Part 2: Nier: Automata and Gender (Patreon)

Section 1: Woman?

I want to be as fair and just in my analysis as possible of course, because although it would be only too easy for me to make a long video complaining how this game, which is full to bursting with sexy anime ninja-maids is sexist… and misogynistic… and problematic… 

What was I saying?

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir *now breaaathe* was born in 1908. She was a french philosopher, although she didn’t consider herself a philosopher. It’s okay Simone, I get it. I tell people I’m not a “gamer” I just play games - do they listen?

In 1929, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre become de Beauvoir’s partner, and the two influenced one another’s existentialist philosophy. For the next fifty years they were in a committed but open relationship, although before you come to claim them as positive polyamorous role models let me let you know that they were involved with two teenage sisters one of whom de Beauvoir taught in secondary school, and let me also say: ew.

Let’s talk about some of her work instead, yeah?

De Beauvoir was the first person to articulate the difference between biological sex and socially constructed gender. She also explored the definition of women in reaction to the definition of men, which was, funnily enough, why she called her book on the topic The Second Sex. This, as has been examined repeatedly is a hegelian understanding of gender. Women, the other is defined so that men can be defined, in the same way that the slave in Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic is defined as other so that the master can be recognised as the master.

She also explored the moral and ethical implications of existentialism, specifically the existentialist work of Sartre. See at first de Beauvoir claimed that it would be impossible to base a moral and ethical system off Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and then she went and … just… did it… which is if nothing else, an incredible hype strat. In The Ethics of Ambiguity she constructed, piece by piece, an understanding of morality and ethics in a world where not only humans have no inherent meaning and purpose, but every human is both subject for themselves and object for others - given freedom by their own self-consciousness or self-awareness but given limits by their position as an object.

All this to say, there is more to de Beauvoir’s work than just The Second Sex, even if people consider it to be her BIG WORK so in terms of confronting sexism and divisions between genders, honestly it’s… almost in and of itself a little bit sexist that Simone is the woman character who is a woman and her main thing is that she is a woman and her ideas are all about womaning and women. Arguably though, this is because each instance of a philosopher is, rather than an actual nod at their ideas in the game, a nod at a school of thought that they represent.

Simone de Beauvoir may be seminal, but she’s also a slightly outdated feminist reference. In the same way that referencing Marx and Engels gives a nod to awareness of class consciousness but ultimately Marx’ theories are about 200 years out of date at this point… referencing de Beauvoir is used as a nod to feminism in general, even though Simone de Beauvoir did other philosophical work than just feminist theory, and The Second Sex is 70 years old this year.

I mean, the first chapter opens with the words “Woman? Very simple, say those who like simple answers: She is a womb, an ovary” parts of which, some people, may ummm… find to be outdated now, although she does say that’s for people who like simple answers, so ehh?

Simone - the robot, not the french woman - is the most hyperfeminine character in Nier: Automata. Everything about her is about performing femininity to the max. She sings from atop a stage, 20 feet tall and deadly wearing an elaborate metal ball-gown decorated with the corpses of androids she has slain - and honestly? Goals.

The first time you meet Simone in Nier: Automata she isn’t named, she is just another boss you have to defeat, but on the second playthrough, as 9S the hacker, you get a literal peek inside her world. It turns out that she was wildly in love with Jean-Paul - the robot not the french guy. Simone made herself more and more elaborately feminine in order to try to attract the affections of Jean-Paul, but Jean-Paul, eternally wrapped up in his own thoughts, pondering the nature of existence, barely noticed her.

I don’t think it’s fair to call this a reversal of the real-world relationship between Jean-Paul and Simone, as much as it’s accurate to say it has nothing the fuck to do with it. Like, you could say maybe Jean-Paul - the french guy not the robot - was more jealous and in real life the pursuer, rather than the one being pursued, but I don’t think we can really know that that’s true, especially as the story of these two people in a non-monogamous relationship has been retold by so many monogamous people. I think it’s easy to see where the trope of the jealous possessive man could have crept in.

