Fullmetal Alchemist Anime/WMG

=== Note: This page is for theories about the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime. See Fullmetal Alchemist for the manga and the current anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. ===

Homunculi aren't necessarily ...
Well if you tried to bring a dead loved one back to life, and got the hideous abomination homunculi look like at first, wouldn't YOU freak out and assume you didn't actually do it? The only reason the homunculi aren't acting like themselves is because of the Red Stones' influence. Case-in-point: Wrath. On the other hand,  are homunculi's weakness because, while it cripples them, it also reasserts their humanity and reminds them of who they really are, which is why   Thus making each of their stories and deaths that much more tragic - they really were people revived by their loved ones, just Brainwashed and Crazy by.

The animeverse takes place in the same multiverse as His Dark Materials.
The Gate is powered by the energy released when a person's daemon disappears at death. Lord Asriel also harnessed this power to. The Homunculi are not soulless, but they have been brought back from the World of the Dead and therefore no longer have their daemons.
 * This troper feels silly to draw connections between Full Metal Alchemist and H.P Lovecraft, but because of his unnatural love for the latter, this troper has always believed that the single, giant eye in The Gate belongs to Yog-Sothoth. After all, he is the portal between worlds, and he has that "Gain knowledge, lose something personal" attitude.
 * My obsessive love for Doctor Who lead me to believe it was the Time Vortex. (Some gain enlightenment and some go mad...)

Envy looked like Hohenheim because Envy had a family of his own before he become a Homunculus, and Hohenheim went on to possess one of his descendants.
It would add a whole new level to Hohenheim's pre-series douchery, but it would certainly explain it.

Envy wasn't showing Edward his "real" form.
He doesn't remember what it looks like, and he based his "true" appearance off Hohenheim. It was a tactic to throw Edward off so that he would have the chance to impale him.
 * That's the impression this troper always had. Besides, if Envy had really showed Edward his real form - assuming Hoenheim looked different in his original body, as it would seem from flashbacks - Ed wouldn't have recognized him at all, and would have happily kept beating the crap out of him. It was probably just Envy getting his point across symbolically that he's.

Homunculi have souls just like humans
The lack of human souls is propaganda used by Dante to control homunculi.

They all seem to have human emotions and drives. Greed, who is not indoctrinated by Dante, doesn't feel any effect from the theoretical lack of a soul. Wrath acted like a normal human boy until the others got to him.
 * That's not that wild a guess. They just aren't complete. The homunculi clearly aren't normal; but over time, they get their memories back. It's suggested that Shou could have successfully completed his human transmutation had he simply had the strength of will to attach a soul to the chimera. It shouldn't be all that different with the homunculi.
 * The Homunculi have souls and are quite "human" even when they are sociopathic. But their souls aren't the same ones that left the original hosts. Their souls come from something that lives inside the gate, those black, baby-like things. Perhaps they're souls of children who died before they were born or in early infancy, which clung to any life they can find? The memories come from the body's extreme similarity, down to the neural pathways in the brain, as incomplete as they are. (Physically, one can link specific neural pathways to specific memories.)
 * It's flat out shown with both Sloth and Wrath that they have the same souls.

OTL's version of Roy Mustang is Stauffenberg (the man who tried to kill Hitler).
Both of them were career soldiers. Both of them lost their left eye and wear an eye patch (although it didn't happen to Roy until the very end). And, of course, both of them tried to kill (a) Fuhrer, to varying degrees of success. The only problem with this is that Stauffenberg would be much younger than Roy (by at least a decade), but seeing as how Pride has been a Homunculus for at least a decade or so yet Fritz Lang appears to be the same age, exact age correlations don't seem to matter.
 * Actually the Fuhrer was a peculiar homunculus because he could age at the rate of a normal person. He wasn't immortal like the other homunculi, so it makes sense that he and Fritz Lang look the same age.
 * Also OTL's Alfons was older than Ed, and for that matter, Alphonse, so age doesn't seem to need to match up.
 * Actually, he wasn't. Time had passed since the end of the anime, and Ed is now 18 while Alfons Heiderich is 17. Alphonse Elric would have been 17, too, except his restored body was the same age as he was when they tried to bring back their mother, so he was effectively de-aged by about five years.

