The Girl Behind the Wrench - Winry Rockbell
First things first: I apologize for this being late. It was due last week and I see it's been taken off the master list, but I hope I'm still able to post it.
Title: The Girl Behind the Wrench
Author: Sora (soraphilia)
E-mail: ishisuzu[at]gmail.com
Character: Winry Rockbell
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi)
Spoilers: The entire anime (51 episodes)
Notes: This essay covers the anime, with only one event from the manga illustrated briefly. I was originally going to expand on things unique to Winry in the manga, but I decided the essay was long enough in covering just the anime. Also, the manga is far from being concluded, making it still impossible to do a complete analysis of her character in it.
A Simple Country Girl? - Background Information
Winry Rockbell is a fifteen-year-old mechanic from the country town of Resembool (official spelling in the US release; also called Rizenbul, Risenbourg, and others). An orphan since she was seven, she lives with her grandmother, Pinako, who trained her in mechanics from a very young age. Together they run a business providing war veterans and accident victims with mechanical arms and legs called automail.
Most importantly to the story, Winry is also the best friend of the two protagonists, Edward and Alphonse Elric. Since the Elrics were the Rockbells' closest neighbors and had children who were the same age, Winry grew up with Ed and Al almost as if they were her own brothers, and her grandmother even became Ed and Al's guardian after their mother died.
When Ed lost his right arm and left leg and Al lost his body in an attempt to revive their mother through alchemy, Ed asked Pinako and Winry to make him automail so that he and Al could become State Alchemists and search for a way to get their full bodies back. Then the Elric brothers left their home to join the military, returning to visit Winry and Pinako whenever Ed needed maintenance or replacement automail.
"Just Another Token Female" - First Impressions
After a brief glimpse of her in the beginning of the first episode, the anime introduces Winry in episode 3, which gives the backstory for the plot of Fullmetal Alchemist. Here we first see her as a five-year-old with a puppy in her arms, complaining that she's bored as she watches Ed and Al draw an alchemical array on her living room floor. As the brothers' first attempt at alchemy, they've decided to transmute a pile of ashes into a doll for Winry, but she's become impatient with the setup and just wants her present. But when the transmutation process begins, the lights in the room go out and the ash pile grows and distorts into a ghostlike figure with a gaping mouth and hollow eyes, making Winry scream and collapse in tears as Ed and Al run to comfort her.
Although her behavior in this first scene is understandable considering her age and the situation, she comes off at first as a bit of a spoiled brat and a crybaby. This isn't helped by the fact that the next time we see her in this episode, she yells at Al for trying to make her feel better after she finds out her parents have been killed. When I watched the beginning of Fullmetal Alchemist for the first time, without having any forehand knowledge from online of the series or characters, my impression of Winry wasn't the entirely positive one it is now. I had a feeling that she would grow up to be a boring and sometimes annoying token female whose main purpose was to become the love interest of the main character.
But even then, there was something about her that interested me and made me want to see more of her. Part of it was that I just loved her character design, and her third major scene, in which she inspects Al's new armor body in fascination, was amusing. Also, I guessed that she, like a lot of female characters in anime, would be unfairly hated and bashed by the fandom. Character bashing gets on my nerves, and in the case of the "boring token female" it usually makes me realize that although they may not be great, they're not as bad as the fans make them out to be. Even if I don't particularly like them as characters, I end up feeling drawn to them just because they're so unfairly hated.
Fortunately, the introduction of Winry as her present-timeline self proved me wrong about her character. On Ed and Al's visit back to Resembool in episode 17 and chapter 9, we see that Winry has grown into a skilled automail mechanic with a feisty temper and an obsession with tools and machines. She takes great pride in her work and is prone to yelling at Ed and hitting him with a wrench whenever she finds out he's broken the automail she worked so hard on. But not-so-underneath this attitude, she's a caring friend whose real concern is for the safety of Ed and his brother.
