written 22 March 2025
wait wait hold on nier automata is really cool lore :0. Here's a really nice summary of it in a reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/nier/comments/fr1nqv/comment/fltcpot/.
occurred to me I might want to back up that reddit post. it'll be below.
they also have a really neat (spoiler) "fuck it, soul linked plague" gimmick that a really good webcomic, stand still stay silent uses.
SOMA is also really cool :0
the nier thing:
NieR Gestalt spoilers follow:
Humans were going to go extinct due to a pandemic called White Chlorination Syndrome. In order to escape this, they developed a way of extracting the human soul from its physical form - called a Gestalt. They then developed Replicants that, through the Replicant System, would be 100% biologically identical to humans and continuously reborn by gathering data from the Gestalts. The plan was that after WCS had been eliminated, the Gestalts would reunite with their respective Replicants and become fully human again, thus saving the human race.
Androids were developed before and alongside the Gestalt project to oversee the Replicants during the Gestalt project.
Emil was originally a human child before the Gestalt Project went into full swing. He was part of a series of bio-weaponry experiments with the aim of fusing humans and magic to combat Legion (mindless thralls who had succumbed to WCS). The experiment resulted in his sister becoming the "ultimate weapon" and him gaining the ability of petrification in order to stop her after she went insane from losing her humanity. In NieR Gestalt, Emil is, speculatively, the last full "human" in existence even though the experiments had made him ageless and magic. Later he absorbs his sister's essence and becomes the Ultimate Weapon himself.
In the end of NieR Gestalt, all of the Gestalts are doomed to perish from Relapse (going unstable) when Replicant NieR kills Gestalt NieR, because Gestalt NieR's Maso (Magic) was slowly "repairing" faltering Gestalts. With the Gestalts gone, the Replicants also begin to die out because the Replicant System doesnt work without Gestalts and Replicants cant reproduce normally. Humans go fully extinct.
Years pass and the only intelligent beings on earth are Emil and Androids. Then aliens invade and Emil clones himself a bunch to create an army to fight them off. The Emil in NieR Automata is one of these clones, although the original Emil is supposedly still alive somewhere.
Project YorHa was created by androids who had ultimately lost all purpose in life after humanity was doomed.
The Machines were created by the aliens to fight the Androids and the Emils. Sapience was incepted into Machines (then called Machine Lifeforms) by a very old military robot nicknamed "Beepy" who developed sentience through unique social intereaction followed by an extremely long period of time in which his logic circuits could develop and process complex variable combinations. He then merged that processing power with every machine in an abandoned Military Compound, thus creating the first Machine Lifeform. Beepy then sent out a signal to all the mindless fighting machines, demanding that they should simply "live." Eventually this got through to them and they began developing their own complex logic and came to know sentience and "free will"