Why Nier is a Perfect Flawed Protagonist

Comments · 521

• NY

  @ny4nk0 · 3 years ago (edited)

  I also really love the irony that in his quest to save his sister, he deprives her of the one thing she truly wants: more time with him. The black scrawl is incurable, and yet he would rather put his faith in a fairytale than accept reality. Are his heroic deeds truly for her, or himself? I love how every loading screen is a letter from Yonah's journal, often expressing how much she misses the protagonist and how lonely she is without him. It's subtle, but effective.

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• EM

  @Emery101 · 3 years ago (edited)

  “The man who sold the world.”

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• KI

  @kisa4748 · 3 years ago

  i like the moment where he tells emil "but you saved US. never look back. ever" etc after killing the whole village to help his sister.. he was just being kind but it felt like a messed up moment that set the tone for how it was gonna be

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• KU

  @KuroValentineIX · 3 years ago (edited)

  &quot;you don&apos;t have to be insane to kill someone, you just have to think you’re right.&quot; <br><br>damn. that actually hit me some kind of way

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• KI

  @kingofcheshire · 3 years ago

  Aside from being a great protagonist in terms of story themes and what he represents, his design is top notch, one of my favorite jrpg protagonist designs period, the hair, the outfit, the overall silhouette, should be illegal to look this cool

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• BL

  @blackcitadel9 · 3 years ago

  You see him shake his head, it&apos;s to clear his mind of any doubt, because at that one moment where the Shadowlord nodded as if giving the go ahead at his own execution, I think Nier wondered for the first time. &quot;Am I actually doing the right thing?&quot; and then dismissed it.

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• BE

  @BeneathTheMaskXV · 3 years ago (edited)

  Ironically in his quest to save Yonah he ended up truly dooming Her, himself and the rest of the world and forever tainted his legacy being remembered only as “The Destroyer.”

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• SU

  @sunayoru · 3 years ago (edited)

  i really appreciate nier&apos;s character. his line when consoling emil after the Aerie incident, &quot;It&apos;s all right. Really, don&apos;t look back,&quot; really defined his character to me. he&apos;s a fixed and static character who doesn&apos;t change throughout the story much, whilst cultivating the growth of the other characters. he was doing the best he could given the information he had. i think things would have gone a lot differently if Devola and Popola didn&apos;t use him like a tool, or if Kaine didn&apos;t withhold shades being sentient from him and Emil. <br><br>there was no way he could have known what opposing the Gestalt project and fighting the Shadowlord would cause, and like Emil says in Automata, the four of them were genuinely trying to save the world. everything that happened in the Gestalt project was unprecedented and I don&apos;t think Nier&apos;s at fault for humanity&apos;s extinction. I would even go as far as to say that it wasn&apos;t the Shadowlord&apos;s fault, either, or Devola and Popola&apos;s, or the original humans behind the project. the gestalt project was a pipe dream and hinged on manipulating Gestalt Nier and, later, &nbsp;Replicant Nier.<br><br>nice essay. was a fun watch

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• KE

  @Keira_Blackstone · 3 years ago

  I still don&apos;t really think of Nier as a villain. He had no idea shades were people. There&apos;s a few moments later on in the story where he&apos;s clearly ignoring signs of their sentience to continue his crusade to rescue Yonah, but by that point their body count against innocent people was astronomical. He wasn&apos;t &nbsp;ignoring their pleas for mercy- he was literally incapable of understanding them. The real villains of the story were Devola and Popola imo, because they could have warned him about what was going on at ANY time and chose not to do so until almost all the damage had already been done. The only people he kills from that point forward are them and the shadowlord, both of which were in self defense/defense of an innocent.<br><br>I do, however, think it has something important to say about failing to consider how your actions are causing harm to the people you&apos;re opposed to, and how that&apos;s something more of us should be concerned about.

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• MI

  @MissDerpina2606 · 2 years ago

  I think the tragedy of the events leading to Nier: Automata can&apos;t be blamed to one person only. Several factors brought the fate we see in Automata. <br><br>Also, Nier isn&apos;t the only one who went on a killing spree to annihilate a species. The King of Facade did the same thing though his target was not Shades, it was the wolves. Gideon too wished to annihilate a particular kind ,the robots. Also that NPC at Northern Plains who wants to eliminate the sheeps to avenge his wife..... Yeah, there are a number of characters who want to completely destroy a group because they were wronged or hurt by one amongst them.<br><br>At its darkest core, Nier deals with the issue of anger, hatred, revenge and the psychology of what makes us become &apos;justified&apos; murderers. <br><br>And I think it also teaches us a lesson, that holding onto to such anger will evidently bring ruin to many people. Including yourself.

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• TH

  @TheAngryAsianAnimations · 3 years ago

  Another thing I love is that...Nier isn&apos;t a bad person. &nbsp;Normally I hate cliche anime protagonist characters but it works to Nier&apos;s benefit. &nbsp;You can&apos;t accuse him of being bad. &nbsp;He is the cliche anime protagonist. &nbsp;He&apos;s as good as they come. &nbsp;But as Yoko Taro had said, you don&apos;t need to be insane to kill. &nbsp;You just need to think you&apos;re right. <br><br>In the history of humanity, a vast majority of evil is committed not by mustache twirling villains but people would swear on their soul that they&apos;re the good guy. &nbsp;And most of the time this &apos;you are actually the bad guy&apos; twist the writing is quite clearly on the wall and they have a change of heart and switch. &nbsp;Nier is more reflective of how a real person would be. <br><br>They don&apos;t see that what they&apos;re doing is wrong. &nbsp;And even if they did, they&apos;ll cast aside the revelation. &nbsp;Fact is, every single person from myself to the people reading this, we could be doing something god awful right now and we wouldn&apos;t even realize it because, as far as we&apos;re concerned, we&apos;re just doing the right thing.

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• ST

  @steelawheel · 3 years ago (edited)

  I think another example putting the player into the mindset like Nier’s with “cutting down everything in your path” is the very start of the game when you go to the Lost Shrine to find Yonah. As a new player - at least myself at the time - the Shades we’ve been shown up to this point are aggressive and a threat (the people in the home village say this and we’ve been exposed to them as such). So it’s highly unlikely a new player would even realise the smaller Shades don’t actually attack Nier, especially cause you’d need to pay attention to realise they don’t move to attack but just run around you as if curious, as well as following usual RPG mechanics of attacking immediately what the game has told us are our enemies when they show up.<br><br>I surely didn’t realise until I had to replay this part when working towards Ending E - I wasn’t attacking many Shades cause I didn’t really need exp, and having climbed this damned tower many times before, it’s easier to just walk past. I think I got curious when they were taking awhile to try and scratch me that I ended up just standing there, watching them run around me and that’s when I found out. Definitely wasn’t too keen on attacking them after that realisation, especially if the Shades are (or at least similar) to the ones Gretel would eventually become protective over.

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