Solf J. Kimblee

After his release from prison Kimblee favors a spotless white three-piece suit finished with a matching fedora, a purple tie, and a white overcoat. His long black hair is bound into a tidy ponytail with two loose strands framing his face, and he cuts a tall, lean figure with sharp eyes rendered gray in the manga, deep blue in the 2009 anime, and amber in the 2003 version. That earlier adaptation gives him a rougher look, his ponytail wrapped in pale yellow ribbon and his wardrobe a burgundy blazer over a plain shirt rather than the crisp gentleman's attire.

In the manga and Brotherhood, Kimblee is as much thinker as madman, a self-styled artist who treats his explosions as high aesthetics and prizes their sound above every other quality. He is less immoral than amoral, watching people and events with detached curiosity while dismissing morality and grey areas as contaminating noise. Guided by creeds like survival of the fittest, he genuinely admires strong will and firm conviction yet cares nothing for the lives spent in the conflicts he studies, his own included. Cultured and articulate, he cloaks his heresies in gentlemanly manners and clever argument. He was jailed for years after the Ishval war for turning his combustion alchemy on people outside his sanctioned kill list, then quietly cleared to serve as the Fuhrer's concealed left hand. The 2003 anime strips much of that polish, making him openly bloodthirsty and driven by pleasure rather than philosophy, keeping only his conviction that everyone, himself among them, is worthless.

Kimblee's alchemy revolves around transmutation circles tattooed into both palms, a sun symbol for gold on the right hand and a moon symbol for silver on the left, which join into a hexagram when he claps his hands. In the manga this array forces an unstable imbalance of energy into whatever he touches, making it detonate, and he can even send that instability traveling to trigger blasts from a distance; using only the hexagram lets him reshape matter without setting it off. A Philosopher's Stone pushes the power far past its usual limits, letting him bypass equivalent exchange and work with a single hand. The 2003 anime reworks the method, shifting an object's atomic makeup into a gunpowder-like compound that he then compresses into an explosion, a technique he prefers to unleash on living targets. In both storylines he meets his end after a clash with Alphonse, finished off by a third party bearing an old grudge, Heinkel in the manga and 2009 anime and Scar in the 2003 series.