Jen

I feel like there’s so much to examine about him that it’s hard to organize well, but if I were to pick out the main things that really interest me, it’s his autonomy, morality, and humanity (or lack thereof, in all three). In all of these, I feel like N is quite complex and nuanced, and falls into a very gray area that’s just fascinating!

When N is a child living in a forest, he has basically complete freedom, because he doesn’t even experience the arbitrary limitations of societal expectations. He can do whatever he wants, because there’s nobody responsible for him, and every Pokemon he meets is his equal. This paradigm shifts to the complete opposite the moment Ghetsis picks him up, because the introduction of a Father— the rigid social role of family— means that N has to fulfill obligations to someone other than himself, and will suffer social consequences if he doesn’t.

When we examine his actions as an adult, it’s important to note that decisions are predicated on information and context. When N was growing up, he was always presented with Pokemon who had been abused by their trainers, who wouldn’t even speak to him. He got to see the worst parts of the world, and nothing else, and because of that he ended up incorrectly extrapolating from the little unfortunate realities he experienced and projecting that onto the rest of the world. 

Though N makes the final decision on whether or not to do something asked of him (find the legendary dragon, defeat the champion, become the king of team plasma and the leader of the region), the people  who have presented him with only the information that would prime him to make a decision are really the ones who have control over his actions. But does that really excuse him entirely from being willing to do them? Does ignorance absolve him of accountability for his actions, even if this ignorance was manufactured by people who sought to use them?

When you also consider the pedestal that Team Plasma put him on, and how it was put into his mind since childhood that he was special, chosen, meant to be the savior and the king because he was the only person with the innate ability to do so, it becomes self-fulfilling in that failure is not an option. If you spend an entire life with a fixed identity built on the backs of others’ perceptions of yourself, then failing to meet those expectations is a soul-crushing experience that feels like it robs you of your identity. 

Of course, he genuinely cares about the Pokemon, but I wonder where in his mind the line blurs between empathy and duty. The pitfall of building your identity on others’ expectations and desires is that in the end, that too is a perception, and is liable to human error. 

I wonder if N took it upon himself to free Pokemon even if they didn’t ask it of him because somewhere that he wouldn’t acknowledge, he thought that based on his limited information of the world, he knew better than them and would be able to give them a world they could not envision for themselves, but would want if presented as a possibility to them. The tragedy is that this applies to himself as well— he was never given the full picture, and those who sought to use him did not give him the education to know all the possibilities and choose for himself what would be best, believing that they probably knew what was best for him as well. N’s position would be enviable to any of the people who follow him: he would be in the position of ultimate power over the region if he’d followed Ghetsis’s plans for him.

This man is just wrapped in so many layers of irony and I feel like there’s so much more that can be unpacked about the contradictions in his worldview that are a product of his incredibly messed up upbringing. I feel like above all it’s incredibly tragic that he’s spent almost his whole life in service to others, whether that be willingly to Pokemon or unknowingly to Ghetsis and Team Plasma. I feel like he’s never gotten a chance to have his own identity outside of that— his own passions or interests— but we do see some of that peek through in the way he sees the world with formulas and uses math and science everywhere!

Delving a bit more into headcanon territory, I feel like part of controlling N’s knowledge must have also included curating his education on different topics to steer away from things like history, social studies, and literature, since these would be most likely to give N the resources to poke holes in Team Plasma’s fabricated reality. I like to think that N’s focus on math is because math is something “pure,” and thus something he can study as much as he wants.