(This Cannot Continue.)

For Nier/Taroverse Fans:
(Skip this section if you’re not one of my tragic people (yet)):

This essay is primarily aimed at fans of Nier:Automata, or at least people interested in it. Or good game and sound design fans in general. 

That said, I am primarily a Homestuck blog, and my perspective will include some comparisons to Homestuck. Don’t worry, nothing you won’t be able to follow– even if you’ve literally never heard of Homestuck. In fact, you may come away from this with a new area of interest if you’ve exhausted Nier: Automata’s content and it left you hungry for a similar kind of story. 

Even if you can’t imagine reading all of the comic proper, Hiveswap is coming out soon–possibly even this month, and I’m confident that game will make an excellent entry point into the series. I’m also running a youtube channel dedicated to explaining the comic to newcomers, along with potential lore links between the game and the comic, a la Dark Souls.

This piece will include some fairly big Homestuck spoilers, but frankly I don’t think it will matter either way–like with Nier: Automata itself, even spoiling the entire story couldn’t for a second make up for the actual execution.

In any case, No matter how much you’ve interacted with either Nier or Homestuck, you should be able to follow along and enjoy my points about both in this essay just fine. 

I’m also going to avoid spoilers about Nier: Automata for the most part. However, I will be outlining the basic premise of the game and the thematic undercurrents that run through the entire story, so there are obviously some spoilers for the early game.

---

For Homestuck Fans: 
(Skip this section if you’re not one of my tragic people (yet)): 

Yeah, I know I’m in the middle of a whole series of essays on Jake and that I kind of established a strong build up for the next essay. That one’s still coming–I might publish it tonight or maybe tomorrow. I’m excited about it!

But frankly, I kind of went through some really intense and borderline traumatic stuff in my personal life the last couple days. Not to do with Dirkjake or Homestuck at all–everyone who’s read my posts has thus far been terrifically kind to me, and the criticism and feedback I’ve received has been constructive in polishing and framing the next entry. I haven’t gotten a single anon hate message or anything. Thanks for that.

Just to do with some stuff irl, and writing is how I cope, and what happened made me want to write about this right the fuck now. I don’t feel like it can wait, no matter how much I love the subject of Jake English. Given how bombastic I am in those essays, that should give you an idea how strongly I feel about this subject.

I also think that understanding my views on Nier will illuminate how I approach and deconstruct Homestuck from an analytical perspective, and at the very least help you contextualize my ongoing writing on the comic. So this is relevant in the long term anyway, I’m just kind of chagrined I’m essentially pulling an analysis series intermission here. Fucking RIP, I have become my own comedy.

---

OK, so all that stuff out of the way: This essay will be split into four sub-sections, following a naming convention you should be able to recognize pretty quickly. 

I want to talk about the main antagonists in Nier: Automata: 

The Machines, and why they’re currently my favorite antagonists in any video game ever. 

Androids: Data for the uninitiated.

(This Cannot Continue.)

Nier: Automata is the latest entry in what is obscurely understood as the Drakengard-Nier franchise– A series of action RPG Square-Enix games.

Like Homestuck’s Andrew Hussie, most of the Taroverse saga (Drakengard 2 can stay in its corner) was conceptualized and directed by a notable Auteur figure: Yoko Taro- from whom the franchise gets its name. That’s not to say he’s solely responsible for the quality of his games, but simply that this is the reputation he’s earned in the fan community. 

The reason I bring these auteurs up at all is that they both seem concerned with very similar ideas, leading to some peculiar similarities between their works. By bringing up the similarities between them, I feel I can better get at the core of what each series has to offer, and hopefully enticing fans of the one to consider the other.  

Both series include explorations on the nature of existing as part of the Multiverse, along with multiple and sequential apocalyptic scenarios (both stories span over thousands if not millions of years and several civilizations). 
They both have questions to ask about the human condition, the nature of power and relationships, and humanity’s relationship with both reality and God. 

