Devon says that he has no idea how I can do 5 things at once. I’ll be farming for items on Nier while guzzling coffee and listening to the audiobook version of 1984 on Youtube. When I want to turn my brain off and plug into a wonderful world of pleasant static I always turn to mindless video game sidequests while listening to a book that I have read a million times. It is the worst kind of self-indulgent time-wasting and all those other hyphenated shameful things.
Funny story, I have revisited the George Orwellian totalitarian dystopia at least 5 times now since I first discovered the audiobook posted to Youtube when I was in college. I feel like I owe it to George Orwell and to Winston Smith and myself to never forget about Big Brother and the lives of Julia and Winston. I’m afraid of forgetting about their tragic deaths and equally tragic lives.
I think it’s the same reason for why I keep playing Yoko Taro’s games recently. I continue to pump out fanart of the characters on a weekly basis because I’m so afraid of their sad lives disappearing into one of my deepest brain pockets, where the memory will gather dust and lose its importance. In a few months from now, I will have recovered from this obsession with the works of Yoko Taro and I’ll have forgotten all about the story of 2B’s death and 9S’s slow psychological deterioration. The way I keep clinging to these characters and their memory is really creepily reminiscent of the themes in the game itself. The second protagonist, a young android named 9S spends the third half of the game slowly going mad because he’s terrified of losing the precious memories of the time he spent with 2B. Those times they spent together were like memories of pure light. Yet, memories are disposed of and replaced so easily in the post-apocalyptic world of androids. Precious memories of the ones they love are what give their lives meaning and that meaning is taken away easily.
Part of me resents this type of emotionally masochistic storytelling because I see that this kind of reaction is exactly what Yoko Taro was going for. He targets every sensitive nerve, makes you empathize deeply with injured and disenfranchised characters and then makes them suffer more. The poorest and most abused characters in his stories always wind up the worse at the end. He toys with the idea of throwing them a rope to climb out of the hole their in, but when they manage to reach the top they come to discover that that hole was actually at the bottom of a deeper hole.
I think I pulled a brain muscle working out that metaphor and it probably shows.
ANYWAY! I should make up for it with a BARRAGE OF NIER AUTOMATA FANART.
Alana Tedmon Illustration 