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An Elegy for Nina Tucker: Domestic Tragedy and the Legacy of Fullmetal Alchemist
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An Elegy for Nina Tucker: Domestic Tragedy and the Legacy of Fullmetal Alchemist
We must endure — but not forgive — the cruelty of this world.
By Leah Thomas
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Published on June 26, 2025
Credit: Bones
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Credit: Bones
Dear Nina,
I wish I would have known you better, but I am glad I knew you at all. The first time I saw you, I was a university freshman who preferred the lonely grime of an ill-kept dorm to the social taxation of jungle juice-drenched campus parties. I worked late nights washing dishes in the cafeteria until midnight on Saturdays. Then I returned to my room with fried panko stuck to my sopping jeans, my shoes squelching, and told myself it was the superior college experience. And though this may have been a delusion, on one of those early Sunday mornings after a night of thankless work, I started watching Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), and there you were.
Your story began bittersweetly. You and your father were a small but loving family, one that had known its share of hard times. Your father, once-renowned, was struggling at work, determined to renew his license as a State Alchemist so that he could support you both. Your mother had abandoned you when you were barely a toddler. For a child of almost four, life had not been especially easy. Is it any wonder that you greeted two parentless boys, the Elric Brothers, with open arms? What more could a lonely child want than a pair of playmates?
Your father apologized for the mess, saying there was no wife to do the cleaning. He showed the brothers to his extensive library, where they would research advanced alchemy that kids their age should know nothing about. You insisted that the younger brother, Alphonse, eat his dinner properly. You scolded your big white bear of a dog, Alexander, for tackling Edward, the elder, albeit smaller, brother. You tenaciously pulled them away from their studies and played with them in the snow and dared wonder whether they could live with you forever.
Credit: Bones
Nina, I think in another life, they would have loved nothing more.
Edward sculpted a tiara for you using the same alchemical arts that had not saved his mother. Alphonse gave you piggyback rides. Though your would-be brothers were only children themselves, they often forgot it. You refused to let them. You all knew the same pain: the Elrics had also lost their mother under harrowing circumstances—not once, but twice. First to illness, and then to failed alchemy attempted by small, clumsy hands. But in you, they saw that somehow, a stubborn flame of wonder still flickered. How on earth had you managed that?
They loved you unreservedly, heart and soul (and so did I). You three celebrated Edward’s birthday together and found yourselves in the midst of a true spectacle when your hostess went into labor. None of you had mothers; all of you were awestruck.
Credit: Bones
You attended Edward’s State Alchemist examination perched atop Alphonse’s lofty shoulders, clutching his helmet like a buoy. When you walked home together at sunset, you fell asleep upon those iron shoulders were carried there safely.
Nina, please forgive me, but you did not strike me as special. Instead, you struck me, and anyone else who heard your laugh and watched you play, as something infinitely more wondrous: you struck me as an actual child. So many writers fail to capture what it is to be four. But like an unexpected cold breeze in summer, your believability was a bracing, indisputable good thing in a story about broken alchemy and sick immortality and war. You were, to your troubled young guests, a reminder of what childhood could be. You had four limbs and warm beds and delicious food and a stunning library and a dog to cuddle by the hearth. You appeared, also, to have a loving parent.
But this is an elegy, and your parent was not loving.
Credit: Bones
I hate that describing what happened to you—no, what was inflicted upon you—sounds so ludicrous. But so many awful human actions sound ludicrous on paper. There is a certain level of human cruelty that so beggars belief that we can only interpret it as some twisted attempt at humor. Your fate has to be ridiculous so that we can bear it.
In the hours before your death, you lay on the floor with your pastels and drew a picture of your family as it once was. It’s you, your father, your mother, and a dog that is not Alexander. This was your family, before your mother told your father she could not bear a life of poverty and vanished from your world. The portrait is a gift for your father, but the next day, Edward finds it burned to pieces in a bowl on the dining room table. It fills us all with dread.
