Shou Tucker

Tucker looks the part of a slight, middle-aged man behind a pair of glasses, short on both height and muscle, with a receding hairline that leaves only a little brown hair and a shadow of stubble. He is nearly always shown in one outfit, a washed-out green open-collared shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbow over a black undershirt. In company he keeps a mildly pleasant look, but on his own he tends toward a downcast, uneasy expression, a mood the 2009 anime captures in his title card.

At first he seems merely quiet and withdrawn, putting on a polite, gentle face for guests while, as his daughter Nina noticed, burying himself in his work far more than in his family. Beneath that surface is a desperate, self-deluding, and manipulative man drained of conscience. Terrified of returning to poverty, he was willing to sacrifice first his wife and later his own child to hold onto his certification, and when his crimes came to light he showed almost no remorse, insisting it was simply the march of science.

He is incapable of genuine empathy or of grasping any viewpoint but his own. Though he understood on some level that others would be horrified by his experiments, which is why he lied that his wife had walked out, he could not comprehend the reason for their anger, convinced any alchemist in his straits would have done the same. Edward's furious reaction to the truth genuinely caught him off guard.

At Mustang's suggestion the Elrics visit Tucker to study his texts and grow briefly friendly with him, Nina, and their dog Alexander. He confesses that bio-alchemy is unforgiving work and that he has produced nothing worthy of his yearly assessment since the talking chimera that made his name, fearing this year's failure will end his career. When he suddenly claims a new speaking chimera, Edward realizes it is a fusion of a living human and animal, Nina and Alexander, and nearly beats him to death as he coldly justifies himself. Placed under house arrest, Tucker is soon killed by Scar, who then mercy-kills the transformed Nina. The prequel manga reveals his first talking chimera had likewise been his wife, whom he presented as a breakthrough after falsely claiming she had abandoned the family.

The 2003 anime enlarges his role considerably. There he answers to Basque Grand rather than Mustang, transmutes Nina and Alexander under pressure, and is secretly spared execution and sent to Laboratory 5 as a researcher and test subject. A rebound turns him into a monstrous chimera fused with a canine, and he spends himself trying and failing to restore Nina, crafting lifeless dolls in her image. Allying with the homunculi, and later with Greed and then Frank Archer, he schemes to use Alphonse and a Philosopher's Stone to remake his daughter, only to be told his will was too weak to bind her soul, a final blow that shatters what remained of his sanity. A live-action film gives him yet another version of the role, ending with his death at Lust's hand.