In the Anime, Hohenheim really wanted a daughter.
Hence why Ed wears a ponytail, and why

The Armstrongs are
Like anime! . The "Armstrong line" down which talents have been passed for generations is the line of people connected not by birth but by the same souls. Generations refers to a period of time of about 20 years, and not actual generations within the Armstrong family. They were just careful and stayed alive long enough to figure out how to turn their body-necrosis effect into a benign sparkliness.

Colonel Armstrong is Mr. Clean
He's an extremely muscular bald man constantly surrounded by sparkles.
 * He's also a Major

Hohenheim transfers his soul into bodies that he's created as opposed to stealing other peoples'.
He creates the body the regular way, except he doesn't immediately attach his soul to it, which prevents the Gate from opening. It explains why he looks exactly like he did in the flashback, and why his bodies don't seem to rot as quickly as Dante's. Note that Hohenheim seems to have had the same body for about ten years while Lyra!Dante starts rotting about... a week? A month? Anyway, it's in pretty bad condition only a short time after the last soul transfer. The rotting is explained as being a result of their souls being corrupt, so Hohenheim's more 'humane' method of transferring his soul from body to body means that, while he's not the greatest person, he's still not as bad as Dante. It also fits in a little better with Hohenheim's personality, because while he was a douche, he seemed to have at least some morals.
 * Considering how long Old Lady Dante lasted, it may be that the act of stealing a body destroys the soul more than taking an unowned body. Thus, displacing Lyra's soul made Dante's too weak to sustain any body - or maybe Lyra made one last transmutation...

== Alchemy is powered by the souls/deaths on both sides of the Gate, because the energy required for a transmutation is so immense. It just so happens that "our" world has a much more substantial population. ==

The Red Stones don't give alchemists the ability to override Equivalent Exchange.
Rather, it gives an alchemist the ability to fold time, instantaneously summoning whatever matter is required for his or her transmutation from random points in the universe.

The Red Stones don't give alchemists the ability to override Equivalent Exchange.
They're just "worth" more in the exchange. General relativity still holds and matter=energy, it just takes a lot of energy to make matter out of nowhere. That's why creating a lot of matter tends to "use up" the weaker versions of the red stone.

The series is set in the twenty first century.
It is set in an alternate universe, which doesn't have the "modern" technology we have. However, it is set in our century. In the "other" world, our world, you go back in time one hundred years.
 * The inscription on the inside of Ed's watch clearly sets the series at the beginning of the 20th century.
 * In whichever episode Ed is shown Hohenheim's love letter to Dante, it is pointed out that the Gregorian calendar has been trashed in their world.
 * To expand, the first episode states that they attempt to transmute their mother back in 1910, presumably by their calendar. The main plot is repeatedly stated to take place 4 years after that. That means the series ends in 1914 by their calendar. However, at the end, in our world, the time is labeled as 1921. Ed hasn't aged at all, and it is strongly implied that this is happening at the same time as the scenes in their world immediately prior. There could not possibly be a 7 year gap given Ed and Al's apparent ages. This strongly suggests that the 2 calendars are about 7 years out of sync. As well, when Ed comes back out of the gate, about the same amount of time has passed on both sides, suggesting that the time flows are synchronous.

The Gate is a facet of Unicron
Every time alchemists use alchemy, souls are consumed, removing them from the cycle of reincarnation, depriving Primus of pieces needed to bring new Transformers into being, as a soul consumed cannot be made into a Spark.

Greed's (age when he was a human): 35.
Uh ... don't look at me. It was in a dream. No kidding. Sounds kinda old, though.

Armstrong sparkles because...
He doesn't, actually. He simply appears sparkly because everyone in the world, including the camera, is in love with him. This mysterious attractiveness has been passed down the Armstrong line for generations, which is why the rest of his family also appears to sparkle.

It's possible to make a chimera capable of human language (not just speech, but conversation) without .
By using a gorilla/chimpanzee, a (or some) corvids, and maybe a dolphin and/or parrot/mynah bird. You would have to teach it how to talk, but it would still be capable of passing an auditory Turing Test after a couple of years. The problem is that Shou.

The world of Pokemon is on the far side of the Amestris of the Fullmetal Alchemist anime from
Asplode your head. The worlds have greater and greater deviation from our idea of entropy and conservation of work as you go further down the line. The reason the Olympus Mons have gotten plot-relevant lately is because (aside from Mewtwo, canonically the strongest pokemon apart from the specific baliwick of creating worlds or making flowers grow) of the.

