There's been a sentiment among players that Iron Fist isn't so much Nathaniel's route as it is Skylar's route. This is a perfectly understandable sentiment, and it's also partially the intended effect. Nathaniel doesn't have an internal motivation for joining the tournament, he's motivated entirely by the inciting incident that is his grandmother's sickness. His kit in-game reflects this as well, with all of his skills providing support to an ally, but not much in the way of his own damage output. Nathaniel is at his core an introverted person who doesn't really take the spotlight.

Unfortunately, this has also come with the opinion that Nathaniel is more boring than Lincoln or Ryka. He is upstaged by Skylar in his own route, who people consider a more interesting character as well. So although his design is well-liked for being cute, people don't find his personality as compelling.

It's kind of reflective of the design process in a way. Nathaniel is one of the oldest characters created for this project, but he wasn't originally the protagonist. In the earliest story concept back in 2015, Phoebe was the main character with the prototypes of Skylar, Jess, and Cody as her teammates, while Nathaniel was on one of the opposing teams. That story concept didn't last for very long though, and only existed in the form of documents and vague plot points. Also his name was Minerva Mihal, with his cables being a weapon called "Ariadne." Very Greek mythology nerd-coded.

I revisited the cast much later in 2019 when thinking about how I'd want to make a video game. The original idea for CHI Project was to make a turn-based rpg with grid-based movement (like Disgaea or Fire Emblem), rather than the more traditional RPG combat we currently have. Ultimately I lowered the scope to make developing less taxing on myself as a newbie developer, but I do want to tackle the genre at some point in the future. Had the original idea come through though, Nathaniel's skills would've put his arms to use in constricting enemy movement, or repositioning them into more favorable positions. This part of his kit was translated into his ability to Delay enemy turns, as well as how the skill Prisoner's Dilemma actually swaps enemy positions cosmetically.

As for why Nathaniel overtook Phoebe for the protagonist spot, it's ultimately because I had a stronger design concept for Nathaniel when I got around to actually drawing everyone in 2018. Meanwhile I hated Phoebe's initial design and couldn't come up with a better one until 2024. The two also overlapped a lot personality-wise initially as untalkative, introverted, slightly childish individuals, so I decided to consolidate all of those traits into one character and then gave Phoebe an entirely new personality.

Backstory-wise, it was also just efficient to make Nathaniel the protagonist. Him being a poor kid from the boonies made exposition come real naturally, since he and the audience are in the same boat regarding not knowing how a lot of the world works. Is it lazy writing? Probably. But it works.

However, now that Nathaniel was THE protagonist, suddenly that put much more focus onto his arms. A minor character with a prosthetic is just a cool design, but a major character with one puts it into the forefront and forces answers about how the world works. The most common question I'd get were about why his arms were cables instead of something more traditionally humanoid.

Full disclosure, I'm not myself a person who has prosthetics. I, however, wear glasses. And this question reminded me of how people would ask why I didn't wear contacts instead. My mom in particular would emphasize that contacts would make me look more attractive. I didn't have the words for a long time, but I think my reason was that it had become part of my life and my identity at some point. I'd developed so many small habits around having glasses that it felt discomforting to remove them from my life entirely. I'd grown so used to seeing my glasses when I looked in the mirror. In fact, I practically never saw my face without glasses because my nearsightedness was so bad that I physically couldn't see my face in the mirror. I'd only ever seen my glassesless face in documents, like passports. And no one really looks amazing in those.

This line of thinking when combined with Nathaniel's backstory and anecdotes from people with actual prosthetics led me to creating The Prisoner as Nathaniel's stage identity, and the in-universe way he's coddled and seen as a poor soul that needs to be freed from his circumstances. There's a sort of acceptable level of deviation from humanness before people get weirded out. Graphically we have the Uncanny Valley. But I think we also have a similar phenomenon face to face, or even conversation to conversation. I've never been good at pretending I was a "normal" person, I've got a monotone voice and a lack of facial expression, so people often compared me to a robot. And for the most part I liked it, as robots were some of my favorite fictional characters. But I guess it also rubbed me the wrong way that creating a robot character often came from removing "human" traits until we got what the author considered inhuman. It implied to me that I was inhuman. A lot of stories about becoming a cyborg are focused on that inhumanity, to the point that often it's an in-universe phenomenon that the more of yourself you replace with robot parts, the less human you yourself become. And that rubbed me the wrong way.

It wasn't just my expressionlessness that made me sympathize with robots, but also the fact that I didn't understand romance. So many stories use romance as the core of a message about what it means to be human. I'm sure you can think of many stories where a robot falls in love and that becomes proof that it's a sentient being. But for me it almost seemed to imply that I was less human than a fictional character. That I was less human than something explicitly designed to be inhuman.

When I sent out a casting call for voice actors, Nathaniel received the most auditions out of any character I had listed. It made sense, I billed him as THE protagonist. But surprisingly few of those auditions actually fit his character. Because even though  I specified in the details that I was looking for a quiet, somewhat monotone performance, most auditions gave me the complete opposite. A lot of people submitted high energy deliveries, like they were auditioning for Goku or Naruto. 

It was kind of funny. A little frustrating, but funny. Because it so clearly illustrated the invisible expectations people had of humanness. In anime and manga, the stock hero is that cheerful never-give-up type whose main feature is that they are, at their core, explicitly very human. They believe in love and friendship and passion and the indomitable human spirit. 

To be clear, I love the power of friendship. I love idealists who knock cynics down a peg. But people are also always surprised to hear that about me, as they see me as a robotic individual.

So for Nathaniel, I wanted to make a character that IS an idealist. Nathaniel IS the power of friendship type. He just isn't very emotive, or otherwise immediately traditionally heroic. He doesn't look immediately human, he looks and acts more robotic. But between Ryka and Lincoln, he's the closest this story has to a paragon hero. He just has a hard time showing it in a way that most people understand or notice.

Anyway, wow, this was a really long ramble. I hope that it's interesting to someone out there, I hope that it's relatable to someone out there. I hope that if you feel inhuman, you feel at least slightly more accepted.

Thank you for following the development of CHI Project. Tune in next month to hear my thoughts on Skylar!


"They like us best with bionic arms and legs. They like us deaf with hearing aids, though they prefer cochlear implants. It would be an affront to ask the hearing to learn sign language. Instead they wish for us to lose our language, abandon our culture and consider ourselves cured. They like exoskeletons, which none of us use. They would never consider cyborg those of us with pacemakers or on dialysis, those of us kept alive by machines or made ambulatory by wheelchairs, those of us on biologics or anti-depressants. They want us shiny and metallic and in their image."
- Jillian Weise