NieR, Pascal, assisted suicide and false choices

The following piece will spoil the everliving shit out of key scenes of NieR: Automata. It also discusses suicide assisted or not, eugenics, and systemic ableism.

Thanks to Rob Haines for feedback on this piece and confirming I was going somewhere interesting.

This one needs a lot of context

Let's set the stage first. A streamer I like, Josh of Intelligame, recently made his way through the last stretch of NieR: Automata (shortened to NieR further down). The entire pitch of Intelligame is thinking through games in-depth, especially narrative ones, notably the ways in which they resonate with real-world issues. NieR is an obvious candidate: it wears its influences on its sleeve and tells you, explicitely, repeatedly, that you should think very hard about the story and themes you are being presented with.

While I have not played NieR myself, this is the third full playthrough I have been vicariously enjoying over the years, and so my own thoughts are starting to take some kind of structure. For the purposes of this specific essay, I want to focus on one especially difficult scene (seriously, I am not kidding about those content warnings).

Pascal is a pacifist machine who has founded a village of like-minded robots, disconnected from the collective consciousness network and swearing off the endless war against androids. He is introduced fairly early into the game and quickly becomes a trusted, friendly figure you have likely become extremely fond of. He's hard to hate! For plot reasons we will not get into, the entirety of the village eventually gets slaughtered in as gruesome a manner as possible, much of it by your own hands.

Pascal, however, escapes with a gaggle of children to take refuge elsewhere. We will also not get into what being a "child" even means as a machine - all you need to know is that those characters are clearly emotionally immature, with Pascal as a pillar of their ongoing education. Pascal himself renounces his pacifist ways as the makeshift shelter gets swarmed by wave after wave of hostile machines in one of the most epic fights that NieR has put you through yet. Eventually, the battle is won - but victory is short-lived. All the children are found dead, having pierced their own cores and therefore ended their lives in a permanent manner.

All of this is mere table setting for what happens next and actually interests us today. Seeing this tragedy, Pascal blames himself. He is the one who taught the children about fear, in an attempt to keep them safe. According to his own words, all of this is his fault and unbearable: "I cannot live with this heartbreak inside me". He asks you to wipe his memories, or, failing that, to kill him. A third option - not especially well-hidden - is to walk away, leaving him to his despair.

It must be noted that the game makes it clear relatively early that losing your memories is the same as dying. Confronted with the upcoming rebirth-from-old-backup of an android friend, a character says: "You'll lose you. The you that exists at this very moment." The choice Pascal gives you is to kill him, or to kill him.

False choices

There is no other option. No other affordance, no other verb. Kill, kill differently, or walk away. No option to sit with Pascal a while, to let the worst of it pass together. This is a common theme in games - Spec Ops: The Line is especially well-known for tackling this topic of false player agency. It is coherent with the character you are playing at the time, A2, being especially ill-equipped to support someone going through despair, let alone a suicidal crisis. A2's own answer to anguish has been committing mass-murder of machines, after all. The scene is superbly written and gets its depressing point across very effectively.

I gave you game context, but now we need to add real-life context. Assisted suicide, the term I will use for medically assisted voluntary end-of-life procedures, is currently a hotly debated topic in several places. MAiD in Canada has been steadily expanding, with leading questions crawling into assesments. The UK is jumping on the bandwagon. France has been discussing it for years and is now putting it on the agenda. It is easy to see it as an essential human right, a vital option to choose to go on your own terms.

I personally used to believe this - until I saw Flavia Dzodan, also known as redlightvoices state a simple point: it should not be easier to die than to live. In an unfair society, assisted suicide is a false choice. Do note that for the purposes of this discussion I will be ignoring the topic of clearly-defined terminal physical illness - even though the blurring of that definition is a key mechanism, it would probably triple the length of this piece.

This is where's Pascal's end hits hard. Pascal does not have to die, but the game suggests that all you get to decide is how he dies. Pascal only asks to die because living has become unbearable. And the game gives you no option to help him live: at best, it lets you walk away and refuse to do the deed yourself. Does the moment pass, after you leave? Does Pascal find a way, however temporary, to go on? Or does he follow the path we saw other machines take in this very location, throwing himself into molten steel and putting a swift end to it all? What happens next? We do not get to find out. This is, so we're clear, excellent writing, because this is a videogame and not real life.

We are by now well into the fifth year of a worldwide, disabling, mismanaged pandemic that is leaving many people more sick and desperate than they used to be. Late-stage capitalism, in what I hope are its death throes, makes it ever more difficult to house and feed and care for ourselves, especially if we are marginalized on any axis. Welfare systems and social nets are being systematically dismantled everywhere. Wars that never truly stopped are claiming ever more numerous lives and, when blasted non-stop into our eyes by news media and social networks, freeze us into inaction from the sheer constant stress.

In that context, can assisted suicide be anything resembling a free choice? The Futurama Suicide Booth was supposed to be caricature. Yet everywhere, disabled people are sounding the alarm. In the UK, the notoriously awful benefits scheme was already killing people by the thousands even before covid. France is speaking of the "right to a dignified death" even though it does not care to give anyone a dignified life. Jolanda Fun's recent death in the Netherlands is an especially egregious recent example of where such laws lead.

The affordances for life are disappearing. The affordance for death is being made ever easier to use.

I refuse all of these options. I refuse to answer the question asked, I refuse to walk away. Let me sit with Pascal, for but a moment, until the crisis has passed. Let me help. Let him live. Let's all help our friends who sometimes wanna die maybe not die.