Shou Tucker

Shou has the appearance of a bespectacled middle-aged man, having little in the ways of muscle or height and his receding hairline leaving him only with a small amount of brown hair, and a slight beard stubble. He has only been shown wearing a single outfit, that of a faded green open-collared shirt with sleeves that he keeps rolled up to his elbows, and a second black shirt underneath. When around others he maintains a mildly content expression, however in private he is often more downcast and anxious and is notably depicted as such in his title card caption in the 2009 Anime. Shou initially comes off as a soft-spoken but asocial man, often preferring to keep to himself rather than spend time with others. When having guests, he does put on a polite persona and appears to be quite gentle, friendly, and kind. However, as his daughter Nina had begun to notice, he was more often engrossed with his work than his family. In reality, Shou suffered from a lack of confidence due to his research not producing any viable results and is a very desperate, delusional, selfish, and manipulative man devoid of any sort of conscience. In order to get his qualification as a State Alchemist, he was willing to sacrifice his wife and later his own daughter in order to maintain it from fear of returning to a life of poverty and regret. After his atrocities were unveiled, Shou showed a notable lack of remorse for his actions and instead claimed it was merely the advancement of science, focused solely on remaining a State Alchemist. Shou has no genuine empathy for others' feelings and is unable to understand any perspective different from his own. While he intellectually understood that others would be enraged if they found out the truth behind his experiments—hence his lying to Nina and the Elric brothers that his wife abandoned them—he didn't understand why, and believed that any other alchemist would have done the same thing he did if they were in his financial situation. As a result, Ed's violent reaction to finding out that Shou had turned his own wife and daughter into chimeras took him by surprise.