Gracia Hughes

Gracia is an Amestrian woman with green eyes, defined more by her soft, motherly warmth than by any striking physical feature. She comes across as a gentle homemaker, and in the 2003 anime's early episodes she is shown heavily pregnant with Elicia.

Kindness runs through everything Gracia does. She regularly bakes cakes and sweets for Edward, Alphonse, and Winry and keeps a caring, welcoming household. Her role is small in scale, but her warmth makes her a quiet emotional anchor for the people around Maes.

In the manga and 2009 anime Gracia mostly stays in the background, yet she figures into two devastating scenes: Envy borrows her form to freeze Maes long enough to murder him, then wears her face again before Roy Mustang, jeering about how easily her husband fell for the trick. She resurfaces in the final chapter when Alphonse visits her and her daughter, and she and Elicia appear briefly in the fourth opening sequence.

The 2003 anime hands her a larger early role. Standing in for the manga character Satella LeCoulte, a hugely pregnant Gracia hosts the Elrics and young Nina Tucker on Ed's birthday, then goes into labor during a blizzard; while Maes braves the storm for help, the panicking children end up delivering the baby themselves, and Ed discovers he can perform alchemy without a transmutation circle when he reheats her water. In the film Conqueror of Shamballa, Edward meets a parallel-world Gracia who works as a florist and lends clothes to Noah, quietly admired by that world's version of Maes Hughes.