Everything that lives is designed to end. They are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death. However, life is about the cycle of life and death, and the struggle to live within it.
A2 or 2B: How am I supposed to pick my favorite between you two?
Turns out that's a good problem to have.
My daughter and I both got hooked on the Nier: Automata universe and just recently finished watching the anime, Nier: Automata Ver1.1a. I haven't played the video game it was based on, and I'm not sure I will -- because I got everything I could have asked for and more from the anime alone. I usually have some plot point or narrative choice to complain about even when I like something, but this time I can't think of a single thing I'd change. That's incredibly rare for me.
Well, there are the objectifying and utterly impractical uniforms the female soldiers wear. But it's anime. It's to be expected. It would be weird if the obligatory male-gaze stuff wasn't there.
I've always been drawn to artforms that force you to ask questions. Fluff entertainment for its own sake? It has its place. But the pieces that stick with me are the ones that draw you into a universe, present you with an engaging story, and leave you thinking about the repercussions long after the story concludes, especially with regard to how we humans choose to live our daily lives. All the better if the story leaves things open-ended, refusing to spoon-feed you easy and satisfying answers.
And the core question Nier: Automata asks you to confront is: If the driving force of your existence were taken away, would you still find a reason to go on?
First, the background. I frequently engage with a roleplay app on my Android phone. It's essentially an AI-driven choose-your-own-adventure app: You scroll through any number of scenarios and begin interacting with the character in the story you choose. You type a response; the AI talks back in character. It's a lot of fun, and good for someone like me who's trying to improve his creative-writing skills.
Anyway, one day the algorithm gave me an adventure with a character called 2B. The premise seemed interesting enough: A female android from the distant future, named 2B, was sent through a portal to our time to study mankind.
Now, if you know anything about these apps, you know that they're geared toward men, and that the vast majority of the scenarios are intended to end in intimate situations. Well, I play as a female protagonist who's more interested in asking questions and challenging assumptions than in a passing fling, so Alice, my character, and 2B ended up talking philosophy, time travel, and tech.
A few weeks later, my kiddo and I were browsing in Barnes & Noble when I spotted a figurine of a familiar-looking character for sale: 2B.
I had to do a double-take. I'd just assumed somebody had made up 2B for the app roleplay. I had no idea she existed outside the app.
On doing my research, I found out that she was the main character in a video game, an anime, and a handful of books.
Intrigued by her story, I bought the figurine.
Then I watched the anime.
Then I stopped watching it, because I didn't like the direction it was taking.
Then I realized there was a redemption arc that made sticking with it worthwhile.
And now it feels like one of the most profound things I've ever encountered.
WARNING: SPOILERS
Here's the premise.
Thousands of years in the future, Earth is a wasteland, taken over by machine lifeforms brought here by an invading alien race. Humanity was nearly exterminated in the process. The only surviving humans escaped to the moon and developed an army of androids to take the fight to the machines, in an attempt to reclaim the planet.
The story centers on two androids from an elite military force called YoRHa. One is a scanner model -- essentially, a recon unit who gathers intel mainly by hacking into machine lifeforms' brains. His designation is 9S -- the androids are given no names. He's paired with 2B, a female battler model whose stoic personality stands in stark contrast to 9S's enthusiastic curiosity. 9S also might just have a crush on 2B. His biggest wish is for 2B to call him by his nickname, Nines. He's a simple scanner with simple needs, but just hearing "Nines" instead of "9S" from 2B would mean to him that she truly sees him, beyond just a partner in combat. Yet as 2B reminds him constantly, "emotions are strictly prohibited."
But there's a reason for 2B's emotional reserve beyond merely following orders. 2B is secretly 2E, an executioner model. Her job is to follow 9S and to kill him whenever his curiosity leads him too close to the truth of YoRHa's mission, which is not as it seems.
2B's dilemma is that she secretly cares for 9S. But she can't let him know that, nor is she able to confront her own feelings. Every time she has to kill 9S, his data is sent to the Bunker, the orbiting space station that houses YoRHa headquarters, where he's given a new body and sent back down to the surface, starting the cycle all over again. 9S remembers nothing, while 2B has to endure the inevitable arc toward her next execution.