Dante was originally a man.
First off, "Dante" is a male name. Who would name their daughter Dante? Perhaps "she" started out as Hohenheim's crossdressing male lover until the power of the philosopher's stone actually allowed "her" to transfer into the body of a female.
 * And then the gender-confusion passes on to "her", right? Then it makes sense why !

Riza has some sort of link to what happened in Ishbal, other then just being one of the soldiers who fought during the war.
Since Riza's past was never discussed in the first anime, expectantly after deviating so far from the manga, this is my favorite Epileptic Tree. Based more then anything on her actions and what she says in the episodes right before and after.

"The Elric brothers have in-tangled themselves in a very dangerous web. The colonel wants them to be under his supervision now. That's the real reason he's keeping them close." Episode 39, when the subordinates are all hanging about, seeming to be on break. Sounds like she knows something they don't to me. Latter part counted as a question-avoiding distraction, or the off chance she might have told Roy part of what happened by now.

The outburst toward Armstrong right after they. Something about it made her seem pissed for more then that reason to me.

Why wouldn't she tell? Well, being that  didn't really exist according to the books, she'd have no real proof. Besides,  should sumup why pretty good.

Why rejoin the military? What better way to pick apart a conspiracy then from the inside out?

After Ed and Al left Amestris forever, Winry got together with Sheska.
She was lonely, and her relationship with Sheska was already close. So why not?

Envy was originally Wrath.
Unlike in the manga, where the homunculi are named after the sin that Father removed in order to make them, the anime homunculi are named by Dante, after the sin that they remind her of the most (or at least that's how it looked to me). Well, Envy wouldn't have been very envious originally, would he? It's only within the last fifteen years that he would have had anyone else (Ed and Al) to be envious of. What he will have been before that, was angry, pissed off, and raging at Hohenheim and the world, much in the same way that animeWrath rages at Izumi and everyone else on the planet. Envy probably changed his name shortly before the series started (after finding out about Ed and Al), leaving the position of Wrath open for the newbie. It makes even more sense if you realise that animeWrath is practically animeEnvy's Shadow Archetype. Think about it: they're both Artificial Humans of Ambiguous Gender, with the same bad taste in fashion, vindictive streak, impulsive tendencies (although Envy's are slightly more controlled due to his greater experience), abandonment issues and fondness of displaying a Slasher Smile in combat. That can't be a coincidence. The difference is that Wrath has people who genuinely care about him, and is eventually able to lose that anger, whereas Envy, after 400 years of nurturing his spite, has nothing but deep-seated rage left to him; all that's left is psychosis and self-loathing. Heck, both of them even have a rivalry with the same character (Ed). Having Envy as the original Wrath would only make the comparison between them that much more obvious: the original Wrath gives into spite, focusses his hate and becomes Envy, while the new Wrath defies his own sin and becomes a better person in the process.
 * That actually makes a lot of sense. If Dante had just been assigning names, which is the impression that this troper got, who's to say that they couldn't be changed?

King Bradley isn't an Alternate Universe version of Fritz Lang; he's an alternate version of Fritz Lang's father.
It's the only way I can rationalize him looking the same, but being about thirty years older.

Soon after The Movie Winry died somehow
And made it through the gate. Ed most likely never met Winry's counterpart, but Winry herself. I like to think suicide but accidental death or an illness seems more likely and in-character/in-show. He is also wearing automail in a post-movie OVA. Who knows how to make automail in our world?
 * Or possibly she made it through somehow, like how Ed did.

Frank Archer had dextrocardia.
Like Dr. No. That's how he survived the side his heart should have been on getting vaped.
 * I thought that was because he was a Time Lord, and the anesthesia from the cyborg surgery kept him from regenerating properly?

Noah was falling for Ed, and by mid-movie she was in love with him
Rose was in love with Ed, and counterparts have the same love interests. Part of the reason she wanted to go with him was because she loved him.

Hohenheim is Nicholas Flamel.
Or rather, he body jumped one last time after Envy killed him.

Winry's counterpart is named "Wendy"
It was the mangaka's meaning for Winry's name, but it was misreported as "Winry".

Winry's counterpart is a mechanic, or at least has a knowledge of tools
Counterparts seem quite similar in personality and skill, and Ed was in automail in the "Birthday" OVA.

Selim Bradley was supposed to become the next Pride
Since Pride was the only homunculi who can age I think he would have died of old age. So he adopted Selim and when he gets old enough the homunculi would killed Selim and Dante or Selim mother would have tried to bring him back to life creating the next Pride.

