Key Takeaways
- Pascal teaches machine children fear, highlighting the importance of experiencing both negative and positive emotions.
- A2 emphasizes the fear of being alone, acknowledging the significance of cherishing time spent with loved ones.
- Bitter irony unfolds as fear of being alone leads to cannibalization, showcasing irrational decisions made under stress.
The following contains spoilers for episode 21 of NieR Automata Ver1.1a, now streaming on Crunchyroll.
The Goliath has been defeated, and the children saved, but A2 receives an urgent message from the Resistance camp. Meanwhile, Lily and her allies quarantine themselves from infected Resistance members, after being exposed to the Logic Virus from one of the distraught machine children, turning zombie-like in the process.
Though Jackass, Popola, Devola, and the others come to their rescue, Lily makes the resolve to stay back and kill off the infected to ensure the virus doesn’t spread. A2 arrives on the scene just as the final survivor, Lily, who is also infected, asks A2 to put her out of her misery. 9S obtains the final code and realizes that his feelings for 2B were mutual, while Pascal is confronted with the sight of the machine children being cannibalized.
What It Means To Be Human
Most people agree that experiencing both negative and positive emotions is vital to the human experience. With that, the ability to grow, adapt, and learn follows suit. Pascal actively distanced himself from other machine lifeforms and founded his own village in hopes of living a more passive and enriching lifestyle. Because of this, he had the ability to empathize with and relate to other androids, even befriending the Resistance and earning the respect of Lily, who lost her comrades to his kind. One of the primary lessons he taught the machine children of his village was the concept of fear. Fear is what keeps things alive, as it serves as a deterrent to pursuing activities that may be otherwise deemed dangerous. In episode 18, the machine lifeforms exhibit this exact behavior in response to A2’s scolding. Curiously, A2 herself teaches them another concept: being alone.
The Fear of Being Alone
While attempting to cheer them up, A2 stated how happy she was that she wasn’t by herself; and when they asked what that meant, she explained the importance of appreciating the time one has with their loved ones, as they could easily end up by themselves any day. In the ensuing panic, after the surviving machine children are brought to the Resistance camp, one of them exhibits symptoms of the Logic Virus. It’s implied that it was its own turmoil that infected it. In episode 6, the Logic Virus bore a striking resemblance to PTSD, when 21S peeked into Lily’s memories, while administering a cure for her contamination. Subsequently, she was also the first of the group to be infected. Under stress, people (and even animals) can make irrational or extreme decisions.
Bitter Irony
When Pascal bears witness to what’s left of the machine children, the first that was infected cannibalized the rest, which stemmed from its fear of being alone, and that it thought a keepsake music box it was carrying broke. Ironically, it can be argued that A2 planted this idea in its head, as with children in real life, they often overreact and take things in a literal sense. When it thought it was at risk of losing everything, it ate everyone else so they could “be together forever”. To a different degree, 9S suffers from this as well. Upon an encounter with 2B’s old flight unit, he discovers a message that was left behind for him, which confirmed 2B’s feelings were mutual. But unlike the machine lifeforms and the Resistance, he is truly alone.
Community and family are a stellar aspect of what it means to be human. And with every meeting, a parting is sure to follow. Lily, suffering from the same virus A2 had initially saved her from, dies at her hand from a gun, the weapon A2 had protected Lily from.