To some degree, it seems like Nier: Automata trends towards making ironic tragedies for all its philosophers. Kant the forest king becomes Immanuel the tiny baby, Kierkegaard is the headless head of a suicide cult, Hegel is some… balls… okay…

So perhaps the cases of Jean-Paul and Simone - the robots not the french philosophers - have more to do with constructing these ironic tragedies than reflecting the real people and their actual relationship at all. Jean-Paul - the robot not the french guy - is chronically wrapped up in his own bullshit so much that he barely notices the world around him. His arc ends with him disappearing to “go seek the truth of the world”.

Simone’s ironic tragedy has to do with her love for Jean-Paul, but really it has nothing to do with him. He is the object of her desires in exactly the sense that she talked about in The Ethics of Ambiguity. It could be anyone in her story, the point of her story is that she is in love with someone, and trying to be as feminine as possible to attract them.

If the game were really trying to reference philosophers’ actual ideas by naming characters after them, rather than just using them as a reference to a school of thought they belong to, it might have named this character after Judith Butler instead.

Judith Butler outlined the theory of gender performativity - the idea that gender is performed. This is commonly misconstrued as “gender is only a performance” which is upsetting to trans people, for example, because it would suggest that when they aren’t performing their gender enough they aren’t their gender. However, that’s patently absurd - nobody would hold cis people to a standard and say that, for example a cis man stops being a man when he isn’t growing a thick, impressive beard, or talking over women in meetings, so although gender can be performed, there is more to gender than meets the eye, literally. And if you’re an angry TERF who thinks this is just utter degeneracy, I honestly couldn’t care any less about what you think *dabs*.

Inarguably, Simone’s character is all about the performance of femininity - I mean, she’s in a theatre, on a stage. The problem with how Nier: Automata represents this idea of performed gender is that Nier: Automata’s central philosophy is You can find meaning in a meaningless universe, but it has to be better than “us vs them” which in the case of gendered differences translates to more or less “gender is fake”. Now, I’m not gonna argue with “gender is fake” exactly, but the game frames this message through the lens of femininity, and still makes masculinity default. Even the sexy shirtless machine men Adam and Eve, for the amount they are arguably objectified or sexualised, they aren’t presented as engaging in an excessive and frivolous display of gender.

Simone on the other hand is the subject of a kind of obvious question, why does she dress like that? She’s a robot. Her gender performance is implicitly under scrutiny even as the game wants to tell us “gender is fake” in a way that male characters’ gender performance is not. Ultimately, that reinforces a stereotype that women are less serious, and that femininity is a pointless extravagance reliant on luxury.

But of course, this doesn’t just revolve entirely around Simone; this has to do with all the women in Nier: Automata.

Section 2: The Women in Nier: Automata

Our old pal Simone is one of four feminine-presenting machines in the game. There are other machines that are identified as female, but the three followers of Jean-Paul are the Machine with Makeup, the Machine in Love, and the Machine with a Dream. 

Although they are in different locations, at different relative distances from Jean-Paul, and also to Simone, they are not entirely in a physical path from one to the other. The middle iteration, the Machine in Love is way out in the desert, but the Machine with Makeup is in the same location as Jean-Paul, and the Machine with a Dream is in the same location as Simone.

Instead of necessarily being on a straight physical path to Simone, they are on a metaphorical path towards her. Machine with Makeup has begun to perform gender, in a basic way. Machine in Love is performing her gender not just with makeup but also with clothing and other decorations, although she still retains the default machine form. Machine with a Dream has upgraded her form beyond the basic one to perform femininity better.

To me though, the most interesting thing is the names. Although none of them have names like people, the progression of the names of these machines is really interesting. At first, a totally literalistic name, Machine with Makeup, then a name indicating an internal life, and feelings, Machine in Love. We can infer that the Machine in Love is in love with Jean-Paul, although this isn’t definitely the love that defines her character. Machine with a Dream may be dreaming about being with Jean-Paul, but maybe not. This name is the most ambiguous, and allows us the most room for us to imagine what it means. What is her dream? It could really be anything.

The problem with these machine women, exactly as with Simone, is that their femininity is being constructed, but that construction is being pointed out, which highlights it as being fake, frivolous, pointless expression of gender whereas the male machines are undecorated, default shaped machines. The game undercuts itself because although it’s going for “gender is fake” it winds up at “masculinity is normal, femininity is fake”. The male machines don’t perform their gender at all… unless… Jean-Paul’s hat… is masculinity…?

