  |
This article's content is marked as Mature The page contains mature content that may include coarse language, sexual references, strong drug use, extremely traumatic themes, and/or graphic violent images which may be disturbing to some. Mature pages are recommended for those who are 18 years of age and older. If you are 18 years or older or are comfortable with graphic material, you are free to view this page. Otherwise, you should close this page and view another page. |
|
| “ | Open your eyes. 'God' is nothing more than a construct created by man to inspire fear and promote order. If you wish to see me struck down, for all these atrocities, use your own hands to do so, not 'God's'. | „ |
| ~ Wrath to Logue Lowe. |
| “ | There's something comforting facing death like this, wouldn't you agree? It's all that matters, nothing else seems to exist outside my pure instinct to survive. Rank, personal history, birth, race, sex, the name given to you; it's all meaningless, this is the only thing that's real, to fight on behalf of my own life and nothing else. I've never felt so complete, I guess you could say I've finally arrived. | „ |
| ~ Wrath to Scar. |
| “ | I've lived my life by forever following the path that had been set for me. Thanks to the idiosyncrasies of humanity, it was... at least a life worth living for... and maybe even a life worth dying for. | „ |
| ~ Wrath's last words after being defeated by Scar. |
Wrath, also better known by his human alias Führer King Bradley, and also known as Wrath the Furious, is the secondary antagonist of the Fullmetal Alchemist franchise.
He first appears as the somewhat happy-go-lucky ruler of the country of Amestris, but he is later revealed to be in fact one of the Seven Homunculi created by the mysterious being known as Father. His entire life was devised so that he would rule Amestris on Father's behalf, to help him enact his plan. He is also the arch-nemesis of Roy Mustang, Scar, Ling Yao, Greed, and Ling Yao's bodyguards, Lan Fan and Fu.
He was voiced by Hidekatsu Shibata and Hidenobu Kiuchi when he was young in Japanese, and by the late Ed Blaylock (who also voiced Sengoku in One Piece, Sebas Tian in Overlord and Jose Porla in Fairy Tail) and Christopher Bevins when he was young in English.
Personality[]
| “ | Everything from my name to my position was given to me by my superiors. My wife, however, was of my own choosing. | „ |
| ~ Wrath tells Hawkeye that his marriage is the only real part of his life |
At first glance, King Bradley appears as a cheerful and easy-going man who frequently escapes responsibilities to have some free time, offers people melons and watermelons or dresses as a tourist when he goes to a countryside town, while at the same time ruling his country with an iron fist and sometimes adopting a hands-on approach while dealing with threats.
In truth, Wrath is distant, reserved, cruel and merciless, as devoted to Father's cause as any other homunculus. Being created from the Deadly Sin of Wrath, he is extremely irascible, though it seldom manifests as violent outbursts, but rather as a cold, controlled anger, hard to notice at first glance.
Despite being a relentless warrior who mows down all opposition without respite, and a ruthless ruler, who openly disdains the concepts of God and divine punishment, not caring the slightest about people he slaughters, his goofy persona is not entirely made up.
Although Wrath dismisses humans as hopeless weaklings who struggle in vain in a world too big for them, and scorns their attempts to fight for lost causes, he always remains polite and respectful, if aloof and imposing, bears his foes no ill will and genuinely praises them when impressed. This shows that, for all his faults, his affable nature towards his people was genuine.
He barely hides an interest for human nature, noticing with amusement that humans unexpectedly put a thorn in the homunculi's side. He somehow sympathizes with the protagonists, letting them escape after defeating them more than once out of genuine respect for them.
Wrath enjoys simple pleasures like having a cup of tea or spending time with his family and is fond of his wife, as his marriage is the only element on his life that he could decide himself and she is the only human that he truly cares about. It is also subtly implied that he harbors resentment towards the Gold Toothed Doctor, who personally supervised his development since he was a child.
Powers and Abilities[]
| “ | It makes a lot of difference when you're using a weapon that you're more comfortable with. | „ |
| ~ Wrath, after using knives to steal Fu's short sword |
Wrath may be unable to regenerate but he has exceptional speed, strength, agility and durability, even greater than that of his siblings. He can escape from a collapsing bridge in the midst of an explosion, dodge point-blank gunfire, toss a full-grown body with one hand, and fight to the full extent of his skills even when severely wounded.
Wrath regularly complains that age reduces his speed and reflexes, but it does not seem that big a hindrance. With his current power, it can easily be guessed how formidable he was during his heydays.
Wrath is a supreme swordsman who fights with two military sabres, and even up to five, drawing and striking with uncanny speed and precision. He is undoubtedly one of the best fighters of the series, able to dominate the very powerful Greed, Fu and Scar, in skills alone. He is deadly even with weapons he is unused to like daggers.
