and Pride's true identity are unknown, but Sloth is Trisha, Edward and Alphonse's mother, Lust is Scar's brother's lover, and Wrath is Izumi's lost child.
Throughout the years, Dante has been trying to create another stone, since the one that she and Hohenheim made was quickly diminishing, thus manipulating skilled alchemists into making it for her, as well as using the homunculi to help her. She uses them by promising them humanity with the stone, but the ones that have known her true goal of using it for herself (Pride, Envy) are still fiercly loyal to her. Greed was the only one who was not loyal, and for the 140 years before the series' events, Greed was sealed and imprisoned using alchemy and his skull. It's because of that, I believe that Dante has remnants of all her homunculi to control them when they get unruly.
Now, for the series itself, Dante once had the body of an older woman. This body was who Izumi knew as her teacher, and Izumi never knew about Dante's secret. However, when Edward comes to fight Greed, Dante transfers her soul into a new body, that of a young woman named Lyra. However, after only a few months, the body began to rot, and Dante wanted the stone much more to prevent her death, thus making events proceed more quickly. She plans to use Rose's body as her next body, and recently encountered her former husband, but banished him to the other side.
Reality Description:
This will probably be a super long description because there are a lot of important things about the world of Fullmetal Alchemist. Sorry. 8(
First of all, the world as we know it of this series is the weirdest shape ever. There are five countries, and they're, essentially, big circles. Amestris is the largest country, and the most important one. There are four other countries to the North, South, East, and West. In that order, it's Drachma, Aeruga, Xing, and Creta. The only countries we really know about are Drachma and Xing, where Drachma is cold mountainous land and Xing is desert, and has an Asian population. However, none of the other countries are important in the anime, so that's basically a "just so you know" thing. Amestris is the focus, so as a small reference before I go into the history, have map.
The most important cities in the anime are Central, Lior, and Ishbal. Central is the capital of Amestris, and thus where most of the military is located. There is a mostly forgotten legend associated with this town that long ago, there was once another city where Central now stands, but it disappeared in a single night. This is important, so remember it. Lior, however, is the setting for many of the final events of the series. After Edward and Alphonse "liberated" this sity from an oppressive religion, the city fell into dischord and chaos, much like a small province called Ishbal. Fourteen years before the present point of this series, there was a massive civil war, or you could even say genocide, against the Ishbalans because of their different skin color and eye color. In reality, this was a plot to create the Philosopher's Stone using the thousands of lives lost in this war. In part, it was successful, but the incomplete stone is Scar's arm. Lior is important because this is where the stone is completed, using a military conflict to quiet the people to use the lives of the soldiers as the final component, making Alphonse (since Scar gave his arm to Alphonse so Al would live) the true Philosopher's Stone.
Now, before I get into alchemy, the Philosopher's Stone, etc., there's a few other parts to add to the actual setting. For example, the world of Fullmetal Alchemist is vastly different from our own. The recorded date is the early 20th century, but it's also noted that the Christian calendar is discarded, and Christianity is a forgotten religion. However, the appearance of the cities and technology does place it in a late Industrial Age, but with more advanced technology than would be expected in this age, such as fully operable prosthetic limbs (automail) and cars from, roughly, the 1930s era.
With this is mind, remember I told you about that legend of Central? Well, it's true. About 400 years ago, Dante and Hohenheim used Central to create the first Philosopher's Stone. To bury the evidence, they quite literally buried the city, and this forgotten city is in a massive cave, of sorts, underground. This is also Dante's home, which is only accessible through a forgotten Christian church and the now destroyed Labratory 5. She picked the nicest, most lavish mansion, of course.
Okay! Now I can tell you about all the keywords that probably confused you.
First, homunculi.
However, the creature that is created is alive, even if it's a grotesque thing. When it is fed incomplete stones, however, it gains powers and is given a more human form which resembles that of the person that they were supposed to be. Dante leads these homunucli as well as giving them life through the stones that she feeds them. The homunculi are all named after the seven deadly sins, and their weaknesses are remnants of the person they were supposed to be (such as hair, or a bone) and the nodes across their body. When all of these nodes are stabbed, they are incapitated enough to be fought...uh, more fairly than they were. Also, alchemy is a weakness, but only Dante and Edward know how to use it in this fashion.
Dante and the homunculi are all seeking to create an item called the Philosopher's Stone. Using alchemy and thousands of human sacrifices, the Stone is created. It, in theory, allows one to bypass the Law of Equivalent Exchange, but in reality, the price was already paid by the sheer amount of lives that go into its creation. Dante wishes to create a stone to transfer her soul and avoid death, while the homunculi seek it to become human.
One other important part of all of this is just where the price is paid to. Any alchemy pays its price to a concept called "the Gate", which exists in the same way that Heaven or Hell exists. Meaning, experiencing the Gate is a metaphysical kind of thing, and has some crazy Christian magic. Or something. I don't get it either. But the Gate can only be accessed by a person when they perform a human transmutation, and it also serves the worst point of the series. Ughhhhh do I have to explain this?
SO. Because they wanted to cash in on some bullshit, The Gate links the world of Fullmetal Alchemist to our world. The parallel is WWII-era Germany (SOMEHOW. DID THEY EVEN USE ZEPPLINS IN WORLD WAR II?) or maybe it's WWI. Who cares. Point is, you can cross the gate and go to the other side, which is our world, and sucks.