Oh yeah, and Yoko Taro put himself in the game too, but I’m not mentioning it. I don’t wanna give him the satisfaction, smug bastard.

The androids, for the most part, don’t have the same problem, because while the machines are building from the bottom upwards, trying to learn to imitate humanity, the androids were made in humanity’s image.

The YorHa androids come in two kinds, adult woman and young boy, or more accurately, ninja maid and hacker teen. There are adult men among the resistance androids down on Earth, but among the androids from the space station, 2B and 9S seem to be a pretty representative sample.

2B herself is quite well written, even when she isn’t in the story. In another story a woman who was murdered at the start, kicking off a revenge murder rampage would be the “woman in the refrigerator”, but here 2B is the heart of the story, the main character.

I’m not going to rant on about the design of 2B and the YorHa androids forever, because I think it’s enough to say that they are clearly designed to be sexually inviting.

2B is placed in a position where you have a certain relationship to her. You think that you are acting as her, since you control her in the story, but a part of you still exists separate to her as the observer, as the voyeur, and that’s where the parasocial element creeps in.

Parasocial relationships, recently the hot-hot-topic of many YouTube video essays, is the academic term for one-sided relationships where someone feels like they have a real relationship with someone they don’t necessarily have a social relationship with.

Relevant to our discussion of Nier:Automata, it’s also very possible to design something to encourage that relationship. For example if a website sent you a push notification to congratulate you every time that a content creator thought your comment on their content was good.

Some of these people are people I have real, social relationships with, but all of them are creators whose content I’ve watched, so to some degree I also have parasocial relationships to the idea of those people, and at least in the case of Lilly - my biggest fan - some of those people will have parasocial relationships to the idea of me.

Parasocial relationships aren’t inherently good or bad, they are just what happens when there is some sort of character or persona that seemingly interacts with you, the audience - you feel like you know them, even though you don’t. And that’s why, even if you do have a social relationship to a public persona, there exists this separate element, this relationship to the character that they play.

So going back to Nier:Automata, we can see that this character, 2B, is someone we’re developing a parasocial relationship with. We push button and she do thing, and when she do thing, she sexy. So, there’s a parasocial attraction to this character.

You might even say hey, I find this gratuitous, I don’t want to look at her butt all the time but the game deliberately autocorrects the third-person camera as you run to a low-angle trailing behind her. There is, I think, a fairly solid case that the design of the game is trying to illicit that parasocial attraction.

When asked about the design of the YorHa androids, Yoko Taro, ever the enigmatic and facetious dickhead replied: “I just really like girls.”

In that design talk where he looked at “backwards script writing” and “photo-thinking” his example was that the audience is sad because “a girl dies”. It is almost absurdly tokenistic, and objectifying. The girl - young, innocent, loved - is just a tool to make the audience sad. 

That is a degree of objectification that feels like it can only be self-aware.. Right? …. Oh god...

However, the strongest piece of evidence that the game is trying to build up that parasocial attraction doesn’t actually relate to 2B or any of the feminine androids - it’s something about the male protagonist of Nier: Automata instead.

Section 3: 9S is a worthless pissboy

In Michael Saba’s essay Saba says that there was a particular thing in the game that made him sit up, and take notice. When he was fighting Simone, and she was demanding that people look at her, insisting that she must be beautiful, the game wouldn’t let the player move the camera, denying Simone the attention that she demanded. 

The thing is, the part of the game that made him sit up and take notice is also what made me sit up and take notice. Michael says in that essay that other analysis of this game misses the mark, but I haven’t really seen any analysis of Nier: Automata that really looks at gender.

That’s weird to me, because playing through one loop as 2B and then another loop as 9S has a pretty clear meta-narrative, in my opinion, to do with gender and the sexuality of a presumed straight male audience.

At first, you are positioned one step removed from 2B, although common sense would tell you you’re actually no-steps removed. For all intents and purposes you think you simply are her. As I said before, you press button she do thing. Because you don’t realise that you are one step removed from 2B, you aren’t aware you’re developing that parasocial attraction.

When you play again as 9S you are an extra step removed from 2B. Now, seeing her through 9S you can maybe see that you are being shown 9S’ relationship to her, and realising that his unrequited attraction is your unrequited attraction. Your parasocial attraction to this character on a screen may as well be his attraction to this real woman who treats him coldly and brushes off any attempts at friendliness. Any relationship they have is clearly in his head, with a character of her, not the real person she is.

