Is 2B From Nier: Automata Overly Sexualized?
April 30, 2019
Nier Automata is an action role-playing game developed by PlatinumGames and published by Square Enix. PlatinumGames and Square Enix are two Japanese Video Game Companies that have worked on the Nier trilogy. As of now, Square Enix and PlatinumGames are working together to develop a new video game called Babylon’s Fall. In only two years Nier Automata had sold over 3.5 million copies on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows. This number of copies includes all versions of the game in addition to both physical and digital copies making up this number. Nier Automata has also received an award for best Soundtrack from The Game Award for Game Of The Year in 2017. Nier Automata has a total of 17 chapters with 26 different endings and is over 60 hours. The game contains many unique features that keep the player active and going even when you want to play something else.
Who Is 2B?
2B is one of the three protagonists of Nier Automata. She is a battle Android, whose purpose is too protect humanity and reclaim Earth from the alien machines that pushed humans to live on the Moon. 2B is a member of the automated YoRHa infantry that fights in the 14th Machine War. 2B is soldier who burns with determination to complete her objectives. Although 2B is known for not showing any emotions throughout the her story. She does shows sympathy and kindness to her panther, 9s; but only because 2B is forced by her Commander to kill and erase 9s’s memories for every time 9s discovers something new about the Project YoRHa. After doing this countless times, 2B feels nothing but pain and hatred within herself. Yet, the only time she feels happiness is when she is on missions with 9s.
Is 2B overly Sexualized?
2B is equipped with a multitude of weapons for close quarters combat and can attack from range using the Pod support system. Her eyes are obscured beneath her standard-issue military visor, which she rarely removes. She does not wear pants of any kind. Her only choice of cover for her lower behind and front is a black leather dress with a attached short skirt; which still reveals her privacy when she walks, runs, jumps, fights, and falls. Also, 2B wears long black leather boats and high heels wherever she goes. In fact, her entire outfit is completely made up of leather fabric.
Many gamers have different perspectives and opinions on how 2B presents herself. The community has stated that female characters need to appear more realistic in combat fighting, and should not be over sexualized to appease more to male gamers. However, some people of the gaming community has taken another side. Saying that 2B’s outfit makes a lot of sense for combat against machines and her enemies. While these two groups argue about what looks realistic and what doesn’t; this still does not answer the question, “Is 2B overly Sexualized”?
Jocelyn K. Hernandez says, “I wouldn’t think so but some aspects of her outfit may be revealing. But how she is dressed doesn’t seem very appropriate to combat.”
Vagabundork • Nov 14, 2020 at 9:53 pm
Is Nier Automata’s 2B over-sexualized?
Of course 2B is over-sexualized. People that say that 2B’s outfit makes sense for combat are wrong and miss the point entirely: a) 2B doesn’t exist. b) The game world doesn’t exist. Their opinion is a classic fallacy in which fiction is used to describe real world problems by ignoring (deliberately) that fiction is not real. In other word, this is a diegetic justification for sexism.
Appealing to a supposed fictional reality in which “things are like that”, deliberately omitting the fact that a real person was the one who made the decision to include that element in the fictional world in the first place.
This fallacy works like this:
Critic: “Nier’s robots wear revealing clothes, the aim of the game is for the robots to show their intimate parts as a mere fan-service”.
Fandom: “The critic is wrong, and you can tell he didn’t pay attention. If he had paid attention to the game, he would know that there is a reason for this: robots try to imitate humans, but they do so imperfectly, so the result is a parody that mimics in an out-of-place, or erratic, way some human attitudes or behaviors; in other words, 2B doesn’t wear sexy clothes to appease the fans, it does so because she believes that’s the way human women should dress.”
In other words: Someone makes a criticism of some element of a work, usually for being racist or sexist; then, the fandom defends the work citing in-world reasons (diegetic reasons) to explain why things are so.
Therein lies the problem: fictional worlds are not real, and the creators of those worlds can change the elements as they wish or as they need, and in fact this is what happens in 100% of the cases: whether it is a single writer or a group of hundreds of people working on a video game or movie, the story, the designs, the events, the dialogue, and all the elements of the work go through constant revisions, until in the end someone makes the decision to finalise the project, in what is considered the final version.
The only reason why things are the way they are in fiction worlds, is that the author decided that this is the way things should be. Someone, a real person, of flesh and blood, decided that Nier’s robots should show their underwear and crotch, it’s not a real world where that’s the way things are, it’s a fictional world that someone built that way.
It is a mistake to pretend that the controversial, or even harmful, elements of a work of fiction are justifiable using in-world arguments.