We Used to be Humans: Number 6, the deviant body, and dehumanisation in NieR:Replicant

Who gets to be considered a person by those with the power to decide?

This post, as all others I’ll be writing here, contains spoilers for NieR:Replicant. It also contains some descriptions of real-world violence committed against disabled people, in section 4.

The moment at which I knew I needed to write about Replicant was when Halua showed up.

Halua is the older sister of Emil, a deuteragonist and companion of NieR Replicant’s nameless protagonist (alongside Grimoire Weiss, an enchanted book with a superiority complex, and Kainé, who I’ll talk more about in a future post). I suspect that this blog will end up being in large part about Emil; his relationship to his own body is one of the most interesting stories in the game to me from a disability studies perspective, but I want to start with his sister.

Emil is blind…well, sort of. What Emil really is is a human turned military-grade weapon. He’s maybe 12 years old, but he’s been maybe 12 years old for about a thousand years. Through a government project, he’s given sight that turns to stone anyone he looks at; an unimaginable power. But he’s a gentle soul, and his ability to petrify anyone he so much as glances at horrifies him — so he blindfolds himself, and shuts himself away in his schlock-horror, post-Resident-Evil manor (which happens to be built above the military lab which doomed him to his fate in the first place).

We’ll talk more about Emil’s story later, but what’s relevant here is that, through his search for a remedy to petrification-by-sight, he discovers the lab in which he was created (he’s sufficiently traumatised that it seems to have been erased from his memory).

And he also discovers — and remembers — that he once had a sister.

That he still has a sister.

Meet Halua, also known as Number 6.

1. The Abject Body

“We used to be humans. Normal humans,” Emil recalls. But whatever Halua is by the time we reach her, she’s no longer a “normal human” by any definition of the word. A giant skeleton who moves like an insect, with glowing red eyes, a fixed grin, and a ribcage broken open to reveal a hollow interior, everything about her appearance seems designed to communicate her status as a monster.

Her chest is empty. Her eyes are dead. She is, to all intents and purposes, crucified. She should not be alive. But she is alive, and she’s angry.

The philosopher Julia Kristeva defines the feeling of horror and disgust evoked by certain repulsive sensory experiences as “abjection” (Powers of Horror, Kristeva, 1980). The abject is what emerges when we are exposed to body horror, to sewage, to blood, to injury. It breaks our sense of How Things Are Supposed To Be. It disturbs order and systems. It reminds us that we are mortal, material bodies with permeable boundaries. In doing so, says Kristeva, it confronts us with the reality of our own death. And so we reject it.

The abject is at odds with systemic and institutional rules, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be created by systems and institutions. Halua, too is a weapon — “Number 6” — created by a military experiment. The companion book Grimoire NieR tells us that she offered herself up for this experiment in place of Emil, to protect her beloved brother.

But the experiment is a failure, or perhaps it’s a little too successful. Number 6 is too strong and too hostile to be of use to a government project. When she comes to in her new, abject body, she’s immediately hostile to her creators. She must be controlled. Order has to be restored. The threat she poses is too great.

So Emil — Number 7 — is given the power to turn people to stone with a glance, to control his sister and seal her away. To restore the “symbolic order” the abject has broken through.

(It’s implied that Emil so traumatised by this that he forgets his past until he re-encounters Halua during this, her first and only appearance in the game.)

“She’s my sister,” Emil says, an ordinary introduction in extraordinary circumstances.

Halua, though, does not speak. Nailed and chained to the wall, she roars and grumbles and tears herself from her restraints. Emil realises that he must merge physically with her to combine their powers, and though he recognises her as his sister, even he still views her as a threat; “If my sister somehow manages to swallow me up, if my original self becomes lost, I’m afraid I may try to hurt all of you…and if that happens, I want you to kill me” he says.

As if to answer his fears, Number 6 engulfs Emil into the void in her chest, and the protagonist is left with no option but to defeat her in a bossfight.

2. Objectification and personhood

The language the protagonist and Weiss use to talk about Halua (never to her, only about her) during the fight struck me straight away. “This thing’s way too quick!” the protagonist yells as Number 6 tears across the room to attack him. “Magic is the only way to damage this one,” says Weiss, a hint to the player as to the battle’s gimmick (no swords, just spells). “Then kill that thing with magic and let’s get Emil out of there,” responds the protagonist.

The language use here feels so carefully chosen to me that it’s almost self-conscious. This thing. This one. There. What, not who.

