

The Boy’s Chapter – Yonah and Nier (Art by Itahana Toshiyuki)

I realize a lot of people get angry with me for being slow to cover things or for holding a strict stance about not releasing raw photos of various source material for other people to potentially translate if I’m not able to do it in a timely manner. I get it. There is a ton of supplemental material scattered all over the place that makes it difficult for anyone outside of Japan to obtain and translate. I’m not going to get into the details on why I have such standards, but all of this is to say… sorry I’m late but it is what it is. So, here’s a rarely discussed topic about the younger brother Nier in NieR Replicant.

It is canon that the younger brother Nier sold his body in order to care for Yonah.

First of all, this particular novel was included in the NieR:Automata Black Box set. I translated a ton of comments from the staff about it here.

Although very little if not anything at all was stated regarding this in the game (it’s been 8 years, so I don’t really recall anything about this), the NieR Replicant Recollections novelization included a little too much information that made SQEX very nervous… which they ultimately asked Yoko to remove. But instead of deleting the lines outright, Yoko did a very Yoko-like thing by merely redacting the lines. Therefore, there are several pages in the first chapter that have nothing but black bars.

This very subject came up during the 2nd Live Broadcast on December 27, 2016, which I entirely forgot I had also translated this entire page! Woops!

Sample redacted page from the novel.

The Boy’s Chapter ー Page 36

The first time he was called to work at the Seafront was about half a year ago. He helped deliver urgent letters, tulip bulbs to the flower shop, and buy natural rubber for the material shop.

With the thought of leaving Yonah alone at home weighing heavily on his mind, he quickly slipped passed a large Shade visible in the distance. The first time he set eyes upon the ocean he thought it was such a beautiful sight, but he was utterly dumbfounded how the entire town reeked of fish so putrid. Just by walking around for a short while, his hair and skin grew sticky from the fishy air that it often made him feel ill. It was the girl at the flower shop that told him this was because of the salty sea breeze.

After purchasing the bulbs and materials he was asked to fetch, he set upon a large house that spanned an entire city block. The path leading there was always packed with pedestrians, making it difficult to reach the house itself. Finally succeeding in the task he set out to do―to deliver the letter―he hardly had the energy left to find his way back.

Maybe it was due to the time of day, or maybe it was the people who lived in that area who didn’t particularly care to have discussions with strangers walking through town, but he felt like he couldn’t even ask for directions. He was so completely lost, with no inclination on how to get anywhere, that he didn’t even know what to do. With fatigue setting in, he decided to rest near the front gate of a nearby house.

“Hey, what are you doing over there?”

Entirely startled by the voice, Nier jumped to his feet and moved slightly away from the front gate.

“You’re not from around here, are you? Are you lost?”

▲ As it turns out, a portion after the segment that I translated above had to be cut from the novel due to…reasons. If you have read the novella “The Red and the Black” you will know that brother Nier was selling his body to someone in Seafront in order to get money to care for Yonah. It is highly probable that this is what the publisher wanted to remove from the novel.

The following is a mix of translations and my own summary of the narrative in this chapter.

To differentiate between the two, I’ll put my own summaries in red.

Redacted sections will be in black and white.

The above scene ends with 11 redacted paragraphs.

Then it switches over to Yonah just going about her day while feeling relatively healthy enough to go outside to visit the library and just enjoy the day. She still wasn’t completely free of her coughing spells, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as other days when she had actually coughed up blood.

After this brief statement, three more paragraphs are redacted.

The next moment Nier seems to have been aimlessly walking and found himself in front of the fountain in town, where Devola called out to him.

“What’s the matter? Are you feeling all right?”

“Ah, I was just thinking…”

“Alright, then. Heeeh, so you’re tying up your hair now?”

“It… gets in the way, so…”

Up until now, he had a habit of casually tying only the hair in the back up tightly.

The last sentence in this paragraph, including the next seven paragraphs or so, which span the entire next page, are redacted until it leads into a conversation with Popola.

“There’s a job I’d like to ask of you, but it’s extremely dangerous. I don’t know if it’s right for me to even ask this of you…”

“What sort of job is it?”

“Exterminating Shades. Of course, you won’t be alone. There will also be about three others from various towns who will join. You’ll be with other adults, and these Shades aren’t very strong… But, we can’t let them go, right?”

The next three paragraphs are redacted.

“I’ll do it. I don’t care if it’s dangerous.”

“Seriously, be careful, okay?”

The next three paragraphs are redacted.

“Popola, thank you.”

But the dark color did not fade from Popola’s eyes.

So, Nier goes to the rendezvous point at the North Gate to meet up with the other three people who will be going on the expedition. When the others see him, they tease him for being just a kid.

“Go home, brat. We’re not going out to play, alright?”

“I know, but…”

“Get outta here. It’d weigh on my conscience if I saw a dumb kid like you get himself killed.”

Nier had been talking to just two of the three people who were supposed to be in the group when a voice from behind spoke up.

“What are you guys talking about?”

He recognized that voice, even if he didn’t want to remember. He knew exactly who it was before he even turned around.

“Why are you here? Oh, right. You’re from this town, eh?”

The next two paragraphs are redacted.

