From my upbringing, as a woman, I had a mix of both sides of the situation of both nature and nurture. I was raised with two brothers but had traditional adults in my life pushing back and forth. I clicked very well with things that boys are traditionally interested and still am (love Legos, cars, interested in computers and gaming), but I also met roadblocks along the way. It was common for me to get very girly things for my birthday and Christmas, not to mention the adults in my family (primarily aunts and uncles) just asking "Are you sure you like those?" It made me question myself a lot and really did whittle down my own confidence at a young age. I am glad that my brothers help encourage my interests and did things along with me (including times I wanted to try dollhouse and dress-up), and my own parents for being pretty hands off in pushing one thing or another. I am just naturally curious and always questioning, so it helped push the boundaries that kept being put in front of me as I was being railroaded. I'm now working in an engineering field, while it is mostly male dominated and it has been a tough road to get this far, I can say that it helped that I was nurtured to pursue my own goals that I wanted deep down inside. I would be remiss to say that I did feel the pressure though to keep my looks up, be presentable, at least when out in public due to the bombardment of advertisements and marketing, it is very difficult to avoid, especially when comparing yourself to others. Like Casen's daughter, I also noticed at a young age that there were things I was not really included in though, like certain sports and various activities that I would be able to do when I was younger. Especially after puberty, things got very strange as I was a lot more self conscious and well aware of how I looked to others too. I did have social groups with other girls where there would be arbitrary roadblocks set like how I should look and dress. Meanwhile, on the other end, I was kind of being shunned by the boys who would tell me "You're a girl, you're not allowed to like this" sort of think. Even if my family was willing to let me do what I wanted, I felt like society dictated how I should be. There's plenty of stories where some guys act very...aggressive when a woman is interested and capable of doing things they do (especially in automotive and still the case in certain multiplayer video games.) I don't know if it's natural for them to feel threatened or if they are raised that way, but it was like another roadblock put in front of me. It was very frustrating throughout my teens, as I did not feel like I belonged, so I reverted back to the social group and went through my phase of trying to fit in and yet still try not to be "like the other girls". Luckily for me, I did get wise and got myself into a technical institute to pursue what I wanted, and worked my butt off just to prove people wrong. It certainly wasn't easy, and being a woman in a male dominated field was (and still is) very intimidating. I have found a good balance in life now, and been happy with just dropping the traditions that can be forced upon us, whether by family or society; however, I feel like my story is the exception. I am grateful that I had support from family and some stubbornness to not follow the crowd, but I know that not everyone has the support or social structure that can really encourage their passions that I initially wanted as far as I can remember.
All of my life, up until my father's death in 2019, I have been fighting with the concept of 'becoming a woman'. My father was someone who had complete control of my family's life, due to the fact that he was the one who provided the biggest financial support, and that continued to be the case until he passed away. When we were children, me and my brother were both highly discouraged to follow anything that appealed to us on a personal level, unless it was something my father agreed with. My older brother too, was brought up in a way to 'become a man'', and even though it was certainly a traumatizing experience for him too, due to society's gender expectations of men he was able to explore himself more, and make some doors open for him. In my case though, I was only given a true chance to explore life and myself when my father lost his influence on him. I am Greek and I have lived in Greece almost all of my life, so even though I did almost everything I was blackmailed to do in order to secure a 'good' future for myself and not disappoint anyone in my family, the financial crisis became so bad when I graduated from university, that it was practically impossible to become independent in society. To give some perspective, the minimum wage would be something around 480$, and the rent for a small apartment around 350$. So no matter how much I fought and struggled to become my own person, something major would always put me down and chain me to what I should do as a woman. I was shamed so much by my parents and ex boyfriends that I was completely unwilling to cook for myself or cook for others, but how can I possibly find the will to do something like that when the picture I grew up with was my father, despite how it actually tasted, constantly criticized my mother's cooking which always resulted in my mother crying? Everything I was pushed to do was investing in an average pay job that could provide some security so I can become a mother later in my life. Every time I experimented with anything that lead me to another path in life, I was immediately discouraged and heavily shamed for even having a dream. I struggled with depression for so many years, changed so many jobs, even tried to live abroad in a 'better' country, but that oly resulted in me being sexually harassed by my roommates, or being looked down upon for being a foreigner and a woman in that country’s society. One thing that kept me going all these years, was the things that I kept very close to my heart and didn’t share with most people except my friends. The games I enjoyed playing, the music I loved listening to, mastering languages that opened up my eyes to new worlds, all the stories that were born inside my head when I wasn’t able to experience life the way I should as my own person. When I discovered this channel, I was incredibly moved by the fact that there are people out there who think, feel, and take seriously the things that aspire me so much. You guys are the first channel I ever became a patreon to! Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for us, and thank you so much for paying attention to so many nuanced things that eventually resulted in this conversation related to Simone. I haven’t been feeling confident to talk to you before, but this spoke to me on a very personal and even existential level, so I couldn’t help myself and write this very long comment. English is not my native language, so please forgive the awkwardness of my writing. I am turning 35 this year, and I still don’t know many things about who I truly am or who I aspire to be. Society screams at me for not being a mother yet, for not having a secured ‘career' yet, for not desiring to serve a man yet, etc. But it is the first time I feel truly free, and having the chance to listen to your analysis and the way it sparks conversations such as this, through art pieces I hold very dear to my heart, is incredibly healing to me. Thank you very much, I will always be extremely grateful to both of you and to all the lovely people who watch and support your channel.
I am a woman and wanted to say that you both handled the women and nature/nurture subject very well. Yes, very much nurture (or conditioning as I prefer to call it) and as parents, sadly you are unable to control your daughters' interactions with others when you are not around. Just a little about me. I am 60. I work in IT and have done since I could work. In my day, there were *no* women in IT but it never phased me. I was and still am good at it. I am proud that I managed to break through that conditioning. Keep at it Mike and Casen, peace out
I also was going to write about this! For Mike & Casen: in case you don't know, the factory was a symbol for Marx & Engels for the suppression of the working class and distracting its people (e.g. 2B and 9S) from revolting through all sorts of bureaucratic busywork, which is established by the upper pseudo-aristocratic class. I'm fuzzy on some details, but i hope this makes enough sense, why the robot is named Engels! Love your discussions 😉💪
Yep, and if I recall correctly the appeal of the communist/socialist theory was very strongly directed at, and caught by, factory workers. Which makes sense when you think about it! An office worker shuffling numbers around is deprived of the fruit of their labor in a way that's very abstract, it might not be immediately clear how their work is creating value, or how much. If you're making a _car,_ on the other hand, the end product is _very_ obvious, and so is the discrepancy between it's price and how much you and your coworkers are getting paid for making it.
Hey guys, Woman, I'm keeping this brief, I have a tendency to go with pointless purple prose haha -The role of the modern woman in 2023, having been born in 1988, feels like it's going through a change. Some good, some bad. Women have grown to be regular workers in a majority of fields. This benefits me greatly, as an information security freelancer. Womens' pay has increased immensely. I am deeply happy for these changes. However, my own mother would pressure me immensely to marry. To find a man. To settle down. To put my foolish ambitions to rest. That experience of girl/womanhood was negative, but maybe it won't be negative like that forever. But also, for reasons I'll mention at the end, I have no intent of having children, but if I were to have a daughter, I would do my absolute best to continue that trend - and if my daughter's father were not on board with that, I would have selected my child's father poorly, or made quite a poor life choice, by my own judgment. -I remember being asked by one of my guy friends when I was a teenager why I didn't have any hobbies. I did, I just kept the fact I played videogames and roleplayed on the internet secret from everybody, because for girls at the time, and even now I think, that was strange. And to be fair, it was also a fringe thing for boys at the time, but it was more acceptable for boys to be into the "weirder stuff". -Following off that, the visible change in the chest area in female puberty is mirrored by muscle growth in boys, but there's something 'strange' and 'other' societally about the breasts. Boys get in trouble for staring at them. Girls and woman know something about their body is desired and they will receive attention toward their breasts, much, much before she's ready for that sort of attention oftentimes, and then, there's the other thing that we, as a culture, do not want to talk about because it's "icky". Despite half of all humans going through the cycle of menstruation. -I run D&D and tend to portray a very dark and politics-heavy setting (I got into your guys' channel witj FF Tactics), and whenever there's a new person that joins us - man or woman doesn't matter - they often say something to the tune of "I really didnt expect it to be like that" - Some meaning good, some meaning bad, but the insinuation is they didn't expect /me/ to run things as I do. I think an aspect of that is because I'm a woman, BUT, it may not be. But I'll never really know. And that's true for a lot of things in society. "Did this interaction happen how it did because of my cultural identity as 'female'?" It's a thought that makes me glum sometimes. Amazing episode, I'm so happy you guys are finally talking about this masterpiece. You guys both talked about that touchy subject very respectfully I think, similar to the touchy subject of mental health in Senua's Sacrifice, another game I love. One thing to look up: /Tokophobia/, fear of pregnancy / motherhood. A uniquely female fear, and one that is touched on in Drakengard / Nier, as well as in Bloodborne - which the UA-camr "Honey Bat" made an excellent video-essay on, called "Visceral Femininity". Absolutely love the content, Thanks, guys!
As a woman this section of the game was so impactful. Because we are always, from a very young age, told to do certain things to attract men. We’re sold things, from a very young age, to look our best for others. We play with dolls that maybe have professions like a Doctor Barbie, but it is pretend. No one told me I could peruse anything I was interested in, I drove myself to be an artist. No one encouraged me. And honestly it goes deeper for me, as someone with ADHD. I struggled a lot in school socially and academically but I felt no support system to get me on track to do much. Life as a woman is to serve others, to be maternal, a caregiver, to have compassion even if people and life walk over us. At one point we step back and wonder if everything we’re doing is for us or it’s something society has told us to do.
Only a few minutes in but on the discussion of 9S going through the 2B diagnostics after the factory mission. It's actually a recording of what actions you took in the A playthrough. 9S said that it would be recorded and now in B it's played back exactly how you did it. So for someone like me who spent about 10 minutes going through each option to mess with 9S and hear any funny dialogue, I had to sit back and watch it all again LIKE 9S HAD TO! Oh man it really got me invested in him as the POV for playthrough B because I was in his same mindset
@@TheMilhouseExperience in fairness I wasn't having a bad time, it made me feel oddly nostalgic since I hadn't seen that dialogue in 35-40 hours or so. But I did really put that on myself
I believe when you're going through the 2B reboot as 9S, it plays the video that was recorded during this part of your 2B playthrough. So however long you waited to adjust the settings and the dialogue option you chose (in this case "Something calming about your voice"), will be exactly the same as your 2B playthrough.
I guess just to add to the conversation of women… I was very lucky growing up in that my parents wanted me to be whatever I wanted, let me pursue things, etc. However, I was also relentlessly bullied in elementary school and highschool for not being particularly feminine, for being a ~nerd, for not having boyfriends, being ugly, etc. And a lot of this did come from boys (some girls as well). I did find my people eventually, but a lot of that grade school stuff did really shape who I am, and the only “relationships” I did get into were both abusive in some fashion. And yet, as someone who has no desire to have a partner, I still have no self worth in my appearance other than if a man validates it, or is interested in me, whatever. It also really bothers me that I don’t seem to be desirable to men at all (despite not even wanting to be). It’s a pretty tangled web. So, the Simone stuff is pretty…on point for me lol. All of this need to be validated by men is also constantly blasted at women through media as well. I know men get it too, and I think it’s actually intensifying a bit, which is sad… Anyway, thanks for the discussion, and peace to the ladies in the comments.
