IE: Change that can't be explained by character development.
I did a re-read of Fullmetal Alchemist this month and right in the first chapter when Ed confronts Cornello he outright tells him that if he gives him the Philosopher's Stone then he'll keep quiet on the fact that Cornello's building a fake religion to create an army of cultists to take over the country. Cornello fights back and the stone breaks, so it never really comes up again, but then a similar scenario happens in Chapter 8 when he meets Dr. Marcoh, who presents him with a Philosopher's Stone of his own creation, and later when he's leaving Armstrong asks him he why didn't just forcibly take it to get his his brother's body back and Ed replies that he could, but he saw how many people relied on Marcoh and couldn't bring himself to do it, and wouldn't want to steal it either way.
The change is even more pronounced as early as Chapter 3, the first one after leaving Liore, where Ed and Al go to a mining town owned by a crooked military official. Ed's kicked out of his inn for being a State Alchemist and calmly rationalizes that everyone hates him for signing up with the military, then leaps back in to save the kid of the innkeeper who threw him out in the first place. When pressed why he won't help make gold for the miners so they can pay their taxes he tells them the money would just end up in the official's vaults and they should all leave town if it sucks that bad, and one of the miners tells him that it's not about the job, the mines are their home and lives, which immediately leads to Ed devising a plan to break the law by making gold, buying the deed to the mines, and then handing it over back to the miners to screw over the military official.
This isn't really a CinemaSins style nitpick fest searching for plot holes, and I can plainly see stuff like this happen in instances where stories are written in installments where the world and characters aren't totally established as what they will eventually become. I'm just wondering how often this happens.
I did a re-read of Fullmetal Alchemist this month and right in the first chapter when Ed confronts Cornello he outright tells him that if he gives him the Philosopher's Stone then he'll keep quiet on the fact that Cornello's building a fake religion to create an army of cultists to take over the country. Cornello fights back and the stone breaks, so it never really comes up again, but then a similar scenario happens in Chapter 8 when he meets Dr. Marcoh, who presents him with a Philosopher's Stone of his own creation, and later when he's leaving Armstrong asks him he why didn't just forcibly take it to get his his brother's body back and Ed replies that he could, but he saw how many people relied on Marcoh and couldn't bring himself to do it, and wouldn't want to steal it either way.
The change is even more pronounced as early as Chapter 3, the first one after leaving Liore, where Ed and Al go to a mining town owned by a crooked military official. Ed's kicked out of his inn for being a State Alchemist and calmly rationalizes that everyone hates him for signing up with the military, then leaps back in to save the kid of the innkeeper who threw him out in the first place. When pressed why he won't help make gold for the miners so they can pay their taxes he tells them the money would just end up in the official's vaults and they should all leave town if it sucks that bad, and one of the miners tells him that it's not about the job, the mines are their home and lives, which immediately leads to Ed devising a plan to break the law by making gold, buying the deed to the mines, and then handing it over back to the miners to screw over the military official.
This isn't really a CinemaSins style nitpick fest searching for plot holes, and I can plainly see stuff like this happen in instances where stories are written in installments where the world and characters aren't totally established as what they will eventually become. I'm just wondering how often this happens.