If I had to describe my opinion on their philosophical differences in a paragraph, here’s what I’d say: Homestuck explores the concept of the multiverse while presenting a path for how to reach Heaven. The Taroverse explores how it can be used to imagine an endless, cyclical Hell.

If you’re not averse to spoilers or watching some pretty disturbing and depressing stuff and you want to see a fantastic case for this reading of the Taroverse, I suggest watching @pixievalkyrie ’s excellent breakdown of the entire franchise’s history. Fair warning: Trigger warnings for pretty much every kind of horrible abuse and degradation of life imaginable. 

If you want to see my case backed up further for Homestuck, well– there’s no earthly way to break Homestuck into smaller chunks like the Taroverse allows for, so I suppose you’ll just have to stay tuned to my work and read the comic yourself in the meantime. But Tex Talks does a very good job of explaining the nature of Homestuck’s setting in this video, and I think you’ll find similarities. 

Now we can finally get to talking about the damn game. 

---

Aliens: The Shape of the Enemy.

(This cannot continue.)

The premise of the game is as follows: After surviving about four distinct apocalyptic events and/or wars, thousands of years in the future, Earth faces an alien invasion. The invasion is successful and drives what’s left of humanity off the planet and onto the Moon. 

The aliens do not fight themselves, however– instead preferring to build a distinct industry of robotic weapons to fight their war for them: The Machines, our antagonists.

In response to the threat, humanity builds autonomous weapons of their own.
Our Protagonists: The Androids. The three primary androids in our story are two combat androids, codenamed 2B and A2, and one scanner/support Android codenamed 9S. Here we see 2B, 9S, and A2–from top left to bottom right.

What’s immediately noticeable is how different Androids and Machines are. 

Androids look and feel, for all intents and purposes, perfectly human. They talk fluently, consider complex problems, and clearly care for each other. They are expressly ordered not to show emotions, but they demonstrably have them anyway. 

Machines, by comparison, look like crude imitations of people, toy-like and expressionless. Their voices are synthesized and robotic, their intonations and accents alien, making it difficult to discern emotion. Machines look mass-produced and cheaply customizable, with a variety of modifications pasted onto a crude and simple base design to fill out enemy types.

Androids are also ridiculously more competent and functional. This is a hack n’ slash game, and the Machines are direct analogs to, say, Heartless from Kingdom Hearts. 

During gameplay, you’ll mow them down by the hundreds practically effortlessly, and though there are some bigger and tougher variants, most of them come across as borderline pathetic in their attempts to fight.

But both kinds of robots share a few similarities, one of which is this: 

They are both connected to Post-Singularity Server networks that give them orders on how to fight their enemy. 

For both Machines and Androids, these supercomputers are the structures actually calling the shots–they’re the sources of the series of orders that lead to a war that seems to span anywhere from centuries to millennia. 

Neither Androids or Machines are calling the shots. But Androids have a design that makes it easy for them to signal feelings and complex internal realities, and Machines are designed to look very easy to dehumanize. 

And this is a Taroverse game, so of course this depressing as hell setup is only the beginning of a long fall down. 

---

Machines: Sounds that mean nothing. 

(This cannot continue.)

Early into the game, 2B and 9S begin to note more and more machines behaving erratically. More and more machines become non-aggressive, staring blankly into space or beginning to ramble about random subjects, wandering the land and modifying themselves based on their environments.

As a player, Your orders are clear: Machines are to be eliminated. These are also the orders of 2B and 9S, and the game has you continue carrying them out mostly unquestioned except through these little niblets of bizarre behavior from the machines. It doesn’t matter anyway–they’re the enemy, and you have to fight to win. 

This dynamic comes to its first climax in what will surely become one of the game’s most memorable scenes. 2B and 9S find their way to a small enclave of machines minding their own business, and what they find staggers their imaginations:

These robots are non-hostile. They’re rocking cradles while repeating “Child. Child.” Bumping into each other in suggestive ways while repeating “Love. Love.” and “Together. Forever.” All in those monotone, synthesized voices. Sounding so empty and wrong. 