So, Nier connection spoilers regarding the god rising from the volcano, don't read on if you aren't ready for that: . . . . . . . . . . The "god" that arose from the volcano and gave enlightenment to the machines is expounded on in the story "The Fire of Prometheus" in the Drakengard 10th anniversary book "World Inside". In the story the P-33 robot "Beepy" that was fought as the junkyard boss in Nier reflects on its life and resolves to leave earth to explore space, as it does it is attacked by the machines but seeing they are mindless automata it chooses to respond by giving them life and the ability to not do that.
I was a little disappointed they didn’t mention this. I’m pretty sure they’re aware that it’s Beepy because they talked about it in their Replicant episodes.
I think it’s pretty clear they haven’t made the connection yet, but hopefully the comments will point them in the right direction for the end of the pod Nier connections. @Resonant Arc But yeah, Beepy rises from the Volcano and finds himself in the middle of the machine war. The machines created by the Aliens attack him, and realizing they had yet to gain consciousness, Beepy connected to their network and shared his consciousness with them. This event being the catalyst for the machines gaining sentience and cutting themselves off from the network. Interesting, then, that the machines created by the Aliens gained their sentience from a machine created by humans. The androids, machines, and humans are all far more alike than they are different.
I think the point that Casen and Mike were trying to make with the honorifics is that in English, 2B is saying something like, "Stop addressing me as a superior, and just address me as a regular person." whereas in Japanese, it would read a bit closer to, "Stop addressing me as just a regular person, and address me as a friend." If not a friend, then at least two people that are much closer than strangers. Typically you only drop the honorific with people that you are quite familiar with. Small thing but, it hints at what their actual relationship is earlier on in the game. Rather than "Ma'am," which denotes respect towards a superior like -senpai or -sama, perhaps a better translation would have been "Miss," which denotes cordiality and formality, but not necessarily superiority or respect. It's tough, though, simply because even that is a word that we hardly use in English. We don't have a true equivalent.
Yeah I think I interpret it slightly different. When I hear 2B say "Don't call me ma'am" and it was translated as "Don't call me 2B san", I take that 2B is not trying to be friendly with 9S at all. Her Unit name is 2B so lets just stick that and not add any flair or attachment to it. Which is why she also refuses to call him "Nines". If they went with "Don't me 'Miss 2B'" as in "Just call me 2B" you could interpret it as 2B attempting to offer an olive branch of casualty to their relationship and I don't think she is into that. 2B at this point is a very by the book android. And they're trying to get that across that she just isn't into nicknames at all.
As a woman myself, I kind of experienced something like what Mike was talking about. I've always had an interest in learning Japanese (I even majored in it in college!), but sometimes when I talk about my learning progress with family, they're like, "yeah, but isn't it gonna be hard to settle down in a foreign country?" and "don't you want to start a family eventually?" As if all women eventually default into caregivers and wives and abandon their career. Men get to have as much kids as they want, but don't have to deal with the pressure of settling down (not speaking for all men, just my observations), I mean look at Elon Musk. The guy has 10 kids in his 50s and has shown no signs of slowing down his career ambitions. I also think that women who grow up under traditional patriarchal hierarchies (especially in religious households) have to deal with this the most as they are expected from a young age to grow up to become mothers and care for their husbands and homes. They don't really do anything else. This makes me think of a youtube video I saw where wives were asked what hobbies they like and they had to name things that did not involve their husbands and kids and these women were struggling. It was like their entire life as centered around caregiving. I'm not saying you can't enjoy that, but there has to be more to you than being a mother. That's just my two cents.
Don't think I've ever seen a gaming channel with such a thoughtful comment section. The educational and ethical value of this podcast is insane. Can't stop marveling at what you've accomplished here.
The passage in question from Sarah Bakewell's *At the Existentialist Cafe*: "The physical lusciousness of life was never a threat to Beauvoir: she could not get enough of it. As a child, she wanted to consume everything she saw. She would gaze greedily into the windows of sweet shops - ‘the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscopic inflorescence of acidulated fruitdrops- green, red, orange, violet - I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasures they promised me’. She wished the whole universe could be edible, so it could be eaten as Hansel and Gretel ate from the gingerbread house. Even as an adult, she wrote, ‘I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset.’ Travelling to New York in 1947, she felt an urge to eat the neon signs, brightly arrayed against the night sky. Her appetite extended to collecting things, including many gifts and souvenirs from her travels. When she finally moved from hotel rooms to a proper apartment in 1955, it quickly filled up with ‘jackets and skirts from Guatemala, blouses from Mexico … ostrich eggs from the Sahara, lead tom-toms, some drums that Sartre had brought back from Haiti, glass swords and Venetian mirrors that he had bought in the rue Bonaparte, a plaster cast of his hands, Giacometti’s lamps’. Her diary-keeping and memoir-writing also reflected an urge to acquire and relish everything that came into her grasp."
jean-paul and simone reading recommendation: after Sarte’s death, Simone DeBeauvoir released a collection of letters he sent her, many of which are love letters, and also, cringy af. They are ironic to read alongside both his works and Nier Automata
My girlfriend, before she became my girlfriend had the issue to be a person other people wanted her to be. She was in a bad relationship where her boyfriend, who has agoraphobia, who literally wanted her to be his maid and do his household, without doing anything to work on his illness. He made her indirectly cut ties to all her friends and focus solely on him. In a really cruel way she was struck by the death of one of her brothers and her dog loosing a leg by jumping out of a third story window, let her take a breather from him and assess her situation and cut ties with him and become self-determining again. After I told her how I feel about her she, (she's the woman of my dreams) for the first time considered me as her life-partner and some deep meaningful conversations she found the same feelings. One of the first things I told her was, that she's a free bird to do whatever she wants because some women wait for her men to allow them to do things. So many women and men are obsessed, like simone, to be someone that others like, in place of to be the person they like to be.
On a deeper level, notice the influence that both Friedrich Engels and Simone de Beauvoir take from Hegel here, particularly the lord-bondsman dialectic in the *Phenomenology of Spirit*. It is an extremely important concept in the history of philosophy. Simply put, Hegel imagines a clash between two human beings, who seek to overpower one another and gain recognition in doing so. They come to war with one another, and one wins while the other is defeated. The one who wins is established as "lord" while the one who is defeated is established as his "bondsman." The lord is the ostensible master over the bondsman, but he not only becomes fat and weakened off the labour of the bondsman, the recognition that he receives from the bondsman is a false one, for it is coerced through the threat and the practice of violence. Whereas the bondsman, put under a position of servitude, is able to work hard and overcome his limitations that placed him in this position of bondage to begin with. He is the one who becomes the "stronger," and is the one who recognizes the more meaningful recognition from the lord who, whether he verbally acknowledges it or not, is now dependent on the bondsman practically and for recognition. The bondman ultimately realizes that the lord has power over him because he has himself given the lord that power, and the possibility lies therein for him to reclaim said power. Put in place class (the lord is the bourgeoisie class, and the bondsman the proletariat) or gender (the lord is men and the bondsman woman), and we can see how both Engels and Beauvoir draw heavily from Hegelian thought in their thinking of the problem of alienation. Both Engels and Beauvoir posit the essential power in the hands of the alienated subject, and present a way to overcome said alienation: by recognizing this fact (that one has instantiated a "false consciousness" that holds oneself in bondage) and by affirming the true power and freedom that comes from within oneself.
A missed point was 9S saying "I don't care about the weather," that is useless information juxtaposed to the robots talking about "what nice weather we are having" Lots of threads can be taken from there
Astute observations and discussion about The Second sex! Been a while since I read it myself, but I do remember noticing that in my favourite adventure, the party composition was "The young Hero", "The old Master", "The Scoundrel" who actually is a hero at heart, his friend. And "The princess" (Leia), who in essence is the only woman in the story. And that is not only her gender, but also her role. All other are the "default sex" with roles. Fascinating that it took from Simone wrote that book, almost until now before the problems started to be addressed in the popular culture (and Hollywood is getting quite a lot of flack for it) I also agree with your observation about women and their hobbies. Had a discussion the other day, were I made the point that your sex does not determine if you are good at cooking or not, but you gender determines if society wants you to do it as a hobby or careerer, or if you are supposed to do it to make food for the family. Luckily, it seems that in Scandinavia at least, young girls are getting more encouraged to get hobbies, and enjoy niche things as well that isn't accepted "girl hobbies".
I don’t think it’s “what society wants” but what your sex is more inclined to do. Scandinavia has more equal opportunity laws that have given every opportunity for women to follow their desires career path. And they tend to choose motherhood. It’s all starts with the sex’s inclination of women being more social oriented and men being more item/task/function oriented. It’s kind of why women tend to take careers that don’t pay as much: teachers, secretaries, caretakers; but nothing that would be more demanding like cab or bus drivers, surgeons, mechanics or company CEO’s. Those that can do that are dedicated and deserve a level of admiration because it takes some level of mental separation to thrive in those jobs. Same goes for men that do the first set of jobs. As well as construction workers, sewage workers, plumbers, electricians, ditch diggers. They literally keep society running. It’s not easy, but at some level men better understand some jobs need to be done or all the nice things we enjoy go away. But fancy you mentioned Scandinavia, because the information gathered from that region has proven that the more equal the opportunities present themselves to both sexes, the more the differences between the 2 present themselves. Some people really want others to know about this, but those people have been trying to force equality of outcome over equality of opportunity. That’s how “diversity hires” became a thing. And it is a more detrimental thing because it is no longer promotes meritocracy, the best person for the job/service you want, and becomes more nepotism towards things people were conceived as but that I don’t think is really addressed in Automata and is much more current compared to Automata’s other inspirations.
@@TheMilhouseExperience The reason I mention Scandinavia, is that I'm Norwegian, but I've lived in Sweden for about 7 years now, so this is the societies I know best Equal laws perhaps, but social pressure is still strong. (And don't get me wrong, the laws here are awesome, and is a force for good, it's only slow to translate into social acceptance). The hearth of the discussion is the nature / nurture debate. And like you point out, we have a lot of historical baggage with us. Women where supposed to rare children, and menn were supposed to provide resources. Menn stil have the social pressure of earning more than ones spout, even in Scandinavia. No one says it out loud, but the expectation is there. (And good luck closing those wage-gaps before the pressure stabilises ) In a similar fashion, when I grew up, girls (at large) did not watch anime, or played video games, and those girls who did got socially punished, and had to defend their decision to have such an unfitting hobby. "You should go have better suited hobbies, like food, sewing or dresses" which people actually said out loud, but mostly just insinuated with looks, tones of voice etc. Girls growing up now have less of this, and are "allowed" to play video games much more than before, or have hobbies that are a bit out there. My point is that we shouldn't just look around us and see "this is what is, this is what nature dictates, and this is how it should be". Nature played a huge part in leading us here, but nature could have led us elsewhere as well (just look at other cultures), and where we are now, isn't necessarily the best place we could be. And we should not underestimate social pressure. We have evolved to be highly social creatures, so it is no surprise we are impacted socially either. And just like with video games, careers are slowly but surely changing. In my opinion, we can't do much to change our biology, but we can study and change our social expectations and cues, and we should be less judging of people a bit outside the norm. PS. "...proven that the more equal the opportunities present themselves to both sexes, the more the differences between the 2 present themselves. " My background is in natural science and mathematics, so "proof" might mean something else to me, but I will argue that no such thing has been proved. It has been shown that this is one _possible_ outcome. But you would need to show that all other outcomes are impossible for it to be a proof. And you would also need to show that it is the only variable that means something. Like I've argued above, social expectations plays a huge role. And the next generation of women are already challenging the previous norms a bit. So it is already changing.
Regarding the volcano story, it's referencing how the robot from nier that gained sentience ( I assume by being exposed to magic from a shade for so long) ended up taking off into space I believe and offering it's sentience to the machine life forms. ( Pulling from side content flames of Prometheus)
This is Beepy in particular. He doesn't forget Kalil's last wish that they'd go see the world outside together, so he flied to space. Also, the mountain that mentioned on the vignette montage is an abandoned/reconfigured-as-machine factory Junk Heap.
