Dante (Fullmetal Alchemist)

Dante is a master alchemist from the 2003 series of Fullmetal Alchemist. First appearing in Episode 32 "Dante of the Deep Forest", she appears as an elderly woman who lives in isolation, away from large cities. She is a master of alchemy and talented pharmacist; it was Dante who originally taught alchemy to the Elric brothers' own teacher Izumi Curtis. Later in the series, however, it is revealed that Dante is the master of the Homunculi who have been plaguing the Elrics throughout the series. She is also much older than she first appears as she has been using Philosopher's Stones to prolong her life for centuries.

History
400 years before the events of the series, Dante and Hohenheim were lovers and alchemical practitioners. Upon discovering the fabled Philosopher's Stone, they attempted to use it to achieve eternal life. However, forging a Stone required many human sacrifices, and even then, the Stone could not grant someone true immortality but merely transfer a soul into another body. Dante and Hohenheim used criminals and the terminally ill as the necessary sacrifices to make a Philosopher's Stone and transferred their souls into the bodies of others in order to prolong their own lives.

Over the centuries, Dante and Hohenheim crafted several Philosopher's Stones. In doing so, they also caused a number of disasters, such as the destruction of Hohenheim's home city and that of the city that Central would eventually be built on top of. During this time, the two lovers also had a child, but that child would die from mercury poisoning. Hohenheim attempted to resurrect his son with alchemy, but in doing so created the Homunculus who would become known as Envy.

Around twenty years before the events of the series, Hohenheim left Dante, disgusted by the actions the two had taken in the pursuit of immortality and by how Dante had lost her humanity. While Hohenheim would go on to meet Trisha Elric and fall in love with her, Dante continued to pursue "eternal" life. Unable to create a Philosopher's Stone on her own, she sought out other alchemists and manipulated them into researching human transmutation, thus leading to the creation of other Homunculi who she would recruit into her service, promising to make them fully human.

During the events of the series, Dante and her Homunculi had begun manipulating the Elric brothers, Hohenheim's sons, from afar. The brothers had attempted to bring back their dead mother and paid the price with their bodies, only to create a Homunculus instead. While the wounded Elric brothers left their home for the care of their neighbours, the Rockwell family, Dante took the Homunculus they had created and fed her Red Stones until she fully developed into a replica of the late Trisha Elric. Dante would name this creature Sloth.

Some years later, while living in the forest in an isolated manor, Dante hired the young alchemist Lyra as a housekeeper whilst also tutoring her in alchemy. However, Dante had wanted Lyra as a new host body as her current one at that time was rotting, a side effect of her continued use of Philosopher's Stones to transfer her soul into new vessels. With one of her Homunculi, Greed, having gone rogue, Dante engineered a situation in which to frame Greed for her murder. After having obtained a Philosopher's Stone, she created a Flamel array which she used to transfer her soul into Lyra's body and Lyra's into her own, aging body. Dante then killed Lyra and left the body for Greed to find. Possessing the remains of the person that Greed was made to replace, she activated the Flamel array again in order to weaken Greed and make him vulnerable. With Edward Elric pursuing him, Dante counted on Edward believing that Greed had killed her and would then kill him, leaving her with one less nuisance to deal with. In her new body, Dante began operating out of a restored mansion located in the underground city beneath Central. Having stirred up a conflict in the desert city of Reole, she would soon have a new Philosopher's Stone and had already selected a new body to inhabit, that of Rosé Thomas. It was also during this time that Dante had her long-awaited reunion with Hohenheim, who knew that she was manipulating his sons and tried to convince her to stop. Instead, Dante incapacitated Hohenheim and summoned the Gate, sending her former lover to a parallel world.

Once the Flamel array encompassing Reole was activated, the Amestrian military troops present in the area were converted into a Philosopher's Stone. Being at the centre of the array, Alphonse Elric became the host of all the human souls sacrificed to forge the Stone, making his armour the Philosopher's Stone itself. Later, Dante would send Envy and Sloth to kidnap Alphonse so that she could use him to transfer her soul to Rosé's body. Sloth was destroyed during the conflict with the Elric brothers, but Envy managed to take Al and bring him back.

