On occasion, I really fall in love with a secondary character. And I don't mean the fan favorite, the sort of character that has primary character potential. I mean a character that will in all likelihood live out their life in their secondary role. In a long running series (or game), they might only have a few scenes.
I'm going to talk about one of them from Attack on Titan, and be warned, there are spoilers for manga Chapter 124, which was released just yesterday.
One of my favorite characters in Attack to Titan is Nile Dok. I hesitate to call him my favorite out of all of them, because he's definitely not part of the main cast and isn't given as much breathing room, but he is definitely my favorite secondary character.
I like Nile because he's complicated, and in a setting where most of the primary cast is willing to lay down their lives for what they believe in, Nile is a lot more humble than that. He could have joined the Survey Corps like his friend Erwin (who eventually became the Commander of said Corps), but instead he decided to settle into a job with the military police and marry the woman he loved.
Though he considered it a bit of a cowardly move on his part, because out of all their classmates only Erwin survived, Nile does not regret it, because that decision allowed him to have a family that would have been impossible for someone in the Survey Corps (which is known for its high fatality rate).
Nile was not popular when he was first introduced, because he appears in an adversarial role. He wants to take Eren, the protagonist, away from the Survey Corps, a group of people who Eren (and by proxy the audience) highly respects. When everyone else is hiding away within their walled cities away from the titans, the Survey Corps explores the outside, hoping to discover the truth about their world and the titans that surround them.
But gradually, through his connection with Erwin, Nile's backstory comes through and he becomes a more sympathetic face among the leaders in the military. By the most recent story arc, he's willing to take a chance on peace by discretely handing off a child combatant from the opposing country to the boy's older brother. He's not supposed to do that, but he knows that the boy should really be with his family rather than in the middle of a warzone.
It's sadly the last good deed that he gets to do.
We know from earlier in the arc that Nile has been "infected" (for lack of a better term) with some spinal fluid that's going to turn him into a mindless titan when the antagonist gives the signal, and the signal goes off. He wasn't the only character infected, so narratively the transformation had to happen to avoid making it a toothless threat, so I'd made peace with the fact that in all likelihood Nile was going to die and never make it back to his wife and kids.
It's how he died that bothers me.
There are multiple named characters who are transformed by the signal, and the two who clearly die as titans this chapter are Pixis and Nile. Pixis is killed when the Titans in the city are led to the fort and they're collectively taken out by members of the Survey Corps. However, Pixis gets a few lines said about him and regrets expressed by those about to kill him. Pixis, at this point in the story, is the de facto head of the military and he's also the first sensible officer the series introduced, so it's not surprising that he would get a little bit of a send off before being slain by his own soldiers.
Nile is handled differently though. None of the primary cast has ever been in Nile's court aside from Erwin, who is long dead by this point. Any relationship has been a professional one. But we as readers still know Nile and that he was one of the ones who should have transformed, so it's not surprising that he appears post-transformation so we can learn about his fate. But it's not a reluctant send-off by those who care about him.
Instead, he's used as a prop to recreate the trauma Kaya expected when she saw her mother being eaten right in front of her. This allows Gabi to save her life (causing Kaya to see her in a new light) by killing Nile. Gabi and Kaya have no idea who Nile is. All Gabi knows is that it's a titan, and it's about to eat Kaya.
Gabi and Kaya have had it rough, Gabi being a child soldier and Kaya having lost her sister due to Gabi killing her during the invasion of Gabi's hometown. But Gabi eventually learned that Kaya's people aren't the heartless devils she thought they were, so she's learned to see them in a new light. Putting them in this situation where Kaya's about to get eaten allows the two of them to start talking again (instead of trying to kill each other).
I understand what the story was going for, but it was really hard to cheer for Gabi when she's killing my favorite secondary character in an incredibly heartless (but necessary) manner. From her perspective, it really could have been any titan, and the result would have been the same.
But for me, the reader, it wasn't, so the choice to put Nile there was purely authorial intent. For the most part, I think was simply a tidy way to wrap up Nile's fate, but there's a problem with that, because even though Nile isn't part of the main cast, he has been given enough depth that he's not simply a cardboard cutout. He has a life beyond his immediate function on the story, and he's been built up so that there's a reason to care about him.
Attack on Titan isn't a series that's kind to its characters, so I wasn't expecting survival, but I did expect closure, and for what Nile has been, it's a sad thing to go out as a character building prop.
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