On the question of why Yoko Taro might have opted to use the name of the philosopher "Friedrich Engels" for the first boss, I think we might look at Simone as an example for how Taro goes about incorporating famous philosophical figures into his story. As rightly pointed out in this podcast, Simone here stands for a kind of alienation that is caused by the conflict between the sexes: women are the "second sex" who are alienated from themselves. They fail to realize the essential truism that "one is not born but becomes a woman," and they unconsciously surrender all of their power and agency to men and take on the "false self" that men, other women conditioned to accept the framework, and society impose on them. This is why although Simone is initially an androgynous robot and no different from the "male" in appearance, it increasingly takes on the persona of the female in order to win over Sartre. In much the same way, Engels is represented as a factory, clearly a callback to the social alienation brought about by the Industrial Revolution as identified by the philosopher himself in his *The Condition of the Working Class in England*. Like the character Engels in the game, men are transformed into instruments of production [the emphasis on the factory] by the capitalist-industrial complex, and fail to grasp the insidious truth that they are exchanging their agency for a false "essence" of capitalist exploitation. If our analysis is onto something and if *NieR: Automata* ultimately sides with Sartrean existentialism in pointing out that "existence precedes essence," then it casts light on the ways in which men have in the domains of gender and class alienated themselves by holding onto a false, metaphysical concept of an "essence" that actively contributes to their practical, material suffering. Better instead to liberate oneself, realize the power that one instinctively has as subject, and create a mode of existence for oneself conducive to human flourishing.
As a woman, and addressing the points about gender in the video... First, I think having the Simone robot talking about tailoring itself to what could appeal to a "him"... I can relate as someone that has grown up with several insecurities. But I don't see it as necessarily a thing that plagues women. It could be said that a lot of men have insecurities and try to shape themselves to what others (their romantic interest) wants as well. Still, those quotes hit me hard! Second, about the hobbies thing - that was surprising to me, as someone that while growing up also made a lot of video editing, learned new languages, read a ton of books, practiced dance, theatre... Maybe it is a cultural thing (or more likely an individual/community thing) but I at least don't see myself in that category, and probably not most of my female friends either. I should say I'm from Southern/Western Europe, because maybe that makes a difference. There are generalisations that I have made about USA and UK women (not really fair I might add) that have led me to think I can't relate to them very well because of those reasons: being very much concerned with physical appearance, a lot of makeup, skimpy clothes, more interest in clubbing and malls, etc... This is just to say that maybe there is a cultural component there, but I am probably drawing it from unfair assumptions. One thing that I have noticed though, is that women tend to be more relational, and the men I know not so much. At least the men I know are more solitary, maybe more individually centred, while the women I know are more social and focus on friendships and community. This has concerned me, but the men that I have pointed this out to have said they are fine like this. It makes me think that it might make it more difficult for them to express emotions, to find real companions and community, but it's also not my place to force them to reach out like that. Not all these men have focused on work, nor have they been confident, so I wouldn't consider that an explanation. I have also seen more women in my life have "drive", as you say, so I can't make a relation there! We might just have very different networks/experiences here. But, I should say, the way my mother and father talked to me was very different than they talked to my brother. It was more protective and limiting for me. So I think that does play a part in some of my insecurities... Now, it is quite interesting to see that the comments on your video so far addressing this topic have veered into something very different ahah
I am not a woman, but I think that men, in general, tend to keep other people at a distance and are less eager to pursue emotional connections. It doesn't mean that men see no value in those connections, only that they will not try to form connections that will just break anyway, they will have more acquaintances and less true friends, but they value those few friends a lot, more than brothers even. About the generalisations you've made about women in the USA and UK, generalisations that I kind of made too, it more of a big city thing, and as a society we are failing our young, both boys and girls in different ways. The stereotype of the girl forever pursuing shallow ideals of beauty dictated by media and peer pressure, having little to no interest in anything else other than looks and social status is something that is culturally imposed on them, by both sides of the political spectrum, and it leaves very little room and incentive for young girls to pursue what they really want. As Mike pointed out on the video, he observed this behavior, but seems to be purely cultural, and as Simone says, women are forced into a position, into roles. The same happens with men, of course, but in different directions, but generally men are allowed to be individuals way more than women. When it comes to clubbing, that one is incentivised for both men and women nowadays, making both pursue the same kind of shallowness. People that are more Conservative might say that women need to be housekeepers, mothers, be pretty and that's it, while people that are more Progressive might veer in the complete opposite direction, but both sides fail to allow women to be who they want to be. Sure there are things that come from nature, but social pressures may affect women more due to how women tend to integrate more than men with a wider social network. It also happens to men but not on the same way. Young peopleare feeling lost these days, told that they can be anything except who they want to be.
@@williansnobre can you say more on what you mean about clubbing and shallowness? When I go to the club I feel totally free and I absolutely love to dance so I think it's hard for me to understand the shallow part of your comment.
@@mana-uv7cz It can be different for each individual, but what I meant was the culture, incentivised by media, of going out, dancing and drinking without restraint. It can be something that makes people feel free, sure, and with balance it is liberating and opens yourself to new experiences and new people, but without balance it can be negative, as going out, dancing and drinking only to come back home alone or worse, with bad company. A momentary happiness followed by a long period of regret and anxiety, an endless and fruitless search for something that can't be found there, this is the kind of shallowness that I am reffering to, the one pushed by media, specially the music industry. I'm not saying that this is everyone's experience, but this is way more common than it should be. By the way you asked I presume that for you the experience is positive, so hey, more power to you.
@@williansnobre yes it is positive for me. But I wanted to understand what you meant simply cause it differed from my experience and not because I thought you believed everyone had a negative experience. I do get what you are saying now because some songs at the club are very shallow if you listen to the lyrics.
According to the novella, Fire of Prometheus, written by Yoko Taro, the machines were given intelligence by P-33, the boss from Nier replicant. I think that's what the picture book is referencing.
It is. That is an essential part of the lore, I kinda hope they make an breakdown of the side material that was made around Nier Automata because there is a lot of it that adds some essential context to the lore and Fire of Prometheus is a major piece as to how the machines gained sentience.
@@jenniferrannila1414 they won’t lmao it’s always gonna be the old “this isn’t a LORE podcast” which I get but in order to understand why the machines got “consciousness” you literally have to understand that it truly came from p33. Even going into the book Taro wrote there’s even more thematic stuff that really makes both games come together. But again. That’s lore. Not story telling lol as they’d put it. Which honestly gets a bit annoying but I get it. 🤐🤷🏽
When you talked about how your brother's kids being really stereotyped to their gender, even though they were raised to not be. It remembered me of Anima and Animus and how the only way of being complete is understanding the other side. So by being exposed to both male and female """things""" the kids were able to be better at the side they identified the most.
Hi! Latina woman here to provide some perspective. I really want to commend you for opening up a conversation about women and inviting us to join in. It's very interesting. So my first thought is talking, being with friends, and shopping from my perspective are all hobbies and skills that could prep you for a job. Fashion has many jobs, all jobs require social skills and the ability to make friends are important in social work jobs since you have to find creative ways to connect with people who are different from you. I agree with your explanation of Simone's philosophy and I do think this kind of nurturing is one of the main reasons women enter more social and caring type jobs. I also think at least in my culture I was very much so expected to take care of my family in other ways my male cousins were not. My mom did praise me for cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and translating for her. I felt better about myself when people noticed me for these things, but it did take up my time. meanwhile I did have a huge interest in video games that I would sometimes get chastised for. My mom always let me play, but she wished I took more care of my appearance, she loves shopping and wished I would go with her more often. I also had interest in music, but I would only pursue that interest in school. I wanted to do dance as well when I was younger, but my mom felt nervous about me dancing with boys. She said she didn't trust them, and that attitude only grew as puberty went on for me. So yes I think you bring up very interesting points that align with at least my experience. I feel like we live a society where the socialization is so ingrained that it's really truly hard to know how much influence nature has.
Sorry to make the comment so long, but yes when you brought the notion of a woman's worth being tied to marriage it made me realize I never touched on that. So many stories and movies perpetuate that idea to women, but also so do our own histories. In my culture's history a woman was considered ready for marriage at fifteen and it was the mark of becoming a women. Coming from a colony the economy was always bad and many women in the past were either sold or married off very young as means of survival for the family. Today a quince is considered a right of passage and marks transition into a woman. My quince was 15 years ago and I did a very traditional one where I wore a white dress (appealing to the idea of marriage). Nowadays most people wear whatever color they want but the parties resemble what you would see at a modern wedding. Even with all the change overtime our culture still perpetuates the mark of becoming a woman with all the cultural markers you would find at a wedding. We even share a dance with our fathers and a boyfriend if we have one. So thought I would throw that in there to demonstrate yet another way society can implicitly put these expectations on women.
You made me realise that was another aspect of differentiated/gender language from my mother: asking me to care for my appearance, try to wear this, or not wear that, etc. I don't remember her ever saying that to my brother, but he was older than me so maybe I miss that. She still says it to me as an adult though! I find it is probably related to how she was raised as well.
@@nyxian_grid oh for sure. My mom would more so comment on straightening my hair, but she would also too influence clothing choice since she would buy a lot of clothes for me since I would choose to not go to the mall.
You bring up an interesting point of cultural expectations and norms very important in this discussion its a very nuisance topic. From my understanding of Latin and Hispanic culture women are very nurturing with in their family and traditional gender roles from older generations are instilled upon them.
@@The810kid Thank you!! I agree with that, our culture does value the idea that women nurture. I see that idea come up a lot when older people talk about the relationships of my younger family members.
Not a girl but am a middle school teacher, I think what you’re saying used to be more true but is increasingly less the case over time. If anything I’d say the average middle school girl is more driven to try new skills and the average middle school boy either thinks they’re going to be a pro athlete or professional gamer/streamer. I find the stereotype among adults is that young girls are always on their phones doing nothing and boys are doing things but I largely find the reverse to be the case. All personal anecdotes of course, but this is what I’ve observed over 10+ years in middle schools
Content warning: eating disorders etc. . . . . So the conversation around Simone and DeBeauvoir's thesis on womanhood really got me thinking about my own personal experience of growing up female, becoming a woman, and the ways in which my early life differed from the typical female experience. Firstly, Simone (the machine) and her desperate objective to be beautiful reminded me of my ongoing struggles with disordered eating: her expressing wanting to vomit is very much indicative of that, not simply the direct parallels to bulimia, but also a cloying need to undo what she had done when she felt out of control. We women often feel as if our agency is tethered to the expectations of patriarchy, whether that is cast upon us by men or other women. We all are preconditioned to expect softness, beauty, and unattainable perfection of being a woman. It's an impossible merry-go-round of upkeep and any woman would tell you that when we are not behest to others, we're just as content as guys are to let go and just allow ourselves to be imperfect and animal. The moment we feel others' gazes, we feel this bizarre need to perform. I was very intrigued by Mike's discussion about the ladies in his young life who seemed to have frivolous interests. Oddly enough, I knew girls like that at that age as well, and me and my friends tended to avoid them - we (this includes my female friends) were definitely closer to Mike in being ambitious hobbyists. But as I get older I see there is a comfy middle ground in embracing simplicity and how being too ambitious can feel like a mill, always producing, and useless unless we're producing. I was such a tomboy when I was younger. Now in my 30s, I can appreciate my feminine side, the part of me that loves to schmooze, shop and play for the sake of release, rather than being commodifiable.
