Nina Tucker

Editor's Note: This entry includes spoilers from Fullmetal Alchemist.

About

Nina Tucker is a character from the anime and manga series Full Metal Alchemist. She is a four-year old girl who was fused together with her dog and turned into a chimera by her father. Due to her transformation and subsequent death, she is often used as a troll tactic to anger the series' fans.

Origin

Nina first appeared in Full Metal Alchemist's fifth chapter, The Alchemist's Suffering, released in December 2001.^[5] In it, Edward and Alphonse Elric visit Shou Tucker, a chimeric alchemist who was able to create a chimera capable of human speech. They meet his daughter Nina and her dog, Alexander, and they become friends. Some days later, the brothers are informed by Shou that he had created another chimera able to speak. However, Ed realises the chimera contains both Nina and Alexander, and he beats Shou nearly to death when he admits it. Alphonse apologises to Nina, as they're not able to separate her and Alexander. After the brothers leave, Scar enters the house and kills both Shou and Nina, asking God to take care of their souls.^[1] On March 17th, 2011, "NEW ACCOUNT – KAIROUZVISUAL" uploaded the death scene from the 2009 anime series to YouTube, gathering over 400,000 views in the following years.

Spread

The moment is notorious among anime fans for being depressing. Kotaku called it "One Of The Most Depressing Moments In Anime" in 2016.^[7] The moment was called the most depressing moment in anime by Comicbook in 2018.^[8]

One of the earliest uses of Nina for trolling purposes can be found on a thread submitted on 4chan's anime and manga board /a/ on February 25th, 2012. The thread featured a "Japanese animal noises" game, the second response being Nina in her chimera form.^[3] Another joke appeared on s4s in June of 2015 (shown below, right).

Other iterations of the meme surrounding the character use the moment to make dark humor punchlines. For example, Tumblr user lychgate made a post showing Shou with the caption "when you don't have enough money to afford a dog-sitter and babysitter," leading to shocked responses (shown below, left). A Feel Old Yet? joke tweeted by user @guerrilladawg gained over 13,000 retweets and 21,000 likes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References