Reactions to Nier a few days later, spoilers and such.
The whole thing being about dealing with sickness, death, and the loss of people you care about and trying to figure out how to handle that hit real hard just today. It's been about a year since my stepmom started dying, as in went into hospice and was clearly not doing great. About this time last year I started needing to drive across town on a nearly daily basis to give my dad some time to go get a shower and eat and take care of himself. I think a lot about the last day I spent with her, where she was unconscious most of the day, full of painkillers and anything that could help her relax. I stayed there for hours, and she only said two things to me: "I'm running through fields in my mind" and "I used to write poetry". Those were the last actual words she said to me ever before she died a few days after that, and I think about them regularly.Andrea and I, we were never totally good with each other. She came into my life when I was trying to deal with the emotions of my parents’ marriage falling apart, and she had no idea how to handle a teenager. We fought a lot. A lot of resentment was built. I cared about her a lot, but I was barely ever able to express that while she was alive.
In terms of what you do, Nier is largely about running through fields. I realize my emotions about her and her death have never totally been sorted out. I mean, they won’t be, closure is a fucking myth, and that’s to be expected. Ending E seems to acknowledge this, after Kaine does so much to get Nier back, and a giant flower blooms over the world, and who knows what happens after that? Shit always keeps happening. Andrea would have liked that flower, as she loved her garden, even as she couldn’t keep up with it physically. She wanted things to keep happening. She left so many books for Logan.
Almost everyone you meet in Nier is dealing with losing people, and they all do it differently. The whole world exists post loss, and there’s not a right way to deal with the larger or the far more personal losses of these people. Anger is a normal response. The king of Facade goes on a revenge rampage. Kaine swears a lot and fights with everything. Popola rages at the player for the loss of her sister.
Hiding is another response. Emil hides himself as much as possible, either in the mansion or avoiding your eyes when he is floating next to you. The Shadowlord mostly broods in his tower and tries to make things back to what he dreams of as normal. There’s so much loss.
Nier is the most honest character about this for me. He rages. He hides. But mostly, he lets himself be distracted by sidequests, journeying across fields and towns to get the next random thing for a person who he barely knows. Nier basically plays a videogame. I never really identified with Nier as a character, but dang do I get that. It’s what I did when Andrea died. I played a lot of Destiny 2. Fulfilling requests for NPCs sure felt like doing something. It wasn’t dealing with the problem, but it was dealing with myself a little. Sidequest progress carries over; each time Nier does it again, there is less to do, less ways to distract himself, less ways to avoid doing what has to be done. Which is why, a year later, maybe I am processing Andrea dying a bit more. I’m not distracting myself as much, even if playing Nier was maybe an attempt at distraction. It failed in the best way.
I was running through fields in my game; I’m probably not gonna write any poetry though.