NieR hits different now
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Spoilers for the NieR series follows, if you
haven't played them.

So the NieR games are about the end of the world
happening again and again and the ways life
keeps going through it.

The first end-times in NieR is the black scrawl,
a disease that essentially wipes out
humanity. The second end-times is the gestalt
project, which was an attempt for buying
humanity time to cure the disease but ultimately
fails by creating two new forms of humanity one
of which becomes monstrous and the other still
vulnerable to the black scrawl. The third
end-times in Automata is, of course, the
slaughter of the YoRHa who---as is explained in
the *actual* twist of Automata---are what's left
of humanity: human souls in bio-mechanical
bodies that are immune to the black scrawl.

The point of these games, in a sense, is that
life keeps going after the world ends again and
again and again. Every time life should be
completely wiped out there's some remnant that
lives on and continues, new forms of life
evolving and developing sentience alongside the
human race's continued adaptation to a world
that falls apart every few thousand years.

So, yeah, why am I recapping all of this? I'm
saying that it all fucking hits different in
year three of the pandemic. It's not even just
the literal nature of the games being about a
deadly disease it's just the general feeling of
being mid-collapse, like you're just going on
with life while it's obvious that everything is
falling apart around you.

One of the only other works of fiction that
captured this feeling was another jrpg: Persona
3, in its last few months of plot. There's a lot
of subtle and not-so-subtle things they did in
that game to capture the feeling that you're
living in a city that's just decided to give the
fuck up and accept the end of the world.

That's how I keep feeling, though. I feel like
I'm living through a slow motion collapse while
everyone is too worn down to do anything other
than just keep going with their everyday
life. And it's not just covid it's everything:
the rising fascist movements all over the west,
the further centralization of power and capital
into the hands of a few small companies who keep
merging into bigger giants, the ways it feels
like we're losing more self-determination by the
year.

It feels like we're just being dragged along
towards the cliff's edge.