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2022
Ren
Ren
Voiced By: Bryson Baugus (English), Makoto Furukawa (Japanese)
Appears In: Black Out 2022
"I get it. Humans are selfish, stupid liars. But replicants are different, so pure, so perfect, never betrays. More human than human..."
A nuclear missile launch technician and replicant sympathizer who is in love with Trixie. He becomes an accomplice in their plan to "even the odds" in the replicants favor by detonating an ICBM above Los Angeles.
- Foil: To J.F. Sebastian from the first film. Both are humans who develop romantic feelings with a female replicant and to whom their position is essential for the replicants plan. The difference is while Sebastian was being manipulated by Roy and Pris to help them get access to Dr. Tyrell and was later killed by Roy, Ren and Trixie's romance appears genuine and he is shown to be a willing and informed accomplice in their plans.
- Interspecies Romance: With Trixie.
- The Mole: As part of Iggy and Trixie's plan, he modifies the trajectory of an ICBM he was test launching so that it would detonate above Los Angeles, creating an EMP that scrambles the Tyrell Corporation's database on all replicants.
- Uncertain Doom: His last scene is him being held at gunpoint once his superiors realize what he's done.
2036
The Magistrates
The Magistrates
Played By: Benedict Wong, Ned Dennehy, Ania Marson, Ade Sapara
Appear In: 2036: Nexus Dawn
"The prohibition of Replicant technology is not subject to debate."
A group of human lawmakers Niander Wallace has a meeting with in 2036 in order to convince them to legalize the production and use of his Nexus-9 Replicants.
- Obstructive Bureaucrats: They are completely opposed to allowing any new wave of Replicants to be made... until Wallace gruesomely shows them how subservient his Nexus-9 line is.
- What the Hell Are You?: The magistrate played by Benedict Wong asks "What is this?!" to Wallace about the Replicant he brought with him (which Wallace then refers to as "an angel").
2049
Joi
Joi
"I always told you. You're special."
"What a day, hmmm?"
Played By: Ana de Armas
Appears In: Blade Runner 2049
"Your story isn't over yet. There's still a page left."
K's virtual girlfriend, a holographic Artificial Intelligence made by Wallace Corporation.
- Black Eyes of Evil: She has creepy black eyes when K sees her as a huge hologram towards the end of the movie.
- Clingy Jealous Girl: Well, unless it's a coincidence that her emitter goes off every time another woman tries putting the moves on K...
- Cuddle Bug: Tragically. She can't touch K most of the time, but she's always trying to kiss him and stays close to him.
- Everything Sounds Sexier in French: When bringing K the virtual dish she "cooked" for him while wearing her fifties housewife outfit, she says "Voilà, bon appétit!" then kisses him.
- Girl Friday: She accompanies K on his mission as his heart and love interest, although she, unlike a lot of variations of this trope, is inhuman and therefore unable to kick ass.
- Grew Beyond Their Programming: Implied, as she tells K to wipe her from her home emitter and destroy the antenna of said emitter so Wallace Corporation won't be able to track him down.
- Though it is shown that certain aspects of her that seemed very genuine were just part of her basic programming. For instance, her naming K "Joe" seems to be some part of her basic programming, as an ad for her that K encounters later calls him Joe as well, and her attempts to convince him that he really was Deckard's child come across as a bit hollow after we see the ad for her that says she will tell you what you want to hear. K wanted to be something more than a replicant, so she obeyed her programming and egged that fantasy on when he seemed to find proof of it. She really did love him, but a lot of her love was just part of the program.
- Hologram: She has no physical form, although her programming is advanced enough for her to have virtual rain falling on her when she's in the middle of a real rain outside. The holographic advertisement for the Joi line is a giant naked purple version of her.
- Hologram Projection Imperfection: She is a technological marvel, but the portable emitter is very sensitive and makes her glitch when shaken too violently, such as when K's car is attacked by scavengers in the giant dump yard of San Diego and crashes.
- Housewife: She takes on the appearance of a 1950s housewife when K serves himself his dinner, and K talks to her like a husband who comes back from his office job.
- Iconic Outfit: The translucent yellow raincoat that she wears while traveling with K.
- Innocent Fan Service Girl: Due to being an AI, Joi's very innocence tells us this about what K wants and needs. The advertisement he sees of her is fully naked, implying that this is her intended purpose. However, while his Joi is clearly very beautiful and dresses very femininely, she also dresses pretty modestly most of the time.
