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I remembered watching a battle scene from the 2009 anime titled Fullmetal
Alchemist and was puzzled by how Edward Elric managed to throw volley of
punches at Father, a homunculus or the dwarf in the flask whom had earlier
absorbed an entity and gained the power of God.

Is it because the power of God cannot be controlled and led to Father's
defeat, or because the absorbed homunculus or souls are revolting inside
Father thereby restricting Father's focus on a battle? How did Elric win this
seemingly impossible fight? What happens to Father after vanishing into thin
air? Did he return to the flask?


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2015-04-03T05:59:54.373
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fullmetal-alchemist-series fullmetal-alchemist-brotherhood
How did Edward manage to defeat Father?


I'm going to answer based on the manga, because I still have not seen the
Brotherhood anime. I think this is just fine, as it seems that the anime
streamlined the ending a bit.

**This is going to be spoilerific, but scarcely more than the question itself,
so I'm not putting _all of it_ in spoiler tags.**

Let's start at the core of the issue. You say that Father "absorbed" God. This
may be a bit of a misnomer. It's more accurate to say that he simply contained
God within himself to control its power. And this is the crux of his defeat.

![Father, referring to people as fuel](https://i.stack.imgur.com/c43yY.jpg)

While not explicitly stated, it's obvious that Father needs tremendous amount
of energy to contain God. He already had the power of half the people of
Xerxes, but his plan was to bolster this power by the souls of all the people
of Amestris. However, Hohenheim managed to thwart this part of the plan by
forcing the release of these souls right after they were taken.

This weakened Father's grip on God, but not enough for full release yet,
although his control over his powers obviously weakened (See chapter 105,
pages 32-33). After this, **everybody** started attacking him. The military,
the rebels, Edward, May, and even blinded Roy Mustang. Father deflected all
these attacks without even lifting a finger, sometimes even retaliated.
However, even though he seemed to be unaffected by all these attacks, they do
require energy from him to block. Slowly but surely, his energy reserves
diminished to the point that he started to take damage.

This led to even more energy drainage, because now he had to use the energy to
rebuild himself. Energy that he desperately needed to contain God. As the
battle waged on, it became more and more obvious that God was actively
battling against Father to escape. He tried to salvage the situation by
absorbing Greed, but this turned against him, because Greed (and as far as I
understand, only Greed) betrayed him and caused his limbs to turn fragile.
That and the final punches from Edward pushed his energy reserves over the
limit, and he no longer had the power to contain God. What happened next is
sort of hard to explain, so I'll just refer to Chapter 108, page 21.

After all this, Father, now reduced to Dwarf in the Bottle, found himself in
front of The Gate. He had a brief encounter with
[Truth](http://fma.wikia.com/wiki/Truth) and was then violently dragged within
The Gate, to whatever fate awaited him in there.


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Edward might have defeated Father but Father was in a highly weakened state
and not be able to fight back allowed Edward to beat the homunculus. However
it was kind of an unfair fight and if Father still retained some power left,
he would of annihilated Edward with breaking an sweat. Edward is a good
fighter and alchemist but Father has the freakin power of God itself and even
before than, he was already the most powerful alchemist of all time alongside
Hohenheim of course. Edward only managed to win with Father's power
handicapped and the army providing backup. In a one on one fight, Father would
have undoubtedly won


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2017-02-08T03:01:26.160
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I believe that because the truth had ed's hand and al gave his soul to return
something that truth had already claimed as his then when ed got it back he
literally had the "hand of god" And because of this it trumped the small
amount of it'self that father had managed to contain.


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