Envy's Freudian Excuse was a good justification for his issues. (Warning: spoilers ahoy!)
Okay, so most people don't think  was enough to make him into a sadistic sociopath, but that's only part of it. Not only did, but he also left him with. If you watch that part where  tosses around Rose's baby, and later shows to have no qualms of killing said baby, it's pretty clear what kind of   is. It's safe to say from that assessment of  that Envy's psychotic behavior has a lot to do with. didn't treat him like a son after, but a servant. After  tried to revive ,   wound up with a homunculus instead. After that,  no longer considered him. One episode has. could have drilled into Envy's head that he wasn't capable of anything but jealousy and hate, and eventually, he started believing it. When Envy started getting memories of his human past,  may have twisted the story to make it sound like , and without any other source to go by, he believed her. However, he still had memories of, so he was confused. He eventually concluded that  When you consider that this has been happening to you for , and possibly the added "bonus" of the Philosopher's Stones (which may wreak havoc on your psyche, if the other homunculi are anything to go by), it would make sense why Envy's a headcase.
 * Hm, sounds like the start of an epic fanfiction!

The Red Stones wear at your sanity
Think about it. Wrath went nuts after being given them by, and he had memories of the Gate after eating them. You could also say that the older the homunculi, the crazier they are (which might be something of a giveaway as to who's the oldest). And then there's what the stones are made of. That means, and that can't be good for your mental stability. And then there's. No wonder they're crazy!

Wrath is autistic
Or at least, he has many of the symptoms of autism (more specifically, Aspergers Syndrom). His social skills are pretty poor (an obvious result of  and away from people), and he seems to be lacking in emotional maturity. Also, he holds a very strong attachment to, to the point where he. On top of that, he doesn't really seem to have much sense of personal space on a couple of occasions, and says and does things without regard of how it makes others feel (more or less unintentional). Then there's the hyperactivity.

Fullmetal Alchemist in this adaptation is actually a 'What If?' scenario! (Spoilers galore)
The first series pokes at what would have happened if had reached Hoenheim before. Here's what happened: Dante lived in Xerxes around the time when Hoenheim was still a slave. She was very wealthy, and hailed from a high-ranking family, but she wanted to gain power grater than what her status had to offer. When she met Bob the Blob, she had a conversation with him about what he planned to do, where he came from, and how he would use slave 23 to execute the plan. After hearing about this, she dangled him over a balchony, dropping him to his death. Shortly after that, she met Hoenhiem, married him, and started all the crap the first anime gives us.

Envy in the first anime is Father
In the first anime, Envy is technically a homunculus that also happens to be Ed and Al's half brother. In Brotherhood, Father is a homunculus that is also technically Ed and Al's half brother. So, in the first anime, Father!Envy's plan was to use Ed and Al to create a perfect human transmutation circle using Amestris, and attain the power of the Gate to spite Hohenheim. but, due to the differences in the universes, Envy did not end up with the proper homunculi, and was forced to result to a more inferior plan. Also, to spite Hohenheim, Envy made Hohenheim's original body immortal, so that when he was close to his soul burning out, Hohenheim would doom himself by alchemically destroying his own body, regardless of the fact that it was immortal. Also, Envy states at the end that the Gate will take him wherever he tells it, implying that he knows more about things than he lets on.

The First Anime is actually based off of rumors all around in the Brotherhood world.

 * Not everyone knows about the truth of what happened but everyone knows fragments of it. Communication is difficult between countries. Rumors could spread about how King Bradley could be a homunculus or how that Selim died. All sorts of stories could spread through the various countries twisting the truth.

The writers originally intended to include a Whole-Episode Flashback detailing the Dante and Hohenheim's past

 * This is admittedly more wishful thinking than actual speculation, but at the end of the series these two characters are the only ones to feel conspicuously underdeveloped, with their motives, methods and histories being defined so vaguely as to be downright frustrating. A flashback episode going into greater detail about their origins and histories would have fit right in, fleshing out the characters and rounding out the series at a nice tidy 52 episodes, as well as answering a lot of nagging questions without sacrificing some degree of ambiguity surrounding them, which is what the writers were aiming for. Furthermore, the removal of the brief flashbacks about their past in the last 6-7 episodes would have granted the writers more time to devote to Mustang's coup, a plotline which felt distinctly truncated in the final episodes. (The last time we see Mustang's crew before the end of the show they're in the trenches fighting against the troops still loyal to Bradley, and Havoc says he wants to "try out his Colonel Mustang impression". The next time we see them is in the epilogue, after Bradley has already been dethroned and Amestris is at peace, with no explanation of how they made it out of the trenches alive. Also, for no particularly good reason we never actually see Mustang lose his left eye - it's merely implied that Archer shot it off.) Really, with just one or two more episodes' worth of run time, nearly all of the problems with the anime's ending could easily be fixed. It's hard not to get the impression that the production became rushed during the home stretch.

