Love in the Time of (NieR:)Automata
Early in the game, Operator 6O — the communication unit assigned to facilitate 2B’s mission — calls her for their regularly scheduled contact, and then proceeds to cry her eyes out. 2B, the stoic soldier uncomfortable with overt emotional displays, is alarmed; 6O really does sound like someone just died or the Bunker just got invaded.
It turns out that 6O was rejected by another operator (her senpai, in the Japanese script). 2B ineptly comforts her, and later gets a quest to send 6O a desert rose, who answers in chirpy delight. It’s a little moment, tender, sweet, a glimpse of what could have been. (The operators are all women, by the way, and 6O — that fox! — has been inside the YoRHa commander’s bedroom… if you know what I mean.) The Bunker is packed to the brim with lesbians; it just so happens that many androids in this game are as gay as a rainbow meadow. This includes the delightful Jackass, a Resistance android who becomes the player’s voice of rage at the end. Possibly she and her girlfriend are the only couple who survives.
Romantic love isn’t the only thing at stake in NieR: Automata. Familial love is given as much importance, and subjected to the same brutalizing. Pacifist Pascal is uncle to children in the village he leads, a Resistance android wants a family so badly he resuscitates a scanner unit, Operator 21O asks 9S to fetch her a human family’s personal effects. The machine network administrators Adam and Eve are brothers, the latter born from Adam’s ribcage. Devola and Popola are older androids, once overseers of an ancient — and failed — human project, created as twins: always paired, always together, so that neither of them has to shoulder their burden alone.
Very few relationships in this game survive; very few are healthy and functional.
flowers for m[A]chines
And then there’s 2B and 9S.
When I began playing NieR: Automata, my first — instinctive — response to the android 9S was annoyance. A boy android that follows 2B around and constantly ruins my screenshots wasn’t exactly the most endearing, and I knew that sooner or later a heteromance would occur; media has this tendency when a female and male characters are put in close proximity at extended lengths of time. Plus, it’s a bit creepy. The boy dresses in shorts and, yes, when you take the blindfold off he absolutely looks like a child. It’s not a stylization thing: other models look like adults. 2B looks like a grown woman. 9S looks fourteen at most. He’s not only shorter, his body has a narrower silhouette. 2B isn’t bulky, but she just takes up more space. When she’s hit in combat, she barely pays attention but when 9S is hit, he cries out. 9S is not a combat unit, and it shows: he feels delicate. He is the body that is wounded to hurt 2B. Adam nails him to a wall to provoke her, and it works — she shows rare emotion, and dispatches Adam in a fit of rage. ‘Let’s go home,’ she whispers to 9S as she picks up his wounded body.
When pressed ‘What kind of feelings did 9S harbor towards 2B? What kind of feelings did 2B harbor towards 9S?’, Taro Yoko’s answer is ‘No comment.’ This is interesting, partly because Taro knew what he was doing — this kind of baiting is exactly what queer relationships in media get all the time — but secondly because, in the game, 9S refers to his time with 2B this way: ‘I was so happy to be with someone. It was like I had a family.’ 2B herself says, ‘My memories with you… they were like memories of pure light.’
So it’s ambiguous, nicely so. Most people assume the heteronormative obvious, and I’m willing to give it that, but with caveats that theirs is both a tragic relationship and a deeply dysfunctional one.
Supplementary material shows us the previous occasions 9S was executed. In one, he intuits 2E’s true purpose and preemptively attacks; he dies. In another iteration, he has again found 2E out. This time he accepts his execution, telling 2E to kill him next time — not because he wants to die, but because to him getting to meet her and spend time with her is worth the price of his own annihilation; he knows that his love for her will persist, however many times they meet ‘for the first time’. 2B/2E is all he has. They both suffer, but neither can escape this cycle. 9S can’t stop his curiosity, it’s hard-coded into him. 2E can’t disobey her orders, and her memory of his executions is never wiped.
The game’s first routes conclude with 9S succumbing to machine corruption; he asks 2B to mercy-kill him. Wounded from combat with Eve, she’s down to her bare hands, and she strangles him in a scene that mimes romance: she strokes his face, he submits to the kill. They very much don’t kiss. The music rises to a crescendo. He chokes. It’s as good a synopsis of their relationship as any. They depend on each other completely, to the exclusion of all else. (2B could have pursued 6O, though 9S admittedly has the same problem with his operator 21O, who also knows what 2E is for and what 9S’ fate will be, over and over. His misfortune is that nobody who wants him as family can allow themselves to get close to him.)
9S having a traumatized breakdown that turns him toward mindless violence is a typical enough arc, so much so that his voice actor Hanae Natsuki has voiced more or less the same character in Tokyo Ghoul. The naive and gentle boy who snaps and goes on a journey of vengeance is a type that litters Japanese media, but as with the rest of NieR:Automata there is nothing to celebrate. He doesn’t gain more power, he staggers through fight after fight, his body breaks and his character model grows battered. The hacking that felt like supreme control in Route B becomes another vector of infiltration: the super-AI/network ego Red Girls suggests that the way he repeatedly hacked into the machine network is how they got to know him so well, and they have feasted on his suffering. It’s not a revenge fantasy. It’s just sad, and the Red Girls laugh at him.