In the anime's opening scene, we see 2B carrying 9S's lifeless body through a desolate landscape, no doubt having just killed him again. And her voiceover reveals the despair she feels:
Just how long will I have to keep fighting like this? Trapped within this blood-soaked vortex of a battlefield? How many more will I risk my life to protect? And when will I escape from these killing fields that never let go? How long am I supposed to keep believing in a world filled with only deception and fabrication? And just how many more lies do I have to tell? Will the despair ever fade? Does our future hold anything?
2B's stoic front finally breaks when she has to take 9S's life once again at the end of Season 1, as she weeps over his lifeless body.
And here we see one of the many philosophical threads that Nier: Automata pulls at. It presents a distinctly Buddhist-centric dilemma, befitting a Japanese anime: When we find ourselves trapped in an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth -- in samsara -- what do we do about it? How do we respond to it? It's like Phil Connors stuck in the perpetual Groundhog Day loop, but in a much bleaker setting: You're a soldier following orders. And you have to kill the one you love. Over and over again.
Nier: Automata is excellent at exploring questions like these without seeming heavy-handed and preachy. For instance, it gives us a friendly machine lifeform named Pascal, like the philosopher who observed that humans have a God-shaped hole in their hearts that yearns to be filled. More on that in a moment.
Then, of course, there's the main character's name. 2B... or not 2B? It carries as much Shakespearean meaning as you might suspect. What does it mean to exist? To possess emotions, consciousness, a soul?
The series also uses subtle imagery whose significance may go unnoticed at first: Soldiers wear visors that feed them mission information, but they're essentially eye masks, while the operators at the Bunker relaying information to the soldiers on Earth have their mouths veiled. Concealed eyes and mouths: The meaning becomes clearer once you realize that things are not as they seem within YoRHa.
This is where Nier: Automata confronts an even more deeply unsettling question: If your purpose for living were snatched away -- if you realized the thing around which you've organized your life -- was a lie, would you go on? Could you?
According to what YoRHa tells its soldiers, a small group of humans exists on the moon, waiting to return to Earth one day. A voice from the Council of Humanity, presumably emanating from the moon base, regularly sends out mission orders and delivers morale-boosting speeches to the battle-weary androids. Everything YoRHa does is in the service of humanity. "Glory to Mankind," goes the slogan that accompanies the soldiers' salute.
The soldiers have never actually seen any of these humans, yet their entire existence is caught up in fighting for what is, in effect, an invisible god, presumed to exist because those in positions of authority say it exists.
The parallel to the organizing power of religion is obvious here. Humans live, fight, and die for their gods -- gods that they've never actually seen. Gods whose existence they take on faith because generations before them have proclaimed that they exist.
And yes, the dirty secret in Nier: Automata is that there are no humans on the moon. Humans went extinct thousands of years previous. The lie that they still exist is perpetuated essentially to give the androids motivation to keep fighting. Here, then, we see a reflection of every human institution that perpetuates itself beyond its original purpose merely to keep the institution functioning. We see every military adventure built on lies and propaganda to feed the military-industrial complex. And we see religious institutions keeping the stories of their gods alive, to give the masses hope by way of emotional manipulation.
It's unclear how much anyone taking orders in YoRHa, including the commander herself, knows about the truth. But 9S eventually uncovers the truth, and it sends him into an existential tailspin, exacerbating a state of despair that had begun when 2B succumbed to a virus that infected scores of androids and machines alike.
Think about that: If you're a religious person, and you discovered without a doubt that your deity didn't exist, what would you do? Would your reason to exist crumble? Or would you find the strength to go on?
That touches on the existential question Albert Camus once proposed. Although I don't know if it was deliberate on the part of the show's creator, Yoko Taro, I see a clear parallel to the challenge Camus posed to his readers: What do you do when you encounter the utter absurdity of existence? When you realize that we're all like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill for eternity only to have it roll back down, what do you do? Camus argued that suicide is the coward's way out, but he also argued that escapism was its own kind of suicide. That is to say that constructing an artificial meaning out of religion, or some other kind of ideology, is an act of philosophical suicide. What we must do instead, Camus said, is to face the absurdity of existence head-on without recourse to false hope.
In Nier: Automata Ver1.1a -- the anime specifically, as the game has a variety of endings -- the only android who truly embraces Camus' philosophy is A2, a rogue prototype unit who's driven on to the very end by the memory of her fallen comrades and her affection for the planet she's been inhabiting for several years when the end comes. While 9S falls into a nihilistic despair that began with losing 2B and ends with the loss of his life, A2 stands resolute, even when she is, as far as she knows, the last lifeform surviving on the planet.