Unique Trait[]
| “ | You might have the eyesight of a god, but even you can't dodge an attack you can't see coming! | „ |
| ~ Captain Buccaneer, after stabbing Wrath though a dying Fu |
The Ultimate Eye.
Wrath's power, the "Ultimate Eye", is contained in his left eye, usually covered with an eye-patch to hide the homunculi Ouroboros mark.
It enables him to see anything with flawless accuracy, including things beyond human sight like air movements, and to predict the outcome of every situation, the aim of all blows and anyone's weak points.
This makes his strikes even deadlier and enables him to predict all attacks and dodge in advance. With it, Wrath is close to invincible in battle, utterly trouncing Greed and Fu at the same time.
Political Power[]
As Amestris' absolute ruler, Wrath wields huge military power and an almost complete control over the military and the State Alchemists, which he uses to keep an eye on those useful to the homunculi and to replace troops who do not blindly follow him with ones that are more faithful. To put it simply, when on Wrath's bad side, one gets the entire country of Amestris against him, save from a few undisciplined factions.
Biography[]
Background[]
Wrath being born.
60 years before the start of the story, Wrath was a nameless orphan with no relative, raised among other abandoned children for the sole purpose of becoming Amestris' puppet-king. These candidates were taught politics, military strategy and swordplay. When they came of age, they were infused with a Philosopher's Stone so that Amestris' future ruler would be part of the Seven Homunculi.
The young man who would become Wrath was the twelfth candidate and the only one who survived the process. The new homunculus was named King Bradley and enrolled in the army, rising in ranks to become dictator of Amestris according to Father's designs.
Contrasting the other homunculi, who hold every soul in their core Philosopher's Stone and can heal to a near-limitless extent, Wrath seems to only have his human soul fused with his Stone. As such, he cannot regenerate, and being originally human, he is only homunculus who ages, albeit much slower than normal. Despite being the youngest homunculi, he is without a doubt the second strongest, right below his "adopted son" Pride, and one of their two thirds-in-command along with Lust.
As King Bradley[]
Fuhrer King Bradley makes few appearances in the first chapters of the story. First when he visits the primary protagonists Edward and Alphonse Elric in a hospital, after they met Lust and Envy in the Fifth Laboratory, and discovered that it housed hidden researches on the Philosopher's Stone. He advices the protagonists to be careful and to avoid the secret organization behind all these experiments.
Bradley is later seen renewing Edward's license as a State Alchemist (an alchemist who works for the military) without any examination nor test, then accompanying him back to Dublith, hoping to meet the Elrics' master Izumi Curtis and appoint her State Alchemist. There, they learn that Alphonse got abducted by a homunculus named Greed, prompting Bradley to invade Greed's bar alongside a military squad to rescue the young armor-bound alchemist. He mercilessly slaughters most of Greed's chimera underlings and swiftly beats Greed himself into submission, revealing an Ouroboros mark on his left eye.
Real Identity Revealed[]
Bradly ruthlessly kills Greed's henchmen/friends.
Bradley brings Greed to Father, revealing himself as Wrath, the last homunculi. Before Father absorbs Greed back, Wrath reveals that Edward, Alphonse and Izumi have been through the Gate of Truth and can be used as candidates for the sacrifices that Father needs.
Wrath later witnesses Colonel Roy Mustang killing Lust, but he does not kill him, retreating unnoticed and calling an ambulance, having noted that Mustang makes a potential candidate for the sacrifice.
Bradley slices off Greed's arm and leg.
When the Elrics, the Xingese prince Ling Yao and his bodyguard Lan Fan team up to capture a homunculus, Wrath and Gluttony stumble upon them and he severely wounds Lan Fan. However they manage to escape through the sewers, after Lan Fan severs her left arm and binds it to a stray dog to serve as a distraction. Gluttony eventually gets captured and Wrath reports it to Pride, before sending Envy to free their "sibling".
A short while later, when Roy Mustang tries to leak to the military High Command that Bradley is a homunculu. He discovers that they are fully aware of Bradley's true nature and Father's plan.
Wrath then informs the Elric brothers that their childhood friend Winry Rockbell is constantly watched over as an unsuspecting hostage, threatening to kill her personally if they leave the military or step out of line. Yet he allows them to continue their alchemic researches.
Wrath is surprised.
King Bradley holds Mustang at the Central Command for the night, stating that he will not kill the Colonel, but will not allow him to wander, either. To ensure Mustang's cooperation, Bradley reassigns his loyal subordinates: Falman is sent to the north, Fuery to the south, and Breda to the east. Havoc is already gone, having returned to his family's home. For Riza, however, Bradley has something else in mind.
