2B
2B is INFJ. YoRHa No. 2 Type B is a combat android in Nier: Automata, PlatinumGames' 2017 collaboration with the director Yoko Taro, which has now sold more than ten million copies. She fights alongside a scanner unit called 9S and is prohibited, like all YoRHa androids, from having emotions. Her real designation is 2E: executioner. She has been assigned to kill 9S every time he discovers the truth about humanity, and she has done it many times, and he has always known.
Who Is 2B?
2B is the initial protagonist of Nier: Automata, developed by PlatinumGames under the direction of Yoko Taro and released in 2017. Her formal designation is YoRHa No. 2 Type B, a battle android in an organisation fighting a proxy war against machine lifeforms on an abandoned Earth, ostensibly on behalf of the last surviving humans on the moon. Akihiko Yoshida designed her, in the black, blindfolded silhouette that has become one of the most recognisable in the medium.
YoRHa androids are forbidden emotions. 2B follows the rule more visibly than most, presenting as controlled, clipped and deliberately flat - the English localisation team described the intent as droll rather than emotionless, which is a fine distinction that turns out to matter enormously. Her partner is 9S, a scanner unit who is markedly more expressive and more curious than he is supposed to be.
What is 2B's secret?
She is not a Type B. Her true designation is 2E, an executioner model, and her actual assignment is 9S. Scanner units investigate, and 9S keeps investigating his way to the truth about what YoRHa is really for and what happened to humanity. Every time he gets there, 2B kills him, and he is restored from a backup with the memory removed. This has happened many times before the game begins. The detail that reframes everything is that 9S has been aware of the arrangement. The game's central relationship is therefore two people maintaining an unbearable routine in full knowledge of it, and neither of them saying so.
How INFJ Processes the World
Every INFJ operates through the same hierarchy of cognitive functions. Here is how that stack maps onto how 2B actually thinks, decides, and acts.
2B: What the INFJ Profile Explains
2B's dominant Ni is the reason the enforced emotional suppression reads as tragedy rather than as characterisation. Ni holds a complete picture and holds it privately, and 2B is carrying the entire shape of her situation - what she is, what she does to 9S, what will happen the next time he asks the wrong question - while presenting a flat surface. She is not empty. She is a person who can see the whole trajectory and has no permitted way to acknowledge any of it.
The auxiliary Fe is what she does with the small amount of room the rules leave. Almost everything she gives 9S is oblique: the tolerance of his chatter, the correction of his behaviour with a lightness the protocol does not require, the way she stays close. Fe reads the other person continuously, and hers is running at full capacity underneath a regulation that forbids it from being expressed, which is why the performance registers so strongly with players who are told repeatedly that she has no feelings.
Why does 2B stay with 9S?
Because she is ordered to and because she wants to, and the game refuses to let either answer cancel the other. Her tertiary Ti is visible in how precisely she keeps to the letter of the rules while violating their spirit continuously - she never breaks protocol, she just interprets it. The inferior Se surfaces in the only register she has left: violence. Her combat is the one place where an android forbidden interiority is permitted total physical expression, and Yoko Taro's design makes that the emotional outlet, which is why a game about repressed feeling is also one of the most kinetic action titles ever made.
2B: INFJ Letter by Letter
Everything real about her happens where nobody can see it. She speaks in short functional sentences, volunteers nothing, and carries the central fact of her existence entirely alone for the whole first act of the game.
She holds the full shape of the situation - what YoRHa is, what she is for, where this ends - long before the player does. The dramatic irony of the opening hours works because she is operating on a complete picture while 9S is still assembling one.
Her attention is permanently on 9S. Under a regulation that forbids emotion, she still adjusts to his mood, tolerates what she is not required to tolerate, and stays close. The feeling is not absent, it is illegal, and it leaks out through everything she does not say.
She executes. Orders are carried out completely and on time, including the one she most wants not to receive, and she does not stall, evade or improvise around it. The horror of the character is that the discipline holds every single time.
Why 2B Is INFJ, Not INFP or INTJ
ISTJ is a reasonable first read, since she is disciplined, procedural and visibly committed to duty. The difference is what the discipline is covering. An Si-dominant character follows procedure because procedure is the reference point, and would experience the executioner assignment as a difficult duty. 2B experiences it as a private catastrophe she has understood in full from the beginning, and the game's structure depends on her having seen the whole thing rather than taking it one order at a time.
ISTP comes up because of the extraordinary combat competence and the flat affect. But the flatness is enforced rather than natural, and the story is explicitly about what is underneath it. A Ti-dominant android would have a framework she could state; 2B has a perception she is forbidden to voice, and the difference between those two things is the entire character.
The INFJ Personality
Visionary and private. INFJs have an unusually clear sense of where things are heading, and quietly orient themselves and others toward it. Their empathy is real but operates from insight, not emotion alone.