Winry Rockbell

Winry Rockbell (ウィンリィ・ロックベル, Uinrī Rokkuberu) is a main supporting character of the Fullmetal Alchemist series. She is a girl from Resembool and the close childhood friend of Edward Elric and Alphonse Elric. Winry is a training surgeon and mechanical repair specialist/enthusiast as she is the daughter of Yuriy Rockbell and Sarah Rockbell, two surgeons that worked on the Ishval Civil War and is the grand-daughter of Pinako Rockbell, a well known mechanic and surgeon in her youth. Winry also supports Edward as his personal automail engineer and mechanic, making sure his prosthetic right arm and left leg are always in good working order.

Appearance
Winry is seen wearing different clothes on the story. She has pale skin, big dark blue eyes and long light blonde hair that reaches her hips, with long bangs falling on the front and a fringe directed to the left. Usually her hair is tied in a long ponytail. Her hair, while it is straight, is often portrayed as wavy in some ilustration of the manga and the anime. When she works as an engineer, Winry wears a beige (sometimes portrayed as green) jumpsuit that normally is down and ajusted to ther waist, exposing a black tube top. She also wears brown gloves, common sandals, a green kerchief that covers her fringe and her hair is tied in long ponytail. After moving to Rush Valley to work with Garfield, Winry wears a black zipped crop top with white stripe on the center. Winry has her ears pierced in an avant-garde style with two identical pairs of hoop earrings on each earlobe and an additional two cuff studs worn vertically on her right ear, above the others. When she travels to Rush Valley, she is seen wearing a dark blue jacket with a white shirt underneath, along with a dark blue skirt and bown boots. Sometimes, she is seen withouth the jacket.

After the Promised Day, Winry is seen with her hair loose and using a pink jacket with a black shirt and blue jeans. In the anime adaptation, Winry becomes physically older, having a more adult face and appearance, while in the manga she still looks the same until the final chapter. In the end of the series, she is seen with her hair loose and wearing a white jacket with long magenta dress, along with blue jeans and light sandals.

Personality
Winry is cheerful, strong-willed, bubbly, hot-headed and empathetic. She loves everything about automails and mechanic, and always puts all her heart and effort into her work. She also loves her patients and is always ready to help them. Due to her love and full knowledge about automails, Edward often calls her a "engineering otaku" or a "crazy gearhead", while she always calls him "an otaku alchemist" in response. Usually she always hates when Ed brokes her automail and often uses her wrench as a weapon which always makes Ed and Al fear for her rage. Dedicated to her work and her friends, Winry works with almost excessive devotion on the various automail whose maintenance she undertakes for the sake of the people who depend on her, going so far as to take multiple consecutive overnight workshop sessions and travel long distances without hesitation in order to ensure their prompt and proper completion. While she has good intentions, Winry can be stubborn and straightforward, often calling others out for their weaknesses and delusions, but she also offers emotional support to her friends when they need it. She has a strong sense of morality and long respect for her parents, who unfairly died in the war doing the right thing. While at first she tried to kill Scar after discovering that he is the killer of her parents, later she decided not to kill him since her parents saved him once, even tought she is clear that she will never forgive him. After losing her parents on her childhood, Winry developed a strong attachment to her relatives and also got abandonment issues, always hating being left alone by the Elrics and fearing that she could lose them. She also hated to see her two best friends taking the burden of their mistakes on their own. When Ling Yao suggests that Alphonse does not need his human body since he is inmortal now, Winry gets mad at his words, to the point of leaving the room, since she knew how Alphonse suffered emotionally for losing his body. She is very compassive, empathetic and sensitive, and often is seeing crying or getting openly emotional towards others, something that she does not have a problem with expressing it, even thought Edward calls her a "crybaby" jokingly.Winry also hates putting her friends in danger or akward situations because of her, getting mad or dissapointed at herself .Due to her cheerful and bubbly attitude, Winry is admired by other people, seeing her as a charming and sweet person, to the point that they seem to get in love with her for a little moment. Winry is also admired by her patients and they prefer when she is the one to attends them instead of Garfield. In many occasions she is seen to be indifferent about the theme of love, being open with her reason to reject Alphonse in her childhood, and also, she is clear an relaxed with the fact that she has romantic feelings for Edward, and is seen teasing him when he akwardly realizes that he loves her too. Even though, she is seen getting flustered when Edwards confesses to her at the end of the series.

Relationships
Edward Elric -After losing his right arm and left leg, Winry took on the role of his personal automail mechanic, building him sophisticated new limbs when she was eleven years old. Since then, Winry has served as Ed's constant well of support, both mechanically and emotionally, though they still find themselves arguing frequently due to their stubborn and hot-headed personalities. However, this affectionate hostility appears to be masking a deeper relationship. Though Edward has not outwardly admitted any romantic feelings toward Winry, he is rather overprotective of her and becomes unnaturally flustered at the mere suggestion of an amatory relationship between them. Winry, for her part, has admitted to herself that she had been falling for him all along. Edward also says in various ocassions that he hates seeing Winry crying and he blames himself whenever it happens, which is something aknowledged by Winry, as she promises him that she will not cry by sadness again. They finally confess to each other at the end of the series as Edward proposes to her, although they use The Law of Equivalent Exchange to do so. According to the Fullmetal Alchemist Chronicle (Official Guide), they get married in 1917 and have many children in the end, showing both an unnamed daughter and son.

