So the Latin text on the wall on page… 16, I think, reads “pater abavo est creator filius redemptor et mediator”, which one internet source has helpfully translated as “The father, due to ancestry, is the creator, the son is the savior and pacifier”. It’s presumably a biblical reference, though one also wonders if it’s deliberate foreshadowing…
On page 32, Kimblee is forming a Buddhist hand sign, or mudra (印相 in Japanese… I think) - this one is the Abhaya Mudra, which “symbolizes protection, peace, and the dispelling of fear”, according to the internet.
My Latin is even worse then my Japanese but I’m pretty sure that the grammar makes no sense here. “The father, from/to the great-great-grandfather, is creator the son redemptor and mediator”
Abavo is dative or ablative of abavus (great-great-grandfather) so it’s like the particles から or に in Japanese.
Lust’s line, 計画1はもう最終段階に入っているのだから is one of the things I quite like about FMA. A general storytelling rule is that you can’t stop the villain too soon in his plan, otherwise the tension goes away. Unfortunately, in a lot of stories, tension is maintained right to the end by simply having the hero fail to stop the villain at every step of his plan - or even in some instances, furthering the evil plan from sheer incompetence.
(See: any series requiring the hero to assemble pieces of a MacGuffin in order to prevent the villain from using it, only for the villain to just steal the whole thing once it’s complete - if you’d left the pieces where they were, nothing would have happened. But I digress.)
In FMA, the heroes don’t stop the villain’s evil plan in its early stages, because it’s already in the endgame before they’ve even noticed the plan exists. Before they’ve even met any of the flunkies. The story of FMA isn’t people trying and failing to stop the plan, it’s people trying to work out what the plan is.
The symbol reads “Pater Abavo Est Creator; Filius Redemptor et Mediator”, which translates from Latin into “The Forefather is the Creator; the Son, Redeemer and Mediator”, but does not appear to have a real-world source.
Recently I caught up with the club (yatta!) and watched some anime episodes ahead. So, this people behind ウィンリィ！(For these who don’t know them: nothing’s happening here, just some observation)
I kinda wonder why they’re there. The manga doesn’t formally introduce them until the middle of next volume, and they don’t show up again in this volume at all. Perhaps Arakawa-sensei just went “Wow, I actually like those background character designs I made, maybe I’ll make them into actual characters”, but they’re kinda a bit too distinctive to be mere background characters.
Brosh’s pose in the second panel of page 69 is presumably a reference to Yamcha’s death post in Dragonball, though he’s flipped.
