![]() After that, 2B finds a village of robot pacifists. They’re rutting, fighting, even rocking a ramshackle cradle to try and sooth an imaginary baby to sleep, all before they start begging the androids not to kill them. ![]() When you find them, the clanky little cylinders with their glowing eyes are pantomiming humanity at its biological basic. After she and 9S are reunited, they go into a desert where she has to ferret out an enclave of robots who “don’t feel anything,” at least according to YoRHa, the organisation running this android military operation. The permanence of death and its implications on life sit at the heart of Automata’s obsession with classical existentialist philosophy, something it wears on its sleeve even beyond 2B’s Hamlet-sourced name. It’s stopping at the same coffee shop every day and not learning the barista’s name. For them, death just stops meaning anything. There’s no miracle to observe, just a job to do because there’s nothing that special about the fact that they were conscious, then not, then conscious again. Her experience is different - more painful, more tedious given the discomfort of her circumstances - but ultimately the same as 9S’. At the same time, her tone is knowingly formal she’s clearly done this dance before. ![]() When she meets him again, she’s flustered and awkward, not sure how to behave after realising he doesn’t remember the very real intimacy they shared when self-destructing. So he doesn’t remember fighting a couple of building-sized robots with buzzsaw arms? What’s one more death if he is, for the most part, fine?īut 2B is disturbed by the loss of 9S’ waking time. When she meets him later in the android base orbiting a desiccated earth, she still seems rattled even though 9S is walking, talking, and ready to rejoin the fight. While she’s more than willing to blow herself up to off a couple of red-eyed robots at the beginning of Automata, she seems disturbed by the fact that her companion, 9S, has to explode along with her, only his death comes before his most recent memories can be uploaded. The banality of endless resurrection does at least seem to be traumatic for 2B when it’s occasionally disrupted. And when dying is part of your daily routine, what’s one more death? At the end of Automata we get a concise, surprising answer: One more death might be the only thing that matters, in 2B’s life and in the game. She has a black box, a record of her experiences, that will be uploaded back to the android home base so she can slide into a brand new body and keep on going. She’s ready and willing to blow herself up to see the job done because she’s done it before. For Nier: Automata’s fetish-maid-android-samurai, death is just another occupational hazard of waging an endless war on bulbous robots that stole Earth from a seemingly exiled human race.
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