To Err is to Human; to Forgive, Divine (NieR: Automata)

(Originally written on the 20th of December, 2022)

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR NIER: AUTOMATA

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NieR: Automata's title has always been of great interest to me. The dual meaning behind it perfectly encapsulates the existential struggles that the characters must endure, themes made immediately apparent by 2B in the game's opening monologue. The word "automata,” or more specifically “automaton” refers to a moving mechanical device made to imitate a human. This device would act according to predetermined instructions, unable to choose for itself, to act (for a lack of a better word) autonomously. As her comrades die around her, 2B ponders on the nature of her cruel existence and whether or not the cycle they have been forced to walk down is a punishment. They cannot stray from the instructions they have been given by what they believe to be their gods: the humans that they were made in imitation of. Frederick Nietzsche, however, contemplated the hypothetical existence of an "übermensch" capable of imposing their own values, directly tying into the origin of the word "automata." The game's title is derived from the Greek word "αὐτόματος" which carries a completely contradictory meaning: "self-acting," "self-willed," or "self-moving."

The self-acting nature of the übermensch is tied to Nietzsche's most famous quote: "God is dead and we have killed him." It spoke to mankind moving past religion as a necessity for both morals and meaning. This quote becomes literal when 2B makes good on the end of her opening monologue when she "wonder[s] if [she]'ll ever have the chance to kill [God]" and strangles 9S during the events of Endings A and B with 9S having the same base personality construct of No. 9: the android that created Project YoRHa and fabricated the existence of humanity on the moon, what is described as "a God worth dying for." 2B and 9S embody Nietzsche's analogy of morality and free will, with the two filling the roles of the bird of prey and the lamb respectively. People do not decide to act, rather, it is their actions that are dependent on who they are. A person cannot control whether or not they are a bird of prey or a lamb, they are shaped entirely by factors outside of their control. They are not free to choose how they act. In the case of 2B, she was designated as an Executioner-type android to keep 9S from learning the truth about YoRHa.

This determinist reality is not necessarily a pessimistic one, it merely means that one's actions have consequences. P-33's desire to reach "the outside world" came from the human gestalt Khalil, and it was this desire that ultimately led him to grant the machines "gifts." These gifts, each taking a unique shape are the reasons that they ultimately revolted against their creators, literally killing their gods and rejecting their doctrine in order to embrace their own meaning with many of the quest-givers and NPCs being machines with their own individual beliefs, customs and lifestyles. The game takes a critical view of humanity; when the red girls disconnected machines from their network and encouraged them to adopt human behaviour. Pascal's village, the Forest Kingdom, and the cult in the abandoned factory all failed, invoking a quote from the English poet Alexander Pope, "to err is to human." The androids observed the machines repeating the same mistakes, being unable to change, and yet their war with the machines lined up perfectly with the events of the Second World War (with even some names and locations like Pearl Harbour being re-used). The androids themselves are epeating the worst mistakes of humanity as they battle in the ruins of false cities made not by humans (or even Replicants for that matter), but by androids as mere replications of the cities of their supposed creators (exactly like the copied city created by Adam: one of the very machines that the androids detested). The androids' black boxes are secretly made from machine cores; the two peoples are one in the same but were told to hate each other by their "gods." Nietzsche's morality analogy explains that doctrines stem from this hatred. Masters will base their beliefs on what they have, whilst slaves will reject what they lack. Conflict becomes inevitable as religion fundamentally creates an "us vs them" mentality.

When 9S learns the truth behind the black boxes, he breaks down and begins relentlessly stabbing an image of 2B, the android that he once harboured great affection for. While this is related to his hatred of machines and him beginning to see androids and machines as one in the same, it also brings to light a deeper truth about 9S himself. His feelings for 2B reflect Nietzsche's perspective on love and how it was innately possessive and driven by egoism. He hated her for killing him, for posing a threat to his will to power. Part of his hatred of A2 came not only from the fact that she killed 2B, but because A2 looked identical to 2B, serving as a constant reminder of what he had lost. She was his protector, she validated his existence. However, her true nature (of which he unconsciously aware of) was a direct threat to his existence, to his ego, leading to Adam asking him:

You're thinking about how much you want to **** 2B, aren't you?