Tough Love - Strengths and Weaknesses
Winry is generally a cheerful, outgoing person who likes to help others, and not just for a living. Although she's the same age as Ed and only a year older than Al, Winry often displays big-sister-like or even motherly tendencies towards them. She reminds them that no matter how alone they feel when they're out in the world, they will always have a home with her and Pinako. When she finds the inscription "Don't forget 3.Oct.10 [Oct.11 in the manga]" inside Ed's State Alchemist watch and returns it to him, Ed explains that he keeps it as a reminder that he and Al can't turn back on their journey because they have nowhere to return to. Winry bursts into tears and asks, "Why?! You do have a home! You have Grandma and me!"
In addition to her bond with the Elric brothers, she makes fast friends with the Hughes family during a visit to Ed in Central, and sometime later, with Hughes' secretary Scieszka. The latter she first runs into after Hughes is killed, during a visit to his grave, and immediately agrees to help investigate the reason behind the murder. She uses her lockpicking skills to get them underneath the military headquarters where they can tap into the phone lines, and although this excavation itself is a disaster, they manage to uncover just enough information to know that something is terribly wrong inside the military. After telling this to Lieutenant Ross, she takes the frightened Scieszka to stay with her back home in Resembool.
Another one of Winry's strengths is her perceptiveness. Being very emotional herself, she's often able to pick up on others' thoughts and feelings when nobody else can. After the Fifth Laboratory incident, when Ed is worried that Al might feel betrayed because Ed refused to sacrifice the prisoners in order to save Al's life and get his body back, Winry tells him what is closer to the truth: that Al wouldn't have wanted Ed to save him if it meant sacrificing other people, and if his anger had anything to do with that, it was over the fact that he saw Ed even contemplating it. In the manga the situation is a bit different; Winry gets the brothers to reconcile with each other by being the one to make Al understand the guilt Ed feels in being the one who trapped Al in his armored body.
Ed and Al have always been Winry's closest friends and two of the people she cares most about. Since she's Ed's mechanic, she seems to have become somewhat partial to him and feels a greater responsibility for his well-being. She hits and yells at him when his automail breaks, but she also takes responsibility for her own mistakes. Once, she forgets to put in a certain screw while fixing the automail, and when Ed calls to tell her it's broken, she travels to see him herself so she can fix it. Unfortunately she learns that Ed has not only broken his automail this time, but has landed himself in the hospital and Al has been broken in pieces. The brothers don't want Winry to worry about them, so they refuse to tell her about the dangers they run into with the Homunculi and Scar. But she can tell from the damage they suffer that something is wrong, and being uninformed only makes her worry more.
Along with her tendency to worry, Winry can sometimes be too emotional and impulsive. She's quick to speak her mind and, if need be, to give others a piece of it along with a wrench to the head. Although her outbursts are usually the result of good intentions, she sometimes goes too far and acts immaturely and irrationally. And worry is one of the main triggers of Winry's emotional outbursts. Knowing so little about the life they're living now, she doesn't understand why Ed and Al continue to endanger themselves in the attempt gain back their bodies. Some FMA fans take her stance on this to mean that she only cares about Ed's automail; and that the real reason she wants him to stop trying to get back his real limbs is because she sees it as an insult to her workmanship. During a stop in the town of Rush Valley in episode 26, she attempts to make Ed realize he's better off living with automail than with using alchemy to get back his real limbs, and her method involves getting her new automail-limbed friend Paninya to steal Ed's State Alchemist watch and outrun him. When Ed finally gets the watch back, Winry asks in tears: "Is automail not good enough for you?"
This was an immature act on her part, but I also think the intention behind it is misinterpreted as a lot more selfish than it really was. Personal pride may be a small factor in it, but it's clear that overall she's far more concerned about her friends than about herself. She wants Ed to keep his automail not because it's her own work, but because she doesn't want anything worse to happen to him and Al in trying to get their full bodies back. She wants them be happy with what they still have: each other, her and Pinako, and their own lives. As she reminds Ed in episode 17: "Automail can be replaced, but you only have one life."
