Eye of God

The entity is never shown in full. All that the audience ever sees of it is one enormous eye and a mass of dark, tendril-like arms reaching out from the far side of the Gate. Its color shifts between adaptations: a pale pinkish red in the manga, purple in the 2003 anime, and grey in the 2009 series. Only the manga's shade lines up with the red eyes of the homunculi and of Father himself.

Rather than a character with wants of its own, the Eye behaves like an implacable force. Whenever a person reaches past the boundary of life and death through human transmutation, it hauls them bodily through the Gate and floods their thoughts with knowledge they never asked for. Fans have tied it closely to Truth, and the two may well be one and the same, since Truth also names itself God. Late in the story, Father muses that the world itself is a single vast organism, a kind of nervous system, a description that fits an entity rendered as an eye trailing synapse-like limbs.

The being's greatest mark on the story is Father. The homunculus who would rule Amestris from the shadows was formed out of the Eye's own essence, which is why his earliest gaseous shape so resembles it. In the manga and the 2009 anime, the Eye turns up in every scene where the Gate opens or a human transmutation is attempted, and at the tale's close it is this presence that reabsorbs Father, pulling him back into the abyss he came from. The 2003 series leans instead on the Gate Children to fill much of the same role. Readers have linked the Eye to broader ideas as well, from the Gaia hypothesis of the Earth as a living whole to the kabbalistic Ein Sof, fitting given the mystical threads woven through the franchise.