Been rewatching 03 recently. One interesting aspect of it in the design, abilities and certain motifs attached to the two characters mentioned is that it takes a sort of Jungian approach to the topic of motherhood in many places. In the case of Sloth (the boys' mother) it sort of made a kind of "passage into adulthood" plotline in the sense that Jung identified one of the negative aspects of the mother archetype that tends to be repeated in myth as "[font=Lato, sans-serif]anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate", and that water was a motif associated with the archetype. Sloth's ability was that she was made of water and typically drowned the people she killed within her body, in a sense a "devouring". I suppose how that related to motherhood was that it represented being sort of over-bearing and holding children back, be it from adulthood or self-actualization or what have you. To put it simply in her case she represented an obstacle and a past mistake the brothers needed to defeat as a means of rectifying wrongs they'd done and moving on, facing the ugly truths about their world they'd go on to. In essence, growing up.[/font]
[font=Lato, sans-serif]In little Wrath's case, another motif he associated with the negative side of the archetype was enclosed dark spaces (like the oven in Hansel and Gretel). In Wrath's case, this place is the gate. This, Jung asserted was used by the creators of this myth to evoke what he believed was a universal unconscious fear children have of being shoved back in the womb, or kind of "sent back where they came from" to put is less grotesquely (as an aside, I would point out in this case, Jung was not particularly scientific at all and probably shouldn't be treated as such in this case). It's a fear of abandonment more than anything, which obviously is more or less what happened with Wrath, sent back to the darkness where he came from (ie the other side of the gate) from whence he had just been brought back. This being the impetus for his anger, an anger he had to sort of overcome as his character arc. Kind of the opposite idea of the Elric boy's arc.
So...I'd conclude the idea of motherhood in '03 had more to do with personal growth than reproduction. As an aside I am probably going to need to edit this to make it readable, I am quite sleepy writing this lol. [/font]