Beyond Rush Valley - Character Development
In the second half of the series, Winry winds up traveling with Ed and Al for a while and grows up a lot. She meets Izumi Curtis, their former alchemy teacher, and learns about Izumi's own past attempt to bring back the dead after her first and only child died as an infant. Shortly after this, the body of Izumi's child, which had survived and grown up on the island where she attempted the transmutation, became the Homunculus known as Wrath. With this Izumi realizes her mistake in having left her transmuted child alive and takes Wrath back to the island in order to kill him once and for all. When Ed, Al, and Izumi's husband can't figure out where she has gone, Winry is the first one to realize what's going on, and tells them to look for Izumi on the island where she transmuted her child. When they arrive there, they find Wrath ready to kill Izumi -- and anyone else who tries to prevent him from doing so. Winry finds herself unable to do anything in the life-and-death battle that begins between the Elrics and the Homunculus, but in the midst of it, she begs Ed and Al not to kill Wrath because, despite what he's become, she still believes he's human.
So, while Winry does not want her friends to be killed, she also doesn't want to see them kill anyone. As someone whose doctor parents were killed in the Ishbal War, she is even more sensitive to death, particularly murder, than most people. However, death is something she can't help but encounter on her journey with the Elric brothers. During a stop at a refugee camp, she meets two Ishbal children who knew her parents during the war, and runs into an emotional dilemma. Not knowing who she is, the children tell her that the Rockbells' murderer was a State Alchemist who specialized in flame attacks: Colonel Roy Mustang, whose direct command Ed had been under since he joined the military.
With this, Winry finally decides to listen to Ed and Al's earlier insistence that she's not meant to travel with them anymore. Never one to be good at hiding her feelings for long, she knows she wouldn't be able to keep any feelings about her new discovery a secret from them if she stayed in their company. Without telling them anything about what she's learned, she forces herself to smile and requests to return to Central City with Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye and the rest of the military about to leave the camp.
The way Winry deals with the truth about her parents' death, in my opinion, shows extreme growth of character away from the girl in episode 26 who tried to force Ed and Al cater to her feelings and wishes without looking at the bigger picture. By this time, she has fully seen and understood that they have burdens of their own that have nothing to do with her, and that involving them in her personal problems would only make things worse for everyone. There's no doubt that it hurt her to know that Ed was working under her parents' murderer, but instead of telling him who Mustang was and insisting he leave the military, she held her emotions back for the sake of more important things.
But her confrontation with her parents' death doesn't end there. On her return to Central, Winry learns more about Roy Mustang and his goals from some of the people he's most important to: Riza Hawkeye; and Gracia Hughes, the widow of Lieutenant Colonel Maes Hughes, who Winry had befriended on her last visit to Central. Knowing that Mustang has the trust and support of good people, she realizes that her parents' murder wasn't a simple issue of black and white, of good and bad.
During a scene after she returns to Resembool from Central, she visits her parents' graves and explains their deaths to Ed and Al's father, who has recently returned from a long absence.
"How sad," he says to her.
"Please don't say it that simply!" she responds. "It's not 'sad'… I know the person who killed my parents. I also know that he's not a bad person. And because of that, I don't know what to do." (From episode 43.)
At this point, however, Winry doesn't seem certain in her statement of knowing Mustang isn't a bad person. She has heard it from others, but not yet seen it for herself. This changes later in the episode when Mustang's troops capture Winry and Scieszka looking for Ed and Al in the woods in Resembool. At this point, the Elrics have gone missing after Ed decided to quit the military, and Winry and Scieszka are captured as possibly having information about their whereabouts. Winry demands to know if Mustang really thinks Ed and Al are traitors, and if he had thought the same of her parents when he killed them in Ishbal.
At the end of the episode, the group of military members and hostages finds the Elric brothers and Mustang reveals his side of the story behind Winry's parents' death. Back then he had believed it was his duty to follow military commands above all else, but his obedience of an order to kill two innocent doctors had changed his view. After killing Winry's parents, he decided that he would not obey any more orders he believed were irrational. For this reason, he had gone looking for Ed and Al on his own initiative, outside of orders. Although we don't find out in detail what Winry makes of this, the last shot of her in this episode shows her looking calm and somewhat sympathetic. This is the last time the issue of her parents is brought up in the series, and it can be concluded that she and Mustang have made peace with each other indirectly. Winry has seen how his murder of her parents caused Mustang's beliefs to change for the better, and is able to see beyond her personal loss to fully accept that he is a good person.