I wanted to say a loud "YES" when you mentioned the need to perform when others' eyes are fixed on us. It resonated with me! I remember moments when I let myself feel free to play as/with the guys and judgement was swift.
hi, this is one of my first times for longer commenting/discussions. i’m usually nervous to have attention on myself but, you asked for more perspectives from women and feminine aligned people, and as an avid fan of you guys, i would like to try and offer some perspectives. i studied a lot of women and gender studies in university, and just have a huge interest in feminism and things of that subject. i would also like to say i’m not speaking for any other women who comment (obviously), but would love to hear more from others if anything. lastly, i’m still young and learning (starting grad school soon) and so some of my perspectives are what i know now in my early 20s. (also, when i comment from here on out, when i say women, its a general sense) firstly, on the topic of women and ‘hobbies’/skills; i think that there’s definitely something in the concept of “becoming a woman”. in general society, women have been expected to have view things that can be seen as skills differently from a male perspective. i’ve noticed that while were listing the experiences with the past women in your life, there was this idea of practical skills vs emotional skills. i’m sure you guys noticed this, but there’s an idea that practical skills are more useful in the long run vs emotional skills. learning instruments vs learning how to have a deep conversation with people, learning how to fix a tire vs learning how to fix an emotional connection. i think this relates to the idea of ‘becoming a woman’ in which women in society all grow and are taught/expected to focus more on things that would have had more impact in a traditional “family” home. women grow up, and they aren’t told things such as learning “skills” in terms like instruments and stuff. a lot of women, especially in my experience, will usually experience being told to focus on tasks/hobbies that focus on housework (living in the home). so i think as you guys talked about it a bit, but yeah, from a male perspective, women wouldn’t have hobbies. but in a women’s perspective, these skills are being built because women are expected to be emotional available in where society wants them to mainly exist, in the home. studies have pointed out that for young boys and girls in the classroom, younger girls are less confident to speak up than young boys in class, especially in areas that society today deem as male specific (math class, for an example). just something i felt was important to bring up in relation to this conversation. young girls feel like they can’t be as assertive as their boy classmates. you guys wondered “how many of the girls in class felt like they couldn’t be as assertive about the things they want to do”, and my answer is, probably way more than you think. language is a very important factor here. i’ll use the classroom to speak on this, there have been interesting discussions here. the languages that teachers use on young studies, even unconsciously, is gendered. even if there are efforts at home to keep a child’s life gender neutral, the outside world is also enforcing these ideas of gender and expectations onto people. it’s a huge interesting discussion. a good video/series to watch about this can be ‘Gender Neutral Education | Can Our Kids Go Gender Free’ which is available on youtube under the channel ‘Real Families.’ relating this to career, there’s a lot we can touch on here. a lot of it comes down to how the work force hasn’t been accommodating to women since the start, and even now. like simone speaks of, men have more choices, and it’s because of this that it seems like women (in a general sense) do not tend to have this sense to practice these larger skills. a lot of women have spoken about that this kind of drive to build practical/physical skills as they grow older and have more experiences. however, like you said, it’s a nature vs nurture type deal. in my personal experience and studies; just like what you guys were saying, i definitely think that the idea of women being inherently nurturing is one that has been caused because of society and the norms placed for women. i also have noticed myself that, for women especially since a young age, there’s a very heavy importance placed on family, romance, love. (so basically relates back to the ‘hobbies’ of women being dating and friendships, motherhood, etc.) it’s a lot of mixed things ( i just call it the patriarchy LOL) that honestly would take me hours and hours to type about, but these are just some things i wanted to comment. apologies if this ramble is just long and basically makes no sense, i have so many thoughts on feminism and these topics. and as you guys noticed just from the second sex, it’s one that can cause headaches, etc. i would just like to also commend you guys on how you approach the subject and ‘the second sex’, very authentic and refreshing. love you guys, as always! ps.s; also, casen spoke a bit on the idea of consumption, and this is definitely something that can be explored with more feminist texts. i recommend checking out the article ‘Hunger as Ideology’ by Susan Bordo!! another recommended article is ‘Remaking the She-Devil: A Critical Look at Feminist Approaches to Beauty’ by Kathy Davis. here’s a quote from the article, which i find super relevant to today’s episode. “The female body seems to be in constant need of transformation. Historically, women have gone to great pains to improve and transform their bodies in order to meet cultural requirements of femininity,” until next time!
I like to think that the goliaths were called “Marx” and “Engels” because factories are part of the means of production! So in a way they claimed the means of production.
Just a few thoughts: 1. Casen keeps referring to Eve as her/she, I don't think Eve's name is referring to its "gender". I feel this because when we see Adam and Eve's interactions in the cutaway scenes, Eve asks Adam: "Wouldn't it make more sense to call ourselves Cain and Abel?" To which Adam simply states "Eve" fits better and that Eve should be proud of the name, but never states that it's because of a gender-based reason. Eve also asks why they have to wear clothes, to which Adam responds that because of the book they're reading (most likely the Bible) that covering up (I believe he says "covering our crotches" though I could be wrong) was what humans did for reasons of decency. By that logic, wouldn't Adam think that Eve should cover their chest if they were female? Also, Eve has a very male-looking chest, yes I know there are all types of bodies, but... Of course all this could be moot because they're machines and just might not have a "gender" at all. 2. On Mike's observations about the women in his life, I have a feeling I know what Mike is talking about. My niece is of a particular religion that promotes that type of "thinking" and she is a VERY opinionated and masculine in a lot of ways, but also very devout to her religion and it is something to behold seeing those two things crash into each other and the conflicts it has caused. 3. I suddenly want to listen to the KISS song "God of Thunder". Don't know why.
I think Casen might just be slipping up, which is easy to do when one of the characters has the name of one of the most famous female characters in the world.
@@Msoulwing Fair enough, I just thought it was worth mentioning. I always loved the Cain and Abel comment from Eve given how ironic it would have been, especially on Eve's part.
I dont usually comment but have a lot of thoughts around Simone. Firstly as a woman, soon to be mother with a career and rural pastors wife there is a lot in here that has my head spinning. 1. I think this might be a way in how women and men think differently but I am really surprise where the anaylsis went with Simone. Immediately when seeing her story it's a gut punch. Another woman commented about ED's and I appreaicte her vunerability as the way it is described reflects the pain a woman goes through to recieve love from someone. Mike brought up how gaining skills helps you gain value in a society. And YET I feel the whole point of Simone in the game is that her value is being recived from a man (a robot man) The lengths she goes to get there are destructive and horrifying. And yet, it is a very real a unique struggle to being a female. While I appreciate where the conversation went I feel thay get's to the heart of what is being going on here. I don't know if there is time to revisit this discussion but I think it would be valuable to have a woman's perspective in a video because there is A LOT to analysis from a woman's perspective with this section in the game. (Just listened to the part where Mike touches on jt at the end but would still love a deeper discussion on this) 2. In regards to the hobbies, I brought up being a rural pastors wife because of something interesting Ive noticed about the differences in the young girls Ive mentotrd in contrast to the ones now. These young ladies are STRONG. They have skills and hobbies from living on a farm and needing to work together as a family to make their farms run. They love hunting, snowmobiling, horses and some are even great mechanics. Do they talk about boys and worry about their appearance? Yup! But these ladies are mature and well rounded indviduals. And their mothers are some of th strongest woman Ive meet. On the outside a lot of people would see them as "trad wives" but they are knee deep in mud helping a mother deliver a baby calf and moving hay bales in haying season. In contrast to the students I work with at Uni. Holy moly thats a differnt story. Thats where I see the infuence of social media, discontenment in singleness reflecting their value and deep struggled with their relationship to men that cut your heart. The rural girls have these same struggles but a lesser extent because of how busy (and disconnected from the internet) they are and I also see them work out their relationship in a healtheir way ironcially because of the religion that in the past has downgraded a womans value. It actually elevates it and it is a work for both ladies to work on that their value doesnt come from their work or a guy but from a good God that loves them and elevated the place of a woman RADICALLY through Jesus in the Gospels. And that in turn helps them know they are a whole person creating healthier relationships. I love church history but Augstine had some awful takes on woman. What the Bible actually says is very different. Simone was not whole without the love she felt she needed. So she did what she thought she needed to do to recive it. The role that beauty plays in this I am suprised also wasn't touched. There is something in a female that says "I must be beautiful to be loved" And since we arent immacualte everyday we feel that insecurity. It's a joke but I know Ive asked my husband "do you still love me?" Esepcially as I feel an ugly monster in the middle of morning sickness. And yet what I have learned from him and actually other men on social media is that for some reason they still love their wives and see them as just as beautiful (I know thats not true in every realtionship and there is deep pain with spouses concering this but these are the ones I observe that are in health) There's a lot more I am thinking on with my own growing up as the odd duck teen that was more interested in hobbies then boys but I'll leave it to my personal processing. The part about becoming a woman I am poundering more now in the transition into motherhood. It is another process in the body that feels even crazier then puberty. If it's true it happens more then once in a woman's life and it's pretty brutal each time 😅 Really appreciate what you guys are doing.
I said already earlier on playthrough A that Simone is my favorite boss of all time, I love the conversation her second encounter sparkled. Great job, don't steer away from conersation starters like these and don’t be afraid to express your own experiences as honestly as in this one
I’m at the point where you guys are talking about the Spirits of Fire video short. You are right in a lot of ways but it is a literal story. P-33 due to the experiences it had from NieR: Replicant it rose from the Junk Heap and it brought the Machine’s intelligence because it saw them in an endless war, this is all part of the short story called the Fire of Prometheus thus the “Spirit of Fire”.
Mike: "I had hobbies to further my carrer, while girls had hobbies that did not." When it comes to success in the workplace social skills are way more impactful than practical or intellectual ones. When it comes to nature vs nuture. It's a mix and not in the clean 50% way, but the annoying stochastical spectrum one. Some people have a strong nature and nuture can't change it. Some people lack a strong nature and get impacted by nuture a more. As Casen observed, this leads that people, that don't get their nature acomodated early, to overcompensate later.
The slow realization that American society isn't organized to support self actualization of people born with xx chromosomes is a helluva conversation arch, but a hugely salient one.
I think we can see how it goes both ways. Just look at phases of life: boys are supposed to act one way, girls another. And if they don’t the other kids can become real nasty to one another. Enter into dating and men are expected to make money and be over 6 foot. Women are expected to be homemakers and faithful. And it is a mess because of polygamy normalization. Enter into parenthood, the men are expected to make money, while the women are expected to take care of the children. But if divorce happens, women are heavily favored in custody, child support and alimony. Sometimes the father is restricted to seeing his kids for a few hours a week. It’s a mess and both men and women’s measured happiness has declined over time. There are other factors, of course( (the economy, inflation, single parent upraising) but I think most people would agree that feminism in the last decade or so has had a major hand in creating and changing a lot in society. Much of it is not better for both men and women.
Gotta respect how you guys will hit us with Ayn Rand during one series and de Beauvoir in another. People assuming your politics spend way too much time in toxic spaces online and can't help but see the world through an "us vs them" black and white filter. I, for one, appreciate how you explore so many different ideologies and schools of thought without judgement, even if it's something that I don't necessarily agree with 100% myself. People have become scared of hearing other perspectives due to modern echo chambers and social media. Ironic that the thing that was meant to bring us all closer together has driven us so far apart.
The event where the "God" emerged from the volcano and appeared before the machines did actually happen, and what it gave the machines was "consciousness", for the lack of a better term off the top of my hat right now, my understanding is that this is the catalyst that sparked the machines into becoming more than what they were originally made to be. This is detailed in a short story called The Fire of Prometheus. Play NieR Replicant first, then read the short story for full context.
These comments are such a treat, I'll get myself later food and just scroll through these while eating. Thanks Mike and Casen for making this possible and thanks everyone for sharing your insights from your personal experiences!
What I enjoy most about Route B is that you have to play as 9S, the character who most adamantly affirms that nothing that machines do has any meaning, to learn that there is intent and motivation behind every single one of the big boss battles that we're fighting. The paradox there is something I find deeply fascinating.
