Bodies in Nier Replicant
NieR Replicant is a game characterized by a preoccupation with bodies, their failures, their betrayals, and their significance both constructed and inherent. Each of its protagonists enjoys a complicated relationship with their body, its main plot threads revolve around the discrepancy between body and soul, and the game both out of necessity and seemingly some genuine interest engages with sexual politics. An accounting of this ought to be made in an organized and thoughtful fashion, and I believe the best way to proceed with such an account is to discuss how the questions of corporeality touch upon each of our protagonists, painting a picture as we go. It is worth noting that I will from time to time touch upon the question of authorial intent, as Yoko Taro and associates have been vocal and engaged with fan questions. While this may be the case, I am engaging with NieR as a text, of which its creators' interpretations are one of many and do not possess a unique charisma of truth. I also do not wish to make conjecture about authorial intent, but merely about what I regard to be substantive and valid readings of a work of fiction. Spoilers will be unmarked and plentiful.
Kaine is a fairly apparent and explicit case of bodily and sexual politics. Kaine is an intersex woman of uncertain parentage raised in a xenophobic, superstitious, and authoritarian society. Within her society she is a pariah along with her grandmother Kali and is forced to the social margins, often subject to violence and abuse from a young age. Kaine is a creature of contrasts and contradictions: a beautiful woman full of hatred and profanity, a victim who has become a fierce warrior and herself a victimizer, a social outsider who herself participates in genocide and the destruction of the other, a woman ashamed of her body who dresses in an outfit that would make Hugh Heffner blush, a human and a shade, an object of sexual gratification but also one of revulsion.
The issue of Kaine's presentation is a recurring discussion in the game, frequent reference is made to her undress and Weiss refers to her with the increasingly affectionate nickname "hussy", despite the fact that Kaine's sexuality is actually a subject that is not broached in the game – her existence is solitary and lonely, and her only romantic inclinations are rather chastely directed towards Nier himself within the game itself. Indeed, in Ending E, NieR is reincarnated with all his purity in the body of a child, and the pair cling to each other in nudity amid a pure white blossom – a Lunar Tear, which by this point has taken its place as a signifier of pure love (Yonah and Nier, Kali and Kaine, and now Kaine and Nier). As Kaine holds NieR, there does not appear to be a sexual element to her protective embrace. In this sense, we see a glimpse of Kaine the maiden, Kaine the woman.
The audio CD "Lust" depicts Kaine as lustful and fixated on Nier, and engaging in necrophilia by proxy in a fit of madness. Kaine is also a murderer, with a dark passenger in the form of the shade Tyrann who permits her to live only so long as she victimizes others. Kaine is uniquely situated to prevent the wholesale slaughter inflicted by Nier upon the Shades, including innumerable children and infants, yet she remains quiet and does not disclose her understanding of their language. Kaine drips with profanity, threatens to mutilate her enemies often in sexualized fashions. Kaine, in this context, is powerful, violent, lustful – here we have Kaine the monster, the phallic Kaine.
These contradictions are not tolerated well within Kaine. Her duality, reflected in her twin swords, one of which is ultimately destroyed in her conflict with Nier, is the source of a great deal of suffering. She struggles to continue to psychologically steel herself to kill Shades as the apparent evil of her deeds makes itself clear. Even after avenging herself on the shade Hook, Kaine is not satisfied and simply wishes, feeling her purpose exhausted, for death to take her before being, effectively, reanimated by the benevolence and purity of child Nier. Even Tyrann, symbolic of Kaine's evil and masculinity is eventually moved by the experience of love and comes to regard himself and his actions with disgust. Kaine ultimately resolves the struggle between feminine-masculine, good-evil, chastity-sexuality in favor of her womanhood.
However, as in all conflicts there is a unity in opposites. Kaine's phallic aspect is given rise to by her desire to protect her womanhood, her virtue, from the community of hatred that surrounds her, from a society that spurns and rejects her. Kaine is hateful and murderous because she has been given no other recourse, no other communities, no other options. A clear example of this is in Ending E, where when the player attempts to manipulate the camera to obtain the vaunted panty shot, and as the game's achievements frames it, "discover her secret" – a clear reference to her ambiguous genitalia, Kaine assaults and eventually murders the player themselves to defend her chastity and modesty. Rather than an intrinsic quality of her person, her aggression and masculinity are passed onto her by her grandmother as means of self defense. Kaine's greatest acts of evil and murder are all fundamentally acts of love, tribute, and defense to those who have given her life meaning. One might interpret her clothing, which shows clearly a body she hates and despises, as an act of self-sacrifice, a hair shirt, a tribute to the efforts of her grandmother and to those that love her.
