Back in Xing, LanFan has a pet dog called Echo. She had to leave him behind since he was not a dog made for battle and LanFan is almost as protective of him as she is of Ling. Fu believed Echo would be a distraction, so he left him in the hands of his son/LanFan’s uncle.
LanFan, Izumi and Roy are siblings. Their mother was from Xing. At 16, she was in a bad relationship which landed her pregnant. Too afraid to be a parent, as soon as Izumi was born, she left her in the hands of one of her friends and headed for Central. Then she met Roy’s father and Chris. 5 years after Roy’s birth, there was a car accident and his dad died. Grief stricken, she returned to Xing and was taken in by Fu. She ended up in a arranged marriage and died giving birth to LanFan.
One of the details that gets lost in the transition of manga-to-anime for Fullmetal Alchemist, is the overt presence of foreign language. For example, the Xingese characters actually regularly speak Xingese amongst each other. While they aren’t the only example of foreign language being spoken, they are the most prominent.
In the anime, every character no matter what race or what country they are from, speaks the same language as a translation convention. The only real hints that there are other languages present are very minor, like the fact that Ling wrote his message to Lan Fan completely in Kanji and that no one outside of them could read it.
However, the manga has an interesting convention to denote that foreign language is being spoken, by giving every foreign language speech bubbles that are horizontal instead of vertical. This is lost slightly even when the manga gets translated because in Japanese, the vertical speech bubbles also have vertically typeset dialogue which help better distinguish the languages. Nonetheless, the speech bubble shapes are very distinct.
When Ling talks to Ed, his speech bubbles are all vertical
As are Lan Fan’s
But look at Fu’s thought bubbles here and compare them to Paninya and Al’s vertical bubbles. They’re horizontal! Fu is shown to be thinking in his native tongue!
Conversations that we heard all in one language in the anime, were supposed to be in Xingese.
Like Ling, Lan Fan, and Fu on the roof.
And Ling speaking with Mei at the end of the final battle.
Its just one of those really neat details Arakawa uses that makes FMA’s world just a bit richer in the manga than what we see in the anime version of the series.
Nonbinary and Lesbian Winry and Lan Fan icons for anon! Let me know if you want anything changed!! Unfortunately I couldn’t find any mangacaps of Lan Fan, sorry.
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