Envy

The shape Envy wears most often is a slim, wiry youth of ambiguous gender, pale-skinned and muscled beneath long, ragged strands of hair. The eyes are violet and cut through by narrow, reptilian pupils. Hair color has shifted between versions: pitch black in the manga and the 2009 series to match the other homunculi, but a very dark green in the 2003 adaptation and much of the merchandise, a green tint that has clung to the character ever since. Its usual outfit is entirely black, a cropped top over a skort, fingerless gloves that run to the elbows, footless stockings, and a headband stamped with a triangular alchemical mark. This clothing is not really cloth at all but an extension of the body, shifting along with every transformation and even vanishing when Envy takes animal shape.

Beneath the humanlike disguise waits a monstrous true form. In the manga this is a vast, serpent-bodied chimera with four pairs of legs, a maned head, a beastly snout, and a cluster of pupils crowding one eye. Most unsettling are the countless human faces and arms that press outward from its hide like the drowning trying to break the surface, each one a soul of Xerxes bound inside the Philosopher's Stone at Envy's core. Once that Stone is nearly spent, the true form dwindles to a tiny, jawless serpent with a leechlike mouth, near helpless until it can latch onto another living thing. The 2003 anime imagines the underlying form differently, granting Envy blond hair and golden eyes like Hohenheim's kin, along with a towering leviathan shape reached by passing through the Gate.

Only Pride outdoes Envy in sheer cruelty. Envy treats human misery as entertainment, killing without a flicker of guilt and preferring to twist a victim's feelings for whatever advantage it brings. There is genuine pride taken in the damage done, most infamously in boasting about having lit the fuse of the Ishvalan war and wrecking countless lives with a single careless act. Sowing conflict and suffering among people is, by Envy's own account, the entire point of existing.

What sits underneath is the sin itself. Envy quietly covets the inner resilience of humans and the loyal bonds they form with one another, ties that the homunculi rarely offer each other. That jealousy is precisely what feeds the hatred, and it is a wound Envy cannot bear to have named; being forced to confront that buried envy is ultimately what drives Envy to self-destruction. In lighter moments Envy can be loud, clownish, and vain, openly fond of looking cute and bristling at any insult to that appearance. Relations with the other homunculi run cold, apart from a real fondness for Lust, whose death Envy loudly demands be avenged, and open hostility toward Greed. For all the bluster, the story frames Envy as the loneliest and most sorrowful of the siblings, one who never tasted genuine contentment.

Like the other homunculi, Envy never ages and heals with startling speed, sealing wounds that would kill a person outright; pushed past the limit, though, the body collapses into a small, wormlike parasite rather than reforming. No food, drink, or sleep is required to keep going. Even in the compact preferred form, Envy's strength, speed, and durability outmatch any human or beast, although raw combat skill remains a weak point.

The signature power is transformation. Envy can become any person, creature, or invented figure, copying voices as readily as faces, so long as the new shape stays within the mass of the true form, which is enormous enough that the limit rarely matters. Limbs can be reshaped into weapons or stretched out and sharpened, and Envy proves able to imitate not just a target's looks but their mannerisms well enough to walk among people unnoticed. The disguise of Father Cornello, which whipped a whole town into violence, is the standout example, though overconfidence and small slips can still betray the ruse to anyone who knew the original well. In the reduced parasitic state, only one trick remains: biting into a host to seize control of its body, feeding off the victim's soul or Stone to rebuild strength, a puppetry that fails against automail and so could not claim Edward.