Emil is textually homosexual. He expresses his wish during the wedding of Facade's King to Fyra that he might enjoy such a wedding some day and as Nier assures him he will find a bride some day, he is left to awkwardly note in his absence that this is not what he desires. The creators of the game have similarly confirmed their understanding of Emil as a homosexual character who is motivated by an unreciprocated love for Nier. Emil is depicted as pure and essentially omnibenevolent, despite being cursed with a body that destroys everything that he sees and later contains a monstrosity so profound that it exterminates entire communities. His love for Nier is chaste and is held in contradiction to the terror of his condition.
I think, however, equally compelling as a strictly homosexual reading is a reading of Emil as transgender. Wishing to be the bride in a wedding is conducive to such a reading, and NieR is a game with a lot to say about bodies. Emil is first met wearing a blindfold, alone, isolated from the world, unable to see the people he loves or wishes to give himself to, the very act of looking, of desiring, in this regard, becomes violent for Emil. Emil spends more time with Kaine than Nier for his time in the narrative, and they develop a close bond. It is, as well, Kaine who Emil petrifies with his gaze, not Nier. It is to free Kaine from the stone which symbolizes Emil's world that Emil descends into the depths of his home, his past, to confront the monstrosity within, represented by Halua, his twin sister, who has been reduced to a monster.
Emil gives himself to the monstrosity willingly, sublimating himself and being devoured by it with the hope that he might take it similarly into himself. And he does. Emil and his feminine counterpart, twins, exist within each other as anima and animus. Emil is blessed with sight, desire, knowledge, power, but is placed into a monstrous, hideous, ghoulish body, which he despises and which provokes fear and hatred from those who might previously have offered him kindness. It is a body designed to inflict harm, a body which does not suit its contents, a body which Emil himself desperately fears. In joining Kaine within the ranks of monstrous bodies and dysphoria, Emil is able to free her from this self-imposed prison. He is able to enable her to live a normal life. Emil rescues Kaine again in the narrative, saving her in Ending E and in the Shadowlord's Castle. These are tasks Nier is incapable of performing. Nier, despite loving Kaine, does not appear to understand her and might be incapable of understanding her. It is only her peer, someone who truly does empathize with her monstrosity, Emil, that is able to free her.
Emil as a pre-awareness transgender woman, trapped in a rotting, artificial, ghoulish body designed to do harm on her and others, able to free and empathize with those like her, pining after a man who cannot understand her, now free to desire but acutely aware of her own ugliness, inadequacy, and the hatred her desire provokes in others, I argue is extremely compelling. It is worth noting that Emil's bodily monstrosity escalates as the end of the eternal childhood her body had been trapped in, her beatific and cherubic features melting away to bones at crude angles, her hair falling away, at the moment she is meant to be graduating into self assurance and control.
Nier and Weiss are somewhat less involved from the perspective of body politics. Nier is noteworthy in that per associated works he was forced into sex work as an adolescent in order to get by, and that as a result he binds his hair into a ponytail as a response to sexual trauma. As he matures into adulthood he severs this ponytail, wearing his hair loose, representing in ways a growth past this. In doing so, however, Nier steels himself into a warrior, devoted only to recovering Yonah, sacrificing everything in his path to do so. In this sense I am not sure Nier has grown past his trauma so much as he has sublimated it into the acts of brutality which he inflicts upon others and his obsessive, bordering on incestuous, fixation on his sister. Nier is repeatedly prompted to feel empathy for other victims and outsiders and refuses to do so willfully, choosing to remain ignorant and deluded in his quest. Weiss, himself without a body or bodily autonomy, assists Nier in remaining blind and hardening his heart.
Louise forms a mirror to the concerns of bodies that are exhibited by Emil and Kaine. A Gestalt without a corresponding Replicant, Louise is a girl who was born without any options, a cruel product of fate. Able to think, feel, and take a false form as a woman, Louise is unable to speak or sing or perform in human society. She admires the beauty of humanity and desperately wishes to join them, cursing her own hideousness and admiring, desiring, the beauty of the world. She is infatuated with Hans the Postman, who cannot and will not reciprocate her love. She is denied humanity or sympathy by Nier and Weiss – although Kaine and Hans are able to provide it for her posthumously. In this sense Louise is a mirror of Kaine and Emil. This parallel might cast Neir and Hans in somewhat of a Walrus and the Carpenter role – they will both mercilessly eradicate the Other from the world, but one will, at least, cry about it.
Louise, is of course, the pinnacle of the Other. She has no Replicant. No earthly or human attachment. She cannot become anything except herself, her efforts to do so render her even more monstrous, hideous, and terrible than before. The sort of perverse excitement with which Nier and Weiss regard her extraordinarily powerful body feels at times reminiscent of discourse about the physicality of transgender women and athletes. It reminds me of the times one clocks involuntarily a person they encounter. It feels dirty, transgressive, and wrong.
There are innumerable stones left unturned in this brief discussion of how NieR Replicant talks about and shows bodies and people's relationships to them, but I thought it would be interesting to reflect on my own thoughts on the issue, how they made me feel, and what kinds of readings can be made of the work.