I think there’s a reason that 2B and 9S are a grown woman in an absurd ninja maid outfit and an adolescent boy. 9S isn’t a fully grown man, so there is a certain automatic harmlessness about him. Essentially, he has the mind and personality of an adult, but the body of a child, making any possible relationship between them absurd. Why should 2B be interested at all by this boy? Therefore he becomes the perfect emblem of both male entitlement and impotence.

9S doesn’t really try that hard to impress 2B or develop a relationship with her. He’s around her through their adventure, but most of their interactions can be summed up by one interaction they have, where 9S tells 2B “My friends call me nines, like as a nickname” and she says “k” and he says “so do you want to call me nines?” and she says “anyway let’s be getting on with the mission now...”

A2, the third protagonist of the game, is a BAD BINCH, by which I mean she kicks ass and totally fucking owns. Her character is less well developed than that of 2B, maybe because she comes in as a secondary character, introduced first as an antagonist. A2 is also, seemingly, less developed than 2B because she in some sense is 2B. That is, she is an older YorHa battle unit that 2B is physically modelled after, and once 2B is dead A2 is there to continue 2B’s story. 2B is revealed in the late game to be a unit sent to kill 9S whenever he discovers the truth that the war is pointless, humanity is already dead and the androids and machines are the same, so that the YorHa’s eternal war can continue. She has done this potentially countless times, and 9S has had his memories wiped and been sent back to continue his service.

So what I mean by “A2 exists to continue 2B’s story” is not that A2 is trying to carry out 2B’s mission in the narrative, but that she is meant to take 2B’s place in the narrative. The reveal of this information by A2 to 9S serves as a final nail in the coffin of their relationship: “Dude, she never could have been into you.”

2B is the main character. The story is about her - the “real” game - but doesn’t feature her for the most part. She is the main character and you feel that since you play as her first. It does a huge amount to other 9S’ story by making 2B the main character, which gives you room to see 9S’ actions from a different angle.

When Adam has 9S held hostage, he taunts and manipulates him, saying at one point “you're thinking about how much you want to **** 2B aren't you” which as has been pointed out, is a 4 letter word that has been censored out, and it could be “fuck”, but it could also be “kill” - but it’s probably fuck.

2B becomes the target of 9S’ hatred as much as the machines are, and it all manifests around A2. Playing as A2 gives you the third perspective. First, seeing 2B as an invisible eyeball, a non-corporeal spectator, then seeing her through 9S’ eyes and therefore seeing 9S’ attraction to her as a parallel to our own. Then with 2B made unavailable to him, we see from the outside a conflict between 9S and a woman near-identical to the woman he was pursuing - A2.

Looking at the story through a squint, focusing less on the details of 2B’s convoluted mission or the YorHa war and just at the general shapes of these character interactions, there is a story here about 9S pursuing 2B, her rejecting his advances, and him flying into a fury, filled with impotent rage while at the same time seriously murderously angry. His rage is impotent because it cannot get him what he wants, but he still poses a threat to her, and by her, I mean the woman who “killed” the woman he was interested in. A2.

This impressionist “squinting” view of the story crystallises in this moment where 9S gruesomely stabs an illusion of 2B over, and over, and over. He is no longer mourning the loss of his beloved, he just wants revenge - on the machines, on the world, on women.

From 9S’ perspective, 2B the sexy and lovable woman he knows who to some degree falls into the born-sexy-yesterday trope is replaced by someone who looks just like her, but is older, with a complete backstory and internal life, and he sees as his enemy. She has “taken 2B away from him.”

I’m not saying this is what Nier: Automata is about, but I would call this theme undeniable. A core interaction of the characters in the story is this exploration of straight male sexuality, and of what happens when women don’t reciprocate men’s affection.

Nonetheless, the 9S-as-audience-insert theme of the second playthrough, shaming the straight male sexuality does something unintentionally that hurts the feminist stance of the game.

That is often the problem with feminism written by and for straight men - it is usually much more focused around how guilty men should feel for how they treat women than anything else, and that means that first they have to represent how men treat women, which means they usually first have to just… replicate a lot of the things they are trying to criticise.