This concludes Winry's own story in the anime of Fullmetal Alchemist, and she goes back to her home and her job, more encouraging of Ed and Al's journey than she was before. She still wants them to be safe, but she realizes how important their goal is to them and no longer yells or uses violence to try and stop them from doing what they believe is necessary. Finally, the series ends with her showing optimism despite not knowing where Ed has disappeared to, and she becomes an apprentice in the automail town of Rush Valley to become the best she possibly can be at her trade.
Conclusion - Why I Wrote This Essay
I think Winry is one of the most interesting characters in Fullmetal Alchemist, and unfortunately also one of the least understood and appreciated. She's often dismissed as an annoying brat who contributes nothing to the series and disliked for not being "cool" like the other female characters such as Hawkeye, Lust, and Izumi. Winry isn't perfect, but the flaws she's criticized for make her a realistic and well-rounded character with room for growth - which she gets plenty of. But her development is often ignored in the fandom and her immature acts in the first half of the series are seen as the be-all, end-all of her character.
I wanted this essay to show how much Winry actually changes throughout the series and the full range of her personality. She's more than just a conveniently talented girl with a temper and automail obsession, and she's not the useless whiner or selfish bitch I've seen some FMA fans accuse her of being. She's a normal teenager who gets caught up in a lot of heavy situations, and she deals with them in ways I think are ultimately very mature and admirable. She makes mistakes - a few that you can watch and find so stupid that you want to grab her wrench from her and hit her right back. But everyone makes these kinds of mistakes sometimes, and I think this makes her all the more human and easy to relate to. Just as importantly, the things she does wrong don't take up too much of her screentime to outweigh her good qualities.
I find Winry both extremely realistic and extremely likable, and that's why she's one of my absolute favorite anime (and manga) characters. I love the main story of Fullmetal Alchemist and could write essays on why so many of the other characters are just as good as Winry, but her presence in the series only makes me enjoy it that much more.
Related Links
Winry and Fullmetal Alchemist Livejournal communities:
wrench_geek - Winry fan community!
alxwinry - Al/Winry pairing fan community
ed_winry - Ed/Winry pairing fan community
fma_het - Community for all m/f Fullmetal Alchemist pairings
fma_yuri - Community for all f/f Fullmetal Alchemist pairings
fm_alchemist - Fullmetal Alchemist main community
Fullmetal Alchemist fanfiction archives:
Scimitar Smile
Touka Koukan
Title: The Girl Behind the Wrench
Author: Sora (soraphilia)
E-mail: ishisuzu[at]gmail.com
Character: Winry Rockbell
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi)
Spoilers: The entire anime (51 episodes)
Notes: This essay covers the anime, with only one event from the manga illustrated briefly. I was originally going to expand on things unique to Winry in the manga, but I decided the essay was long enough in covering just the anime. Also, the manga is far from being concluded, making it still impossible to do a complete analysis of her character in it.
A Simple Country Girl? - Background Information
Winry Rockbell is a fifteen-year-old mechanic from the country town of Resembool (official spelling in the US release; also called Rizenbul, Risenbourg, and others). An orphan since she was seven, she lives with her grandmother, Pinako, who trained her in mechanics from a very young age. Together they run a business providing war veterans and accident victims with mechanical arms and legs called automail.
Most importantly to the story, Winry is also the best friend of the two protagonists, Edward and Alphonse Elric. Since the Elrics were the Rockbells' closest neighbors and had children who were the same age, Winry grew up with Ed and Al almost as if they were her own brothers, and her grandmother even became Ed and Al's guardian after their mother died.
When Ed lost his right arm and left leg and Al lost his body in an attempt to revive their mother through alchemy, Ed asked Pinako and Winry to make him automail so that he and Al could become State Alchemists and search for a way to get their full bodies back. Then the Elric brothers left their home to join the military, returning to visit Winry and Pinako whenever Ed needed maintenance or replacement automail.
"Just Another Token Female" - First Impressions
After a brief glimpse of her in the beginning of the first episode, the anime introduces Winry in episode 3, which gives the backstory for the plot of Fullmetal Alchemist. Here we first see her as a five-year-old with a puppy in her arms, complaining that she's bored as she watches Ed and Al draw an alchemical array on her living room floor. As the brothers' first attempt at alchemy, they've decided to transmute a pile of ashes into a doll for Winry, but she's become impatient with the setup and just wants her present. But when the transmutation process begins, the lights in the room go out and the ash pile grows and distorts into a ghostlike figure with a gaping mouth and hollow eyes, making Winry scream and collapse in tears as Ed and Al run to comfort her.
