Since this series is pretty niche I guess I will start explaining what the hell it is about.

Hyperdimension neptunia, or just neptunia, is a series of videogames and related media which parodies the gamind industry to different degrees while having a main cast of anthropomorphized videogame consoles and gaming companies as the main cast, with them protagonit often being some kind of goddess. How serious the plot is, how much the characters actually relate to their alleged inspiration, and so on varies drastically from game to game.

The main character of this series is the titular neptune, who also goes by Purple Heart and represents a hypothetical seventh generation Sega console... In theory. Because if there's one thing that neptunia didn't actually commit with was making the characters actually based in the consoles they allegedly are, with the references and ties often being VERY surface level, for example nobody can realistically tell me that the Sega Mega-Drive has anything that could remotely justify it being represented as a rapist that abuses both her childhood friend and various kid characters, or that the Playstation 3 is a dictator who wishes to be a high school girl and is also suicidal.

The point is that the series often has a surface-level set of jokes, traits, and so on which are meant to relate to the gaming industry but the characters are often extremely divorced from their inspirations, and the one I want to deal with at the moment is noire, the goddess Black Heart. In the series she is often a secondary character, either a rival, "friend", or sister of the main character depending on the game or continuity, with her taking the role of protagonist for either brief sections of some games or - in her own spinoff - being the true protagonist for once.

As a character she is, at the surface level, a tsundere who is ashamed of admitting her feelings, resorts to violence an oddly high amount of the time, and seems unwilling to open up. And that is how most of the fandom sees her, with many saying that there "Is nothing deeper", which is absolutely wrong, like the most eleven year old reading you could have of her character.

Let's do a brief journey of her character that goes through the biggest appearances she has, those being the Original Hyperdimension neptunia (2010), the second game of the series (Mk2), briefly touching in Victory and Producing Perfection (Since there is much less to chew on in those games), VII (The last mainline game released to date, although a new one is on the works and will be published in roughly three to four months in Japan), and lastly Hyperdevotion where she has the role of protagonist.

OG Neptunia (2010)

This game has probably the most developed plot in all of the series and is extremely different from the remake for the PSVita known as Rebirth 1 - Which I consider to be a crime and abomination against art for reasons I'll touch upon briefly - since a lot of the story was rewritten to be able to catch on the more general audiences the anime adaptation had brought.

In this first game noire is one of the four guardian goddesses (Referred to as CPUs in the localization) which rule the setting, a world named Gamindustri which is divided in Celestia - the original abode of the goddesses - and "The World Below" which is where humans dwell and is divided in four nations, Planeptune ruled by Purple Heart (neptune), Lowee ruled by White Heart (Blanc), Leanbox ruled by Green Heart (Vert), and Lastation ruled by Black Heart (noire). This division in four countries will continue for most of the series by the way.

In this game the nation ruled by noire is shown to be a smog filled industrial mess, with the infrastructure being a nightmare at best and non-existent most of the time, nature is mostly destroyed, monsters run rampant and unopposed with dozens dying to them every day with nothing done to fix it, crime running rampant, and the government currently being controlled by a company known as Avenir who has managed to lock the Senate (The Civil side of the government) at a standstill by holding the majority of the votes - making them able to do whatever they please - while the Sanctuary (Religious side of the government) has basically lost all contact with the goddess who only communicates to the leaders of Avenir instead of her priests or people.

So an incredibly shitty place which is quite literally falling apart with the goddess apparently unaware of the chaos that is happening, and her believers do think that she is unaware of everything going wrong, which is incredibly ironic once you progress in the story. It is revealed that the state of her country is, by and large, because of noire's own decisions.

For you see, our little tsundere isn't much of a tsundere yet (The only guy she may have romantic feelings to is one she treats quite well and even attempts to flirt with, inviting him to her room at night to be in private) but instead is defined by her one-sided rivalry against the protagonist, neptune, who before the start of the game was basically an untouchable goddess and perfect ruler that noire looked up to and wished to surpass in honorable combat... Before falling to temptation and defeating her alongside the other goddesses in a fateful three versus one that saw her fall to the world below.

The first time we see noire she is excited to fight neptune in a fair way, thinking that way she'll finally settle the score and she'll be able to right her honor. She loses, naturally, and retreats to lick her wounds.

In this first appearance noire is split between three factors, her pride and honor wishing her to fight fair and prove herself against the world and to herself, her honest desire to better the world for which she needs to kill neptune, and her love for her people (And particularly a young man named Ganache with whom she is at least best friends with, and possibly having a crush).

This made her grant extra power to Avenir (Of whom Ganache is a co-founder) so that he may help her by developing weapons and machines of war to kill her fated rival and the other goddesses, thinking that way she'll become the true goddess and omnipotent, therefore gaining the power to fix every problem in the world.

This was a horrible idea, for Avenir made her nation ever worse, and even attacked civilians to get to neptune, acts that noire - moved by both her affection and her desire to win - was complicit with and allowed wholeheartedly.

This continues until noire is, in a public event, shown the crimes of Avenir as their scheme to kill neptune and innocent civilians is revealed, which obliges her to turn her back on Avenir to save face against her people. Later, she attacks neptune in private in a different form wishing to end her in secret by herself, and when she fails, she breaks down.

In an uncharacteristic act that wouldn't repeat in the whole series, she curses, screams profanities, and breaks down on the floor. Simply because all of the suffering of her people can no longer be justified, she had acted as if the end justified the means, but there is no end anymore, she failed, and the guilt eats her.