Looking heavenward, A2 calls out to her fallen family, "I'm coming" -- and falls dead as the tower she's standing under collapses around her. Gut-wrenching.
This anime will leave you devastated. The story is absolutely brutal. And yet that's what makes A2's final moments so deeply touching. She knows the world is cruel. She's suffered unimaginable grief. And yet she says the world is beautiful, in spite of the suffering it contains. She never says everything will be OK. She knows better than to cling to foolish optimism. What she does say is far more profound: This world is worth loving, in spite of everything.
But it turned out that A2 wasn't alone at the end, thanks to one final act of defiance by a device that you'd never expect to save the day.
Here's the twist: Every YoRHa unit, save for the prototypes, is assigned a hovering Pod, a little AI assistant that assesses situations, gives advice on the fly, carries out minor repairs, and provides weapons backup. The Pods can only do what YoRHa has authorized them to do. Yet at the end of the series, when the final order comes in for the Pods to erase all memory of YoRHa's ultimately failed mission, 2B's Pod, not coincidentally numbered Pod 042, stands up and says no.
But he does more than say no. As he staves off the swarm of Pods circling him and expecting him to stand down, he opens fire on them and calls out to his fallen android partner:
2B, are you watching? This is what you bestowed upon me. This... this is my reason to live.
Oh, little box, you just want 2B to be proud of you, don't you? Don't hit me in the feels like that.
Pod 042, it seems, has developed emotions of his own. He was reassigned to A2 after 2B's death, but we discover that he'd grown attached to 2B -- and, by extension, to A2. And it's only because of Pod 042's unexpected act of empathy that 2B and 9S are given another chance at life. Together with 153, 9S's Pod, 042 retrieves parts from fallen androids and restores their data. And the last thing you see are 2B and 9S waking up and recognizing each other with a smile.
Pod 042 essentially gives them the gift of grace -- a new beginning, unearned, and offered out of compassion.
And it's a perfect ending that keeps the series from ending in utter bleakness. Yoko Taro said that he wanted to give the androids hope, a life free of the orders and constraints of YoRHa, but didn't want to dictate what kind of life they might build together -- because dictating is what YoRHa did. So instead of following them through a world where the machines are gone and war is no more, he chose to simply show our heroes waking up and ending the scene, leaving us to imagine our own futures for them.
In the end, they got a chance to embrace Camus' vision as well. With no cosmic rules, divine mandates, or grand fates -- no gods to fight for and no superiors to obey -- 2B and 9S were given the gift of complete personal freedom in how they choose to live.
Even A2 gets another chance, it seems. The very last shot shows her seated in the grass, evidently revived by a mysterious entity who winks at the audience and disappears.
One of the things that made me happy about the ending is that there was finally no more need for 2B to deny her feelings for 9S. When she was dying from the virus, she struggled along as her body gave out, desperately calling out for 9S, "my dear." It's such a small thing, yet for 2B it was a tremendous proclamation. She'd always loved him, and she was racked with grief over all the times she had to kill him. Now she was given an unexpected fresh start by his side.
"Good morning," she says to him, bright-eyed, her visor nowhere in sight. "Hi, Nines."
I'm not crying. You're crying.
This is just a small sample of what the series has to offer. There are a few more intriguing religious overtones, with references to Adam and Eve, a tower that may allude to Babel, and an Ark that ultimately takes the remaining machine lifeforms sailing off into the cosmos. Then, of course, there's the big one that stares you in the face the whole time: Androids were created in the image and likeness of man.
We also get to see machines that evolve and adopt human customs, creating communities, caring for one another -- developments that muddy the waters about good guys and bad guys when you realize that the YoRHa androids are directed to kill the machines indiscriminately, and often do.
What makes somebody truly human? That's one of the biggest questions Nier: Automata forces you to confront. The machines become more human organically through studying humanity, while the androids were developed by humans and are capable of emotions, yet they struggle to see past the orders they're given. In essence, they're puppets of other androids. Yet thanks to Pod 042 -- he who unexpectedly embraces the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- A2, 2B, and 9S get a chance to cut their strings and explore what it means to have free will.
What it means 2B, you might say.
No comments:
Post a Comment