Key findings
- Pascal teaches machine children to fear and emphasizes the importance of experiencing both negative and positive emotions.
- A2 highlights the fear of being alone and recognizes the importance of valuing time spent with loved ones.
- Bitter irony occurs when fear of being alone leads to cannibalization and irrational decisions under stress come to light.
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 after being exposed to the logic virus of one of the disturbed machine children and becoming zombies in the process.
Although Jackass, Popola, Devola and the others come to their aid, Lily decides to stay behind and kill the infected to ensure the virus doesn't spread. A2 arrives on the scene just as the last survivor, Lily, who is also infected, begs A2 to put her out of her misery. 9S receives the final code and realizes that his feelings for 2B are 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 comes the ability to grow, adapt, and learn. 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 and relate to other androids. He even befriended the resistance and earned the respect of Lily, who had lost her comrades to his kind. One of the most important 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 might otherwise be considered dangerous. In episode 18, the machine lifeforms exhibit this exact behavior in response to A2's scolding. Interestingly, A2 himself teaches them another concept: being alone.
The fear of being alone
While trying to cheer them up, A2 explained how glad she was not alone; and when they asked what that meant, she explained how important it was to cherish time with your loved ones, as one could easily be alone every day. In the ensuing panic after the surviving Machine Children are brought to the Resistance camp, one of them begins to show symptoms of the Logic Virus. It is implied that it was its own mess that infected it. In Episode 6, the Logic Virus bore a striking resemblance to PTSD when 21S peered into Lily's memories while giving her a cure for her infection. 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 sees what is left of the machine children, it becomes clear that the first infected child ate the rest, prompted by his fear of being alone and thinking a music box he carried as a keepsake had broken. Ironically, it can be argued that A2 put this idea in his head, because like children in real life, they often overreact and take things literally. When it thought it was in danger of losing everything, it ate everyone else so they could “be together forever.” To a different extent, 9S also suffers from this. During an encounter with 2B's old flight unit, he discovers a message left for him confirming that 2B's feelings were mutual. But unlike the machine lifeforms and the resistance, he is truly alone.
Community and family are a prominent aspect of what it means to be human. And every encounter is sure to be followed by a separation. Lily, suffering from the same virus that A2 originally saved her from, dies at her hand, the weapon that A2 had protected Lily from.
