How the definition of wrath, not actual combat skill, decides the outcome of Wrath's fights

[THREAD]

The biblical sin of wrath has less to do with a taste for violence & more to do with revenge. It's the opposite of turning the other cheek, so to speak, and instead advocates for striking back at whoever threw the first punch. On his own, Wrath is not a violent person,

and all of his kills were done in response to someone else trying to kill him first. Many of the fights that Wrath has either failed in, lost, or suffered an injury from are structured so that his wrath was not justified or the violence inflicted on him was absent of wrath.

To elaborate: The numerous times when a Red Shirt attempted to kill Wrath always resulted in him returning the favor. Greed's men at the Devil's Nest and the Briggs Army during the Promised Day siege at Central HQ are the biggest examples.

Wrath even retaliated against characters important to Father's conspiracy. He jokingly cut the top off of Ed's spear during his exam, & Mustang's attempt to burn him resulted in a nasty Impaled Palm that was pretty unnecessary considering Pride could have pinned Mustang himself.

The 1st instance where Wrath fails in his violence was when he attacked Lan Fan & Ling. Lan Fan survived his attack because she was acting in self-defense; Wrath struck first, she held up a kunai to cushion the blow and also states that she had no quarrel with Wrath.

Ling's swordplay, while certainly the best on the heroes' side, was also done in self-defense. His strategy was constantly on escaping and protecting Lan Fan, so one could argue that Wrath's violence was unjustified in terms of revenge and led to his failure.

Greed’s 2nd attack on Wrath in his own home is an interesting case. Greed is certainly wrathful, but he was acting in retaliation for Wrath's massacre at the Devil's Nest, where his goal was ostensibly to capture Greed and his soldiers were meant to carry out the violence.

The context of the fight forced Wrath to act in defense of his family instead of in vengeance, but since Greed's attack wasn't self-defense or free of wrath, the fight was a draw.

Now onto the Promised Day Arc.
The bombing of Wrath's train, while framed as a “no one could survive that assassination attempt” that unrelated characters treat as such, is never treated as an act of murder by Grumman or the engineers who carried it out.

One could argue that they knew it would only slow down Wrath, while Olivier & the rest of the soldiers who'd taken Central had become overconfident & thought it would have removed him from play for good. That didn’t age well as Wrath returned to battle at the gate of the castle.

As stated above, the slaughter of the Briggs troops who fired on Wrath was a given. Buccaneer survives Wrath's retaliation because he, as the Briggs captain, was trying to avenge his troops, and he succeeds in disarming Wrath because it was a nonviolent action.

He still initially fails in his attempts at violence because they weren't free of wrath. Falman never gets attacked by Wrath because he never attacks, but if Greed hadn't shown up, his act of raising his gun might've changed that.

In the resulting fight, Greed was roughly on par with Wrath for similar reasons as before; neither's violence was or wasn't quite justified.

Let’s move onto the Xingese. Fu's vengeance was entirely justified and even done on behalf of someone else, but he wasn't acting in self-defense and he eventually lost. However, Buccaneer's sneak attack succeeded because it was free of wrath.

It was an act of violence that benefitted the heroes immensely, but Buccaneer & Fu were beyond help (both tragically lost their lives to Wrath) and they would not have lived to see its effects.

Additionally, as a sneak attack carried out by two dying humans, it undermined Wrath's belief in survival of the fittest and fighting enemies head-on.

Ling's violence wasn't entirely justified or in self-defense, but his actions of disabling Wrath's Ultimate Eye, shattering his sword, and attempting to throw him in the moat were geared toward removing him from play and giving Ling a chance to offer his Stone as an alchemic aid.

The soldier who fired on Wrath received a revenge wound for his trouble, but it was the only way he could rescue Lan Fan and Greed, so attacking Bradley was justified enough to avoid a fatal retaliation.

Onto Wrath’s last moments. Before Wrath's final fight, he invited a handful of characters to attack him, but none of them had any good reason to take him up on it. Instead, he ended up fighting Scar, who had all the right reasons to win the fight while Wrath had none.

Scar had grown out of his own vengeance directed at alchemy and Amestrians. Additionally, he wasn't fighting to kill; he needed to get past Wrath and activate the reverse transmutation circle.

His turnabout moment consisted of accepting and utilizing his brother's research, which he had condemned as blasphemous in his earliest chronological scene.

Meanwhile, Wrath had ignored his role in protecting the center and keeping the heroes from reaching Father just for the fun of one last fight. During it, he constantly tried to awaken vengeance and wrath within Scar multiple times without success.

After falling in combat, Wrath suffers his final defeat at Lan Fan's hands, though not in combat. He tries one last time to awaken wrath in another person, but Lan Fan ignores his invitation to avenge her grandfather. Instead, with a mixture of pity & contempt,

she asks him if he was ever capable of love. As soon as Wrath responds by talking about how much he valued his wife & how humans made his life worth living, he starts to age and his death speeds up considerably as he mocks Lan Fan for wasting her opportunity to avenge her grandpa

And when he finally dies, he does so without a trace of the wrath he was named for, conquered in combat without resorting to rage and speaking to one of his worst victims about the love in his life.
He died with a smile on his face.

In summary:
Everyone who lost to Wrath struck at him without provocation, thus justifying revenge. Everyone who fought Wrath to a draw or survived otherwise acted with vengeance of their own.

Alternatively, they acted in self-defense or with a lack of Killing Intent that made his violence less justified.
Everyone who succeeded in physically harming Wrath to any extent had some form of selflessness in motivating their violence.

The person who killed Wrath, Scar, fought with the utmost selflessness and only used enough lethality to give himself a clear shot at doing his duty. He'd also discarded the wrath that had previously defined him.

Meanwhile, Wrath had neglected his duty to protect the center and decided to start one last unjustified fight, thus casting aside a good reason for violence in favor of attacking someone who had never attacked him before.

Note: Red shirt is the Good Counterpart of Evil Minions set filler for the heroes' side. Basically fodder to give the writer someone to kill who isn’t that important. Usually helpful when making a monster more threatening.

In general it’s actually really cool to see how all of Wrath’s fights are decided by his sin. This is telling since Wrath himself berated his lack of freedom and his entire life being decided since childbirth, exception being his wife which he dearly loved.

This kind of consistency of his character and themes even relating to every one of his action moments and fights is very impressive and not many mangaka can be capable of pulling off such a feat without feeling forced or OTT