The verb could fit any number of words including "fuck," "save," and "love," but also "rape," "kill," and "hurt." It was not until his mental breakdown that he lashed out at the image of her, no longer being driven by the woman whom he called his treasure. The same way the machines had their own treasures, 2B had become important to his own existence. The game's quests to destroy the three Resource Recovery Units to access the Tower before facing the clones of 2B in the cathedral mirrors the Empire in Drakengard having to destroy three seals before killing the woman harbouring the seal of the goddess. In this case, 2B was 9S's goddess, his treasure. The strategy guide sheds light onto his selfish desires to destroy, obtain and be loved by all. This selfishness is made even more clear in the novelisation A Long Story:

I'll kill anyone who hurts 2B. I'll kill anyone who touches 2B. I'll kill anyone who gets close to 2B. I'll kill anyone who looks at 2B. Because the only one who's allowed to look at 2B is me. The only one who's allowed to get close to 2B is me. The only one who's allowed to touch 2B is me. The only one who's allowed to hurt 2B is me. The only one allowed to…

These were feelings that he had kept bottled up and was willing to cast aside if it meant remaining by her side. There was a spark of purity, of genuine love for her, but it could only shine through once he had gained control over himself, attaining self-mastery in his will to power.

The text was left blank not just due to 9S's conflicting feelings, but for the players to reflect on their own relationship with 2B and whether or not they were capable of putting aside their base sexual attraction and feeling any kind of sympathy for her. Whether or not they could care about 2B was dependent on whether or not they could answer the question posed to them during Ending E:

Do you think games are silly little things?

NieR: Automata challenges the player's conventional understanding of video games and sexuality, allowing you to forego earning achievements and trophies and instead purchase them with in-game currency. Trophies carry great importance to many gamers as symbols of achievement. To trivialise that process by allowing you to buy them calls into question that importance. It is entirely subjective. Do you care about trophies? Does it impact your experience? Why do you even play video games? One such trophy requires the player to "discover 2B's secret 10 times," having them look under her skirt. Not only does it call into focus the player's objectification of 2B (similar to what 9S grapples with), but it also demonstrates the absurdity of "objective meaning." The player must have made the choice to continue lewdly viewing her but the "secret" could have easily been seen at any point by exploding her skirt.

The absurdity of "objective" meaning such as "sexuality" and "shame" is also seen with Adam and Eve who lack sexual organs but choose to cover themselves with pants regardless as they stood in what they called "the graveyard of [their] creators," emulating the humans that felt the shame of the "inherently" sexual nakedness. When their biblical namesakes ate the fruits of knowledge and became aware of their nakedness, they felt ashamed. Upon gaining a greater understanding of "objective" reality, they saw nakedness as shameful. However, such shame is entirely constructed by ourselves. It is we who connect nakedness to sexuality when for asexual Adam and Eve, such sexuality is impossible. Importance is entirely subjective and only an übermensch can rise above the need for objective meaning. After completing the Stamp Collecting side quest, the machine receptionist rhetorically asks if it was fun before following it with "Whether or not you enjoy something simply depends on your own heart." Even the Emil seen in the game, who is not the original, has the autonomy as an individual regardless of the "objective" fact that he is "not" Emil despite having all of the same memories, Kainé's shack being important to him and him alone.

This lack of objectivity extends to the recurring theme of gender identity and expression. The androids, despite being assigned either male or female, lack innate sexual organs. However, they can choose to have either if they so please. Most machines are objectively identical, but some of them like those in Pascal's village took the initiative to distinguish themselves. Pascal himself identifies as male but uses a female voice, the big and little sister wear blue and pink bows, Jean-Paul wears a top hat, and Simone altered her body to look more feminine, invoking the saying of her namesake feminist existentialist Simone de Beauvoir: "one is not born a woman, but becomes one," tying into the ideas of identity and subjective truth as well as how the two are determined by outside influence. Adam and Eve, much like the androids and other machines, lack sexual organs; their naked bodies being beautiful but also uncanny: malleable as newly borns. All of these machines were intentional "deficiencies" on the part of the red girls who needed diverse machines with goals and desires other than the single doctrine to defeat the androids. The machines, with their round heads, were created by the aliens in the image of Emil: a being of great power that fought against them (with the inside of their heads having the same grinning face as him), and Adam was created in the image of humans with Eve being a derivative of him. The mistake was holding on to the long extinct humanity. Many of the machines, especially major boss fights like Marx, Beauvoir, Engels, Grün, Hegel, and Auguste, share the names of human philosophers. In killing them, the player is killing the gods that the androids and machines worship, leaving them to create their own meaning.

Pascal’s name comes from the Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal who believed that having religious faith was preferable over lacking it. This fundamentally opposed Nietzsche's idea of God being "dead" (Pascal is even seen criticising the writings of Nietzsche). Blaise Pascal believed that God was infinite and eternal to the extent where we humans were incapable of reasonably conceptualising him (reason being directly opposed to faith). Thus, it would be best to submit everything to a reason beyond our understanding, including tragedies like the massacre of Pascal's village. However, this way of thinking can only be serviceable to a certain extent as seen when Pascal gives up on life after the children kill themselves out of fear of death. When he pleads for A2 to either kill him or wipe his memories, the player can choose a third, unprompted option: to walk away. This is a decision that the game never even alludes to, the player is creating their own meaning and through it, giving Pascal the choice to grow and find new meaning rather than die or repeat the same tragedy.

