Mr. Flunchy posted:

They're pretty much wearing Nazi helmets dude

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

Eh, the helmet in question is the German-manufactured Stahlhelm, which literally just means "steel helmet" and was used from 1916 all the way to 1992 when it was replaced (in Germany) with more modern kevlar-based helmets. It was also used by China, Austria, Hungary, Finland, and various South American and Balkan nations. And still is today! It's just a fairly generic steel helmet.

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

If you want to point to the weird saluting and genocidal attitude towards the machine lifeforms, go right ahead, but it's really fuckin' weird to point to the generic steel helmet the assault troops wear alongside their miniskirts and high-heel combat armor as the one thing that seals the deal and tips the scale on the current android fashion trend towards "full fascist" - especially when that steel helmet was in use for some 30 years before nazis were even a thing and in nations like China that don't give a poo poo about it in the first place.

Chokes McGee posted:

Sir this is the YoRHa mess hall, HR is down the corridor to the left

Mr. Flunchy posted:

Yeah I'm sure this militant, racist, authoritarian organisation composed of perfect Aryans

Nina posted:

If you wanna find allegory in there YoRHa is more like a religious paramilitary but you really can’t assign anything directly.

Allegories are overrated

Kavak posted:

Somebody told me to wait until Route B to ask for this to be translated, so now that it's done:

Kavak posted:

Somebody told me to wait until Route B to ask for this to be translated, so now that it's done:

Kavak posted:

jyrque posted:

Here's hoping Taro has more stage plays in mind: I'd love a Nier project from machines' perspective.

jyrque posted:

Here's hoping Taro has more stage plays in mind: I'd love a Nier project from machines' perspective.

Mazerunner posted:

I was also thinking that machine-9S went... somewhere, I dunno, and this 9S we're playing is a fresh unit, which is why 21O is treating him with kid gloves. No comment on whether I was right or not, that's just what I was thinking while playing through.

Josuke Higashikata posted:

There was a new stage play announced the other day, which may be a new version of the original but japanese 2B is playing A2 in it.

I think there's a play called YoRHa Boys being made too.
Either way, there's more stage play things happening.

ZiegeDame posted:

The art of the machine lifeform stage play has already been perfected with Romeos and Juliets.

Stephen9001 posted:

You know, this raises the question, why did she stop being a cold professional and transition into mom/mumness? Did she feel so proud of 9S after he helped take out the last major networker operator (Eve) that she decided to be friendlier or what?

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

Oh poo poo, I'm late to ending B. Minor effortpost coming up.

So I mentioned earlier that the Japanese version of the ending song is also an existentialist reference. It's a reference to Gabriel Marcel, mid-20th century French existentialist who coined the term "le monde cassé" - the broken world. Basically, the idea is that the world is "broken", in the sense that it is missing something important and as a result full of crisis and suffering. Marcel is a staunch Christian and so his answer is that what's missing is the transcendental experience of God and therefore reflection and contemplation is the answer to mankind finding itself in this broken world.

It sounds stretching to think of this as a deliberate reference, but this game is laden head to toe with references to existentialism and existentialist philosophers, so I think it is deliberate. Heck, it's arguably the central theme of the entire game up to this point. Nietzsche famously wrote "God is dead". In particular, what he wrote was:


What it's widely understood that meant is that humanity's understanding of the nature has progressed to such a point that the concept of God no longer satisfyingly explains the place of humanity in the world. Furthermore, the rejection of God also results in the inevitable rejection of the morality dictated by religion and even the concept of absolute morality. Nietzsche was worried that humanity thus unmoored from conceptions of absolute morality might succumb to nihilism, believing that without absolute morality there cannot be morality at all and that we are all unconquerably doomed to flounder meaninglessly until our equally meaningless deaths. To be clear, Nietzsche didn't view atheism as incorrect, but he felt strongly that something needed to replace the idea of religious morality, not simply tear it down.

The game so far has shown us two reflections of this struggle. To the androids, humanity was God; to the machine lifeforms, the aliens were God. Their entire existence, their very purpose, circled around their missions to protect or destroy humanity. Well, both their Gods are dead. The machine lifeforms killed theirs; the androids simply failed to keep theirs from dying. Thus unmoored from absolute morality, the two groups basically spend the entire game (and much of the history immediately preceding it) grappling with what it means to live in a world without Gods.

