Important takeaways
- Pascal teaches machine children fear and highlights the importance of experiencing both negative and positive emotions.
- A2 emphasizes the fear of being alone, and recognizes the importance of cherishing time with loved ones.
- Bitter irony develops when fear of being alone leads to cannibalization, showing irrational decisions made under stress.
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 from infected resistance members, after being exposed to the logic virus from one of the deranged machine children, becoming zombie-like in the process.
Although Jackass, Popola, Devola and the others come to their rescue, Lily makes the decision 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, begs A2 to put her out of her misery. 9S receives the final code and realizes that his feelings for 2B were mutual, while Pascal is confronted by 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 essential to the human experience. With that comes the ability to grow, adapt and learn. Pascal actively distanced himself from other machine life forms and founded his own village in hopes of living a more passive and enriching lifestyle. Because of this, he had the ability to empathize with and relate to other androids, even befriending the resistance and earning the respect of Lily, who lost her peers to her 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 acts as a deterrent to engaging in activities that might otherwise be considered dangerous. In episode 18, the machine lifeforms exhibit this exact behavior in response to A2's scolding. Curiously, A2 himself teaches them another concept: being alone.
The fear of being alone
While trying to cheer them up, A2 said how glad she was that she was not alone; and when they asked what that meant, she explained the importance of appreciating the time you have with your loved ones, because they can easily end up alone on any given day. In the ensuing panic, after the surviving machine children are taken to the resistance camp, one of them shows symptoms of the logic virus. It is implied that it was its own turbulence that infected it. In episode 6, the Logic Virus bore a striking resemblance to PTSD, when 21S peered into Lily's memories, while providing a cure for her contamination. Subsequently, she was also the first in the group to become infected. Under stress, people (and even animals) can make irrational or extreme decisions.
Bitter irony
As Pascal testifies about what is left of the machine children, the first infected cannibalized the rest, due to its fear of being alone, and believing that a memory jukebox it was carrying broke. Ironically, it could 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 in danger of losing everything, it ate everyone else so they could “be together forever”. To a different degree, the 9S suffers from this as well. At a meeting 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 an amazing aspect of what it means to be human. And with every meeting, a parting will follow. Lily, suffering from the same virus that A2 had originally saved her from, dies in her hand from a gun, the weapon A2 had protected Lily from.