Barry the Chopper was telling the truth.

 * There never was an Alphonse Elric. Edward Elric was an only child who fashioned an imaginary playmate he regarded as his brother.
 * I half agree with you. Alphonse was a real person, but Alphonse the Armor was based on Edward's memories of Alphonse the Person. He mentioned missing memories of his life as a person; those were the memories where Edward wasn't there. Likewise, when Alphonse was revived, he had no memory of what he did as a suit of armor.

After the movie, Edward becomes a scientist, but retains his interest in alchemy, never giving up hope of one day returning to Amestris.
When he gets word that Irene and Frederick Joliot-Curie have discovered a way to transmute one element into another, he seeks them out to discern whether or not he can use this discovery to his ends, because he regards it as proof that alchemy is possible on this side of the Gate. Ditto when Enrico Fermi manages to achieve criticality in a nuclear reactor.

The Homunculi we see in the series aren't the only ones created, just the only ones who survived long enough to be given their first red stones.
It's more or less stated that all Homunculi are born looking like disgusting mutations and die shortly afterwards if they aren't given the red stones. So, it's quite possible that many Homunculi have been created both before and after Envy was created by Hoenheim, but they were never fed the red stones before they died.
 * This seems likely, seeing as the homunculi in the series flat-out state that there have been others ("the new Lust", etc.). The existing homunculi seem to be merely the ones Dante and the Sins managed to get their hands on.

Rick and Leo aren't fully Ishballan.
Most Ishballans seem to have fairly dark skin, and Rick and especially Leo are old enough that their skin tone should have changed to the "correct" tone. Both Rick and Leo have skin that is not too much darker than Edward's. It may just be that they happen to be light-skinned Ishballans, but considering the fact that the war in Ishbal had been going on for several years and what happened to Rose during the attack on Lior, one can't fully rule out the possibility that they could have a father who isn't Ishballan.

When somebody Grand Theft Me's a body, the body eventually starts to look like the body of the original soul
Think about it. How was Greed able to recognize Dante? Or why did Envys original form look so much like the new Hohenheims body? Its because when a soul hijacks a body, the new body eventually takes on the appearance of the very original body.
 * Hey…this actually makes sense of the whole "Hohenheim met Dante instead of Homunculus Father" WMG above!

Alchemy is the magical equivalent of Atomic Energy.
The life-force of people on our side of the gate power alchemical reactions in the Amestris side. The life-force of people on the Amestris side therefore power nuclear reactions on our side. Also, the story of Fullmetal Alchemist somewhat mirrors the rise of Quantum and Relativistic Physics: the firmly established belief of Equivalent Exchange is gradually overturned, in the same way that the ordered, comfortable world of Newtonian Physics is overturned by the more confusing and uncertain Quantum and Relativistic Theories. Even the notion of Equivalent Exchange is practically Newtonian: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."
 * Jossed by the movie. The whole plot is kicked off by an Amestrian discovering uranium and using it to invent a nuclear bomb.

The reason Wrath and Pride can age.
Is because they were both made using fresh corpses as material. We know for a fact that Wrath was made using the body of Izumi's baby, and it is entirely possible that doing the transmutation that way has a slightly different result than making the body from scratch, such as restarting the aging process. It is therefore possible that Dante made Pride the same way. This doesn't account for the skull that Pride has locked away, but Dante could have made the head from scratch and kept the original as leverage. Grafting a new head onto an existing body to create an aging Homunculus would have been a complicated procedure and would explain Dante's view of him as her "masterpiece"

Hohenheim is Winry's father.
When Hohenheim turns up in Reseembool again, he talks about Winry's mother Sara a fair bit and visits her grave, demonstrating a good deal of affection, but doesn't seem to think about Winry's dad at all. That's what got me thinking there may have been something more than friendship 'tween Hoho and Sara. Then consider that, after visiting Trisha's grave, he sees Sara's and says "My God, I've done it twice." He claims that what he meant was he got Winry confused with her mom again, but that could be him covering when what he really meant was that makes twice he was away while a woman he cared for died. Plus, we see that, while Hoho tells Dante he's still faithful to Trisha even after her death, he's still a shameless flirt with Lieutenant Ross, so his ability to limit himself to one woman may not be as great as he claims.