Although her behavior in this first scene is understandable considering her age and the situation, she comes off at first as a bit of a spoiled brat and a crybaby. This isn't helped by the fact that the next time we see her in this episode, she yells at Al for trying to make her feel better after she finds out her parents have been killed. When I watched the beginning of Fullmetal Alchemist for the first time, without having any forehand knowledge from online of the series or characters, my impression of Winry wasn't the entirely positive one it is now. I had a feeling that she would grow up to be a boring and sometimes annoying token female whose main purpose was to become the love interest of the main character.
But even then, there was something about her that interested me and made me want to see more of her. Part of it was that I just loved her character design, and her third major scene, in which she inspects Al's new armor body in fascination, was amusing. Also, I guessed that she, like a lot of female characters in anime, would be unfairly hated and bashed by the fandom. Character bashing gets on my nerves, and in the case of the "boring token female" it usually makes me realize that although they may not be great, they're not as bad as the fans make them out to be. Even if I don't particularly like them as characters, I end up feeling drawn to them just because they're so unfairly hated.
Fortunately, the introduction of Winry as her present-timeline self proved me wrong about her character. On Ed and Al's visit back to Resembool in episode 17 and chapter 9, we see that Winry has grown into a skilled automail mechanic with a feisty temper and an obsession with tools and machines. She takes great pride in her work and is prone to yelling at Ed and hitting him with a wrench whenever she finds out he's broken the automail she worked so hard on. But not-so-underneath this attitude, she's a caring friend whose real concern is for the safety of Ed and his brother.
Tough Love - Strengths and Weaknesses
Winry is generally a cheerful, outgoing person who likes to help others, and not just for a living. Although she's the same age as Ed and only a year older than Al, Winry often displays big-sister-like or even motherly tendencies towards them. She reminds them that no matter how alone they feel when they're out in the world, they will always have a home with her and Pinako. When she finds the inscription "Don't forget 3.Oct.10 [Oct.11 in the manga]" inside Ed's State Alchemist watch and returns it to him, Ed explains that he keeps it as a reminder that he and Al can't turn back on their journey because they have nowhere to return to. Winry bursts into tears and asks, "Why?! You do have a home! You have Grandma and me!"
In addition to her bond with the Elric brothers, she makes fast friends with the Hughes family during a visit to Ed in Central, and sometime later, with Hughes' secretary Scieszka. The latter she first runs into after Hughes is killed, during a visit to his grave, and immediately agrees to help investigate the reason behind the murder. She uses her lockpicking skills to get them underneath the military headquarters where they can tap into the phone lines, and although this excavation itself is a disaster, they manage to uncover just enough information to know that something is terribly wrong inside the military. After telling this to Lieutenant Ross, she takes the frightened Scieszka to stay with her back home in Resembool.
Another one of Winry's strengths is her perceptiveness. Being very emotional herself, she's often able to pick up on others' thoughts and feelings when nobody else can. After the Fifth Laboratory incident, when Ed is worried that Al might feel betrayed because Ed refused to sacrifice the prisoners in order to save Al's life and get his body back, Winry tells him what is closer to the truth: that Al wouldn't have wanted Ed to save him if it meant sacrificing other people, and if his anger had anything to do with that, it was over the fact that he saw Ed even contemplating it. In the manga the situation is a bit different; Winry gets the brothers to reconcile with each other by being the one to make Al understand the guilt Ed feels in being the one who trapped Al in his armored body.
Ed and Al have always been Winry's closest friends and two of the people she cares most about. Since she's Ed's mechanic, she seems to have become somewhat partial to him and feels a greater responsibility for his well-being. She hits and yells at him when his automail breaks, but she also takes responsibility for her own mistakes. Once, she forgets to put in a certain screw while fixing the automail, and when Ed calls to tell her it's broken, she travels to see him herself so she can fix it. Unfortunately she learns that Ed has not only broken his automail this time, but has landed himself in the hospital and Al has been broken in pieces. The brothers don't want Winry to worry about them, so they refuse to tell her about the dangers they run into with the Homunculi and Scar. But she can tell from the damage they suffer that something is wrong, and being uninformed only makes her worry more.
