Character · Monster
Nina Fortner
She has a name, a family, a law degree in progress, and a birthday she cannot quite remember.
In Otakana the clue reads: Twin sister raised apart in another family
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Monster
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Nina Fortner was born Anna Liebert. She and her twin brother were separated as small children, she was adopted by a German couple, and she grew up in a household with no reason at all to lie to her. What she has instead of a memory is a gap: one night she cannot reach, which the series lets her circle for a very long time before it lets her in.
She is not a passive figure in this. Once she understands what her brother has become, Nina goes after him herself, learns to shoot, and keeps walking into places where everyone else has already given up. Naoki Urasawa spends as much time on her recovery of that missing night as on Tenma's manhunt, and the two threads take most of the series to meet.
Monster is unusual among thrillers in caring what happens to the survivors. Nina carries the parts of the plot about ordinary life continuing: a foster family who love her, a university course, friends who know nothing about any of it. The horror in her chapters comes from how easily that could have been anybody, which is roughly the argument the whole series is making.
Spelling NINA
NINA is four letters built from three: an N, an I, another N, an A. The real trap is that this character has two four letter names, since she was born Anna, and either would look right to a player who knows the story. The game wants the adopted one, NINA, said Nee-na. Her surname, Fortner, belongs to the family who raised her and never appears.