‘You’re thinking you want to **** 2B, aren’t you?’ is Adam’s taunt to 9S, and it seems incongruous at first, crass. But if you play to the end you know that this game doesn’t censor the word ‘fuck’. So what else is a four-letter word that fits there? During the tower gauntlet, the super-AI generates four copies of 2B to attack 9S, another push at what little remains of 9S’ sanity. ‘2B… I’m truly glad to see you again,’ he sobs, before laughing and declaring he’ll ‘tear you all apart, every last one of you.’ The repeated executions took their toll. A part of him hates 2E as much as he loves her. The four-letter word is kill.
(And, of course, A2 doesn’t merely carry some of 2B’s memories; A2 and 2B are both Number 2 models. They have the same face, the same base personality.)
meaningless [C]ode
It’s a running theme in NieR: Automata, if not in all of Taro’s work, that everyone hurts the one who loves them the most. 2B kills 6O, who in her last moment of consciousness thanks 2B for the desert rose. 21O, who wants 9S as her family, becomes corrupted by machine virus and attacks him. Pascal’s village children, having learned the concept of fear from him, commit suicide en masse. Eve wants to go ‘somewhere quiet’ with his brother because he is afraid of Adam being hurt; Adam disregards this and initiates the fight with 2B that ends in Adam’s death (and so setting in motion the rest of what comes after). The forest machines try to revive their king and put him in a small, helpless body. Three centuries pass. The tiny robot baby doesn’t grow. (‘We’re too stupid to figure out how to make him grow,’ the machines lament. ‘Sure is cute though.’)
Grief is lethal. Having witnessed the children’s suicides, Pascal begs A2 to either take his life or wipe his memory — ‘I cannot live with this heartbreak inside me’ — and afterward he stands alone in his village, surrounded by corpses and uncomprehending of what these dead machines are for. Eve tries to avenge Adam and dies at 2B’s hand. The forest king’s subjects throw themselves at the invading androids and are destroyed by the dozen; meanwhile the king’s core has been ripped from the baby corpse and repurposed into one of the machine towers. When 9S reaches what remains of the king, the core emits cries of help, asking for its mother; he fires a laser through it.
In a battle to preserve what they love, everyone in the game loses. Some believe they have succeeded — 2B dies thinking she’s sacrificed herself to save 9S; A2 dies believing she has carried out 2B’s request to protect 9S — but that success is either illusory or temporary.
What lets me enjoy the 2B-9S relationship (and I’m not usually a fan of anything with even a whiff of the heterosexual) is that so much is unsaid; so much communication is repressed. They express their feelings in the other’s absence, through posthumous messages, in scenes where the other is either dead or elsewhere. Beat-to-beat this is how queer romance is often presented (usually by straight creators), unbearably sad and forbidden, eternally barred from fulfillment. Yes, even the ‘partner forced to kill the other’ trope is common among depictions that fetishize queer suffering, along with ‘one partner has to watch the other die’. More than anything — and especially his refusal to comment on the nature of 2B’s and 9S’ feelings for each other — this makes me appreciate Taro as a creator.
(If anyone is curious, when asked about a different relationship from an earlier game, he said, ‘Emil’s gay [and in love with Nier]!’)
Of all the main androids, 9S is the most openly emotional, the most fragile, the most susceptible to pathos. The typical arc for a male character like him is one of powering up, turning stoic and conventionally masculine — often toxically so — with a wardrobe switch to match (see again 9S’ fellow Hanae alum, naive-boy-to-monster Kaneki Ken). No such arc here. His journey to avenge 2B by taking down as many machines as he can before he expires is the journey of a pebble fighting an avalanche. He is not more powerful than before, his clothes stay the same, he needs rescuing. To the end he is saved twice by A2, and he fails to defeat her in combat — he is only able to run her through because she hesitates. 9S’ draw to women, whether it is 21O who wants to mother him or 2B who’s ambiguously complicated about him, is that he is precious, vulnerable, and in need of protection. Not unlike the machine children that Pascal cherishes so deeply, and whose suicides he inadvertently causes through his good intention. ‘She told me,’ A2 informs 9S, ‘[that] she wanted you to become a good person.’ But it is the accumulated weight of self-sacrifices that undo 9S: 2B herself, 21O who voluntarily converts to a combat unit, the twins Devola and Popola who come to his rescue and lose their lives for it.
The failure of love in NieR: Automata is perhaps in that everyone is in a hurry to burn themselves out and give up their lives for those they wish to protect. Unable to comprehend that for their loved ones, it’s their shared moments — surviving side by side— that is the most treasured of all; that a world bereft of the people they want is not a world worth preserving.
My lesbian epic fantasy Snow Queen retelling, Winterglass, is available for pre-order! Get it direct through the publisher or through Amazon. Contains: post-colonial theory, ruthless lesbians, and no white people.