Along with her tendency to worry, Winry can sometimes be too emotional and impulsive. She's quick to speak her mind and, if need be, to give others a piece of it along with a wrench to the head. Although her outbursts are usually the result of good intentions, she sometimes goes too far and acts immaturely and irrationally. And worry is one of the main triggers of Winry's emotional outbursts. Knowing so little about the life they're living now, she doesn't understand why Ed and Al continue to endanger themselves in the attempt gain back their bodies. Some FMA fans take her stance on this to mean that she only cares about Ed's automail; and that the real reason she wants him to stop trying to get back his real limbs is because she sees it as an insult to her workmanship. During a stop in the town of Rush Valley in episode 26, she attempts to make Ed realize he's better off living with automail than with using alchemy to get back his real limbs, and her method involves getting her new automail-limbed friend Paninya to steal Ed's State Alchemist watch and outrun him. When Ed finally gets the watch back, Winry asks in tears: "Is automail not good enough for you?"
This was an immature act on her part, but I also think the intention behind it is misinterpreted as a lot more selfish than it really was. Personal pride may be a small factor in it, but it's clear that overall she's far more concerned about her friends than about herself. She wants Ed to keep his automail not because it's her own work, but because she doesn't want anything worse to happen to him and Al in trying to get their full bodies back. She wants them be happy with what they still have: each other, her and Pinako, and their own lives. As she reminds Ed in episode 17: "Automail can be replaced, but you only have one life."
Beyond Rush Valley - Character Development
In the second half of the series, Winry winds up traveling with Ed and Al for a while and grows up a lot. She meets Izumi Curtis, their former alchemy teacher, and learns about Izumi's own past attempt to bring back the dead after her first and only child died as an infant. Shortly after this, the body of Izumi's child, which had survived and grown up on the island where she attempted the transmutation, became the Homunculus known as Wrath. With this Izumi realizes her mistake in having left her transmuted child alive and takes Wrath back to the island in order to kill him once and for all. When Ed, Al, and Izumi's husband can't figure out where she has gone, Winry is the first one to realize what's going on, and tells them to look for Izumi on the island where she transmuted her child. When they arrive there, they find Wrath ready to kill Izumi -- and anyone else who tries to prevent him from doing so. Winry finds herself unable to do anything in the life-and-death battle that begins between the Elrics and the Homunculus, but in the midst of it, she begs Ed and Al not to kill Wrath because, despite what he's become, she still believes he's human.
So, while Winry does not want her friends to be killed, she also doesn't want to see them kill anyone. As someone whose doctor parents were killed in the Ishbal War, she is even more sensitive to death, particularly murder, than most people. However, death is something she can't help but encounter on her journey with the Elric brothers. During a stop at a refugee camp, she meets two Ishbal children who knew her parents during the war, and runs into an emotional dilemma. Not knowing who she is, the children tell her that the Rockbells' murderer was a State Alchemist who specialized in flame attacks: Colonel Roy Mustang, whose direct command Ed had been under since he joined the military.
With this, Winry finally decides to listen to Ed and Al's earlier insistence that she's not meant to travel with them anymore. Never one to be good at hiding her feelings for long, she knows she wouldn't be able to keep any feelings about her new discovery a secret from them if she stayed in their company. Without telling them anything about what she's learned, she forces herself to smile and requests to return to Central City with Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye and the rest of the military about to leave the camp.
The way Winry deals with the truth about her parents' death, in my opinion, shows extreme growth of character away from the girl in episode 26 who tried to force Ed and Al cater to her feelings and wishes without looking at the bigger picture. By this time, she has fully seen and understood that they have burdens of their own that have nothing to do with her, and that involving them in her personal problems would only make things worse for everyone. There's no doubt that it hurt her to know that Ed was working under her parents' murderer, but instead of telling him who Mustang was and insisting he leave the military, she held her emotions back for the sake of more important things.
But her confrontation with her parents' death doesn't end there. On her return to Central, Winry learns more about Roy Mustang and his goals from some of the people he's most important to: Riza Hawkeye; and Gracia Hughes, the widow of Lieutenant Colonel Maes Hughes, who Winry had befriended on her last visit to Central. Knowing that Mustang has the trust and support of good people, she realizes that her parents' murder wasn't a simple issue of black and white, of good and bad.
