Dante

Dante (ダンテ, Dante), is the fictional character and one of the central antagonists of the Dante's Alchemist series. She is a cold elderly woman and a formidable alchemist herself. Posing as the second leader and master and the benefactor of the Homunculi, Dante is responsible for setting in motion the events of the series and the challenges its protagonists must face along the way, and orchestrates her agenda within the shadows of the government and military.

She is the second-in-command of the Homunculi, who plans to extend her life forever with Philosopher's Stones. She also plans to serve as humanity's protector like a god, by preventing selfish humans from being able to use the Philosopher's Stone for their own selfish actions, ignoring the fact that she is human herself and not truly immortal due to her decaying body as the result of transferring between people so many times.

"By using the lives of those sentenced to hang during the witch-hunts and those who were dying of the plague; By repeating our experiments, relentlessly, despite countless failures, we finally grasped it; The Philospher's Stone."
 * —Dante.

Appearance & Biography

 * Voice Actor: Cindee Mayfield (English), Kazuko Sugiyama (Japanese), Not Known (French), Not Known (Italian), Not Known (German), Not Known (Hungarian), Not Known (Finnish), Not Known (Korean), Not Known (Polish), Not Known (Romanian), Not Known (Russian), Not Known (Poland), Not Known (Serbian), Not Known (Swedish), Not Known (European Spanish), Not Known (Latin American Spanish), Not Known (Brazilian Portuguese), Not Known (European Portuguese)

Appearance

 * Hair Color: Not Known
 * Skin Color: Not Known
 * Eye Color: Not Known
 * Age: Over 400 years old (Deceased)
 * Birthday: Not Known
 * Height: Not Known
 * Weight: Not Known

Personality
Dante's personality and motivation are very enigmatic. She is manipulative, 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 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.

Family

 * Van Hohenheim (former lover)
 * Van Lucifer (husband; deceased)
 * King Bradley/Pride (adopted son; deceased)
 * Treachery ("son"; deceased)
 * Heresy ("daughter"; deceased)
 * Lust ("daughter"; deceased)
 * Anger ("daughter"; deceased)
 * Greed ("son"; deceased)
 * Juliet Douglas/Sloth ("daughter"; deceased)
 * Violence ("son"; deceased)
 * Fraud ("son"; deceased)
 * Envy (Homunculus of her dead son; deceased)
 * Wrath ("son"; deceased)
 * Gluttony ("son"; deceased)
 * Limbo ("son"; deceased)

Neutral

 * Izumi Curtis (former student)
 * Edward Elric
 * Alphonse Elric

Abilities
Dante is an amazingly skilled alchemist - probably the second most powerful, after Hohenheim, featured in the series. 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).

Past
400 years ago Dante and her lover Hohenheim discovered immortality by creating the Philosopher's Stone. With it they switch bodies by having their souls transferred onto different bodies over and over again. Hohenheim and Dante had a child together, who later died due to Mercury poisoning. Later Hohenheim tries to revive their dead son only to create a Homunuclus. Sometime later, Hohenheim left Dante. Left to fend for herself, Dante will go to great lengths for survival and will stop at nothing to obtain the Philosopher's Stone in order to extend her fading life.

Notes & Trivia

 * She may be named after the Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, famous for writing "The Divine Comedy", a three part poem with the first chapter, Inferno, taking place in the Nine Circles of Hell. In fact in the Italian dub of the episode title "Dante of the Deep Forest" was translated to "Dante della Selva Oscura" (lit. "Dante of Dark Forest"), a reference to the beginning of Alighieri's poem.
 * Dante's theme music is loosely based off of Ludovico Einaudi's classical piece "A Fuoco".
 * Dante shares many similarities with her current husband, Van Lucifer:
 * Both, at one point, had close relationships with Hohenheim dating back several centuries.
 * Both "shared" the secret of eternal life with Hohenheim by means of the Philosopher's Stone.
 * Both planned to turn mass numbers of people into Stones in order to become "perfect" beings.
 * Both Dante and Lucifer have the most physical transformations through the course of their respective series (excluding Envy, of course), with each of them gaining a much younger body for themselves.
 * Both Dante and Lucifer are hypocritical in that they consider humans to be lower beings, yet their respective reliances on the Philosopher's Stone render them both dependent on the human race for survival, technically making them little more than parasites.
 * Both Dante and Lucifer are intensely connected with the Deadly Sins and Circles of Hell, both in terms of their relationship with the Homunculi and in the content of their actions.
 * During her confrontation with Edward in the hidden city, she asserts that the Law of Equivalent Exchange is false and that even if a person gives their full effort, it is unlikely that they will receive a reward of equal value. Her words prove ironically true as she attempts to escape and realizes that her efforts in creating the stone were more or less wasted.
 * There is a character that resembles Dante appears in episode "Let's Nab Oprah" from "The Boondocks" series.
 * As hinted above, Dante seems to commit each of the Sins in her appearances:
 * Pride: she has an air of superiority and speaks condescendingly whenever she is surrounded by the Homunculi and sees all those around her as inferior to herself. She feels the thousands of lives lost to the Philosopher's Stone are inconsequential because she was "worth it."
 * Lust: the act of having her soul transferred to other bodies violates her victims. She also takes care in selecting more lascivious bodies to steal (perhaps suggestive of her vanity). Later, while meeting Hohenheim, she licks her own arm, states she hasn't tested out her new body (Lyra's body), suggesting they sleep together. She also makes mention of her plan to take over Rose's body and use it to seduce Edward and "be loved by the son of Hohenheim."
 * Greed: her plans to gain the Philosopher Stone are out of a selfish act of having her life extended.
 * Sloth: despite being a very powerful Alchemist, she prefers to use other alchemists to forge the Stone for her and tasks the Homunculi with all the footwork. Also, like the Homunculus it was named after, she maintained a cold demeanour and was aloof to the world and its inhabitants (ironically, she claims to have committed her deeds to help humans from destroying themselves with the stone).
 * Envy: she showed hints of jealousy when Hohenheim refused her advances saying that Trisha was the only person he loved. Being the first Homunculus and sin created, it's possible that envy was the basis of which other events transpired.
 * Wrath: she was quick to punish anyone who failed her or dared interefere—even former lover Hohenheim and her homuculi servants.
 * Her desire to have her life extended represents the sin of Gluttony: the sin of having more to the point of waste.
 * The series has implied that the transgression of Gluttony is Dante's most grievous offense. When she tells Edward that she is no longer human, the Homunculus Gluttony bursts into the room to carry out a scene that reveals him to be more human than she. When she later takes away Gluttony's mind (his last measure of humanity), she serves to transform him into the physical manifestation of her own monstrosity and is ultimately consumed by him.
 * It is likely that Dante's knowledge and skills in alchemy far surpassed those of anyone else in the series, with the possible exception of Hohenheim—and even then, the different directions their alchemy research took them did grant them an uneven equality (meaning that even though Hohenheim is more skilled than Dante, the fields of Alchemy she studied—Homunculi and the Gate—allowed her to get one up on him).
 * Dante is one of the very few individuals to have an appendage inside Gluttony's mouth that comes back unharmed.