Who are Nana’s parents, anyway? Within the world of MOTHER 3, there is nothing to imply that any of the surviving residents of Tazmily Village are her kin. She stays alone at the beach, which she certainly seems to be quite fond of. In her own words, “Everyone hates me, you know. They all say I talk too much and never shut up.” These are hardly the words of someone with caring relatives. No, Nana appears to be all on her own. She seems to be somewhere around Lucas’s age, as evidenced by her height before and after the three-year transition. So what’s her deal? Who raised her? If not her parents, where are they? Why doesn’t she have any?
Parentless
First, let’s discuss Nana’s parentage. I deduce that whoever they were, they no longer exist. They have since passed on, and they must have died sometime before the Egg of Light was used to reset everyone’s memories. After all, Hinawa’s death was referred to as the first time to people of Tazmily Village “truly knew sadness”. This means that any other tragic deaths must have happened before their memories were taken from them. This could include a countless number of people, but we can at least deduce that this includes Fuel’s mother and both of Nana’s parents.
Therefore, it seems that the identity of her parents cannot truly be deduced. Perhaps they have since joined the ghosts of Osohe Castle in their piano-playing parties every night, or perhaps they passed a long time ago in the world that the White Ship abandoned.
However, there are more implications to this prompt than just the identity of Nana’s parents. We are far from the stopping point.
False Families
If Nana is truly parentless, then who raised her? She does not seem to have any close bonds with the other villagers of Tazmily. After all, she goes as far as saying they all hate her, as previously stated. “I’m not sure why,” Nana states at one point of the game, “but none of the family members in this village really look alike.” These are choice words for someone who has probably spent time analyzing the features of the townspeople in an ill-fated attempt to find her own family. Aside from being evidence for Nana’s status as an orphan, it also has a more important implication. This implication is, of course, that a majority of the families in Tazmily Village are not truly biologically related, and that they have been simply fooled into thinking that they were by the Egg of Light.
Is there any weight to this statement? I believe some amount of the villagers truly are kin. With all due respect to adoptive families, I believe that all of Lucas and Claus’s parents are most likely Flint and Hinawa, in order for the events of the game, and the final battle, to hold their emotional weight. After all, a flashback seems to show Flint and Hinawa speaking over the cribs of Lucas and Claus at an early age — hardly the sort of memory to be falsified when Leder himself admitted that the memory implanting was a rushed process. “In truth, we HAD wanted to create an entire plethora of myths and legends,” he states in Chapter 8, “but our story was made in such a hurry that we weren’t able to. It’s a real shame.” I doubt such detail would be given to the exact moments of a child’s birth while rushing to implant false memories. This is a pretty good indication that Lucas and Claus are, in fact, the true children of Flint and Hinawa.
So where’s the cutoff? At what time were children beginning to be born on the Nowhere Islands to the people of the White Ship? Fortunately, we can use our previous assumptions about Nana, Lucas, and Fuel in order to find the point in which children were first born on the islands.
We know that Nana’s parents are gone, passed away before the Egg of Light took the memories of Tazmily Village. In addition, Fuel must have already been born by this point, in order for his mother to pass and not be “the first death”. Therefore, we can deduce that Nana and Fuel were the last children to predate the Egg of Light. Lucas and Claus must have been some of the first to come after it.
This combines the idea that many of the families are not truly kin, and the idea that some from after the Egg of Light are. I think it is a safe assumption that almost all children older than Lucas are not truly the children of their alleged parents. The only exception to this rule would be Fuel, whose age borders so closely to the time in which the Egg of Light was used, that there was no time to replace his recently passed mother.
A Rushed Job
So why was Nana simply not assigned parents, then? Well, I believe this is for the same reason that Fuel did not receive a new mother before the Egg of Light was used. There simply wasn’t time. After all, the line from Leder I provided above confirmed the process was rushed. Fuel didn’t necessarily need a mother in order to be raised. Yet the question remains — why not just placed Nana under the care of someone else? Why not just make her the adoptive sibling of Fuel, for example? Was it really that rushed?
Perhaps it was. And, this may be a little outrageous, but I want to say that there was a filing error.
I think this panicked, desperate memory removal was so rushed, that Nana was left abandoned for this reason: her name was too similar to Nan’s. I think it’s very possible that as the villagers mixed them up. Something like this:
“Okay, we’re running out of time here. Has Nana been assigned a family?”
“Hmm? Nan? Uh, yeah, we’ve taken care of her already.”
“Awesome, no time to double check, let’s keep going.”
It sounds silly, but I think it’s very possible.
Growing Up
If Nana was one of the youngest children, and her parents died before the village’s memories were erased, and she was completely overlooked, then how the heck did she make it safely to the adolescent years? This is where I’m proposing a link between her and the beach. She sure does like the ocean, after all. She’s one of the last people to leave Tazmily Village. And she’s quite the chatterbox.
I think she was risen by the creatures near the beach. They’re certainly a lively bunch, after all. There’s the pigeons nearby that certainly love to coo and cry. There are Imitation Crabs that hang out nearby. There’s evidence of dolphins in the area from the ear bones that wash up on the shore. And there’s even rumors of mermaids. It’s possible that any combination of these intelligent animals helped Nana eke on by. Of course, even if they played a minimal part, she may have received some assistance from the nearby villagers. Yet her connection to the beach remains strong.
There’s a lot to consider from all of this. The mystery of Nana may never truly be solved, but there’s plenty of evidence to point us in the right direction. One thing is for certain: Nana was a victim of the rushed memory reset, and as a result, she never found a new set of parents to call her own.