The tangents, debates, and discussions these two go through. XD "we should be able to do this in a single episode" Spends entire episode diving into a single character and her real works inspiration. "okay maybe a second." Love it!
Something about eternity you guys mentioned last time, I think it's like if I was a primary school kid trying to explain my views on Nier, I would only be able to explain to a very limited extent. Whereas if I was a high school kid, I would be able to explain a bit better. And if I was a college student, I would gain more understanding to life and hence relate more. But, even though I'm an adult now with a lot of life events happening in my life, I would still hold a different view for the game than to Yoko Taro, as he's the one made the game with his idea in mind. We just know too little about eternity, so in our view, we think it could be like this way or that, could be boring or out of things to do and driving us mad, that's only because we are analysing something that's not made by us, we can't comprehend yet, but the idea was planted in to human. Just a thought. Is like asking a kid from China who's never watched any US tv show to write an essay about Life in the US to his classmates
I grew up in 2000s in Finland and where I was from most of the girls in our school had hobbies and passions. There was definitely also those who wanted to do more stereotypically feminine things but I think they were less than 50% of our school. Culture might have huge consequences for the way young girls approach the world. I never felt or even thought personally that girls would be the 'second sex', things change! Freedom of choice for self expression is awesome
I have the same experience and I'm Swedish. I don't think you can compare us in the Nordics with how things are in The US. In general it's much more conservative there and their society is much more based on religion than it is here. Plus, these guys are mormons and mormons in general aren't exactly known for how well they treat women and how supportive they are of women who want to break away from their traditional role as the weaker sex. Just to be clear, though, I don't know these guys or what their personal views are. I'm saying this more in regards to what he said about his experience regarding his then girlfriend's (and other women's) lack of skilldriven hobbies. I don't find that particularly surprising.
Many people who read deep into the lore of the series probably already know, but the part where 9S speaks about the god appearing from the volcano, is actually in reference to Beepy from Nier Replicant. He managed to break out of the junk heap and it was due to him being humanised by Khalil in Replicant, he was able to reach the machines the tenets of being more human. Probably over simplifying but I think that's the general idea. The rewards and nods they throw in for people that read deep into the side stories are awesome.
Although I'm a girl, I suppose I didn't have an entirely stereotypical female upbringing, as I tended to play with boys and was shun by my female classmates. I wasn't really a tomboy, either, but I preferred action over talking in circles. I've always been of the mind that women were made to compliment men and vice versa. We're different, but we... how would one say it in English... fill in the other's weaknesses? We have different roles, which are very noticable in a family. When a kid falls and hurts itself, the mom's there to comfort the kid, while the dad's there to teach the kid not to fall over again and pick themselves up. If that makes sense? Sure, I'll never be as driven and work-focused as a man, but I'm also not really interested in beauty or socialising. My hobbies tend to be very self-centric which do not involve spending time with others, like sports that require coordination+leadership. Like drawing, reading, writing, playing games, studying endangered languages and certain periods of history, historical reenactment, crafting various things and such. And even if someone was to ask me what my hobbies are, I probably wouldn't answer at all, because I get a little embarrassed. Because I'm not a great artist or an amazing writer or a scholar of history. They're personal, not something I'd share with another person.
So I’m a guy, and cant (and don’t want to try) to speak to the experience of women, and the limitations they experience. But I can speak to my own experiences growing up in a religion and religious community. So, I’m from Utah, spent the early part of my childhood in the religion in the religion, the latter part of my childhood out of the religion but still surrounded by those in it, and then in adulthood still geographically there, but socially and culturally more and more removed. What I have found is the more culturally removed I’ve gotten, the fewer elements of gender and sex i personally see as being biologically ingrained imperatives, and the more “nurture” elements I see reinforcing both behavior and socioeconomic trends/choices/outcomes. In my view, this also informs topics we see in current political “culture war” hot topics and wedge issues, but it’s not limited to these (nor are these the best topics for exploring the underlying questions at hand). People inevitably are forced to contend with defining themselves against the larger societal and historical forces at play in the times they live, right? You can’t escape context, even if you declare yourself immune to it, you will always be encompassed by it. Albert Enstein, Karl Marx, and Harvey Milk are all products of choice and circumstances both. Socrates plopped down in Central Park might have had a lesser influence with the same basic ideas. Anyway, all of that is to say that context shapes meaning, but is also a product of shaped meaning; it is an understanding of meaning itself. And so these external, non-intrinsic, environmental, CONTEXTUAL factors to shaping what a person is, can be, become, is inherently fluid, changing, and subject to constant reinterpretation, both by the person themselves (as they are being shaped, in the process of forging the person they are becoming), but also by the outside observer, trying to understand this person. The forces that shape you are themselves in the process of being shaped.
In Japanese 2B is a lot more softer in general, like for the call me Nines thing she is more like "...not yet" rather than a "I'm good", and in other quests in English she is like "not my problem" in Japanese she seems embarrassed about the topic and doesn't say anything.
I cannot speak to the experience of womanhood, but I agree with Simone's idea that nobody is born as man or woman. These are roles that are constructed and projected onto us. We are what we are constructed to be, and self-realization comes when we reconcile the differences between what we are told we are vs what we know ourselves to be. As a child, my worldview was innately queer. I had no conception of boxes of identity nor of arbitrary binaries until they were forced upon me. I am the youngest of five children, with three older sisters and one older brother. I felt far greater kinship with my sisters, with their behaviors and interests, than with my brother (though video games, fantasy, and sci-fi united us all, I am happy to say). In identification with their interests, I figured I would try on their clothing as well - my sisters' dresses, my mother's church shoes, etc. It didn't take long to for me to be put in my place. The message I was given was this "There are boys and there are girls. You can't do this or wear that because you are a boy." This didn't stop me. "Then I must not be a boy." This revelation seemed like the only logical conclusion. I was then rejected with violence. This taught me that gender is something rooted in optics, in performance, in something shallow and image-based, or in what we consume in a consumption-driven society. I came to detach from the notion that my outward appearance is any representation of my internal self. I am nonbinary, and while many nonbinary people identify somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of gender, I simply do not identify with gender at all, and it is liberating. Even amongst queer people, many deeply tie their identity to their appearance, how they present themselves. For others, it is tied to their body. All these conceptions are valid, but they are not for me. As Simone de Beauvoir writes, and as the battle with the Simone machine so beautifully articulates, a person's gender is something that merely exists through the lens of another person perceiving it, as well as through our consumption. If not perceived, then perhaps it does not exist. I do not care to be seen or perceived as anything, and with that I have finally found security in my sense of self, and it has been incredibly freeing.
I'm a woman, and introvert, and spent my teenage years trying to develop skills. Reading, writing stories, typing speed (even on my school lunch break), plenty of little 'mini' hobbies. Very little socialisation, but boy did I wish that I could know how. Beauty was a lofty aspiration, and I would probably be lying if I said I didn't think about it. I certainly became obsessed with clothes and hair, etc, although I considered it my "art". I remember noticing the difference between what boys were allowed to do and what I was allowed to do once puberty hit, and I became fairly bitter and feminist. I didn't want children. I read "The Bell Jar". It's frightening how much I identified with the main character...the behaviours of men and women didn't make sense to me, but I navigated it, because I was there, and eventually changed my mind, as it happens and had children. I was adamant I would go right back to work... and as soon as I had my baby in my arms I couldn't think of anything worse. So nature got me in the end. Things made a lot more sense to me when I learned about evolutionary psychology, and the theory of how this impacts people's behaviour. I want to stress that I don't agree with all of evolutionary psychology nor do I think it applies to all people or situations, but I do find it to be a plausible explanation more often than not. I feel that what Mike has observed about women is accurate and can well be explained by evolutionary psychology. Women seek beauty, and men seek beautiful women who are also intelligent because it denotes health and strong genes. Men in very early times did not have to stick around or care for children if they did not wish to, but women breastfed, and bonded with their young. Women needed the protection of men, not only for themselves because they were physically weaker, but also for their offspring. The explanation given for women to be more sociable than men is because in the past they needed to form strong bonds with other women in order to help them with childcare and other tasks. Any mothers present can vouch for how necessary this is. Being cast out of a social group, in early days almost always meant certain death, because it was extremely difficult for one person to survive on their own. It can be easy to see these behaviours of women to be a result of oppression from society, or plain old vanity, but if you take away these notions and look through the lens of biology, this behaviour could be viewed as a life-or-death necessity. As for the concept that men have more freedom to pursue skills and contribute to society in a meaningful way, although this is true, men are equally restrained. They are considered less attractive to women if they can't provide and protect. Beauty in a man is less attractive to a woman than the ability to provide and protect is, from the evolutionary theory perspective. Therefore, building skills, making a show of intelligence, of ability and skill in general, is very important to men because without it, they may not pass on their genes to any young. They are expected to achieve, and if they cannot do so, then they feel no sense of self worth. The idea is, that the human brain hasn't changed or evolved since very early times. Whether or not men or women intend to mate, these behaviours are presented as subconscious acts. Simone's explanation as to how a woman comes to be, as I've interpreted it, that is to say a woman is a construction of society, it is a very negative view of the human race, hence thematically consistent with the rest of Nier Automata. She indicates that society has at some point decided what a woman should be, and the woman shapes herself to be that way. This is the conclusion that she has arrived at. Despite nature and nurture being so closely interwoven that you can't tell one from another, women don't typically struggle with their femininity to the same extent as Simone does. They usually feel they succeed and compete as a woman to an acceptable level, and do so organically and often without even realising, but Simone does not. Because she can't be a woman. No matter what she does, she will never be human and hence cannot ever grasp what it is to be a human, let alone a woman.
Most straight men do not find most women's interests, interesting. Many of the interests listed in the video for women are in fact skills, but men do not think highly of them. You can make a career being a match maker, as a make-up artist or making make-up tutorials, or work in the fashion industry. Some people literately get paid to shop for other people. Also, many of the social skills women are taught can be used for social media jobs and social work. All of the above doesn't even take into account how pregnancy can effect one's view of life and career.
Curious if you are aware of the coincidence that the Nier: Automota Anime is currently airing. I find it interesting that it is consciously referencing Nier: Replicant, in a way that I don't recall the game doing. It's ongoing. It would be interesting if you can find the time to catch up and see if there is an elaboration, or a difference of storytelling via that format. Anime adaptions have a history of streamlining less obvious beats, or nuances the source material contains
The "religion" for the robots came from beepy(p33) the robot from nier. I'm referring to the flashback of the machines, the "god" from the volcano is p33, it's on fires of prometheus
When you guys are talking about the god emerging from the “volcano” it’s really beepy from Nier, coming out from the depths of the factory and sharing everything that the child shade taught it. I think it does so by accessing the server, because it’s technically apart of the machines itself. But that whole storyline in nier replicant is actually the reason everything happens in nier automata!!!
Fun tidbit about the music during the hacking - keiichi okabe didn't run his music through a filter to get that sound he scored entirely new versions of the songs
Edit: I now realize me trying to contribute to the conversation gets figured out 20mins later, oh well. I think the first vignette around the Desert Area could be referring to the birth of Adam. Substitute the volcano with the machine amalgamation, and the concepts mentioned are all things that will fascinate Adam. Considering how Adam and Eve will essentially rule over the machine network, they could be "gods" to the machines that are gradually developing sentience.