Ultimately, A2 leaving Pascal would be the truest mercy of the three, even if it meant subjecting him to the terror of nihilism. The game's setting is steeped in nihilism, one such example being the how the android corpses of other players can be found and utilised by the player. Objectively speaking, they have no worth or meaning as individuals and can thus be used by others while completely free of moral standards. This futility of life ties into the game's ultimate embodiment of nihilism: the logic virus, its name being taken from the name of code called the "logic bomb" while also being a reference to the lack of faith that nihilists have, with "logic" and "reason" being intertwined. The virus was put in place to prevent other androids from discovering that their religious doctrine and reason for living, humanity, was false and did not exist. The virus makes androids and machines violent, reducing them to the base instinctual urges of a humanity without law and order. We see this affect machines on a wide scale as Eve mourns the death of his brother: his treasure, leading the machines to begin devouring androids (what the game's director Yoko Taro explained was their natural state).

After being disconnected from the machine network, some of the machines formed a cult to cope with their fear of death which ultimately resulted in their mass suicide whilst being infected with the virus. Upon slaughtering the clones of 2B (9S's treasure), 9S was infected with the logic virus himself (albeit through his own doing in an attempt to literally bring 2B closer to him) and in his battle with A2 (the woman whom he saw kill 2B) exclaims that nothing matters, mimicking Eve's own words as he lashed against 2B and 9S after they had killed Adam. Every person in NieR: Automata has some kind of treasure that takes a shape unique to them and them alone. That treasure, whatever it may be, is their reason for living.

Adam's fascination with human conflict creates a link between the observable behaviour of those affected with the virus and mankind themselves. He observed humans as being hateful (the androids repeating this with their unjustified ostracisation of all Popola and Devola units due to the deaths of their creators and the failure of Project Gestalt), with Adam's own death at the hands of 2B being one of great pleasure: Eros and Thanatos are one in the same, our base desires are to have sex and kill. This grim truth is also reflected in Endings A and B when 2B strangles 9S in a very erotic manner, the two primal urges being intertwined for mankind.

Following the death of 2B, the only person capable of standing against the cruel nothingness was A2. Despite losing her faith in YoRHa, she still resolves to wipe out all machine life forms, however, this stemmed from a desire for revenge rather than doctrine. This changes once she meets Pascal and his peaceful village. Whether or not her aiding them stemmed from 2B's memories or simply Pascal's open pacifism, her growing beyond her anger was still determined by the influence of others. Nietzsche's concept of the "will to power" explained how people seek to exercise their authority and prove their individual existence, that one can do so through violence or through aid, with the latter being the preferable option making the former a sign of weakness. The final confrontation of Endings C and D have 9S and A2 embody these opposing wills. A2 learnt to forgive, her heart warmed, whilst 9S became consumed by hatred (while he had given up on finding meaning, there was still an innate desire to destroy and exert his own power). In her ending, she saves 9S from the logic virus and finally sees just how beautiful the world is (making her the closest thing the game has to an übermensch). In his ending, he finally lets go of his spite and nihilism after Adam beckons for him to join them. The two androids are later rebuilt alongside 2B by Pod 042 and Pod 153 who reject their directive and choose their own paths after being inspired by the actions of both the three androids and the player themselves whom Pod 042 directly references during the credits of Ending E. Their individuality came about due to causality, a result of the actions of others.

To obtain the final ending, the player and two pods must defeat the names of the game's creators, literally killing the gods of NieR: Automata. This would not be the first time that the franchise referred to humans as "gods," with the ending of the original Drakengard having Angelus wonder if modern day Tokyo was "the land of the gods." While beating the credits may seem to be an impossible task, the player can be helped by strangers across the world, with the player being given the choice to sacrifice their save data if it meant helping a single stranger kill the gods themselves. When your reason for living no longer exists, you must adapt, and one can do so much easier with the help of others. 2B and A2 may have been created with the same personality type, but their experiences and the people around them shaped them into their own unique selves. The true übermensch rises above moral and existential nihilism by exercising their will to power through kindness. When faced with the cruel uncaring universe, one can choose to do good unto others and determine that they do not lose themselves. For while to err is to human, to forgive is divine, and there is no need for gods in a world where we are gods to ourselves and each other.

9S: Mutual understanding without a network sounds tough.

2B: True. But it also seems kind of fun.