Alphonse Elric - Alphonse appears to be the little brother Winry always wanted. While Al remarks on the fight both he and Edward had over which one of them would marry her, Winry doesn't appear to have regarded those feelings as being too deep, as she is very casual about how she turned down both brothers' affections at the time. However, Winry does seem to be the one person other than Edward who is most affected by Al's intangible state as a soul bound to a suit of armor. She also seems to unquestioningly regard Al as human, despite the doubts others sometimes express about that. She is both protective and defensive of Al's humanity, and cries openly for his pain as well.

Pinako Rockbell - Even since before the death of her parents during the Ishval Civil War, Winry has always had a close relationship with her grandmother, but since the tragedy that befell the Rockbell homestead, Pinako has served as Winry's sole caretaker and closest - if not only - blood relation. The two have a relatively amicable relationship, ribbing each other every so often as they go about their days jointly running their automail atelier, but the bond between them remains as that of doting grandparent and adoring grandchild. When Winry finally sets out on her own path as an automail engineer, Pinako worries silently that the greater world will be too hard on her little Winry, but is very proud when she sees and hears evidence of the young woman's progress. Conversely, Winry worries about leaving her grandmother alone and communicates with her regularly, knowing that there will always be a place for her at home in Resembool if she should so require.

The Hughes Family - Encountering Lt. Colonel Maes Hughes almost by chance during her first trip to Central City, Winry is immediately accepted into Maes' circle of friends as he practically drags her to his daughter Elicia Hughes's third birthday party. She becomes close to little Elicia, who quickly comes to regard Winry as an older sister, as well as Maes' wife Gracia Hughes, who periodically offers the teenage girl motherly advice while teaching her to bake. After Maes's death, Winry remains close to Gracia and Elicia, sustaining an almost familial bond.

Abilities
Winry is a very gifted and passionate mechanic, excelling in the repair of machines of widely varying complexity. Of course, her truest passion and most extensive expertise is in the crafting and overhauling of automail prostheses. Brought up under the tutelage of her grandmother, master automail engineer Pinako Rockbell, Winry has been working with automail for most of her youth and can be considered somewhat of a machinist prodigy, having built Edward a complex pair of limbs at the tender age of eleven. Since that time, her skills have improved to the point that she has surpassed even her grandmother (once hailed far and wide as the "Pantheress of Resembool") and gained a fair bit of notoriety in her position at Atelier Garfiel in Rush Valley.

In addition, Winry appears to have a remarkable wealth of surgical knowledge for her age (despite a lack of formal training), gleaned from having grown up in a family of surgeons. Edward remarks that Winry's early comprehension of advanced medical literature is on par with the familiarity with alchemical texts shared by the Elric brothers when they were young. She successfully delivered Ridel and Satella's child in the 2009 anime, further proving her medical knowledge.

She has also displayed a significantly strong throwing arm, able to pitch heavy wrenches long distance with deadly accuracy. Winry learns to bake from Gracia Hughes during her first trip to Central City and develops her ability to bake pies - specifically apple pies - as the series progresses.

Etymology

 * The name Winry means "Reconciled, blessed" in Welsh, which shows to be a girl who is strong willed individuals who stand up and fight for what she believes in.
 * Winry's surname Rockbell is a play on the Rockwell scale that is used to measure the hardness of different metals.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood / Manga

 * The reason Winry pierced her ears is because she saw that Riza Hawkeye had earrings when the two first met. In the same way, Riza admits that she got her hair long since she saw Winry having long hair too, when she had it short by the moment.
 * In a Brotherhood OVA, Winry explains that the reason she has so many piercings in her ears is because Edward Elric and Alphonse Elric gave her multiple pairs of earrings and she wanted to wear all of them.


 * In the most recent fan poll, Winry was ranked 5th most popular Fullmetal Alchemist character, making her the second most popular female character after Riza (who was ranked 3rd overall).
 * In the Brotherhood character theme album, Winry's theme song is called "Look Up at the Sky," sung by her seiyu, Megumi Takamoto.




 * On the cover page of Chapter 107, Winry is included putting her hand in the circle with the rest of the protagonists.
 * Ed and Winry's romantic relationship is heavily implied in the FMA series and the relationship is confirmed during end of the manga as the two end up together with children, which is one of the most popular FMA pairings. It's also known as "Edwin". Apparently, the number "503" was also previously used as a name for this pairing, based on a brand of jeans of the same number by a company called Edwin. "503" was also the number of Winry's hotel room when she visit Ed and Al in Central.

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