jmtorres | I am on so much crack.

I started designing the array Al's going to use to [end of series spoilers] in League of the Four-Fingered Alchemists story I'm writing, and I started noticing almost all the ordinary arrays in FMA have an even number of points--Al uses a six-pointed one pretty regularly; Roy's salamander array is based on a six-pointed star too, though with out the top and bottom points so it's actually four-pointed; the first array Al and Ed ever use is four-pointed... the only ones that are, say, five-pointed (and you'd think you'd see more pentacles, but no) are ah, [spoilery]. And I started getting into the geometry of the thing, and see, all the even-pointed arrays have symmetry along both horizontal and vertical axes--it's called Klein-four symmetry, and it also means that they all have 180 degree rotational symmetry. A five-pointed array, like the one Dante uses to [spoiler], or a seven-pointed array, like the one Ed modifies in [spoiler], will have other symmetries, but it won't have this Klein-four symmetry. I got into this whole theory about bound and unbound arrays and how even-pointed arrays write equivalent trade right into the diagram by their very design.

Then I got off on this tangent about Scar's phoenix tattoo versus the cross in the flammel and competing mythologies of ressurrection, and why Amestrian alchemists might consider human transmutation to be God's realm when they don't otherwise exhibit any sign of religion, the explanation of which involves *cough* Envy's origin, and I'll leave it at that.

Sometimes, I get too involved in these things...

p. s.

sky_dark, your girlfriend doing arrays on all your walls was like, six times more useful to my insane analysis than anything else on the web, on account of exquisite exactitude.

I am on so much crack.

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