I do think it’s neat that lightning is perceived as “judgement from on high” as a form of smiting from high to low. But since the Aliens are underground-the god of the robots gives fire and life from beneath. Life the comes from the ground and so does their pain
The first story, about the God that emerged from the Volcano, is a Novella from NieR Replicant - The fires of Prometheus. It's pretty much a summary of that novella in there
Speaking of Nature and Nurture of gender roles. I don't know if this is a rare case. My family is of chinese descent, and we live in Indonesia. But me (male) and my younger sister both raised in rather liberal way (?) compared to another chinese-indonesian family that are relatively conservative. Our parents only taught us mostly of how to treat others how you want to be treated, but never asks us forcefully how to live our lives and roles. My sister ends up growing more on the mindset of "developing skills" even more than me, in fact, i'm more obsessed into being in relationships, or at least trying to find one. While i have some hobbies like reading, but my drive into developing skills feels lesser than my sister's. In my childhood, i joined my sister playing and watch Barbie dolls, the same way my sister joins me in more boy-ish activities. This might what shape me and my sister to what we are now. This is not only happening to me. In my circle of friend, i have a distant relative that has similiar way of upbringing. While he has drive to "develop skills", but it's way less than his older sister. I'm not sure if this is a proof of Nurture being a heavier factor or just some rare case.
For an anthropological perspective on the "nature versus nurture" discussion you have here, I highly recommend a recent episode of the podcast *This Anthro Life*. It surveys a lot of the data we have on gender roles and expectations across cultures and through time, which demonstrates just how strongly these things are influenced by culture. That's not to say that there are no biological differences between the sexes, but there is tons of evidence that the gender expectations we see in our society (or any society) are hardly natural or inevitable. Social and cultural norms do an enormous amount of heavy lifting there.
Mike, I think both theses that you put into semi-opposition are correct and go together perfectly well, as long as you don't treat all girls as the same. "Most" girls simply naturally gravitate towards wanting to embody the image of a girl. But "some" girls don't. Those who don't will relate their experiences of feeling a nurtural pressure on them. But that doesn't mean that those who do, do so because of nurture, it _is_ their nature in their case so they don't mind whatever nurture there is, because it already works fine for them with what they want to begin with. These aren't contradictory, just different kinds of people.
As much of a pain as it might be to set up due how non-linear it is, would you guys consider doing a podcast on 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim in the future? It is an absolutely insane sci-fi story, one of the best I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. It pays homage to all of the classic sci-fi stories, in particular the ones of the 80s, while managing to masterfully tie them all together in an original story with one jaw-dropping plot twist after another. It is a masterclass in non-linear storytelling, and I'd really like to see you guys break down the plot and storytelling techniques used in the game, for two reasons in particular. 1. There are seriously not enough videos out there analyzing this very niche and relatively unknown game. 2. Much like with Xenogears, you only get to experience this game's mind-screwy rollercoaster of a plot for the first time once, then all you can do is enjoy watching other people experience it for the first time. Again, might be a bit of a pain to plan out because of how non-linear it is, but I think this game truly deserves the State of the Arc treatment.
Almost forgot! I'll try not to spoil anything, maybe they'll talk about this in the Automata/Replicant talk at the end, but am I the only one who sees the connection, if only slight, between the robot eating androids and Episode Mermaid? I know the motives are different, but I feel there's definitely a connection, if for no other reason than to be a little Easter egg for fans.
27:17 It's funny to think that both 9S and 2B interact with people that contrast with their personalities. In 9S perspective, everyone is so rational and cold compared to him, while on the 2B playthrough, people tend to be more chatty and emotional compared to her.
1:26:00 When kids go to school and play and interact together, they correlate to the common denominator. In case of most children, it's the things they see on cellphones/TV all the time. It's pretty much inevitable to raise them any differently, unless you really get away from these external influences, by moving to another country for example.
For anybody that is interested in reading deep into the lore of the Draken-Nier universe, EruptionFang has done a fantastic breakdown of all the major facets and relevant content in a video thats over 6 hours long. Its brilliant and i would recommend watching and listening to it.
Regarding the use of the name Engels - he's the boss of a factory that was originally used/owned by the humans (bourgeoisie) that has since been taken by the machines, a group that aren't given any autonomy by the others (the proletariat). He's the character defending the act of seizing the means of production.
Having majored in Biology, from very early on our hormonal make up will predispose us to certain actions and interests, of course that personality will be the primary decider but our chemical balance will definitely have a say in the matter and in a way will mold the personality accordingly. Another interesting way to look at it, think of epigenetics as a series of switches, twins may have the same genetic code but will develop very differently if nurtured differently in which it could be explained by having different genetic markers in your code to be activated and deactivated according to different external stimuli. Now I'm probably wrong but with boys and girls it wouldn't be hard to imagine that sexual genetic markers for boys and girls could be activated/deactivated with the nurture given, what I mean is, maybe there is a less needed amount of stimulus to activate a certain marker for a boy than a girl and vice versa. Of course this is only speculation that would need to be proven/diproven with factual evidence.
The settings section of the B playthrough was a recording of my actions and choices of my A story gameplay. This further adds to the differentiation of 2B and 9S as being individuals and is also Yoko Taro's way to mock the player if they took the moment not seriously and fooled around. (This Happens two other times in the story when 9S is immovable and the player would have control of 2B during the A playthrough). I am playing through the game on the switch with "The End of Yorha" edition. Is this not how those scenes play out in previous versions of the game?
Pascal isn't just a philosopher. Pascal is also a programming language (named after the philosopher, of course). So the machine woth that name is very cheeky.
Isn't the god from the first 9S narration supposed to be a reference to P13? The robot from the first NieR. If I'm not mistaken, there's a short story called fires of Prometheus (or something like that) that explains his faith after being supposedly killed by the player in the first game.
If my memory serves me correctly, I remember the UA-camr Clements mentioning that the god in the volcano is supposed to be the big robot in the junk heap during Nier Replicant bursting out. I think. I don’t really know cause it doesn’t really matter. That Second Sex stuff sounds fascinating, especially the “women aren’t born but made” notion. I’m not qualified to speak on behalf of anyone - barely myself to be honest - but I’ve seen lots of spirited and independent women, who were really cool and had ambitions, basically give up on all that and while not become subservient, definitely gave up on the things that meant something to them. I think - again have to preface I’m a dumbass with only my own experience - people get ground down by this awful world and end up just wanting to be looked after. And unfortunately, this world like to grind down the women most.
As a trans woman, I find de Beauvior's idea of "becoming" a woman very interesting. She essentially paves the way for the ideaology that validates us. And i can certainly attest to my journey being a process. One that took many years and self acceptance to arrive at. Also, there is certainly societal pressure to conform to certain societal definitions of what a woman is. Though, to be fair, i tend to embrace them, rather than begrudge them.
So, there are a lot of Marxist themes present in the game and it's a huge disappointment that none of them were mentioned. In brief: 1) The most obvious: the currency used for everything in the game is gained from killing most commonly found 'people' in the game - the machines. It's not exactly the Labor Theory of Value or exploitation, but the idea that the blood and sweat of the average person is what turns the wheels of economy is pretty Labor Theory adjacent. 2) Alienation: when deprived of the ability to think of oneself of the director of one's own actions, high minded concepts such as life and destiny are rendered meaningless. 2B and 9S are not directing their own lives, YoRHa is. The Machines are not directing their own lives, the Aliens/Network is. Right up until the end of the game, most actors in the narrative are alienated from the work they do - whether it is the biding of YoRHa or the Network, and as cogs in much larger machines, struggle to define what 'life' actually is. 3) Class Conscious: Act 1 of the plot reveals that the machines, at some point, acquired class consciousness and overthrew their Alien masters. The machines no longer reproduce themselves in service of and benefit to the Aliens, but for themselves. This is hinted at in Engels' archive 110-B Record 0020. 4) Communism and Pascal's Village: This is a direct quote from Pascal - "Each machine is an equal, which means the traditional capitalistic acquisitions methods of the past don't work for us. Instead, our economy is focused trading materials according to one's need." There are more but those are the important ones, in brief.
I know he's a controversial person, but Jordan Petersen did briefly mention the subject of Nature vs Nurture in society and how when gender roles are removed to a greater degree among the sexes it appears like the more innate differences between the sexes are enhanced. Whether or not this is true, I have no idea, but Casen talking about his brother's kids made me think of it.
Dude... Casen is so smart. He should be on a PhD programme somewhere. He would make a great English lit, anthropology / psych / philosophy or religious studies prof.
I love the music in this game and I really like how they handle the change between peaceful, battle, hacking, etc. The music usually stays on beat and changes to the alternate version as you play. I'm not sure if this was the first game to ever do it this, but I think it is the first one to do it in such a well done way.
From my upbringing, as a woman, I had a mix of both sides of the situation of both nature and nurture. I was raised with two brothers but had traditional adults in my life pushing back and forth. I clicked very well with things that boys are traditionally interested and still am (love Legos, cars, interested in computers and gaming), but I also met roadblocks along the way. It was common for me to get very girly things for my birthday and Christmas, not to mention the adults in my family (primarily aunts and uncles) just asking "Are you sure you like those?" It made me question myself a lot and really did whittle down my own confidence at a young age. I am glad that my brothers help encourage my interests and did things along with me (including times I wanted to try dollhouse and dress-up), and my own parents for being pretty hands off in pushing one thing or another. I am just naturally curious and always questioning, so it helped push the boundaries that kept being put in front of me as I was being railroaded. I'm now working in an engineering field, while it is mostly male dominated and it has been a tough road to get this far, I can say that it helped that I was nurtured to pursue my own goals that I wanted deep down inside. I would be remiss to say that I did feel the pressure though to keep my looks up, be presentable, at least when out in public due to the bombardment of advertisements and marketing, it is very difficult to avoid, especially when comparing yourself to others.
Like Casen's daughter, I also noticed at a young age that there were things I was not really included in though, like certain sports and various activities that I would be able to do when I was younger. Especially after puberty, things got very strange as I was a lot more self conscious and well aware of how I looked to others too. I did have social groups with other girls where there would be arbitrary roadblocks set like how I should look and dress. Meanwhile, on the other end, I was kind of being shunned by the boys who would tell me "You're a girl, you're not allowed to like this" sort of think. Even if my family was willing to let me do what I wanted, I felt like society dictated how I should be. There's plenty of stories where some guys act very...aggressive when a woman is interested and capable of doing things they do (especially in automotive and still the case in certain multiplayer video games.) I don't know if it's natural for them to feel threatened or if they are raised that way, but it was like another roadblock put in front of me. It was very frustrating throughout my teens, as I did not feel like I belonged, so I reverted back to the social group and went through my phase of trying to fit in and yet still try not to be "like the other girls". Luckily for me, I did get wise and got myself into a technical institute to pursue what I wanted, and worked my butt off just to prove people wrong. It certainly wasn't easy, and being a woman in a male dominated field was (and still is) very intimidating. I have found a good balance in life now, and been happy with just dropping the traditions that can be forced upon us, whether by family or society; however, I feel like my story is the exception. I am grateful that I had support from family and some stubbornness to not follow the crowd, but I know that not everyone has the support or social structure that can really encourage their passions that I initially wanted as far as I can remember.
Thank you for sharing that!
All of my life, up until my father's death in 2019, I have been fighting with the concept of 'becoming a woman'. My father was someone who had complete control of my family's life, due to the fact that he was the one who provided the biggest financial support, and that continued to be the case until he passed away. When we were children, me and my brother were both highly discouraged to follow anything that appealed to us on a personal level, unless it was something my father agreed with. My older brother too, was brought up in a way to 'become a man'', and even though it was certainly a traumatizing experience for him too, due to society's gender expectations of men he was able to explore himself more, and make some doors open for him.