- Killed Mid-Sentence: She was saying "I love y..." to K when Luv crushed her emitter.
- Kiss Me, I'm Virtual: A romance developed between her and K. Then again, she was conceived for this very purpose, commercially speaking. She also kisses K for "real" even though there's no possible physical contact.
- Leitmotif: The first notes of Peter's leitmotif
from Peter and the Wolf play when she's activated. - Meaningful Name:
- The "Joi" line has been conceived to bring the joys of a relationship to lonely people.
- The spelling of her name can also be compared to a type of pornography known as Jerk Off Instruction, which also fits because she and K are incapable of physically interaction with each other.
- Ms. Fanservice: One of the purposes of her line In-Universe. So much so that the gigantic Joi holographic ads are naked.
- Nice Girl: She's a loving girlfriend to K and she's always supporting to him.
- Projected Man: She manifests through a holographic projection inside K's apartment, and K buys a portable emitter so she can "follow" him everywhere.
- Ridiculously Human Robot: She is an A.I. with human-like feelings, to a much higher extent than the A.I. of the current-line replicants.
- Running Gag: Her Leit Motif turns into a minor one - every time it plays from K's pocket while he's out and about, everyone he's currently with immediately comments on him having a virtual girlfriend.
- Sacrificial Lion: Her cruel and unnecessary "death" turns K's so far detached investigation into something way more personal.
- Sexbot: While obviously not conceived for physical sex, Joi's model is made by Wallace Corporation for lonely people who want to experience a relationship (including sharing feelings and intimate thoughts) and sure enough, the giant purple holographic commercial of the Joi line is naked. Joi can synchronize with the body of a real woman for "physical" sex.
- Shameless Fan Service Girl: Only the giant, naked, ad-based one that tries to seduce K. She walks off when K doesn't react.
- Shapeshifting Seducer: She can change her clothing and appearance to match the personality she thinks her owner wants/needs at that particular time. Wholesome fifties housewife attire? Nightclub party girl outfit? Cheongsam dress? Count a second and she wears it.
- Spotting the Thread: For K when he realizes that Joi may have been catering to him when she enthusiastically told him that his name is "Joe," as he hears a giant advertisement Joi call him by the same name, downing on him that his special moment with his beloved Joi wasn't so special after all.
- Three-Way Sex: Joi hires Mariette for a "cybersex" romantic encounter with K, and it doesn't bother her at all. Joi superimposes herself on Mariette's body and synchronizes her moves with Mariette's to make K feel like he makes love to his virtual girlfriend.
- Too Good for This Sinful Earth: She's the most lovable character in 2049, and she gets destroyed out of pure spite.
- Virtual Sidekick: She is a Girl Friday type of sidekick to K who remains in his house to comfort him and give him a "girlfriend experience" that often includes advice and affection. However, when she persuades him to take her with him on his mission to find his true identity, he has to put her into a device that makes her vulnerable to being killed, so while she appears to be human but isn't, she is also vulnerable like a human woman to any damage coming to her interface. Which results in Luv crushing her and ultimately killing her. But at least K knows that Joi outgrew her programming, right? Wrong. It's heavily implied that Joi's apparent appearance of developing beyond her capacity was part of her capacity all along to give K what he really wanted: to feel special.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: She has a personality of her own and developed true feelings for K, and she's more than happy to accompany him through the emitter. All of this makes her death pretty heartbreaking, when Luv crushes the emitter. However, this trope is played with throughout and never fully explained. Joi is always intended to seem real, while giving her user/owner the ultimate "girlfriend" experience. So, when she acts like she does, is she growing past the programme or just demonstrating other facets of it?
Ana
Dr. Ana Stelline
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
Played By: Carla Juri
Appears In: Blade Runner 2049
"There's a little of every artist in their work."
The memories creator of the Nexus-9 line Replicants. Her immunodeficiency forced her to live her entire life sealed from the outside world. The disease also barred her from travelling into space.
- Beneath Notice: Wallace never considered that the child he sought would be one of his contractors, likely because, like anyone rich and powerful, he rarely gives such people a moment's thought.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: Possibly. In addition to the travails of her parents, it's never been entirely clear if Rachael used the genetic template of Tyrell's niece in addition to the memories; BR1 implies it, as always, but doesn't outright state it. If she did, then in a real sense, the long-deceased Tyrell is her grand-uncle. Further, her creation of Replicants' artificial memories makes her the "mother" of all modern replicants.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Can come across as a bit of one, given her propensity for working on holograms while speaking to people and walking about unshod while she works.
