Winry Rockbell

Her trademark look is the work outfit: a beige jumpsuit, usually unzipped and knotted at the waist over a black tube top, finished with brown gloves, plain sandals, and a green kerchief tucked over her fringe, with her hair gathered into a lengthy ponytail. Blonde and hip-length, that hair carries a fringe swept to the left and, though naturally straight, is sometimes drawn with a wave in manga and anime art. Dark blue eyes sit in a pale, youthful face. After she relocates to Rush Valley to train under Garfiel, she switches to a zippered black crop top with a white center stripe and pierces her ears in a bold arrangement, two hoops on each lobe plus a pair of vertical cuff studs on the right. When traveling, she favors a dark blue jacket over a white sleeveless shirt with a matching skirt, ribboned boots, and pink socks.

Colors shift across adaptations: the 2003 series recolors her coveralls lavender and her kerchief red, while the 2017 live-action film turns her hair brown rather than blonde. Later in the story her hair hangs loose, paired first with a pink jacket over a black shirt and jeans, then in the finale with a white jacket, a long pink sleeveless dress over a purple shirt, jeans, and light brown sandals. The anime ages her face visibly, whereas the manga keeps her looking much the same until its closing chapter.

Warm, driven, and quick to feel for others, Winry pours herself into automail with a passion that reads more like devotion than a job, gushing over cutting-edge prosthetics until Edward needles her with nicknames like automail freak. She throws herself at her patients' needs, pulling back-to-back overnight sessions and riding trains across the country to keep a client's limbs in shape. That intensity has a fiery flip side: she guards her craftsmanship jealously and is quick to temper, most famously by hurling a wrench at whoever provokes her, Edward chief among them. The 2003 anime leans hardest on her professional pride, sending her into a brief slump when she discovers Edward secretly used alchemy to flatter her work.

Beneath the outbursts sits a deeply loyal young woman who props up the people she loves and weeps openly when she cannot help them. She is blunt when bluntness is called for and morally steady under pressure, once delivering a baby safely during a storm on nothing but inherited medical instinct. Her parents, two medics killed during the Ishval conflict for the crime of saving lives, left her a lasting grief, and learning that Scar was their killer nearly pushes her to pull a trigger before she is talked back from the brink. She chooses to stand beside him as an ally without ever pretending to forgive him. Her bonds run deep across the cast: she becomes Edward's steadfast support and eventual wife, treats Alphonse like the little brother she always wanted while fiercely defending his humanity, shares an affectionate rapport with her grandmother Pinako, and is folded into the Hughes family, growing close to Gracia and little Elicia.

Raised at the elbow of master engineer Pinako Rockbell, Winry is something of a mechanical prodigy, comfortable repairing machines of almost any complexity but truly exceptional at building and overhauling automail. She fitted Edward with a full set of intricate limbs at just eleven and has since surpassed even her grandmother, earning a reputation of her own at Atelier Garfiel in Rush Valley. Growing up among surgeons also gave her an uncommon command of medical texts for someone with no formal schooling, enough that Edward compares her early grasp of the material to his own childhood fluency in alchemy; she proves it by safely delivering Ridel and Satella's child. On top of that she throws a wrench with alarming force and accuracy over long distances, and, tutored by Gracia Hughes, she takes up baking and grows especially fond of making apple pies.