Having deduced that she is the closest and most deeply trusted of Mustang's subordinates, as well as possessing superlative skills, Bradley has decided to make her his own personal assistant. In simplest terms, she is being held as a hostage for Mustang's good behavior, meaning that the Colonel cannot make a move to defy Bradley or defeat the Homunculi without placing his "queen" in grave danger.
Apparent Death[]
Upon learning that the Elric brothers are in Briggs Fortress, the next target for the homunculi's actions, Wrath frees Solf J. Kimblee from jail and sends him to Briggs with Winry, to keep an eye on them and remind them of the hostage situation. However, the Elrics make her escape and they go into hiding.
Wrath later fends off an attack from the reborn Greed, who regained his previous life's memories.
Later in the story, Wrath supervises a military display in the West of the country, until an alert about a terrorist attack in Central City, (the capital of Amestris) prompts him to come back to Central. It soon appears that the alert was a trap, and the bridge on which his train was passing is then blown up. From then on Wrath would not be seen for a very long time.
The Final Battle[]
Wrath on the Promised Day.
Wrath reappears in the midst of the final battle, when the troops of General Olivia Armstrong, the former leader of the fortress of Briggs, have successfully taken over the Military Headquarters of Central. It is revealed that he predicted the explosion thanks to his Ultimate Eye and could rush out of the train to escape the bridge as it was blown up.
He swiftly slaughters all the soldiers who attempt to shoot him, going as far as destroying a tank, and attempts to enter the headquarters, grievously wounding Armstrong's subordinate Captain Buccaneer in the process. However, Buccaneer manages to take away his saber, forcing him to fight with two daggers. Greed then appears and engages a fight against him.
Wrath quickly reveals his Ultimate Eye and gains the upper-hand, but Ling Yao's elderly bodyguard Fu enters the fray. Wrath easily holds off his two enemies and wounds Fu, who then attempts to blow himself up in a desperate attempt to kill his enemy, but not to avail. Wrath cuts all the fuses of Fu's grenades in a single strike, mortally wounding him in the process.
Wrath gets wounded.
However, Buccaneer intervenes and hiding behind Fu's body, he manages to go unnoticed even by the Ultimate Eye and impales Wrath with his own saber through Fu's corpse. Infuriated, Greed strikes Wrath on the face before he can recover, destroying his Ultimate Eye. Wrath falls down to the moat around the headquarters, as Fu and Buccaneer pass away with a smile.
Yet Wrath survives once again and swims underwater towards Father's underground lair, where the Gold Toothed Doctor is forcing Roy Mustang to perform a human transmutation, so that he would see the Truth and become the fifth sacrifice Father needs. Pride and Wrath then intervene and Wrath pins Mustang on the transmutation circle with two newfound sabres, before Pride activates the ritual and takes Mustang with him in Father's throne room.
Wrath then fights to the death with Scar, a survivor of the Ishval people he had slaughtered 15 years prior, who sided with the Elric brothers after learning that the homunculi were behind the genocide. In spite of his severe wounds and the loss of his Ultimate Eye, Wrath drives Scar into a corner, but he who claimed that god was a myth is distracted by the light of the sun after the eclipse, symbol of god in Alchemy. Scar destroys both of his arms and he collapses at last, but not before he could stab his foe with his saber in the mouth.
Wrath welcomes death.
Lan Fan then arrives, prompting Wrath to ask if she wants revenge for her grandfather. Instead, she asks if he feels some remorse after his sad life. He retorts that he has none, but in his last breath, he thanks his human foes for keeping his predicted life interesting until the end.
Contrary to the other homunculi, Wrath's corpse does not crumble into dust, but merely reverts to his real age, wrinkled and with grey hair, with his face covered with alchemy marks. It can be guessed that with his Philosopher's Stone gone, his corpse reverted back to its natural aging process.
