Scar

Early in the story he keeps his identity hidden behind dark glasses and a gold-toned jacket bearing a cross across the back and sleeves, paired with black trousers that carry a white cross on one leg and a stripe down the other. His skin is deep-toned and his eyes a striking red, both hallmarks of Ishvalan heritage, while a silver crop of hair sits atop a head shaved close along the back and sides. The crown stands upright in the manga and 2009 anime but lies flatter in the 2003 version.

The trait that names him is the broad X carved across his brow, cutting down over his eyes and into his cheekbones. Wrapping his right arm is an elaborate tattoo running from a thin encircling scar at the shoulder all the way to the wrist. The manga places him in his early to mid thirties, whereas the 2003 anime draws him about a decade younger.

Grim, terse, and unwavering, he was already a solemn figure before tragedy struck. Devout in the Ishvalan faith, he has long viewed alchemy as a violation of the natural order, a conviction that once put him at odds with his scholarly older brother. After the assault that scarred and reshaped him, grief hardened into a consuming rage toward those who destroyed his homeland, and he cast off his birth name, which his people regard as a divine gift, to become an instrument of God's judgment against State Alchemists.

That fury eventually swells into obsession, pushing him even to target Edward Elric, a boy who took no part in the war. Notably his hostility is reserved for military alchemists; he bears no grudge against Alphonse or May Chang. Traces of his gentler past still surface, as he honors dying requests and grants his victims a moment to pray, and he feels for others who have lost family or place in the world. Encounters with Miles and Winry gradually cool his bloodlust, teaching him to seek not to save Amestris but to change it, and he grows able to work beside former foes and to admit how badly hatred once ruled him.

Trained as a warrior monk, he is a formidable close-quarters fighter with great strength, stamina, agility, and reflexes quick enough to slip past gunfire. He subdues armed soldiers with bare hands, cuts down ten State Alchemists including the combat specialist Basque Grand, contends with the Elrics and Alex Armstrong, and even wins a costly victory over a badly wounded Wrath. Sharp-minded as well, he grasps advanced alchemical theory he never formally studied and reads an opponent's weaknesses on sight.

His deadliest tool is the array inked on his right limb, which shatters whatever it touches. His technique follows only the opening stages of transmutation, comprehension and deconstruction, halting at the second step so that a target is broken down but never rebuilt, reducing it to rubble and destroying internal organs outright. Because this method skips reconstruction, it sidesteps both the taboo against reshaping God's creations and, thanks to its alkahestric roots, Father's alchemy-sealing power. The arm originally belonged to his brother, who transferred it during the civil war after Solf J. Kimblee's attack cost the young Scar his own.

The markings form the deconstruction half of a complementary pair his brother devised by fusing Amestrian alchemy with Xingese alkahestry. Around Chapter 103 he decodes the counterpart array and tattoos reconstruction onto his left arm, finally able to build as well as destroy, raising hexagonal spikes from the earth. In the 2003 continuity the arm is instead a fragment of the forbidden Grand Arcanum, an incomplete Philosopher's Stone that glows scarlet and painfully absorbs souls as it seeks completion.