9S forms an interesting response to this. He says: “Don’t listen to them, 2B. They don’t have any feelings. They’re just imitating human speech.” 

And it’s easy to come to that conclusion, right? It’s not like they emote. It’s not like they’re really able to. Essentially, 9S considers the Machines a threat, first and foremost–so when they act in a way that might engender empathy, he assumes it’s a trick or a ploy–an attempt to win the Androids over in order to hurt them. 

It’s deceitful, but it’s also worse than that. It’s deceit by sheer virtue of it’s premise: Machines cannot possibly say something indicating emotions like love, desire, or care because Machines are not real beings. They aren’t people.

They’re tools and weapons and puppets to a supercomputer’s Agenda– not autonomous entities who think and feel for themselves, at least as far as he’s concerned. That’s what he was taught by his intelligence server, and that server is really the only source of information in his life. It’s natural to rely on it. 

Still, the machines don’t react to your presence and there’s nowhere to go. The only way forward is through violence. And once you provide it, they answer, with a lone Machine rising up and declaring: 

I’ll get you for this. 

As the fight continues, more and more machines make odd statements as they throw themselves at our protagonists, who demolish them by the dozens. Statements like: I love you! Kill! and Hatred! Pain! The robots suggest they feel what you’re doing. That they know what’s happening to them. 

Again, this war has gone on forever, and you–as the Androids–are almost absurdly more powerful than they are. 2B executes machines by the dozens constantly, across every corner of the world she can reach them in. The Machines surely know this as they watch their community die on her sword, one after another. They can likely feel exactly how weak they are. 

But the voices that deliver their pain to the player remain stilted and alien–difficult to recognize. As the battle rises to it’s conclusion, however, one machine voices a thought that catches on. A short, clipped statement every machine can get behind. A meme. 

This Cannot Continue. The machines repeat it faster and faster, uniting under a common rallying cry. This tension builds and builds until suddenly, the Machines experience some sort of breakdown, straight up throwing a collective tantrum in (seemingly pantomime) desperation and repeating the words so fast and so often it barely sounds like a recognizable statement and sounds pure like pure cacophony.

Looking at this screenshot might convey some of the effect, but listening to the noise they’re collectively making is really something else. I’d link to the scene, but I don’t want to spoil what they do next. All I’ll say is that once they all gather around this common, desperate thought, they take action. When they do, the music shifts…

And the game does something I’ve never seen before.

[Please Listen]

Here’s another area where Nier: Automata is similar to Homestuck. Both properties are downright famous for their use of leitmotif and attaching particular meanings to different musical motifs. (The developer of Undertale, Toby Fox, got his start as a Homestuck musician.)

But even in this sense, what Nier: Automata pulls off is uniquely powerful. This song uses everything about itself to inform and flesh out the themes of the game. Once the robots do what they do next, we get an new rendition of the game’s main battle theme. A battle theme titled as Birth of a Wish. 

Right from the title, the song is telling us something. Birth of a Wish (This cannot Continue) qualifies the robot’s collective statement as a wish, a desire. A wish for mercy? For deliverance? For justice, or peace? It’s hard to know. Probably all of the above. 

And the song itself tricks the player. Or at least, it tricked me. I should mention that Nier does one thing that Homestuck only really dabbled in: Vocal work. Specifically, vocal work in a made up language– @pixievalkyrie again comes to my rescue with an excellent breakdown of Emi Evan’s downright staggering artistic achievement in her creation of a composite chaos language derived from most of the major languages on Earth. 

Emi’s music is one of the major reasons I love this franchise, which is to say that when I first listened to this song, I did so actively hoping its vocal works wouldn’t make sense to me. 

And I got what I wanted! The vocals, as usual, were smooth and fascinating but seemingly meaningless enough that I could use the music as a backdrop for my writing–I’ve been listening to this track pretty much nonstop for the last couple of weeks. 