Relationships[]
Family[]
Allies[]
- Homunculi
- Father
- Pride
- Lust † (indirect victim)
- Envy †
- Greed † (formerly)
- Sloth †
- Gluttony †
- Mannequin Soldiers
- State Military
- Roy Mustang (formerly)
- Riza Hawkeye (formerly)
- Lieutenant General Raven †
- Olivier Mira Armstrong (formerly)
- State Alchemists
- Gold Toothed Doctor †
Enemies[]
- Roy Mustang (arch-nemesis)
- Riza Hawkeye
- Edward Elric
- Alphonse Elric
- Van Hohenheim †
- Izumi Curtis
- Ling Yao (arch-nemesis)
- Lan Fan (arch-nemesis)
- Fu † (arch-nemesis, victim)
- May Chang
- Scar (arch-nemesis, killer)
- Tim Marcoh
- Greed † (arch-nemesis)
- Olivier Mira Armstrong
- Isaac McDougal † (victim)
- Drachma
Victims[]
Directly[]
- Isaac McDougal
- Roa
- Dolcetto
- Martel
- Fu
- Buccaneer
- Numerous Briggs soldiers
- Numerous unnamed people
Indirectly[]
- Lust
- Numerous Ishval residents
Quotes[]
| “ | All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men. | „ |
| ~ Wrath |
| “ | Let me get this straight, you think surrendering, and offering yourself will stop the war? How arrogant. The life of each human is worth one, that's all. Nothing more, nothing less. | „ |
| ~ Wrath when Logue Lowe offers himself to him to stop the war. |
| “ | God you say? Now this is intriguing, how much longer do you think your 'God' plans to wait before unleashing his fury? Just how many more thousands of lives must I take before he decides to strike me down? | „ |
| ~ Wrath scorning the concept of God to the face of the leader of the religious ethnic he slaughtered. |
| “ | Why must everyone make such a fuss over the death of a single soldier? The moment a soldier dons his uniform, he accepts the reality that he might be buried in it. | „ |
| ~ Wrath to Roy Mustang. |
| “ | Do they really expect me to make a complete mockery of myself by entering through the back door of my own Palace? | „ |
| ~ Wrath when he decided to act from the front gate. |
| “ | And here I was under the impression you were all pathetic creatures who could never learn a lesson properly. But apparently there are those like you who can learn. Who can change. That's one more reason why I can't stand you humans. It infuriates me when I can't predict how you'll behave. | „ |
| ~ Wrath voicing his surprise at Mustang's improvement. |
| “ | It's almost poetic, two nameless men fighting to the death. | „ |
| ~ Wrath to Scar. |
| “ | Stop throwing around words like "love" and "sorrow." You know nothing. She's the woman I chose. We didn't need such meaningless words to understand each other. That, is what it means to be the wife of the Fuhrer. | „ |
| ~ Wrath to Lan Fan. |
| “ | My life was lived on the rails that were laid down for me...but thanks to you humans, it was...to some degree, a good life...one worth living. | „ |
| ~ Wrath's final words. |
Trivia[]
- As a member of the military, Bradley is named from a real world military vehicle, the M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.
- Wrath's death, like the other homunculi, is poetic and ironic. Wrath spends his life fighting humans and carrying dislike for them and their religious beliefs and is killed by Scar, a religious monk turned serial killer and a victim of Wrath's extermination of Ishval, and passes away peacefully thankful of humanity for giving his life meaning. He also dies after losing both arms in the presence of Scar and Lan Fan, who both respectively lost an arm because of Wrath's actions.
- Wrath's death mirrors the method through which the wrathful souls of humans are punished in Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. In the Circle of Violence, wrathful human beings have their limbs tore off for having lived under the cardinal sin of Wrath.
- Wrath bears a resemblance to General Keiro from Hero Tales, another publication of Hiromu Arakawa's.
- Wrath also bears a resemblance to Joseph Stalin, the most common symbol of wrath, although Stalin only killed because of paranoia, not of dictatorship. Subsequently, in Arakawa's short series Raiden-18, which revolvs around Boris Karloff type Frankenstein monsters, Stalin's corpse is among the many other corpses owned by Profesor Tachibana, and bears a stricking resemblence to King Bradley.
- Later, Albus, an antagonist from the 2018 video game Octopath Traveler, would have a design resembling Wrath.
- Ironically, Wrath is the youngest of the Seven Homunculi, despite physically appearing as the oldest. Furthermore, Pride, Wrath's adoptive son, is in fact his older brother and the oldest homunculus despite resembling a child.
- Despite being the most vulnerable to harm due to his human-based origins (being unable to regenerate injuries and still aging like normal humans), Wrath is one of the strongest and most capable warriors among the homunculi. It is stated by the author that if he had retained his youth, he would be unbeatable.
- In the fourth opening of the series, Wrath is seen shedding tears before a confrontation with Scar, foreshadowing his final showdown, for unknown reasons, possibly to demonstrate he still carries some humanity within him (supported by his very marriage to his wife).
- During the Promised Day, in episode 55 and 56, Führer King Bradley can be seen carrying a Model 24 Stielhandgranate tucked into his belt. He uses the weapon to destroy a tank operated by Briggs soldiers at the command center. This also ties in with his Führer name, as the Stielhandgranate is of German design.
See Also[]
- Pride, Wrath's counterpart in terms of character in the 2003 anime series.
External Links[]
- Wrath on the Fullmetal Alchemist Wiki
[]
 Villains
| ||
|
Manga & Brotherhood 2003 Anime 2017 Movie | ||