luceti app (incomplete)

[snowwhiteproject]

Character

Name: Emil
Fandom: NIER: Gestalt
Gender: Male
Age: 1300-some, going on 13
Time Period: After his "death".
Wing Color: Mottled silver and bone-white, lighter towards the tips.
History: http://nier.wikia.com/wiki/Emil

In 2003, a giant demon woman crashed through dimensions and landed in downtown Tokyo of our world, where she was beaten in a rhythm game by a mute psychopath on a dragon, exploded into salt over Tokyo, and the man and dragon who destroyed her were shot down by fighter jets and impaled on Tokyo Tower. This violently introduced magic into our non-magical world, causing a disease that turned people into horrible white salt monsters.

This was rather upsetting to the people who weren't horrible white salt monsters, and there was a militarized response, including attempts to weaponize magic, some of which were more effective than others; the Snow White project, for one, was too effective, creating a magical monster they couldn't control on their sixth subject.

That Subject Number 6 was Halua, Emil's sister; and to control her, they took Emil-- No. 7-- and gave him a medusa gaze, which they used to trap Halua in the basement of their secret laboratory (hidden under an appropriately creepy mansion). What happened to the scientists afterwards is unknown, though there are some rather distressing statues in the courtyard...

Thirteen hundred years or so later, Nier (the main character), Weiss (a magical book) and Kainé (their very angry companion) find themselves at Emil's mansion. Nier's daughter Yonah had gotten a letter meant for her father, and Nier went to the mansion to find out who, exactly, was writing letters to his daughter. Sebastian, Emil's butler, was apparently the "culprit"; he had been seeking someone to help get rid of a possessed book and some Shades (the monsters of the game) in the library. Emil himself was very shy and cautious and quiet, blindfolded to keep his gaze in check.

While the main characters were there, they formed some pretty strong connections with Emil; Nier seemed to view him in a rather fatherly light (no surprise there; despite being 1300-some years old, Emil looked about 12, only a little older than Nier's own daughter), and Kainé saw herself in him, in his distress over things about himself he couldn't control, and in his skittish loneliness. (Kainé is definitely no longer skittish by the time of the game-- skittish people don't yell that they're going to rip out people's eyeballs and then piss in the sockets-- but she was bullied badly as a child, and deeply isolated. But her grandmother took her in, and taught her how to swear and that it's more than okay to be one's self, and Kainé seemed to be taking her grandma's role towards Emil.)

In fact, the connection between Kainé and Emil is forged fast and firm, and gives Emil the drive to run-- on foot-- while blindfolded-- from his mansion to Nier's village, to warn them of an approaching boss battle Shade, and to try and fight alongside Nier and Kainé-- but in the end, despite their efforts, Emil has to petrify Kainé (at her insistence and his great distress) to seal the shade away in the basement of the village's library.

(Also, Nier's daughter, who was already dying of magical cancer, was kidnapped! It was a pretty awful day for all of them.)

The next five years passed in a timeskip; Nier went around killing Shades, and Emil apparently holed himself up in his mansion, scouring his library for ways to learn to control his magic so he could de-petrify Kainé. When he sends Nier a letter, he's clearly more open and less shy than he had been when they first met, with a kind of admiring tone and quite a few bad jokes; he also asks Nier to come to his mansion, because he's found records of a secret laboratory under his house, and perhaps there are answers there...

Needless to say, the answers they find are Emil's past (though it's much more piecemeal than the version I told), as well as Halua, whose form is that of a large, unnerving skeletal creature, bound with chains and spikes to a wall.

She's also awake.

Emil can't bring himself to hurt her, and she... eats him; and then, a boss battle later, Emil has some sort of... mental communication with her (you know the kind, a empty white void with just the two of them and some symbolic stuff happening), where she passes along how to get at all his magic, and also get at control of it, the exact thing he'd needed.

Halua dies; and Emil, coming into his magic fully... finds himself a skeleton, and flips out a little, until Nier does his thing where he's incredibly solid and strong and fatherly. Emil may be a skeleton, but it doesn't matter. He's still him, and Nier is there for him, and having Nier be there for him gives Emil strength, even with his body changed into something strange and skeletal and floating.

They return to the village, and release Kainé, who wakes up to a floating book, a skeleton, and Nier with a new-to-her eyepatch hovering over her, and she promptly says exactly the right thing (after a moment of pure WHAT THE HELL written on her face); she tells Nier he looks like shit, and tells Emil that she knew it was him the moment she saw him.

After that, Emil and Kainé are nearly inseparable-- though partially through necessity; they kind of freak out normal people, and are asked to just... stay out of villages. Which they do; and when, later, Kainé is hurt and nearly killed, Emil freaks out and sobs that he's weak and scared and sad, but it's being with her that makes him okay, that makes him strong and makes him all right with sleeping outside, so she has to live.

(God, this is turning into the "why Emil and Kainé are my brotp" section, not the history section. :V )

Over the last arc of the game, the four of them-- Nier, Weiss, Kainé, and Emil-- gather the keys to get into the home base of the final boss, the shade that kidnapped Yonah. (Remember her? She was still a thing!) In the course of this, they go to a royal wedding (the bride dies); to kill a shade in the junkyard at the request of the younger of two brothers (his older brother had died in front of him); they kill a tree that was also a shade that was also memories of the past; and to the Aerie, Kainé's hometown, where everyone in the village merges into a massive shade, and Emil loses himself in his magic when they try to defeat it.

Remember how the Snow White project was really, really effective at weaponizing magic?

There wasn't an Aerie left after Emil happened to it.

Emil is basically sweet and gentle, and he was torn apart over what he had done... but Nier tells him to just keep looking forward, and because Emil cares about Nier, and cares about Kainé, and cares about Weiss, he keeps looking forward, to rescuing Yonah, even though he's never even met her.