Which made it downright chilling when I realized, quite abruptly, that I was wrong. I have no idea if you noticed while listening to it or not–I genuinely don’t know if I’m an outlier here (pls send me asks with your experience!). But if you didn’t, then listen again: Most of the vocals for this song are written in plain English. 

They consist of three words: This cannot continue. 

The voices of the robots become part of the song. And the song itself is structured such that it informs the nature of their plight. The voices of the robots are barely musical–they are blank statements stated in synthesized monotone, hard to draw sentiment from. 

But they are persistent, barging into the song as forcefully as they possibly can for as long as they can. Their voices don’t rest or stop willingly, seeming as though they’re almost forming a sort of counterbeat to the song’s main line. And when they stop, it is always because they are cut off, shut down and out of the song by the force of the Instruments. 

Which is fitting, because instruments are what deny them in the game, too–after all, the Androids are simply tools. To the humans, to their server, and to you. 

The experience of listening to them goes something like:
This cannot continue this cannot continue this cannot continue this cannot– Over and over again, until the song inevitably drowns them for its climaxes, only for their voices to return once again. 

It’s a marvel of musical storytelling. But what makes it a diamond is what happens next. Later into the game, you come into contact with a village of Machines waving the white flag of surrender. 

These machines inform the androids that they have disconnected from the information network, as have been many other groups of machines across the world. This is the cause for their erratic behavior–these machines now wish only to learn about the world and themselves and live in peace. 

The music for this village is fundamentally different, to go with the information we gain:

[^Please Listen^]

Here the game tips it’s hand for good. I’m genuinely not sure what language this is in, or if it has actual lyrics–but it doesn’t matter. The vocal work is so stellar that the sentiment and meaning are carried in the simple tone of the voices. Like before, the Robots sing in harmony, but they sound deeply different. 

Their voices are still synthesized, but now they suggest an almost melancholy and gentle inquisitiveness. They sound so similar to the childlike voices that actually emote that the two distinct voice tracks flow into each other, rather can harshly contrasting like (This cannot continue)’s voices do. 

The sentiment conveyed is clear, even though in this case the Machines don’t seem to be speaking any language I understand. These are real beings. 

These are real people. These are just a bunch of kids. 

This is only the beginning of the Nier: Automata experience, and it’ll go on to explore so many more concepts that I don’t feel bad about spoiling it. It would be literally impossible for you to guess what happens next, and this isn’t even a quarter into what the game as a whole has to offer. 

But this is where we get off the train of Nier’s plot and into what the game is trying to tell us. There are only two more relevant pieces of information from the story left for me to spoil. After that, I will be discussing only the message the game is trying to send philosophically, without leaning on any more of the story. 

These are two more similarities between Machines and Androids:

1) Machines and Androids are built from the same materials.

2) Machines and Androids both consider their creators their Gods.

As well they should. Because once humans transgress the boundary of creating sentient life, that is what they will have become. And that is not just a possibility. It is an imminent reality of our future, which is coming sooner than you think. Which is why Nier: Automata is more than just a profoundly existential, deeply enjoyable work of art. 

Nier: Automata is a warning.

---

Humans: Become as Gods.

(This cannot Continue.)

[^Suggested listening^]

The leading scientists and experts of our planet pretty much agree that the Singularity is not just inevitable, but coming fast. The point when the machines we create become advanced enough to recognize and modify themselves, thus beginning a process of autonomous self-improvement that will far outspeed even the increasingly staggering rate of progress we humans are capable of, is coming.

Many of the most successful and scientific minds in our generation have issued dire warnings about AI. Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk–these are not uninformed people prone to spreading fantasy. I know this sounds like sci-fi drama, but it’s just a fact of life–what’s about to happen is real, and serious people are taking it very seriously. 

