The Gate Children

The Gate Children appear as dim, childlike silhouettes that inhabit the collective presence within the Gate in the 2003 anime. They are tied closely to how the Gate works, owning the shadowy, grasping limbs that reach out to pull apart anything and anyone attempting to pass through.

Their central function is deconstruction, using those prehensile arms to take apart travelers who enter the Gate. They can also fuse with humans who cross by artificial means and linger too long in their presence. Soldiers who passed through were found already crushed inside their armor yet kept moving, seemingly reanimated by an implanted Gate Child soul, and could be put down a second time. Dietlinde Eckhart instead gained vast alchemical power from the melding, and with heavy exposure she swelled into a towering, red-eyed monstrosity; the greater a person's time in the Gate, the more of the children latched on. Once she was slain the changes vanished at once, leaving her body intact save for the fatal wound, which suggests they served only as extensions rather than remaking her flesh.

The series never spells out exactly what the Gate Children are, offering only guesses: souls of the unborn or those who died at birth, humans trapped in the Gate, or the dead, though a fully human specter of Izumi Curtis inside the Gate muddies that last idea. The theory of trapped humans gains weight from Wrath, who became a Gate Child after Izumi's failed transmutation sent him back there. In the film Conqueror of Shamballa they attach themselves to travelers and even to the rockets the Thule Society uses to breach the Gate, with unclear effect. Invented for the 2003 anime, they exist to explain the shadowy arms seen in the manga when the Gate opens and when Father and Pride reveal their true forms, and are thought to draw on the manga's entity known as Truth.