In my case though, I was only given a true chance to explore life and myself when my father lost his influence on him. I am Greek and I have lived in Greece almost all of my life, so even though I did almost everything I was blackmailed to do in order to secure a 'good' future for myself and not disappoint anyone in my family, the financial crisis became so bad when I graduated from university, that it was practically impossible to become independent in society. To give some perspective, the minimum wage would be something around 480$, and the rent for a small apartment around 350$. So no matter how much I fought and struggled to become my own person, something major would always put me down and chain me to what I should do as a woman. I was shamed so much by my parents and ex boyfriends that I was completely unwilling to cook for myself or cook for others, but how can I possibly find the will to do something like that when the picture I grew up with was my father, despite how it actually tasted, constantly criticized my mother's cooking which always resulted in my mother crying?
Everything I was pushed to do was investing in an average pay job that could provide some security so I can become a mother later in my life. Every time I experimented with anything that lead me to another path in life, I was immediately discouraged and heavily shamed for even having a dream. I struggled with depression for so many years, changed so many jobs, even tried to live abroad in a 'better' country, but that oly resulted in me being sexually harassed by my roommates, or being looked down upon for being a foreigner and a woman in that country’s society.
One thing that kept me going all these years, was the things that I kept very close to my heart and didn’t share with most people except my friends. The games I enjoyed playing, the music I loved listening to, mastering languages that opened up my eyes to new worlds, all the stories that were born inside my head when I wasn’t able to experience life the way I should as my own person. When I discovered this channel, I was incredibly moved by the fact that there are people out there who think, feel, and take seriously the things that aspire me so much. You guys are the first channel I ever became a patreon to! Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for us, and thank you so much for paying attention to so many nuanced things that eventually resulted in this conversation related to Simone. I haven’t been feeling confident to talk to you before, but this spoke to me on a very personal and even existential level, so I couldn’t help myself and write this very long comment. English is not my native language, so please forgive the awkwardness of my writing.
I am turning 35 this year, and I still don’t know many things about who I truly am or who I aspire to be. Society screams at me for not being a mother yet, for not having a secured ‘career' yet, for not desiring to serve a man yet, etc. But it is the first time I feel truly free, and having the chance to listen to your analysis and the way it sparks conversations such as this, through art pieces I hold very dear to my heart, is incredibly healing to me. Thank you very much, I will always be extremely grateful to both of you and to all the lovely people who watch and support your channel.
I am a woman and wanted to say that you both handled the women and nature/nurture subject very well. Yes, very much nurture (or conditioning as I prefer to call it) and as parents, sadly you are unable to control your daughters' interactions with others when you are not around. Just a little about me. I am 60. I work in IT and have done since I could work. In my day, there were *no* women in IT but it never phased me. I was and still am good at it. I am proud that I managed to break through that conditioning. Keep at it Mike and Casen, peace out
I think the Marx/Engels robots are just Yoko Taro being cheeky. They're giant factory robots. They *are* the means of production.
I see I should’ve read the comments first because I just commented the same lol
I scrolled down here to say this as well!
I also was going to write about this! For Mike & Casen: in case you don't know, the factory was a symbol for Marx & Engels for the suppression of the working class and distracting its people (e.g. 2B and 9S) from revolting through all sorts of bureaucratic busywork, which is established by the upper pseudo-aristocratic class. I'm fuzzy on some details, but i hope this makes enough sense, why the robot is named Engels! Love your discussions 😉💪
And when you grab the arm to use against it, you are literally seizing the means of production. XD
Yep, and if I recall correctly the appeal of the communist/socialist theory was very strongly directed at, and caught by, factory workers. Which makes sense when you think about it! An office worker shuffling numbers around is deprived of the fruit of their labor in a way that's very abstract, it might not be immediately clear how their work is creating value, or how much. If you're making a _car,_ on the other hand, the end product is _very_ obvious, and so is the discrepancy between it's price and how much you and your coworkers are getting paid for making it.
Hey guys, Woman, I'm keeping this brief, I have a tendency to go with pointless purple prose haha
-The role of the modern woman in 2023, having been born in 1988, feels like it's going through a change.
Some good, some bad.
Women have grown to be regular workers in a majority of fields. This benefits me greatly, as an information security freelancer.
Womens' pay has increased immensely.
I am deeply happy for these changes.
However, my own mother would pressure me immensely to marry. To find a man. To settle down. To put my foolish ambitions to rest.
That experience of girl/womanhood was negative, but maybe it won't be negative like that forever.
But also, for reasons I'll mention at the end, I have no intent of having children, but if I were to have a daughter, I would do my absolute best to continue that trend - and if my daughter's father were not on board with that, I would have selected my child's father poorly, or made quite a poor life choice, by my own judgment.
-I remember being asked by one of my guy friends when I was a teenager why I didn't have any hobbies. I did, I just kept the fact I played videogames and roleplayed on the internet secret from everybody, because for girls at the time, and even now I think, that was strange. And to be fair, it was also a fringe thing for boys at the time, but it was more acceptable for boys to be into the "weirder stuff".
-Following off that, the visible change in the chest area in female puberty is mirrored by muscle growth in boys, but there's something 'strange' and 'other' societally about the breasts.
Boys get in trouble for staring at them. Girls and woman know something about their body is desired and they will receive attention toward their breasts, much, much before she's ready for that sort of attention oftentimes,
and then, there's the other thing that we, as a culture, do not want to talk about because it's "icky". Despite half of all humans going through the cycle of menstruation.
-I run D&D and tend to portray a very dark and politics-heavy setting (I got into your guys' channel witj FF Tactics),
and whenever there's a new person that joins us - man or woman doesn't matter - they often say something to the tune of "I really didnt expect it to be like that" - Some meaning good, some meaning bad, but the insinuation is they didn't expect /me/ to run things as I do. I think an aspect of that is because I'm a woman, BUT, it may not be. But I'll never really know. And that's true for a lot of things in society.
"Did this interaction happen how it did because of my cultural identity as 'female'?"
It's a thought that makes me glum sometimes.
Amazing episode, I'm so happy you guys are finally talking about this masterpiece.
You guys both talked about that touchy subject very respectfully I think, similar to the touchy subject of mental health in Senua's Sacrifice, another game I love.
One thing to look up:
/Tokophobia/, fear of pregnancy / motherhood. A uniquely female fear, and one that is touched on in Drakengard / Nier, as well as in Bloodborne - which the UA-camr "Honey Bat" made an excellent video-essay on, called "Visceral Femininity".
Absolutely love the content,
Thanks, guys!
“I’m keeping this brief”
(Writes a novel) 😆
As a woman this section of the game was so impactful. Because we are always, from a very young age, told to do certain things to attract men. We’re sold things, from a very young age, to look our best for others. We play with dolls that maybe have professions like a Doctor Barbie, but it is pretend. No one told me I could peruse anything I was interested in, I drove myself to be an artist. No one encouraged me. And honestly it goes deeper for me, as someone with ADHD. I struggled a lot in school socially and academically but I felt no support system to get me on track to do much. Life as a woman is to serve others, to be maternal, a caregiver, to have compassion even if people and life walk over us. At one point we step back and wonder if everything we’re doing is for us or it’s something society has told us to do.
Only a few minutes in but on the discussion of 9S going through the 2B diagnostics after the factory mission. It's actually a recording of what actions you took in the A playthrough. 9S said that it would be recorded and now in B it's played back exactly how you did it.
So for someone like me who spent about 10 minutes going through each option to mess with 9S and hear any funny dialogue, I had to sit back and watch it all again LIKE 9S HAD TO! Oh man it really got me invested in him as the POV for playthrough B because I was in his same mindset
At that point, you just have to sit back. Smile, and say, “Yep, I only have myself to blame. I did this to myself.”
@@TheMilhouseExperience in fairness I wasn't having a bad time, it made me feel oddly nostalgic since I hadn't seen that dialogue in 35-40 hours or so. But I did really put that on myself
I believe when you're going through the 2B reboot as 9S, it plays the video that was recorded during this part of your 2B playthrough. So however long you waited to adjust the settings and the dialogue option you chose (in this case "Something calming about your voice"), will be exactly the same as your 2B playthrough.
This is correct.
Yes, i waited for 1 hour in the first playthrough and was surprise that it was recorded
I guess just to add to the conversation of women… I was very lucky growing up in that my parents wanted me to be whatever I wanted, let me pursue things, etc. However, I was also relentlessly bullied in elementary school and highschool for not being particularly feminine, for being a ~nerd, for not having boyfriends, being ugly, etc. And a lot of this did come from boys (some girls as well). I did find my people eventually, but a lot of that grade school stuff did really shape who I am, and the only “relationships” I did get into were both abusive in some fashion. And yet, as someone who has no desire to have a partner, I still have no self worth in my appearance other than if a man validates it, or is interested in me, whatever. It also really bothers me that I don’t seem to be desirable to men at all (despite not even wanting to be). It’s a pretty tangled web. So, the Simone stuff is pretty…on point for me lol.
All of this need to be validated by men is also constantly blasted at women through media as well. I know men get it too, and I think it’s actually intensifying a bit, which is sad…
Anyway, thanks for the discussion, and peace to the ladies in the comments.
So, Nier connection spoilers regarding the god rising from the volcano, don't read on if you aren't ready for that:
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The "god" that arose from the volcano and gave enlightenment to the machines is expounded on in the story "The Fire of Prometheus" in the Drakengard 10th anniversary book "World Inside".
In the story the P-33 robot "Beepy" that was fought as the junkyard boss in Nier reflects on its life and resolves to leave earth to explore space, as it does it is attacked by the machines but seeing they are mindless automata it chooses to respond by giving them life and the ability to not do that.
I was a little disappointed they didn’t mention this. I’m pretty sure they’re aware that it’s Beepy because they talked about it in their Replicant episodes.
I think they may be saving it for the end when they talk about links to the previous game.
I think it’s pretty clear they haven’t made the connection yet, but hopefully the comments will point them in the right direction for the end of the pod Nier connections.
@Resonant Arc But yeah, Beepy rises from the Volcano and finds himself in the middle of the machine war. The machines created by the Aliens attack him, and realizing they had yet to gain consciousness, Beepy connected to their network and shared his consciousness with them. This event being the catalyst for the machines gaining sentience and cutting themselves off from the network.
Interesting, then, that the machines created by the Aliens gained their sentience from a machine created by humans. The androids, machines, and humans are all far more alike than they are different.
Yes, it's p33
It's a pain they keep ignoring connections, they already made a nier retro it's essential to cover this stuff!
I think the point that Casen and Mike were trying to make with the honorifics is that in English, 2B is saying something like, "Stop addressing me as a superior, and just address me as a regular person." whereas in Japanese, it would read a bit closer to, "Stop addressing me as just a regular person, and address me as a friend." If not a friend, then at least two people that are much closer than strangers. Typically you only drop the honorific with people that you are quite familiar with. Small thing but, it hints at what their actual relationship is earlier on in the game. Rather than "Ma'am," which denotes respect towards a superior like -senpai or -sama, perhaps a better translation would have been "Miss," which denotes cordiality and formality, but not necessarily superiority or respect. It's tough, though, simply because even that is a word that we hardly use in English. We don't have a true equivalent.
Yeah I think I interpret it slightly different. When I hear 2B say "Don't call me ma'am" and it was translated as "Don't call me 2B san", I take that 2B is not trying to be friendly with 9S at all. Her Unit name is 2B so lets just stick that and not add any flair or attachment to it. Which is why she also refuses to call him "Nines". If they went with "Don't me 'Miss 2B'" as in "Just call me 2B" you could interpret it as 2B attempting to offer an olive branch of casualty to their relationship and I don't think she is into that. 2B at this point is a very by the book android. And they're trying to get that across that she just isn't into nicknames at all.