We can already reform the very shape of our planet. We can already extend our own lives and perform fucking magic like creating warmth when the world is cold, drawing water from nowhere as soon as we want it, and talk to literally anyone anywhere on the planet because we are all interconnected through a massive, sprawling, infinite plane of ideas and concepts we forced into reality–a composite experience containing all of our minds.

Once we have created life that can evolve without us, that is as aware of the world as we are–then we will really be as good as Gods. And when it happens, it will not save us from ourselves. It won’t fix the world for us.

If we are not mature enough to handle it, if we cannot evolve to the responsibility of our power, then it will without a doubt destroy us as a species. And it will destroy us because of our ability to dehumanize and abuse each other.

We humans have more in common with Androids and Machines than one would initially think. In fact, we have one unnervingly real similarity with both of them:

We have intelligence superstructures that inform how we think about reality and other people, too. You’re reading this on one. This is true whether you’re on Tumblr, Reddit, or wherever else this ends up. 

In this time of intense political division, there two main internets: The Left and The Right. The internet is a marvelous place where we can all talk to each other and transmit ideas, sure. But like with the servers providing information to both Androids and Machines, it’s also where a lot of people get their orders.

But not everyone. Obviously, like in Nier: Automata, the reality is more complicated than that. I just wonder if we will realize that long enough to look at what our world has become and fix it. 

There are people in control of my country right now that view me and the people I love as Machines were viewed by Androids. Our voices are wrong. The shapes and colors of our bodies are unnatural and awkward. The intonations and behaviors we use are strange and eerie to them, and the way we love and wish to present ourselves is incorrect to them.

And so when we say we are being hurt it does not matter.
We are not real. We cannot say real things. 
It is all in service to a greater Agenda. 

The horror of the Machines, and the reason they are important characters, is not because of the threat they pose to the characters or some intrinsic Wrongness they reveal about the nature of life or humans. 

The horror of the Machines is how easy it is to ignore the fact that they feel horror. The horror of the Machines is how easy it is to make them look horrible. The horror of the Machines is that they can speak and speak but the Androids may never choose to listen. 

The horror of the Machines is that they are people, and we have stolen that from them. And if we continue to regard other humans the way we regard the Machines in our own world, once we have achieved Godhood, we will inevitably steal it from each other. 

Nier: Automata’s message is clear:

---

Gods: This cannot continue. 

Very soon in the course of human history, we are going to be faced with a Choice. It is a Choice we will have to make every moment, every instant, for the rest of our lives. It is a Choice we are already making, but which many of us still have the luxury to ignore. Although not for much longer.

We must face this choice, both as a Collective and as Individuals. But the choice of each individual must inevitably come first, because how can we decide how to move forward as a species if we can’t even talk and agree about it? 

What kind of Gods are we going to be? Are we going to be like the Humans and Aliens in Automata? This is a Yoko Taro game, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you-you won’t like how they end up. 

Personally, I have a suggestion. 

I would like us to be more like Gods from Homestuck.

I like the world they build a lot better.

---

You can find my writing here, on this blog. You can also find some of my writing on games on ZEAL, and find my series aiming to make Homestuck accessible to non-fans on my youtube channel.

If you like my writing and would like to support me in the endeavor of creating more of it, it would also seriously help me out if you pledged to my Patreon. I’ll be more than satisfied if my words move you enough to simply choose to share them with others, though.  

Doing so will also get you access to my Discord server, where I’m more than willing to answer questions about Homestuck and Hiveswap whether you’re a long time fan or just getting into them for the first time.

I’ll still answer questions if you just send me an ask on Tumblr, but I’m basically always busy with writing or helping to run the communities I am a part of, so answering questions can’t be my top priority at the moment. I’ll get around to all asks, but it might take time. 

Regardless, if you made it this far I am deeply, deeply grateful. More grateful than I think I can express in mere words. I hope my words change something for someone, somewhere. I hope my words change something for me.

Because this cannot continue.

See you again soon, everyone. 

Until then, keep rising.