I love Roy Mustang as much as the next person, but every version of FMA hinges on him looking at a traumatized eleven year old amputee who just committed a class A felony and thinking ‘Let’s enlist him into the military immediately’
to be fair
he initially thought that Ed and Al were in thier 30s based on bad intel
he was gonna probably just report back and tell intel off for wasting his time if Ed and Al hadn’t. Done That.
seriously, Edward and Al managed to pull off one of THE GREATEST alchemical taboos with a shockingly low amount of consequences
Ed lost an arm and leg while Al lost his whole body, and Ed bonded the soul to a suit of armor with basically NOTHING
Roy’s options were essentially either put Ed in jail, put him into a state orphanage, or bring him into the organization where he can keep an eye on him and possibly get him the resources to fix the massive fuckup that happened (and prevent Ed from becoming a Shou Tucker or Kimblee style monster hopefully)
Basically Roy took one look at these kids and said “I’m your dad now,”
the government overthrow at the end of FMA:B is funny bc, like, a lot of people thought Roy was rlly dumb and shallow, which he made sure of on purpose, so to the majority of soldiers it’s kind of like abruptly getting caught up in a coup thrown by Elle Woods from legally blonde
i really cant get over how in episode two of fmab they like straight up just show us that ed basically met the closest being-like thing to god and then. then in literally the next episode hes like. yeah. yeah im an atheist