Credit: Bones
We may or may not anticipate what will happen next. Your father will hurt you the same way he hurt your mother. He will use his terrible alchemy to fuse you to your beloved dog, irrevocably ending both of your individual lives by forcing you to live as one agonized creature. He does not expect the experiment to benefit you. When he fused your mother with an animal, the only utterance she made before starving herself was, “I want to die.” Your father has no delusions that he is doing good. But the monstrosity he made of your mother earned him his State Alchemist license. Should not a wife be ready to sacrifice for her family?
When the brothers find you and realize what he did to you, Edward beats him bloody until you ask, in your broken voice, “Dad, are you hurt?” Even though your father tried to ruin you, Nina, you remain compassionate. Soon after, when you are destroyed entirely, your suffering is ended, but ours is not. What kind of world would treat you in such a way, Nina?
The second time I watched you die, I thought I was prepared. And it was true that the second screen adaptation of your death, while animated with more grace than the first, did not gut me quite as efficiently. Not only because I knew what was coming, but also because your story felt rushed, expedited. Though many would argue that Brotherhood tells a better story by the end, I nearly stopped watching when I saw how it shortchanged you. You existed for less than eight minutes of an episode—there and then brutally gone. You should have been more than a plot point, Nina. You deserve more than a single episode, your existence reduced to a brief introduction and a horrific demise in a dark room.
I wonder if you would have resonated so deeply with so many people if Brotherhood had been your only life.
Credit: Bones
But perhaps it is not at all about longevity—or, in your case, screentime. Nina, too often people mourn the death of children not for who they were, but for who they might have become. This is understandable, and it is the most human of reactions. But a life need not be illustrious or long-lived to be priceless. You were already more than enough to mourn.
Neither of these deaths was your true first, though I saw them on screen before I read your story in print. Your creator, Hiromu Arakawa, crafted all of her characters with nuance and care. And yet she has been, perhaps not without some justification, accused of kicking her readers where it most hurts. When Edward confronts your father, demanding to know why he made an experiment of you, he answers, “I did it because I could.” He then implies that Edward, a fellow alchemist, should understand. In a sense, when writers create characters and then kill them off, we take on the role of Shou Tucker. But that does not mean your only purpose was to die, or that you were not loved by the woman who brought you to life on the page. It is unfair to accuse an author of senseless violence when the violence makes sense: It is not okay that you died, but that is precisely the point.
Hiromu Arakawa grew up on a ranch in Hokkaido, an experience she wrote about in an autobiographical comedy manga, The Noble Farmer, and in Silver Spoon, a heartfelt story about students at an agricultural college. As a girl, Arakawa watched calves being birthed and sometimes dying shortly thereafter. She understood that death is a fundamental aspect of existence. She was determined to capture this reality, not because she was cruel, but because denial does not change the fundamental traumas of existence.
“Enduring and forgiving are two different things. You must not forgive the cruelty of this world. It’s our duty as human beings to be angry at injustice. But we must also endure it. Because someone must sever this chain of hatred.” These words are spoken by a character you never met, Nina, one that your family may have called an enemy, in the 72nd chapter of the story that you lived in. At that point, you had been dead for 63 chapters. And it cannot comfort you, dead and fictional as you are, but it does give us an insight into Arakawa’s heart. I think that heart may have been punctured deepest of all when you died.
Credit: Bones
Arakawa also spoke with WWII war survivors when she was writing Fullmetal Alchemist. She did her homework and adopted an objective stance that condemned not one imagined country or another, but war and its arbiters themselves. She wrote in the afterword of volume 15:
In researching this volume, I interviewed veterans who had been at the front during World War II. I read countless books, examined film footage, and listened to many detailed and intense stories firsthand, but the one comment that affected me the most came from a former soldier who lowered his gaze to the tabletop and said, “I never watch war movies.”
Why would such a comment affect a creator, if not for this reason: As writers, it is imperative that we understand that stories, even those that are fantastical, must be told responsibly.