It seemed like the man from Seafront had already been acquainted with these two other men.

“You know this brat?”

“Yeah, we know each other well, don’t we?”

He grinned meaningfully at Nier.

The next three paragraphs are redacted.

“Well, maybe you’ll be useful after all. At the very least, it’d be fun to see you cry out of fear of the Shades…”

“If you say so, I suppose we’ll take you with us.”

The next 6 paragraphs or so that span about a full page are redacted.

The next section is about seven pages long without much of any redaction, until the end. It depicts the band traveling down a narrow mountain path until they are entirely surrounded by fog even though it had just been a sunny, yet very cold, day. It’s from within this thick fog that shadowy figures appear.

“They’re Shades!”

Nier thinks about how similar attacking these shadowy figures feels compared to when he hunted the wild sheep in the fields. It was the blood. It smelled the same as the black blood that Yonah would cough up. This was the first time for him to encounter Shades and he was thoroughly confused.

Even though they only appeared to be nothing more than dark shadows, they bled. But when they were killed, nothing of them was left behind. In a puff of black smoke, only a dark red pool of blood remained.

What the hell are these Shades!?

But he had little time to think about it as more and more Shades–although they were weak–appeared from the mist. In the confusion, Nier gradually lost all sense of who was a Shade and who wasn’t. He even wondered if maybe he was actually killing living human beings rather than Shades… What if this red liquid was real human blood…?

Then seemingly waking from his daze, Nier realized that the man from Seafront was just beside him. He had a subtle grin on his face. Drenched in blood, that man resembled more of a monster than a man.

Maybe that’s exactly what he looked like, too. He probably looked exactly like this man, drenched in blood, slaughtering Shades. Something deep in his heart enjoyed the killing. Downing three Shades, four Shades, he felt a sense of pride as he downed one after another.

Who is the monster? The Shades? Or us?

The thick fog continued to roll in.

Next, there’s about a page of narrative as the gang find themselves emerging from the fog and the Shades gone. Nier realizes that the two other men in the group were injured pretty severely; one had his left arm broken and twisted in a horrible angle, and the other was entirely dragging one of his legs.

“So, you survived, huh?”

All Nier could do was simply nod.

“It’s just like he said: It was right for us to bring you along. Look at you! You’ve hardly got a scratch! Where is he, anyway? Wasn’t he with you?”

Nier shook his head.

“Yeah… Maybe it was inevitable. I never would have imagined there would be that many of them… It’s a miracle any of us made it back alive.”

The man sighed and seemed to apologize.

“It was wrong of us to bring you. It must have been rough; you’re just a kid.”

“No… It was all for my sister…”

“Well, at any rate, I’m glad you’re okay.”

“I never knew Shades and humans were so alike.” (Nier)

When he was little, he used to call them “black monsters.” The first time he set his eyes on them, he thought they were nothing but shadows. All-in-all, he never once thought about the similarities that connected themselves with the Shades.

“You think so? They looked that similar?”

“They bleed when they’re cut, and they react…” (Nier)

“If you say that, it’s really no different from the sheep and goats. They bleed and feel the same as the Shades when we hit them.

The two men laughed, saying that he’s a kid thinking silly things. It seemed like the two of them never thought of this before either.

“But, I bet it would feel very different than the Shades if you ever killed a person. Of course, in reality, it’s not like we can test this theory or anything.”

“In reality…” (Nier)

Nier looked down at his own dirty hands, his palms dried with a reddish brown color. It was a color that could nether be attributed to a Shade let alone human. The man from Seafront was dead.

One redacted sentence at the end of the previous paragraph.

“What’s the matter? You hurt somewhere?”

The man sounded worried as he spoke. With his eyes still firmly locked on his own hands, he shook his head in answer.

“I was just thinking I need to get home quickly.” (Nier)

As Nier neared his home, he could see the figure of Yonah appear in the second-story window. Maybe she would greet him with a smile again today.

There’s no reason to think any further into things. All that mattered was protecting Yonah. It was quite simple, actually…

As though a heavy weight had just been lifted from his shoulders, he glanced up at the sky. In the same blue as always, a fleck of cloud was being blown by the wind.

And there’s more!

With the recent NieR Replicant collaboration with SINoALICE, there was a curious line that was effectively altered to remove any hint of Brother Nier selling his body in order to care for Yonah.

Before: For the boy, the existence of his sister was literally “everything”. He thought that it didn’t matter how severe the work was as long as he could earn enough money for her medicine, whether it meant exterminating Shades or selling his body.

After: For the boy, the existence of his sister was literally “everything”. He thought that it didn’t matter how severe the work was as long as he could earn enough money for her medicine, no matter how scarred his mind and body might become.

So, this somewhat unsettling part of brother Nier’s life may continue to be censored. Although it’s a horrible, traumatic experience for him, I think it’s a vital part of his character that makes brother Nier stand out from his counterpart Papa Nier. It’s hard to imagine that Papa needed to sell his body to get money enough to care for Yonah, right? It’s that sense of vulnerability and innocence that helps to add an extra level of development to his character showing us exactly to what lengths his willing to go for his sister.

But that’s getting a bit into the Brother/Father debate, so I’ll stop short there. xD