Van Hohenheim

Hohenheim comes across as a tall, broad man in seemingly sound middle age. His long golden hair is worn loose in a shoulder-length ponytail with a few strands drifting across his forehead, and a full beard frames his square jaw. Spectacles sit over his golden eyes, though whether he actually needs them is never confirmed, and more than one woman in the story calls him strikingly handsome. In the manga he favors a white dress shirt and tie beneath a black vest, matching slacks, and a brown overcoat. As a young man he closely resembled Edward, only a touch taller with a slightly heavier jaw, while the 2003 anime gives him a softer face and darker hair.

In his youth he shared Edward's short fuse, flaring up whenever someone mocked his ignorance, and he admitted to having little drive, though he stayed humble and grateful for the help of others. Beneath the aloof image left by his devotion to alchemy and his abandonment of his family, he is a tender, generous soul, quick to praise others yet uncomfortable being praised himself. Because he existed as a human Philosopher's Stone, he privately saw himself as a monster and hesitated to share that truth even with his sons. Despite being perhaps the strongest alchemist alive, he never flaunted his gifts and often did chores by hand rather than by transmutation. Slow to anger and inclined to talk his way out of fights even while under attack, he was above all a hopeless romantic, forever gushing over Trisha and weeping openly for her. His love for his family ran deep, and in the end he gladly traded his own happiness, and his life, for their safety and the world's.

Originally a nameless slave marked only as number twenty-three in Xerxes, he received his name, his knowledge, and his immortality from the Dwarf in the Flask that his blood helped create. That gift made him a living Philosopher's Stone housing more than half a million souls, and with roughly four centuries of study behind him his mastery towered over every other human alchemist. He can transmute with no circle at all, without so much as moving, reshape flesh and organs, and sidestep the law of equivalent exchange, since his body regenerates like a homunculus and stopped aging in its prime. Because he knew each of the 536,329 souls inside him personally, they lent their power willingly and efficiently, letting him trigger transmutations in several distant places at once and raise shields that Father could not pierce short of a nuclear blast. The alchemy he absorbed in Xerxes is implied to underlie Xing's art of alkahestry. The 2003 anime reworks him entirely: there he is no living stone but a man who learned to slip his soul from one body into another to cheat death across four hundred years, remaining as fragile as anyone and rotting each borrowed body a little faster, while his signature skill is molding light into solid shapes, the trait that earned the title Hohenheim of Light.