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 importance of time spent with loved ones.
- Fear of being alone leads to cannibalism, a bitter irony manifesting in irrational decisions made under stress.
The following contains spoilers for Episode 21 of NieR Automata Ver1.1a, which is 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 allies isolate themselves from the infected resistance members, after being exposed to a logic virus from one of the disturbed machine children, undergoing a zombie-like transformation in the process.
Although Jackass, Popola, Devola and others come to their rescue, Lily resolves to stay behind and kill the infected to ensure the virus does not spread. A2 arrives on the scene just as the last survivor, Lily, who is also infected, asks A2 to put her out of her misery. 9S receives the final code and learns that his feelings for 2B were reciprocated, while Pascal is confronted with a vision of a machine cannibalizing children.
What does it mean to be human?
Most people agree that the experience of both negative and positive emotions is important 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 prosperous lifestyle. Because of this, he had the ability to empathize and relate to other androids, befriending the Resistance and earning the respect of Lily, who lost her friends for her kind. One of the primary lessons he taught the machine children of his village was the concept of fear. Fear keeps things alive, as it acts as a deterrent to pursuing activities that would otherwise be considered dangerous. In episode 18, the machine lifeforms display this exact behavior in response to A2's insults. Interestingly, A2 himself teaches them another concept: being alone.
Fear of being alone
While trying to cheer them up, A2 told them how glad she was that she was not alone. And when they asked what that meant, she explained the importance of appreciating the time spent with loved ones, as they could easily end any day. In the ensuing panic, after the surviving machine children are brought to a resistance camp, one of them develops symptoms of the Logic virus. It is implied that it was his own turmoil that infected it. In episode 6, the Logic Virus bears a striking resemblance to PTSD, when 21S looks into Lily's memoirs, while treating her contamination. Then, she too was the first of the group to get infected. Under stress, people (and even animals) can make irrational or extreme decisions.
Bitter irony
When Pascal witnesses what is left of the machine children, the first to be infected cannibalizes the rest, stemming from his fear of being alone, and he thinks that a music box he is carrying is broken. Ironically, it can be argued that A2 planted this idea in his head, as with children in real life, they often overreact and take things literally. When it thought it was at risk of losing everything, it ate everyone else so they could be “together forever”. To varying degrees, the 9S also suffers from this. In an encounter with 2B's old flight unit, he discovers a message that was left behind for him, which confirms that 2B's feelings were mutual. But unlike the machine lifeforms and resistance, he is truly alone.
Community and family are the stellar aspects 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 him from, died at his hands from the gun, the weapon A2 saved Lily from.