During a scene after she returns to Resembool from Central, she visits her parents' graves and explains their deaths to Ed and Al's father, who has recently returned from a long absence.
"How sad," he says to her.
"Please don't say it that simply!" she responds. "It's not 'sad'… I know the person who killed my parents. I also know that he's not a bad person. And because of that, I don't know what to do." (From episode 43.)
At this point, however, Winry doesn't seem certain in her statement of knowing Mustang isn't a bad person. She has heard it from others, but not yet seen it for herself. This changes later in the episode when Mustang's troops capture Winry and Scieszka looking for Ed and Al in the woods in Resembool. At this point, the Elrics have gone missing after Ed decided to quit the military, and Winry and Scieszka are captured as possibly having information about their whereabouts. Winry demands to know if Mustang really thinks Ed and Al are traitors, and if he had thought the same of her parents when he killed them in Ishbal.
At the end of the episode, the group of military members and hostages finds the Elric brothers and Mustang reveals his side of the story behind Winry's parents' death. Back then he had believed it was his duty to follow military commands above all else, but his obedience of an order to kill two innocent doctors had changed his view. After killing Winry's parents, he decided that he would not obey any more orders he believed were irrational. For this reason, he had gone looking for Ed and Al on his own initiative, outside of orders. Although we don't find out in detail what Winry makes of this, the last shot of her in this episode shows her looking calm and somewhat sympathetic. This is the last time the issue of her parents is brought up in the series, and it can be concluded that she and Mustang have made peace with each other indirectly. Winry has seen how his murder of her parents caused Mustang's beliefs to change for the better, and is able to see beyond her personal loss to fully accept that he is a good person.
This concludes Winry's own story in the anime of Fullmetal Alchemist, and she goes back to her home and her job, more encouraging of Ed and Al's journey than she was before. She still wants them to be safe, but she realizes how important their goal is to them and no longer yells or uses violence to try and stop them from doing what they believe is necessary. Finally, the series ends with her showing optimism despite not knowing where Ed has disappeared to, and she becomes an apprentice in the automail town of Rush Valley to become the best she possibly can be at her trade.
Conclusion - Why I Wrote This Essay
I think Winry is one of the most interesting characters in Fullmetal Alchemist, and unfortunately also one of the least understood and appreciated. She's often dismissed as an annoying brat who contributes nothing to the series and disliked for not being "cool" like the other female characters such as Hawkeye, Lust, and Izumi. Winry isn't perfect, but the flaws she's criticized for make her a realistic and well-rounded character with room for growth - which she gets plenty of. But her development is often ignored in the fandom and her immature acts in the first half of the series are seen as the be-all, end-all of her character.
I wanted this essay to show how much Winry actually changes throughout the series and the full range of her personality. She's more than just a conveniently talented girl with a temper and automail obsession, and she's not the useless whiner or selfish bitch I've seen some FMA fans accuse her of being. She's a normal teenager who gets caught up in a lot of heavy situations, and she deals with them in ways I think are ultimately very mature and admirable. She makes mistakes - a few that you can watch and find so stupid that you want to grab her wrench from her and hit her right back. But everyone makes these kinds of mistakes sometimes, and I think this makes her all the more human and easy to relate to. Just as importantly, the things she does wrong don't take up too much of her screentime to outweigh her good qualities.
I find Winry both extremely realistic and extremely likable, and that's why she's one of my absolute favorite anime (and manga) characters. I love the main story of Fullmetal Alchemist and could write essays on why so many of the other characters are just as good as Winry, but her presence in the series only makes me enjoy it that much more.
Related Links
Winry and Fullmetal Alchemist Livejournal communities:
wrench_geek - Winry fan community!
alxwinry - Al/Winry pairing fan community
ed_winry - Ed/Winry pairing fan community
fma_het - Community for all m/f Fullmetal Alchemist pairings
fma_yuri - Community for all f/f Fullmetal Alchemist pairings
fm_alchemist - Fullmetal Alchemist main community
Fullmetal Alchemist fanfiction archives:
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