It's like if I wanted to really get into the problem of anti-semitism as a way of displacing anti-capitalist criticism, so I made a video called “the real problem with Zuckerberg" and I picked out a picture for the thumbnail where Mark Zuckerberg looked sufficiently like an anti-semitic stereotype, or maybe I edit him to have creepy lizard eyes, and then in the video I explain that no, it's not anything to do with him being jewish, it's really a point about capitalism. If I did that, I still would have spent a bunch of time creating an aesthetic for the video that was functionally indistinguishable from regular degular anti-semitism.

The problem is that plenty of people play Nier: Automata in a way that is analogous to just seeing the title and thumbnail of the video and not actually watching it.

So yes, in some ways, the answer to the question “Why did you design the androids to be sexy ninja maids Yoko Taro?” is, in fact “I just really like girls”

In this way the game totally undercuts the attempts at deconstructing gendered differences.

Section 4: A few different interpretations

As I said at the start, The Second Sex is 70 years old this year. There isn’t much in it that is exactly outdated or outright wrong but there has been a lot of feminist theorising since then, not to mention the nature of the patriarchy that de Beauvoir was writing about has changed a lot too.

Increasingly, not just women but people of all genders are encouraged to be as beautiful as possible. Choosing to be sexy is seen as more empowering now, as opposed to original analyses of the limiting nature of being sexually objectified, which means the horny discourse - the unending tidal wave of fanboy boners - is actually… good? Oh no...

The game itself seemingly uses much more modern ideas of gender in its philosophical examination of it. After all, have you seen Simone and her feminine Dragon of chaos?

Yes, under her skirt Simone has a big semi-phallic dragon monster. I feel, that once again this is a use of the game’s Ship of Theseus theme, combined with some of those ideas of gender performativism. Simone has a dragon down there, but you still identify her as a woman. So, in a sense, Yoko Taro says “trans rights” I guess?

In all seriousness there are queer characters in the game, so Nier:Automata’s philosophy of breaking down the constructed identities and looking past differences has been applied there. The androids don’t care about being gay or straight - why would they?

My point in pointing out that The Second Sex is, in some ways, outdated, is that to some degree, the investigation of whether Nier: Automata has read Simone de Beauvoir is made irrelevant by the fact that the game is referencing her as a nod towards feminism in general, rather than her work specifically.

Moreover, my point is that there is an interpretation in which we can understand Nier: Automata to be using a very up-to-date, very sophisticated understanding of gender, and yes, it does all center around Simone’s dragon dick. And if you’re an angry TERF who thinks this is just utter degeneracy, I honestly couldn’t care any less about what you think *dabs*.

There is another interpretation we can make in which Nier: Automata’s feminism is less well thought through, in which the game re-creates a lot of potentially unhelpful tropes in order to criticise them. Inarguably, the way the game delivers these ideas is really complex and rich, but in this interpretation the feminist theory of the game is less sophisticated.

And there is technically another interpretation, in which Yoko Taro really didn’t intend to communicate any feminist ideas at all - one in which he really does “Just really like girls”. I… um… it’s not this one…

Yoko Taro has stated again and again that he doesn’t want people guessing at his intentions, that he wants his games to stand for themselves, so it’s up to us to judge which of these interpretations we like. Of these interpretations, for me it’s pretty clear that the one I prefer is the first one.

Jon Sorce, a non-binary person writing about playing Nier: Automata, and coming to terms with their gender identity, wrote:

The first time I played, I hit the “delete file” button without even thinking. Visiting this world again at the end of the year, with the weight of these past few months on me, the choice isn’t so simple. I find myself sitting down to my computer again and again to visit that screaming thing in the basement of the amusement park. She does not want me here. I wish I could find a way to save her.

For as long as I leave my save file intact, she is still locked away in that basement theater. I am keeping her alive. Breathing. Screaming.

“Beautiful,” she cries, for the hundredth time. “Beautiful. I must become beautiful.”

If only.

That first interpretation of how Nier: Automata deals with gender, in which we give it the benefit of the doubt, and read feminist ideas into it that break down the gender binary seems to me to be the most useful, and meaningful. Beyond use, or meaning, there’s something else about it though. In terms of how we relate to the piece, understanding it this way seems richer to me. In terms of how we experience the game, I think it only makes it more powerful, more rich, more haunting.