In the Shadowlord's castle, they face some characters that are important to Nier's story but not Emil's-- or, at least, weren't important to Emil's story, until (when one of them explodes with magical rage) he sacrifices himself to save his friends, because they mean more to him than anything else...

But he doesn't want to die.




... and in Ending B, we find out he didn't! Yay! Though he is reduced to a rolling head in the desert, he takes heart and rolls along, cheered by the thought of seeing his friends and meeting Yonah. And that is where the game leaves him, though the supplemental materials have some rather silly stories about his travels as a rolling head. It's very cute.

Personality: Emil is an incredibly sweet kid. Though he first appears shy and nervous and formal, once he relaxes he's warm, and outgoing, and chattery, and curious and bright, willing to joke and tease, and made happy just by the presence of his friends-- probably due, at least in part, by his thousand years of being alone and blind, with only Sebastian and the giant spiders as companions.

And he is a kid! Despite that thousand-some years, he's definitely very, very young, prone to silliness and flights of fancy, and deeply, deeply emotional-- he's more than curious, he's fascinated and full of wonder and amazement; he's not just friends with his friends, they literally give him the strength to live as he does; and when he's frightened or sad, he's frantic and sobbing, openly and unashamed. And, in a way, his emotions, including his emotional vulnerability, are part of what makes him so strong: If he didn't feel so deeply for his friends, if he didn't find so much joy in things like just being with them, I have little doubt he'd be... a lot more broken, emotionally, than he is. But since they are there, his sheer joy at having them pulls him out of his darkest moments.

The cast of Nier is, admittedly, rather small, and Emil has few interactions outside the group; but I cannot imagine him being anything but open and warm to any friends he makes in the game, as well.

Strengths:

Physically, Emil is incredibly resilient; he survived an explosion of magic that literally completely evaporated a bubble of cityscape at least a couple hundred yards wide, that he was dead center in, and continued to survive as just a head; he also survived being in the center of a magical explosion that literally wiped an entire settlement off the map. Not to mention the fact that his magic apparently makes him ageless! All canon evidence points to him being functionally immortal; and while I don't doubt that he COULD be killed, as his sister was, it would definitely be pretty hard, since even being the epicenter of a magical overload that destroyed a village didn't do him any damage, and willingly sacrificing himself to an attack that vaporized a huge chunk out of a skyscraper still left him as a head.

Beyond that, of course, he's a skeleton who can fly and use incredibly powerful weaponized magic that he has almost complete control over. He's also a skilled pianist, and during his thousand-some years of living blindfolded, he got very, very, very good at hearing things around him (down to the sex and approximate age of Nier when he walked into a room near Emil for the first time).

Mentally, Emil seems to be intelligent, though not unusually so, and extremely curious; once he joins the party, he's constantly asking questions, conversing and thinking about the things he learns, and coming to conclusions that make the other people in the party have to think a bit. His logic is sometimes a bit childish-- who would want electric lights at night? How could they sleep?, for instance, or his enthusiasm about having performing bears at a theoretical wedding-- but he's bright, active, and engaged in learning about the world he'd been cut off from for so long.

All that said, the true backbone of his character is his emotions; everything about him, from his meta-title of The Mellow Companion to the way his near-to-last words are about how worried he is about his friends managing without him, is heavily tied to his deep compassion and affection and kindness, and his bond with his nierest nearest and dearest friends. As I mentioned in the history and personality sections, his strong bonds with the people he cares most about are literally the things that drive him, that give him willpower and drive-- he lives for the people around him. (For, uh, whatever definition of "live" applies to Emil.)

Weaknesses:

Emil is pretty direly lacking in physical weaknesses. At worst, he has... oddities; despite visibly lacking internal organs, he can eat and breathe, but considering that his body is similar to his sister's-- and she went unfed for a thousand years!-- he probably doesn't NEED to. In the supplementary stories about Emil's travels as a wandering head, he can apparently animate any body his head is attached to, though it doesn't seem to lend any durability to said body. He also mentions sleeping, despite not having eyelids (or possibly even eyes? They sure don't look much like normal eyes, at least, though he can see). This probably means that he's so innately magical that WITHOUT magic, he'd stop being able to function, or even exist-- so, theoretically, he's weak to any anti-magic or magical neutralizing thingies, and the 50% power cut should make him correspondingly less resilient. (Not to mention less ridiculously overpowered; he can probably only wipe out half a village in one go, now!)

Thankfully, he's a little more balanced in other areas.

Both mentally and emotionally, his weaknesses tend to be the flipside of his strengths. He's a smart, curious kid, but he's also a little flighty and silly, and-- while sweet-- generally fails horribly at his attempts at humor. He also seems to lose memories fairly easily, though how much one can expect a kid to remember when he's 1300 years old...

Again, though, the focus of Emil's story is on his emotions, and to put it simply... he lives for his friends, because he probably wouldn't be able to live for himself. He hated his eyes, and hates his body, and seems to accept himself as something monstrous. He outright says that he wouldn't be able to live like this without the love of his friends, that he wouldn't be able to bear being excluded from society without Kainé's company-- even when he's about to die, he doesn't think about it as the cessation of his existence, but about how he wants to see them again, about how they'll fight without him, about how much he'll miss them, not how much he'll miss being alive.

He would literally die for his friends, but it's because he thinks they're more important than his own life.

And how could it be clearer? Over and over and over again, he risks himself for Nier and Kainé and Weiss, from begging them not to risk themselves in a fight in against the possessed book in his library, running to warn the village of the massive shade coming to attack them, delving into his past and risking his life against his sister to learn how to un-petrify Kainé-- and while it speaks so, so, so strongly to the love he feels for his friends, it speaks just as strongly as to how little he values himself.