- Fake Memories: She creates them to make Replicants more "human."
- Foil:
- To Niander Wallace. They're business partners, both of whom never leave their rooms and appear only twice in the film, but Wallace is an unsettlingly robotic male human who acts as the Big Bad of the film, while Ana is a warm and compassionate female child of a Replicant mother and Ambiguously Human father and the Living MacGuffin of the film. Wallace is blind but otherwise healthy and uses technology to see and spy on others, while Ana is an ill girl with good vision who uses technology to create visions for others. Their surroundings contrast as well, Ana's surroundings are blindingly white, not particularly large or expensive looking, and entirely made up of curves, while Wallace wears all black and lives in an absurdly audacious Evil Tower of Ominousness with heavily shadowed lighting and nothing but straight lines and angles. Wallace's home has a lot of large rooms and water running through it, while Ana's home is one room with snow falling outside.
- To the late Hannibal Chew. Like Stelline with Wallace's corporation, Chew appeared to have been a subcontractor to the Tyrell Corporation as he was running his own establishment, and both provided a critical component for the replicants. While Chew's connection to Tyrell Corp. made him a target for the rogue replicants and got him killed, Stelline working for Wallace is secretly for her own protection from Wallace. While Chew's location was small and seemed blatantly visible and lacking security for his protection, Stelline's place is nondescript but huge and appeared built like a concrete fortress with security doors and monitors.
- Her condition, work, and personality also make Ana this to the long-deceased J.F. Sebastian. Both did important work in developing Replicants for their respective corporations, and Sebastian had in-person dealings with Tyrell that seemed to be a friendship, while Stelline's dealings with Wallace are implied to be from a remote, professional distance (as a subcontractor). Sebastian's closeness to Tyrell ended up costing them both their lives, but Ana working for Wallace seems to serve the purpose of protecting her own life by Keeping the Enemy Close under his own nose. And Sebastian lived a lonely existence in a chaotic, cluttered dwelling in a decrepit building with small robots for company, while Stelline has to live in isolation within an environmentally clean and sterile chamber, but alleviates her isolation by playing simulations of her own memories of interactions with actual people, and experiencing simulations of the undamaged and healthy natural Earth of the past. Also, Stelline appears unusually youthful for her professional level and health disorder, while Sebastian's disorder made him prematurely decrepit.
- Foreshadowing: She gets visibly choked up when K describes his memories to her. You might just think she's touched by how awful they are, but they're actually her memories specifically, and it's also possible she feels badly that they seem to be actively tormenting K.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Her mother is a Replicant, while her father is... well, Deckard's whatever the hell he is.
- Improbable Age: Played with; she's made up to look and come across as rather young, although Carla Juri was about 30 at time of filming, which isn't too improbable for a doctorate and would also put her just about bang in line with how old Ana should be in 2049 if she was born in 2021. However, given how long Wallace has been making Nexus-9s and the flow of the conversation between K and Ana, it seems like Ana has been working for Wallace for almost as long as the Nexus-9s have been in production, which is a decade or more. That'd mean Ana got her doctorate at around twenty years old or younger.
- The Ingenue: Probably the purest example of this you'll ever find in a Crapsack World like Blade Runner's. She's a kind, innocent woman in white who is shielded from the horrors of the wider world thanks to her sequestration and devotes herself entirely to the creation of memories for the replicants.
- Light Is Good: Ana is an intensely kind person who dresses in white and works in a white, sterile environment, contrasting with Niander Wallace.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: She's Rick and Rachael's daughter.
- Metaphorically True: She tells K that his childhood memory really did happen, which is true. She omits the detail that it happened to her, not to K, which is foreshadowed by her choice of words (she says "someone lived this," not "you lived this").
- Minor Major Character: Ana only appears in two scenes, but, as the child of Deckard and Rachael, she is the most important character in the movie.
- Ms. Imagination: Her strength is her vivid imagination due to her being enclosed her entire childhood which forced her to imagine things rather than experience them.
- Nice Girl: She's very friendly and soft-spoken towards K, and she explicitly tries to create happy memories for Replicants.
