I thought that humanizing the homunculi was one of the worst moves the anime pulled, a strong part of the “dramatic for the sake of being dramatic” stuff that stained the anime original material, sometimes contradicting or down right killing characterization.
There’s this somewhat recent trend to believe every character, especially villains, require humanization. A villain cannot be good unless he is morally ambiguous and, if possible, tragic.
I think that’s total bullshit.
Sure, human characters are good, but I don’t need every single one and their mother to be a walking ball of conflict and philosophical conundrums. Sometimes I just want someone I can hate. Those are the villains I’ve always remember most fondly and the ones I’ve been missing lately, not the tragic this-didn’t-need-to-be-like-this overdramatic stuff I’ve been getting, just some blatant asshole I can loathe, someone I want to see defeated so that the victory actually matters. Maybe he has reasons to be like that, HURR DURR I’M EBIL is no good either, but make those reasons the basis for their actions, don’t try and JUSTIFY the shit they do, because I WANT to desire to see them beaten.
Greed is a perfect example of this. He is Greed, he is the greed that was taken from father’s heart, so he is greedy. That’s it, that’s all the humanization I needed. Over that, you give him a pretty cool personality and you end up with a very charismatic selfish asshole who’s greed actually ends up helping his friends in a twisted way, and is such a prick that he can die giving a loud and hearty FUCK Y’ALL NIGGAS as he is being melted alive. That was great, everyone loved Greed.
But oh no, we need more ambiguity. So we make him part of some unfulfilled wish of an old woman and give him a dramatic “Ah so you have beaten me, fair battle young warrior, now we must part and yada yada yada” and have him go like some Shakespearean tragic hero.
I guess the homunculi needed something added to them since the true villain ended up being a half-cooked generic mysterious overlord shit nobody actually cared about, but the only one who really struck me as somewhat well done was Sloth. Lust and Wrath, particularly Wrath, just got on my nerves as a pair of unnecessarily overdramatic drones who would just not shut up about their troubles. Even Sloth herself was just another hit to an already dead and buried horse: Ed and Al lost their bodies, their childhood, their innocence, their home and got to see the grotesque abomination they created in place of their mother, did we NEED to have them kill her clone too? Yes, HUMAN TRANSMUTATION IS BAD, WE GET IT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MOVE ON. A lot of characters just stop at that and just don’t get over it. Marcoh, Hoenheim, Mustang, Scar, they all did horrible things, but instead of sitting around angstying themselves to death or REPEATING the massacre (Scar attempting to make the stone was one big fat “Fuck You” to his entire character), they all take an active role in stopping all that from happening again in the manga. Probably the all-time low in the anime was when Mustang threw his entire career and life work down the drain to kill Bradley in what was little more than a cheap badly-planned vendetta that defeated the purpose of having lived like he did up to that point. It was him giving up, however flowery the anime tried to make it look.
As for the “true form” thing, I don’t know what you’re talking about. The only one with a “true form” was Envy, and he didn’t use it so much as a last resort powerup but rather simply to screw with Ed’s head by showing what kind of abomination he really was, as well as what they had done to Xerxes. He did that because that’s just how he is, for the same reason he became Hughes’ wife before killing him and why he tells Ed with a huge grin about how he started the Ishvalan war. He’s a sadistic arrogant bastard, which made his incredibly humiliating defeat all the more satisfying.