While Emil introduces Number 6 as his sister, still his sister — who we see as the ordinary human she once was in a cutscene of his memories — to Weiss and the protagonist, she’s not a person, but a thing. She’s an object, an existential threat, and nothing more. She’s the weapon she’s been transformed into, and not the person she once was.

What’s especially difficult about this is that, well, the protagonist and Weiss aren’t bad guys. When Emil reveals that he, too, is a weapon, the protagonist responds, “Weapon or not, you’re still just Emil to us”. Able to see his friend for who he is beyond his body, he responds with reasonable sensitivity. Not for a moment does he even consider applying the same logic to Halua.

It’s not that they’re intentionally trying to be cruel to her. They aren’t goading or taunting her. It never even occurs to them that she might be able to understand them.

Her abject body communicates enough about who she is that they don’t need to look beyond it.

…Right?

3. The Stone Flower

The companion book Grimoire NieR takes what is implicit in Halua’s story and renders it absolutely explicit. In its story The Stone Flower, told from Halua’s perspective, we discover that in her form as Number 6 her consciousness is fully present, as she describes her own experience of alienation from her body:

I cry. I scream. No sound emerges and no tears fall, but I continue all the same. At some point in my rampage, I see my face reflected in a piece of tempered glass. It’s a sphere with red eyes, and every bit the monster I expect to see. Yet strangely, it strikes me not as sad, but comical. This face is not the source of my sorrow, nor my tears.

Her affection for her brother is also absolutely intact:

When I turn to look, it’s unmistakably [Emil]. He’s holding out his hand to me, a hint of sadness on his face. And forgetting who I’ve become, I run to him and begin sobbing, telling him that we need to run, that we need to find a place where the two of us can be safe.

So Halua is angry at what has been done to her, at what has been done to her brother. She is violent because she has been created to be exactly what she is seen as. She is afraid and sad and angry because she is a person. And she is afraid and sad and angry because she is not seen as a person.

It took me until a second playthrough of the Number 6 bossfight (…I forgot to save) to notice that despite Emil’s fears, Halua never actually harms him. In fact, she does quite the opposite; Weiss frames the fight’s no-swords-only-spells gimmick as a means of preventing accidental damage to Emil. Curled up somewhere inside his sister’s chest, Emil is safe for a moment from the violence that surrounds him, taking no damage at all during the fight, protected by the very person we have to destroy to save him. His fear never materialises; all she does is love him.

And even I, a person arguably super-sensitised to this kind of discourse, didn’t notice at first, because the game so effectively communicates Halua’s body as less-than-human.

When Emil does finally merge with Halua, he meets her old human self in a dreamlike cutscene. She is gentle and loving. She speaks for the first time, to tell him she’ll always be with him. We see her, perhaps, as she sees herself (and it’s rather poetic, I think, that the only person able to really see Halua is her blind brother).

And then she disappears forever. No one ever mentions her again. Even the game itself seals her away unspoken of.

3. Why Should You Even Care About Any Of This: biopower and dehumanisation

Why does any of this matter? Why do I think it’s worth exploring the narrative of a video game in this much depth?

The historian and philosopher Michel Foucault argues that the body is the canvas upon which societal values are expressed, so that “the basic biological functions of the human species” are transformed into political strategy through a process he terms “biopower” (The History of Sexuality, Foucault, 1976. p.138). The ways in which bodies are treated and depicted within a particular historical moment can tell us something about the form biopower might take in that moment, communicating the underlying priorities of the society within which those bodies exist. Fictional media might be viewed as one layer removed from this, with the ability to depict real-world biopower critically, as well as reinforcing it.

I read Halua’s depiction as commentary on the process of dehumanisation, one particular mode of contemporary real-world biopower. Claudia Malacrida (2015) describes dehumanisation, simply, as “the process of attributing less-than-human or non-human attributes to members of a group” (“Dehumanization as a Way of Life", A Special Hell, Malacrida, 2015).

Dehumanisation serves a purpose. Dehumanisation of a person or group allows their behaviour and attributes to be explained away as Just How Those People Are. Often, they are depicted as dangerous; Malacrida uses the example of different groups targeted for extermination in Nazi Germany, constructed as inherently dangerous and different, a threat to “normal society”. In turn, Malacrida suggests, it “permits the management of dehumanised bodies that have been rendered docile in ways that are optimally efficient for the ‘real’ humans who must deal with them”.

Believe hard enough that someone isn’t as human as you, and violence against them can start to seem not just permissible but inevitable.

Malacrida’s own research examines the institutional abuse of disabled people in an early 20th-century centre in Canada. Highly regimented, organised, and structured, the institution treated the bodies of its residents as “unruly matter out of place that disturbed the order of rational modernity”. Inmates were isolated and overmedicated to render them docile; and in a legislative sleight-of-hand which categorised them as non-human, they were deemed unable to provide consent to medical procedures, and forcibly sterilised.