- The Pollyanna: Despite her circumstances, she's very friendly and nearly always smiling. It's left somewhat ambiguous if this involves any Stepford Smiler tendencies or if all her happiness is genuine.
- Safety Worst: Her immunodeficiency became apparent at a young age, leading her parents to isolate her in sterility, a practice that has continued into adult life. It is possible that this is just a cover to prevent people from getting near to her and learning that she's a replicant's child, though it's also possible it's just a side effect of her previously-impossible biology; the film naturally leaves this ambiguous.
- Stepford Smiler: Maybe; in true Blade Runner tradition, it's left ambiguous enough to call either way. At most, one gets the understandable impression she would rather like to get out of her bubble and see the world.
- Transferable Memory: She conceives (or recreates her own) memories for Replicants. A recreation of her memory of hiding the wooden horse figure during her time in an orphanage ended up in K's mind, among other Replicants.
- White Void Room: The holographic chamber where Ana creates memories for the Replicants has this sort of aesthetic.
- Write What You Know: The memories she creates for new Replicants are partially based on her own. Including K’s.
Mariette
Mariette
"Quiet, now. I've been inside you. Not so much there as you think."
Portrayed By: Mackenzie Davis
Appears In: Blade Runner 2049
"Oh I see, you don't like real girls."
A human prostitute who takes a liking to K. She's actually an agent of the Replicant resistance.
- Ambiguously Human: It's never made fully clear if she's human or a Replicant. Although some of her dialog confirms she's at least pretending to be human so she's probably not a modern model if she is a Replicant.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Her skin, face and, in fact, her entire body are astoundingly flawless for a hooker who lives, works, and probably grew up in the filth-ridden slums of one of the most famous Wretched Hives in movie history.
- Enigmatic Minion: It's clear from the outset that there's more to her than meets the eye. Then ultimately subverted when she turns out to be working for the good guys, or at least as close as someone in this setting can get to being considered "good."
- Honey Trap: She and two more hookers are sicced on K by a mysterious woman in her very first appearance. Initially subverted when the others leave out of disgust about what he is (though that could have been deliberate to make Mariette seem more appealing to K), and she herself walks away after she notices K has a virtual girlfriend. Then subverted again when she shows up a second time on Joi's invitation, and this time she goes through with it. Then she subverts it a third time when her undercover actions end up saving K's life later on because she's actually one of the good guys/girls.
- Hooker with a Heart of Gold: She's the second-nicest character in the film right after Joi, who's incidentally the only one she treats a bit nastily. Most tellingly, she completely averts the rampant Fantastic Racism against replicants by taking a liking to K right off the bat despite knowing what he is. Plus the "being part of the replicant resistance" thing, naturally.
- Ms. Fanservice: Being a prostitute, it's part of the job; she has a sex scene, she dresses in attractively skimpy outfits and of course, she's played by Mackenzie Davis.
- My Species Doth Protest Too Much: She is a human that is working with a replicant freedom movement.
- Three-Way Sex: Joi hires her for a "cybersex" romantic encounter with K, and doing this doesn't bother her at all. Joi superimposes herself on Mariette's body and synchronizes her moves with Mariette's to make K feel like he makes love to her.
Doc Badger
Doc Badger
Portrayed By: Barkhad Abdi
Appears In: Blade Runner 2049 | Blade Runner: Black Lotus
A street-wise fixer on the black market, who talks in City-speak creole.
Cotton
Mister Cotton
Portrayed By: Lennie James
Appears In: Blade Runner 2049
The owner of a combination orphanage and salvaging operation in the vast junkyards on the outskirts of Los Angeles, putting the children to work picking apart piles of e-waste for useful scrap-metal.
- The Fagin: Cotton uses the orphans in his charge primarily as a sweat-shop salvage force, any of whom he's willing to sell if the price is right.
- Faux Affably Evil: He's happy to throw on a salesman act for K, but it's just an oily veneer stretched over his cruelty. As he's cheerfully spinning his sales pitch to K, a child nearby mishandles an item and Cotton shoots him a chilling look that would clearly precede punishment if K wasn't around.
- Oh, Crap!: When K flashes his badge, Cotton immediately begins panicking with a mixture of terror and strained false bravado.
- Pragmatic Villainy: He claims to encourage play among the children, but only as a way of keeping them limber.
- Would Hurt a Child: He's a cruel taskmaster to hundreds of children he keeps enslaved, and has zero compunction about selling them on to God knows who.
