#the noah

The fear of losing oneself to the Noah memory will come up often, but it's hard to conceptualize what that's actually like because the only character we know before their awakening as a Noah is Allen, and his situation is decidedly unusual, even among the Noah. The closest we get is Skin, who goes from what seems like a pretty normal guy to a very unstable Noah. Even then, we don't really get to know either side of him well.

Tyki seems like kind of a hot mess at this point in the story, almost careless. The threat of getting swallowed up by the Noah memory is very real, and it does scare him, but he's also prone to a sort of hedonistic enjoyment of losing himself in it too.

Later on, though, we'll see that Tyki does screw his head on tighter after his fight with Allen, taking his own situation much more seriously, enough to even give some advice to Allen on it when the time comes.

Now, Tyki having this black and white motif going on in his character is super important. For most characters in DGM, their internal conflict comes from their love versus their duty, an internal division of priority, rather than a division between opposites. Being trapped between opposites is specifically Allen's thing (and by extension, Mana and Nea's thing). Kanda even pointed it out recently; in this war of black and white, the "Walkers" are decidedly gray.

Tyki is an exception, getting to share the black and white motif, since he's Allen's usual Noah opponent and the character we follow when we're with the Noah. He gets protagonist privileges.