Character · Fullmetal Alchemist
Sloth
He digs a tunnel underneath an entire country and complains about the effort the whole way round.
In Otakana the clue reads: Enormous homunculus that finds work tiring
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Fullmetal Alchemist
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Sloth is the largest homunculus and the slowest thinker, a slab of muscle who narrates his own reluctance in a low drawl: everything is too much trouble. The joke is that his assignment is the most laborious task in the series. He is excavating a circular tunnel beneath the whole nation of Amestris, alone, by hand, over a period of years.
The tunnel matters far more than he does, and the series knows it. What looks like a strange chore turns out to be the outline of a plan the homunculi have been running since before any of the human characters were born. Sloth is the shovel doing the drawing, and he does not appear to know what he is drawing.
He is also fast, which is the gag underneath the gag. A body that size moving at speed makes for one of Brotherhood's more alarming fights, and the reason he is slow the rest of the time is simply that he cannot be bothered. Arakawa gets an entire character out of a single adjective and never overworks it.
Spelling SLOTH
SLOTH is five letters ending in the TH digraph, two letters making one sound, which is where a spell-by-ear guess loses the row. The homunculi all carry English sin words, so no katakana is involved. SL at the front, TH at the back, and one lonely O sitting between the two clusters.