The process of dehumanisation we see laid out in NieR Replicant, then, holds up a mirror to real-world biopower. Though the nuts-and-bolts of the story are the stuff of fantasy (magical military weapons? Your guess is as good as mine), the psychological processes that result in Number 6, skeletal and crucified in a lab facility, are all too real. Through this lens, Halua’s story starts to look less fantastical than observational.

In Halua, I see echoes of the extreme horrors of the institution described in Malacrida’s research. But through the lens of my own lived experience, I also see the smaller, bubbling-under-the-surface stories of my own clients, pushed out of jobs, subjected to neglect and unsafe treatment in medical settings, disbelieved, refused benefits, told their struggles were down to personal failures, gradually and insidiously excluded from mainstream societal structures and treated as if it were somehow their choice. I see the British government’s handling of the pandemic, signing non-consensual DNR orders for people deemed burdens on the health service’s resources. And I see myself. Because some of those stories are my stories, too.

Some in the disabled community have historically referred to non-disabled individuals as “TABs”, or “temporarily able-bodied". Though a contentious term, its underlying point remains; any one of us, at any time, might find ourselves occupying a body constructed as deviant. Live long enough, and the possibility seems almost inevitable.

5. Siding with the outcasts

Halua is a brutal expression of what I view as one of the NieR series’ central conflicts; institutions acting in service of the “greater good”, with little regard for individual lives. What Replicant begins to explore through Halua (and elaborates on through Emil, Yonah and Kainé, on which more later) is the weaponisation, in this case literally, of bodies constructed as “deviant” in service of power.

There’s a lot about some of Replicant’s other explorations of the transgressive body, mainly through its protagonists, that feels liberatory and optimistic. But these liberatory narratives take place against the grain of a society that views non-normative bodies as abject. In several instances, they are literally cast out of the cities and villages scattered across the game’s map, forbidden from entering. The protagonist’s party forms itself into a kind of resistant chosen family of bodies constructed as abject, against the world.

Replicant makes us want to side with the outcasts. We’re better than all those NPCs who truly believe Emil and Kainé are monsters; after all, we can see their whole personhood. We’re not like those judgmental others. We’re above dehumanisation.

But what is both so interesting and so unsettling to me about the game’s treatment of Halua is that she is not afforded the same grace as its other outcasts, and we as players are absolutely complicit in this. We find ourselves drawn into participating in the act of her dehumanisation, perhaps without even realising. Whether we notice or not, we can’t proceed until we destroy her.

In a now-famous interview from 2003, Yoko Taro, the NieR series’ author and director, describes his horrified realisation during the unfolding of 9/11 and the War on Terror that anyone might be capable of atrocities like those he was witnessing:

You don’t have to be insane to kill someone. You just have to think you’re right (Quoted in “The director of Drakengard and Nier reveals the impetus behind his nihilistic games", Killscreen, 2014).

Not only might any of us be Halua, made monstrous by the very systems marginalising us, but any of us might be the nameless protagonist, casting off abject reminders of our own chaotic mortality. Even the game itself arguably re-enacts this; Halua was originally intended to be a deuteragonist, joining the party in Emil’s place. Instead, she appears for a single, short episode of the overall narrative, before the story itself seals her away forever.

I wanted there to be a neat, theory-driven, big-picture thematic conclusion to this essay. I think what I wanted, perhaps, was to remove myself from it. To have something to say that pointed outside of me, and towards the wider world. But instead, what I notice is that, for me, the act of writing this piece itself represents a kind of unsealing. For all that my day-to-day working life revolves around disability, for all that my academic career centred lived experience and ethnography, I have never in my life written or published a single piece of work that in any way even begins to scratch the surface of my disabled experience. I am Halua, a deviant body hidden away for disrupting the symbolic order, but I think without knowing I’ve also been the nameless protagonist unwittingly hiding her away.

If there’s one message that I think represents the heart of the NieR series, it’s that the world is unjust, suffering is inevitable, and that we are fallible assumption-prone creatures who are frequently the cause of both our own and others’ pain — but that, amidst all of those truths human connection is real, and all we have is each other. I’m writing this blog because it’s been my experience that to engage deeply with a piece of media that means something to you can be like holding up a mirror to both yourself and the world at once; if you are prepared to gaze into it and lock eyes with what you see, sometimes you can learn something. If you’re reading this, thanks for coming on the journey with me.