The androids chose to erect an edifice - the YoRHA Project - around their dead Gods and pretend like they were not dead. They're clinging to the absolute morality that no longer exists; Jean-Paul Sartre would have called this "bad faith". The machine lifeforms react in varied ways. Some indeed succumb to nihilism, like the "wise machines" we saw earlier. Others seem happy to be liberated from their purpose and spend endless days in the theme park having fun. At least they found a purpose of their own, which is great; but then there's the opera robot who is practically taken straight the writings of Sartre and Beauvoir as a woman defining herself only through her interaction with males (in this case, suitably, the robot Jean-Paul) and thus living in bad faith. And then there's the cult robots who seem to have taken that Nietzsche quote up there literally and seek to become as gods...

Theres more to come in the next two endings, though...

Um, so quickly back to the song. I greatly prefer the Japanese version to the English one, because the lyrics are so dang much more emotional and really get more into the existentialist core of this game. The singer grapples with the broken world, devoid of purpose, but ends up declaring that even though it's all meaningless, all they wish for is more time to make what they can of it together with the ones they love. I really like it.

Hedningen posted:

Seeing as there was philosopher chat earlier, I feel like the whole Robot Death Cult was an interesting take on Kierkegaardian philosophy. To briefly paraphrase, you can tie his philosophy into the broad field of Christian Existentialism, which unites with Hyper Crab Tank's point about existential philosophy playing a part in the themes of this game.

However, there's some neat stuff to unpack that really makes the entire Factory Cult trip even more entertaining in a few ways. First off, a major theme in his early writing is the hierarchical approaches to life and morality: the three levels of fulfillment are aesthetic, ethical, and faith. He (obviously) places faith as the highest form, but the specific argument is that faith is an irrational, absurd (in the sense of "outside of understanding" rather than "funny") relationship to a power greater than the self that defines the relational object without the object (in this case machines) defining the greater power.

In this case, we get a pretty neat exploration of that in the sense that the original "greater power" could be the network itself - the connected Machines are defined by their relationship and act outside of aesthetic or ethical boundaries from our viewpoint AND from the viewpoint of non-network machines, as they are fulfilled in a Kierkegaardian sense by sublimating themselves to the will of a higher power. I can't recall if the Factory Machines are off-network (as I'm just following Id's lp), but if they are, then the whole "Kierkegaard cult" is a pretty neat thing - cut off from the affirming faith, they are taking a route where they are beyond aesthetics (machines not interested in the physical world) and entered the ethics phase while striving for the next phase, faith. As they are cut off from the higher power of the network, their exploration of faith beyond ethics naturally enters the absurd, in that they reject ethics in favor of a counter-behavior via robot murder to become as gods - in this case, because the primary directive of the network's faith can be read as "wage war", they fulfill the last bit by doing what they believe to be the ultimate command of the network - dying for it. By changing the relationship into one where they "become as gods" (i.e. cause Stubbie death for a higher, inscrutable purpose), they are filling in the absurdity of Kierkegaardian faith and choosing to act entirely counter to self-interest by dying.

It's also a fun thing that works on the nature of faith as absurd in the conventional definition - the cult buildup to Kierkegaard's head unceremoniously falling off is absurd in the sense that it's unexpected and is counter to the expectation that you will fight the big philosopher-named guy with the creepy cult.

However! If we want to read more into Yoko Taro stuff than anyone wants to, it reinforces Kierkegaardian themes even more - in his writings, he was a skilled user of all forms of irony: useful here is dramatic irony, wherein the reader/observer knows more than the characters. In this case, we're savvy: we know that religions tend to go horribly bad in everything he writes, so it's a foregone conclusion that this will go bad to the viewer, but the characters lack this knowledge and go in with the sense that things might be good.

In short: the setup is funny and surprisingly apropos if you give a poo poo about Danish philosophers, I have clearly wasted my life by writing about the intersection of video games and philosophy, and I will be genuinely surprised if anyone bothers to read this incredibly stupid, rough examination of things.

LordAba posted:

You guys are missing the biggest philosophical point: Is 2B still 2B if we can't see her butt?

Really Pants posted:

21O is out for repairs and 1000O1000 was the only available replacement

Kavak posted:

I don't get it.

Sage Grimm posted:

Also before we fall off and miss this chance, may 21O bless this page!

Sindai posted:

Now I wonder what 42O is like.

Sindai posted:

Now I wonder what 42O is like.

McDragon posted:

there used to be a 404B but nobody could find her

Van Kraken posted:

Booooooooo_{oooooooooooooooooo!}

Mr. Flunchy posted:

They're pretty much wearing Nazi helmets dude