Key Contents
- Pascal teaches his machine children to be fearful, emphasizing the importance of experiencing both negative and positive emotions.
- A2 emphasizes the fear of being alone and acknowledges the importance of cherishing time spent with loved ones.
- The bitter irony is that the fear of being alone can lead to self-destructive behavior and irrational decisions when under stress.
The following contains spoilers for Episode 21 of NieR Automata Ver1.1a, currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
Goliath is defeated and the children are saved, but A2 receives an urgent message from the resistance camp. Meanwhile, Lily and her companions are isolated from the resistance members and are exposed to the logic virus from one of the suffering machine children, turning them into zombies.
Jackass, Popola, Devola, and others come to their rescue, but Lily decides to stay behind and kill the infected to prevent the virus from spreading. When A2 arrives at the scene, the last survivor, Lily, is also infected and asks A2 to put her out of her misery. 9S obtains the final code and realizes that his feelings for 2B are mutual, while Pascal is faced with the sight of machine children being cannibalized.
What it means to be human
Most people agree that experiencing both negative and positive emotions is essential to the human experience. With it comes the ability to grow, adapt, and learn. Pascal actively distanced himself from other machine life forms and founded his own village to live a more passive and enriching lifestyle. Because of this, he has the ability to empathize and relate to other androids, and even befriended the resistance fighters, earning the respect of Lily, who had lost her comrades. One of the most important lessons he taught the machine children of the village was the concept of fear. Fear is what keeps things alive, and it prevents them from pursuing activities that might otherwise be considered dangerous. In episode 18, the machine life forms exhibit exactly this behavior in response to A2's scolding. Interestingly, A2 himself teaches them another concept: being alone.
fear of being alone
A2 tries to cheer them up, telling them how happy she is that she is not alone. And when they ask her what she means, she explains that it is important to cherish the time spent with loved ones, because they could be alone at any moment. In the panic after the surviving machine children are taken to the resistance camp, one of them shows symptoms of the Logic Virus. It is implied that the confusion of the virus itself infected it. In episode 6, the Logic Virus is shown to be strikingly similar to PTSD when 21S looks into Lily's memories while curing her of her contamination. She then becomes the first of the group to be infected. When under stress, people (and even animals) can make irrational or extreme decisions.
bitter irony
When Pascal witnessed the remains of the machine children, the first infected child ate the rest, out of fear of being alone and because he thought the souvenir music box he was carrying was broken. Ironically, it could be argued that A2 planted this idea in his head, as real-world children often overreact and take things literally. When they felt they were in danger of losing everything, they ate everyone else so they could be “together forever”. 9S suffers from this to a different degree. When he encounters 2B's old flying unit, he discovers a message left for him, confirming that 2B's feelings are mutual. However, unlike the machine lifeforms and the Resistance, he is truly alone.
Community and family are wonderful aspects of being human. And every encounter is followed by a parting. Lily, who contracted the same virus that A2 initially saved her from, was shot and killed by the same weapon that A2 used to protect her from.
