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Defiance Industries posted:
It's not even about a standard of beauty. I just have trouble with this notion that an effeminate teenager like Brother Nier is somehow a more believable main character for a hardscrabble post-apocalyptic world than the Busey Ugly, leather-faced Father Nier.
Yeah, it IS a bit hard to swallow at first but the game does attempt to make it easier to accept. His world isn't exactly a Fallout situation, it's more of an ill-defined Medieval European setting where everything's just generally awful for everyone. Brother's spent only about a few years as an orphan, living with Yonah in the house their parents built (which according to the villagers is the nicest in town) and at some point I think it as established that his dad taught him how to use a sword and some survival techniques. His status as "plucky orphan" is fairly recent, by like a few years I think, and it's only been a little while since he actually started fighting Shades. Until that point, he'd mostly been getting by (and still does) through the charity of Popola, Devola, and everyone in the village.
That's actually why I think all of this game's little "villager tells Nier to go do mundane collection task" quests actually better fit Brother Nier. He's a dumb, idealistic, naive kid who believes what people tell him and just wants to make people happy. These people probably think "Oh, I could walk down the dangerous road with Shades to buy seeds or I could pay the nice boy on the hill to do it for me!". It's how Brother Nier gets by in this world. Go fetch some herbs! Kill a goat! Buy me some seeds! They're giving him the mundane busy work so they can help him out and feel better about his situation.
And strangely enough, unlike Father Nier he actually seems to welcome these quests. As if he actually wants to do them, it's pretty funny listening to Weiss basically go "Oh my god how do you go day to day doing this boring work?!"