Sometimes that means illustrating moments of beauty during your short life, Nina; placing your hands on a pregnant woman’s stomach and reveling at the kick; creating carefree snow angels; burying your face in the fur of a beloved pet beside the fire. Other times, that means depicting deceit. Your father telling lies about your mother. The precious duplicity and embraces that made you believe he loved you. I am sorry, but this is the truth: to deny the world its darkness, even in fiction, is not storytelling, but delusion.
Credit: Bones
And so Arakawa’s pen was also a knife, and you were never its only target. A loving father and true friend is murdered in a phone booth. A teacher suffers a miscarriage and tries to reincarnate her infant. A serial killer stalks women in the capital city. A wounded civilian, overtaken by panic, wakes in a tent on a battlefield and takes the lives of the doctors who attempted to save his life. The government is infiltrated by imposters who long to destroy the country.
These things are awful, but not unrealistic.
War is real. According to UNICEF, more than 50,000 children have been killed in Gaza since 2023. In April, fifteen Palestinian medics were killed due to “professional error,” and their bodies were thrown in a mass grave along with their decimated vehicles. Domestic violence is real, and it is disproportionately wrought upon women and girls. Every year, more than a million women in America alone are abused by an intimate partner. Your father killed your mother, Nina, and then complained about her. He told her she did not love you enough to stay.
Nina, I don’t presume it is any comfort to tell you this, but even monsters like your father are not relegated to fiction. Family annihilators are real. According to a study that measured familicide cases between 2020 and 2023, one family was annihilated every five days. And sometimes it takes more even than that to stain a vicious man’s name. In 2023, an obituary sang the praises of a Utah murderer who killed eight family members, stating that he saw his children as “cherished miracles.”
If your life felt real in its beautiful mundanity, your death is real in its brutality.
There are reasons you are so often on my mind, Nina, and on the minds of those who watched or read your story. Fullmetal Alchemist weaves an unforgettable fantasy narrative, but characters like you elevate it.
It is the very verisimilitude of your life that has given rise to a cloud of black humor that follows in the wake of your death. I cannot count the number of memes I have seen about you. “This girl and her dog—they’re inseparable!” Bleak as it is to see memes that mock your death, I would be lying if I told you I did not smirk at some. I am sorry for it, Nina.
Credit: Bones
Please understand that human beings laugh when they are horrified. Laughter can mollify deep unease, and at least we can connect in some small way with others when confronted with a single image, be it a screenshot of your transmuted face on a trolling post about animal noises, or a single still of you laughing alongside the Elric brothers. Those of us who know your story are bound to each other by it. Whether we laugh or sob or some dark combination of both, it is a form of connection.
You died three times, and though far too many girls die in stories in order to give boys and men purpose, in your case, your death is an evil that exists separately from some great villain. Your death cannot be avenged. Your father dies within hours of harming you; he never faces trial. He is not the only evil in the story, but rather an insidious symptom of it. There is no way for your death to be resolved. It just is, as most deaths are. And like all deaths, its impact is both incalculable and almost imperceptible all at once.
Years after your father hurts you, the brothers have lost more friends and fought more enemies. They have wept and laughed and suffered and persisted. And yet it is you, Nina, that Edward cannot stop thinking of. In the final moments of his confrontation with a truly formidable foe, he is warned that his next decision may rob him of all his magical abilities. He will be reduced to nothing more than an average human being.
“That’s the only thing I’ve ever been. Just a simple human who couldn’t save one little girl.” Of course, children should not feel obligated to save other children, but when adults fail and the world crumbles and war dominates, is it any wonder that they feel they must?
And a simple human is also what you were, and you were something aspirational because of it. It is what most of us are, and that is plenty enough to shape an entire lifetime.
Rest well, Nina, and know that you have long been, however unexpectedly, the heroine of all our flagging, flickering empathy.[end-mark]
Credit: Bones
In this elegy:
Fullmetal Alchemist (Bones, 2003) Unfortunately, due to rights issues, in America it is difficult to stream the original series online in 2025.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (Bones, 2009) Available on Netflix, Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime, and Hulu.
The post An Elegy for Nina Tucker: Domestic Tragedy and the Legacy of <i>Fullmetal Alchemist</i> appeared first on Reactor.