The next time we find her she says she is planning to retire to Celestia, which is named Heaven in the japanese version, and says that she'll never interfere in human affairs. She does that even though the main antagonist of the series, probably the only being aside from neptune with the strength to kill her without risk, is waiting for her at Celestia to kill her (As far as the characters know, I have my own theories regarding that).

So you are telling me that this character who lost everything, who has been set up as doing everything for a nation and friend she no longer has, who is crushed by guilt to the point of breaking her speech, is going to "Heaven" to the place where someone who wants and can kill her is, and she shows no desire to live or see anyone again?

I think she's suicidal, won't you agree? Well the fandom doesn't agree so let's examine the next game.

Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2

I'm going to cut to the chase, in a specific ending of the game, known as the Conquest ending, the goddesses fight each other again after they had temporarily allied to fight the big bad.

nepgear, that game's protagonist, obtains a Cursed Sword known as the Gehaburn, which can allegedly one-shot the villain if she powers it by killing all other goddesses. However, nepgear doesn't want to do that, having grown close to the others and considering them her friends, oh but what is that? Here comes noire with suicidal ideation!!!

Yep, nepgear's plan was to just steal the energy of the other CPUs to fight the big bad with essentially charged up powers, but after first defeating noire (And her younger sister named Uni), noire complains for why nepgear isn't killing her. Obviously nepgear is confused, why would noire want to die? She even fought against her.

Alas, noire goes and steals the sword from nepgear's hands and after some fighting, stabs herself with the sword to power it. It is briefly revealed that noire had convinced her own sister to also die to power the Gehaburn for nepgear's sake, and noire legitimately hadn't spoken to nepgear until at most an hour before the plot began, am I getting across how quickly noire decided to give her life for someone she didn't fucking know, only putting token resistance so she won't look bad?

Oh wait, doing token actions so it doesn't look like just suicide, why does that remind me of her "retiring" to Celestia where she would die?

nevertheless, nepgear is succesfully traumatized and goaded into killing her friend Uni, mostly due to Uni having been convinced by her sister to kill herself for "The greater good".

(I should make another rant about how absurdly bad noire treats her sister, but that's for later).

So yeah she fucking kills herself on-screen what more can I say, it was also unneeded as the characters literally do defeat the villain without the sword in every other fucking ending.

Victory and Producing Perfection

These two games are so much thinner in plot I'll simply go over some stuff.

The first game was a one-shot basically, a one and done story unconnected to everything else. The second game was a reboot that also doubled as a spiritual successor, with the Goddess Candidates fixing the errors and vices of the original portrayal of the Guardian Goddesses. And Victory, the third game, basically reads like a porno that got the porn taken out.

Shallow plot, the main character is a Dominatrix named Plutia/Iris Heart that sexually abuses most of the cast, there's HEAVILY implied rape, there's even a section in a dungeon, a place literally named "R-18 Island" where a side character (UD Vert) is implied to have gone on an orgy, I really don't know what the fuck the writers were smoking (Also the game is Pegi 12).

I can understand why nintendo of america didn't port this shit.

Anyway, this has a different portrayal of noire where she is not depressed, even though her childhood friend rapes her when she gets mad (Again, PEGI 12, a twelve year old can play this allegedly), all of this taken as if it was the epitome of comedy.

Where was I? Oh right, noire, this is the first portrayal of noire who is apparently happy to be a Guardian Goddess, and doesn't desire to be a normal human (Which she was before in this new dimension) mainly because she can live eternally with her childhood friend Plutia who is also a goddess.

Even then she is shown to be extremely callous and manipulative, doing her best to disparage her friend's reputation at times so that she may be more renowned (Friend of the year).

not much to say, except that it establishes the only version of her that is happy is so because she has companionship, which means I should probably talk about the other joke that follows her.

neptune often calls noire "Lonely Heart" because "She has no friends", something extremely rich coming from someone whose only two friends are two girls she befriended when she was over a century old and they were toddlers she stumbled upon after work. This joke follow her a lot, mainly because it does have some truth, noire doesn't open up to anyone and therefore she is something of a loner, making her job have precedence over her relationships while also hiding her more otaku likes like cosplay, singing covers of anime songs, and anime in general.

In Victory she does have a friend, but neptune still calls her that every scene they're in for the sake of bullying.

In Producing Perfection, an idol management spinoff made exclusively as a cash grab, we can see more of noire in an environment when she isn't angry at her lifestyle.

She actually likes the job of a goddess, rather than just the perks of being an immortal ever beautiful superpowered woman. Mostly because in this idol spinoff she gets to be an idol as part of the job.

Hyperdevotion

In the prologue she sees that her underlings abandoned her, her citizens disappeared, and she immediately thinks she should kill herself. This happens again in the penultimate arc, and she also says she should just rot and die, and is saved by her love interest saying he loves her and everything will be okay, which allows her to return and see she had been deceived.

VII

I am clearly running out of steam but every plan she has is noted at least twice by other characters that it has high chances of her ending up dead if she does it, normally presenting alternatives just for noire to say that it would be best for her to sacrifice herself for others.

This is also the noire from Mark 2 who does kill herself with the Gehaburn.

This gets to a point that she gets captured twice, almost dies a few times even.

Later, there is a dream sequence where she imagines herself in a perfect world, and on it she is a high school girl working part-time as a voice actress (I am sure that is no part-time job but whatever), and on it nobody from her life is there, she is simply living a completely different life with none the wiser.

Conclusion I guess.

THIS GIRL IS SUICIDAL LIKE COME On YOU CAnnOT TELL ME SHE DOESn'T WAnT TO DIE SHE TRIES TO DIE In LIKE THREE DIFFEREnT GAMES COME On!!