Dante tried to command Gluttony to consume Alphonse's armour in order to forge a proper Philosopher's Stone within his body, but Gluttony had become depressed since the death of Lust. Annoyed by Gluttony's moping, Dante erased the Ouroboros tattoo on his tongue and thus erased his mind, leaving only the instinct of the sin that the Homunculus represented: the instinct to eat. Before Gluttony could go ahead with devouring Alphonse, Edward arrived in the underground city to rescue him. Dante attempted to deceive Ed by pretending to be Lyra, but Edward was already aware of how Dante had been using the Philosopher's Stone by this point and was not fooled. Ed confronted Dante, but she was holding both Rosé and her baby hostage. While using the two as shields, Dante called forth the Gate, banishing Ed to the same dimension he had sent Hohenheim to.

However, Ed's dimensional exile didn't last as he was able to summon an Inner Gate, sending his mind and soul back through the Gate to his body, which then emerged within Dante's lair again. Dante then sent Envy to kill Ed and Envy was successful, transforming his arm into a blade and stabbing Ed through the chest. After witnessing his brother's death, Alphonse breaks free of his restraints and decides to use the Philosopher's Stone himself. Knowing that Ed's soul is still at the Gate, Alphonse is able to use the power of the Stone to not only revive Ed, but also restore his body to normal. In doing so, Al used up the Stone completely and sacrificed himself. With the Philosopher's Stone gone, Dante made her escape via the elevator between the underground city and Central, hoping to reconvene with Pride and start again by manipulating other alchemists. However, the now-feral Gluttony followed Dante, eating his way through the floor of the elevator. Dante tried in vain to control Gluttony, but the Homunculus was now driven solely by his urge to eat and attacked her, devouring her.

Personality and Abilities
Dante's personality and motivation were very enigmatic yet also all the more malicious. She is cruel, manipulative, arrogant, narcissistic, single-minded, devious, and vindictive. In her long years as a parasitic soul, moving from body to body, her personality has apparently changed considerably: as Hohenheim lay dying after creating the Philosopher's Stone, she rushed to save him, but now she cares little for the lives of others, believing those who die in order to preserve her life to be "necessary martyrs." Ever since then, Dante developed a god-complex, as well as exhibiting a misanthropic and egotistical view of the world, believing most human beings to be "selfish, ignorant creatures", unworthy of the knowledge of alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone (demonstrating a large degree of hypocrisy as well). As such, she has no qualms over starting wars or taking countless lives, as she is convinced that she is ultimately protecting mankind from itself. Because this is all Dante cares about, global politics, wars, and human lives mean nothing to her, as she has control of Amestris through her homunculus Pride and uses the whole country as a tool to obtain the Stone.

Like Hohenheim, Ed, and Izumi (and later Al), she can transmute without a circle, completing complex transmutations just by clapping her hands. She also possesses other abilities that go beyond normal alchemy: she is able to summon the Gate using infants (whose souls are more strongly linked to the Gate than those of adults), transform Gluttony from a childish fool into a ravenous monster, and split the mind, soul, and body of Hohenheim before sending him into the Gate. Dante is also the only known person to attempt a human transmutation specifically in order to create Homunculi (Greed, Pride, and most likely Gluttony), without any repercussions (apparently).

She uses the symbol of a winged snake fixed on a cross (called a flamel), which is passed on to Izumi, and then to the Elric brothers. It is meaningful that the symbol is the opposite of the Ouroboros worn by the Homunculi. It represents a fixation on the volatile principle in alchemy, as opposed to the endless cycle represented by Ouroboros. In Dante's case, the symbol likely represents her belief that she is immortal and has conquered the cycle of birth and death represented by the Ouroboros. In real life, it is a symbol associated with the 15th-century alchemist Nicholas Flamel, who claimed to have created a Philosopher's Stone and used it to achieve immortality (one of the two main goals of alchemy, along with the creation of gold from lead).