So that's stuff suggesting Hohenheim might have been intimate with Winry's mom. As for him being her biological father: 1) Winry has bright blonde hair like Hoho and Ed, while the brief flashback we get of them shows her parents were both brown haired. 2) The anime writers took the romance out of Ed and Winry's relationship and made them Like Brother and Sister; maybe it was because the writers were thinking of the two as actual brother and sister. 3) In the Kids OVA, Ed has a great-granddaughter who looks just like Winry; Ed and Winry sharing some of the same genetics might explain that a little.

The Gate is the Time Vortex
From the Doctor Who episode "Journey's End", we know human brains aren't built to handle Time Lord knowledge, and from "The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords" and The End of Time, we know that at least some of that Time Lord knowledge comes from the Time Vortex which is why Ed was only able to retain flashes of what he saw in the Gate. Even when applied to a Time Lord, the Vortex causes some to be enlightened, some to go mad, and some to just run away. When Rose Tyler absorbed the Vortex and became Bad Wolf, she actually gained the ability to perform long range, circleless alchemy, which she can't perform afterward either because it never occurred to her to try or memory loss. If the Doctor hadn't sucked it out of her, her body would've been consumed in the same way Alphonse's was, which the Doctor was saved from by regeneration. However, being a Time Traveller and thus having gained some tolerance for the Vortex, she was able to survive it long enough to actually do something. We also know that the Time Lords regulated alternate universe travel, hence the Gate occasionally flinging people to our world.

It's also possible that Hoenheim was mistaken about the source power of alchemy and that, in fact, the Eye of Harmony survived the Time War (Even if the Time Lords didn't) and needs somewhere to pour all that excess energy (Which would also explain where the TARDIS' power is coming from post Time War)

And, just for the hell of it, this would tie in kind of well with my theory on the Avatar The Last Airbender Page page that that Earth is Gallifrey. If that world used Vortex energy to bend the classical elements it makes perfect sense for the Fullmetal world to use it to manipulate the periodic table of elements.
 * Pretty sure looking at the time vortex through the Untempered Schism and absorbing the time vortex into your head are two very different things. Was the former ever stated to have anything to with knowledge about time travel? And isn't the TARDIS' energy post-Time War explicitly said to come from rifts in space and time?
 * Since it's a Time Lord initiation ceremony it probably has something to do with Time Travel knowledge (I believe The Doctor said "Some gain enlightenment, some go mad and some run" or something like that) The Doctor does indeed recharge the TARDIS at the Cardiff rift now, but it was flying around for awhile before that (9 went to the Titanic and Kennedy's assassination, seemingly without Rose) Although it's been awhile since I watched the first Rift episode, so I might be mistaken about that. And it's entirely possible that he'd been using Rifts before that, but it wasn't stated. He may have switched because the damaged/unmaintained Eye was unstable, or may have been unaware it survived. And assuming that the Vortex is the Gate, since The Gate grants the ability to do circleless alchemy (IIRC, by the subject being shown a way to use their own body as a circle, which is why Ed has to clasp his hands) and since remote alkehestry is possible (And presumably possible to do without the dagger circles if you've seen the gate) it's reasonable to assume that one could perform remote alchemy with enough exposure to the Gate, especially if they had the source of all alchemic power at their fingertips. The reason that Time Lords can't do alchemy is either because the Whoniverse isn't being flooded with the energy from the Eye or because anyone who saw the gate from the Amestrian side would've already been an alchemist and gotten there via alchemy and therefore had different groundwork laid in their minds than the Time Lord children, who would've been raised with temporal mechanics and the like from a young age and be expecting looking into the Vortex to have something to do with time travel (Or because, since Time Lords are instinctively temporally aware due to developing in proximity to the Schism, have the necessary groundwork laid that way.)

The 2003 anime series is set in the same universe as Minecraft
And the 'Red Stones' are in fact the same thing as Redstone. The power that players use to move pistons and open doors is alchemical in nature.
 * Either that or Minecraft takes place in a Pocket Dimension of Amestris created by either Dante or Hoenheim.