NieR:Automata Ver 1.1a Season 2

Episode 21

Here's one of the interesting paradoxes in many of these Yokō Tarō projects: the stories have become infamous for their painful twists and the gratuitous amounts of suffering their characters are often forced to endure. Despite how much conventional wisdom would dictate that such material would invariably result in diminishing returns, the predictability of the overwhelming despair and destruction that comes in the climactic moments of the Drakengard and NieR games has only endeared fans to these stories more. Even when I was on my first play-through of NieR:Automata, I don't recall being surprised when Pascal and his villagers met their horrible fates, or when the Logic Virus inevitably consumed the last vestiges of the Resistance. Having sat through nearly two dozen episodes of this show, I can't imagine that even the anime-only fans were all that shocked to watch the world around A2 and 9S crumble into piles of so many scattered Android and Machine bits.

Yet, still, it ends up being a remarkably effective story, all the same. A big part of that is that NieR:Automata has been directly confronting its inability to escape the classic tropes and story beats of a war drama from the beginning. We've been shown over and over how Androids and Machines are just mimicking the mistakes of mankind, right down to the way that we seem doomed to fall prey to our most self-destructive tendencies. Pascal wanted his villagers to have enough fear to give them a sense of self-preservation, but he never accounted for what people can be pushed to when they're driven into a corner with no hope of escape. Lily wanted to be the kind of leader who could give hope to her allies while showing mercy to the weak, and now a single act of kindness has destroyed what centuries of sustained assault could not.

It's a tragedy in the most classical sense, where our heroes and our villains have been on a collision course with their destinies from the opening scene, and there's no force on earth (or the moon, for that matter), that can keep these puppets from playing out their parts. You could criticize “[N]o man's village” for taking a lot of time and animation budget to depict a series of deeply sad and pointless deaths that we all saw coming from a mile away. It never ends well for Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet either and people have been coming back to those stories for over four hundred years. And none of Shakespeare's plays featured any sexy robot maid soldiers, either.

In all seriousness, this was a stellar episode of NieR:Automata Ver1.1a. The way it changed up some of the events from the game kept me on my toes just enough to make the whole affair feel novel, again. The way that Pascal and the villagers go might work a bit better than the game's events would, since there the lack of any player agency would leave Pascal's choose-your-own-despair ending toothless in animated form. I also couldn't help but cackle when I realized that making Lily into the Resistance leader was always about ensuring that this part of the story would somehow hurt A2 even more. Bravo, Mr. Taro, you absolute bastard.

Most important of all, though, is how this episode effectively captures that mix of melancholy, desperation, and absurdly naïve hope that this story has always thrived on. Fear and love have been driving the likes of A2, 2B, and 9S from the beginning, and fear and love will be their shackles to the very end. How very fitting, and how very human.

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NieR:Automata Ver 1.1a Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.