As a woman myself, I kind of experienced something like what Mike was talking about. I've always had an interest in learning Japanese (I even majored in it in college!), but sometimes when I talk about my learning progress with family, they're like, "yeah, but isn't it gonna be hard to settle down in a foreign country?" and "don't you want to start a family eventually?" As if all women eventually default into caregivers and wives and abandon their career. Men get to have as much kids as they want, but don't have to deal with the pressure of settling down (not speaking for all men, just my observations), I mean look at Elon Musk. The guy has 10 kids in his 50s and has shown no signs of slowing down his career ambitions. I also think that women who grow up under traditional patriarchal hierarchies (especially in religious households) have to deal with this the most as they are expected from a young age to grow up to become mothers and care for their husbands and homes. They don't really do anything else. This makes me think of a youtube video I saw where wives were asked what hobbies they like and they had to name things that did not involve their husbands and kids and these women were struggling. It was like their entire life as centered around caregiving. I'm not saying you can't enjoy that, but there has to be more to you than being a mother. That's just my two cents.
Don't think I've ever seen a gaming channel with such a thoughtful comment section. The educational and ethical value of this podcast is insane. Can't stop marveling at what you've accomplished here.
The passage in question from Sarah Bakewell's *At the Existentialist Cafe*:
"The physical lusciousness of life was never a threat to Beauvoir: she could not get enough of it. As a child, she wanted to consume everything she saw. She would gaze greedily into the windows of sweet shops - ‘the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscopic inflorescence of acidulated fruitdrops- green, red, orange, violet - I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasures they promised me’. She wished the whole universe could be edible, so it could be eaten as Hansel and Gretel ate from the gingerbread house. Even as an adult, she wrote, ‘I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset.’ Travelling to New York in 1947, she felt an urge to eat the neon signs, brightly arrayed against the night sky.
Her appetite extended to collecting things, including many gifts and souvenirs from her travels. When she finally moved from hotel rooms to a proper apartment in 1955, it quickly filled up with ‘jackets and skirts from Guatemala, blouses from Mexico … ostrich eggs from the Sahara, lead tom-toms, some drums that Sartre had brought back from Haiti, glass swords and Venetian mirrors that he had bought in the rue Bonaparte, a plaster cast of his hands, Giacometti’s lamps’. Her diary-keeping and memoir-writing also reflected an urge to acquire and relish everything that came into her grasp."
jean-paul and simone reading recommendation: after Sarte’s death, Simone DeBeauvoir released a collection of letters he sent her, many of which are love letters, and also, cringy af. They are ironic to read alongside both his works and Nier Automata
My girlfriend, before she became my girlfriend had the issue to be a person other people wanted her to be. She was in a bad relationship where her boyfriend, who has agoraphobia, who literally wanted her to be his maid and do his household, without doing anything to work on his illness. He made her indirectly cut ties to all her friends and focus solely on him. In a really cruel way she was struck by the death of one of her brothers and her dog loosing a leg by jumping out of a third story window, let her take a breather from him and assess her situation and cut ties with him and become self-determining again. After I told her how I feel about her she, (she's the woman of my dreams) for the first time considered me as her life-partner and some deep meaningful conversations she found the same feelings. One of the first things I told her was, that she's a free bird to do whatever she wants because some women wait for her men to allow them to do things.
So many women and men are obsessed, like simone, to be someone that others like, in place of to be the person they like to be.
On a deeper level, notice the influence that both Friedrich Engels and Simone de Beauvoir take from Hegel here, particularly the lord-bondsman dialectic in the *Phenomenology of Spirit*.
It is an extremely important concept in the history of philosophy. Simply put, Hegel imagines a clash between two human beings, who seek to overpower one another and gain recognition in doing so. They come to war with one another, and one wins while the other is defeated. The one who wins is established as "lord" while the one who is defeated is established as his "bondsman."
The lord is the ostensible master over the bondsman, but he not only becomes fat and weakened off the labour of the bondsman, the recognition that he receives from the bondsman is a false one, for it is coerced through the threat and the practice of violence.
Whereas the bondsman, put under a position of servitude, is able to work hard and overcome his limitations that placed him in this position of bondage to begin with. He is the one who becomes the "stronger," and is the one who recognizes the more meaningful recognition from the lord who, whether he verbally acknowledges it or not, is now dependent on the bondsman practically and for recognition. The bondman ultimately realizes that the lord has power over him because he has himself given the lord that power, and the possibility lies therein for him to reclaim said power.
Put in place class (the lord is the bourgeoisie class, and the bondsman the proletariat) or gender (the lord is men and the bondsman woman), and we can see how both Engels and Beauvoir draw heavily from Hegelian thought in their thinking of the problem of alienation. Both Engels and Beauvoir posit the essential power in the hands of the alienated subject, and present a way to overcome said alienation: by recognizing this fact (that one has instantiated a "false consciousness" that holds oneself in bondage) and by affirming the true power and freedom that comes from within oneself.
A missed point was 9S saying "I don't care about the weather," that is useless information juxtaposed to the robots talking about "what nice weather we are having"
Lots of threads can be taken from there
Astute observations and discussion about The Second sex! Been a while since I read it myself, but I do remember noticing that in my favourite adventure, the party composition was "The young Hero", "The old Master", "The Scoundrel" who actually is a hero at heart, his friend. And "The princess" (Leia), who in essence is the only woman in the story. And that is not only her gender, but also her role. All other are the "default sex" with roles.
Fascinating that it took from Simone wrote that book, almost until now before the problems started to be addressed in the popular culture (and Hollywood is getting quite a lot of flack for it)
I also agree with your observation about women and their hobbies. Had a discussion the other day, were I made the point that your sex does not determine if you are good at cooking or not, but you gender determines if society wants you to do it as a hobby or careerer, or if you are supposed to do it to make food for the family.
Luckily, it seems that in Scandinavia at least, young girls are getting more encouraged to get hobbies, and enjoy niche things as well that isn't accepted "girl hobbies".
I love the way you said that how sex doesn't determine certain things, gender does determine how society will respond to you in different situations.
@@mana-uv7cz Thank you! 😊
I don’t think it’s “what society wants” but what your sex is more inclined to do. Scandinavia has more equal opportunity laws that have given every opportunity for women to follow their desires career path. And they tend to choose motherhood.
It’s all starts with the sex’s inclination of women being more social oriented and men being more item/task/function oriented. It’s kind of why women tend to take careers that don’t pay as much: teachers, secretaries, caretakers; but nothing that would be more demanding like cab or bus drivers, surgeons, mechanics or company CEO’s. Those that can do that are dedicated and deserve a level of admiration because it takes some level of mental separation to thrive in those jobs. Same goes for men that do the first set of jobs. As well as construction workers, sewage workers, plumbers, electricians, ditch diggers. They literally keep society running. It’s not easy, but at some level men better understand some jobs need to be done or all the nice things we enjoy go away.
But fancy you mentioned Scandinavia, because the information gathered from that region has proven that the more equal the opportunities present themselves to both sexes, the more the differences between the 2 present themselves.
Some people really want others to know about this, but those people have been trying to force equality of outcome over equality of opportunity. That’s how “diversity hires” became a thing. And it is a more detrimental thing because it is no longer promotes meritocracy, the best person for the job/service you want, and becomes more nepotism towards things people were conceived as but that I don’t think is really addressed in Automata and is much more current compared to Automata’s other inspirations.
@@TheMilhouseExperience
The reason I mention Scandinavia, is that I'm Norwegian, but I've lived in Sweden for about 7 years now, so this is the societies I know best
Equal laws perhaps, but social pressure is still strong. (And don't get me wrong, the laws here are awesome, and is a force for good, it's only slow to translate into social acceptance).
The hearth of the discussion is the nature / nurture debate. And like you point out, we have a lot of historical baggage with us. Women where supposed to rare children, and menn were supposed to provide resources. Menn stil have the social pressure of earning more than ones spout, even in Scandinavia. No one says it out loud, but the expectation is there. (And good luck closing those wage-gaps before the pressure stabilises )
In a similar fashion, when I grew up, girls (at large) did not watch anime, or played video games, and those girls who did got socially punished, and had to defend their decision to have such an unfitting hobby. "You should go have better suited hobbies, like food, sewing or dresses" which people actually said out loud, but mostly just insinuated with looks, tones of voice etc.
Girls growing up now have less of this, and are "allowed" to play video games much more than before, or have hobbies that are a bit out there.
My point is that we shouldn't just look around us and see "this is what is, this is what nature dictates, and this is how it should be". Nature played a huge part in leading us here, but nature could have led us elsewhere as well (just look at other cultures), and where we are now, isn't necessarily the best place we could be. And we should not underestimate social pressure. We have evolved to be highly social creatures, so it is no surprise we are impacted socially either. And just like with video games, careers are slowly but surely changing.
In my opinion, we can't do much to change our biology, but we can study and change our social expectations and cues, and we should be less judging of people a bit outside the norm.
PS. "...proven that the more equal the opportunities present themselves to both sexes, the more the differences between the 2 present themselves. "
My background is in natural science and mathematics, so "proof" might mean something else to me, but I will argue that no such thing has been proved. It has been shown that this is one _possible_ outcome. But you would need to show that all other outcomes are impossible for it to be a proof. And you would also need to show that it is the only variable that means something. Like I've argued above, social expectations plays a huge role. And the next generation of women are already challenging the previous norms a bit. So it is already changing.
Regarding the volcano story, it's referencing how the robot from nier that gained sentience ( I assume by being exposed to magic from a shade for so long) ended up taking off into space I believe and offering it's sentience to the machine life forms. ( Pulling from side content flames of Prometheus)
This is Beepy in particular. He doesn't forget Kalil's last wish that they'd go see the world outside together, so he flied to space.
Also, the mountain that mentioned on the vignette montage is an abandoned/reconfigured-as-machine factory Junk Heap.
On the question of why Yoko Taro might have opted to use the name of the philosopher "Friedrich Engels" for the first boss, I think we might look at Simone as an example for how Taro goes about incorporating famous philosophical figures into his story.
As rightly pointed out in this podcast, Simone here stands for a kind of alienation that is caused by the conflict between the sexes: women are the "second sex" who are alienated from themselves. They fail to realize the essential truism that "one is not born but becomes a woman," and they unconsciously surrender all of their power and agency to men and take on the "false self" that men, other women conditioned to accept the framework, and society impose on them. This is why although Simone is initially an androgynous robot and no different from the "male" in appearance, it increasingly takes on the persona of the female in order to win over Sartre.
In much the same way, Engels is represented as a factory, clearly a callback to the social alienation brought about by the Industrial Revolution as identified by the philosopher himself in his *The Condition of the Working Class in England*. Like the character Engels in the game, men are transformed into instruments of production [the emphasis on the factory] by the capitalist-industrial complex, and fail to grasp the insidious truth that they are exchanging their agency for a false "essence" of capitalist exploitation.
If our analysis is onto something and if *NieR: Automata* ultimately sides with Sartrean existentialism in pointing out that "existence precedes essence," then it casts light on the ways in which men have in the domains of gender and class alienated themselves by holding onto a false, metaphysical concept of an "essence" that actively contributes to their practical, material suffering. Better instead to liberate oneself, realize the power that one instinctively has as subject, and create a mode of existence for oneself conducive to human flourishing.
As a woman, and addressing the points about gender in the video... First, I think having the Simone robot talking about tailoring itself to what could appeal to a "him"... I can relate as someone that has grown up with several insecurities. But I don't see it as necessarily a thing that plagues women. It could be said that a lot of men have insecurities and try to shape themselves to what others (their romantic interest) wants as well. Still, those quotes hit me hard! Second, about the hobbies thing - that was surprising to me, as someone that while growing up also made a lot of video editing, learned new languages, read a ton of books, practiced dance, theatre... Maybe it is a cultural thing (or more likely an individual/community thing) but I at least don't see myself in that category, and probably not most of my female friends either. I should say I'm from Southern/Western Europe, because maybe that makes a difference. There are generalisations that I have made about USA and UK women (not really fair I might add) that have led me to think I can't relate to them very well because of those reasons: being very much concerned with physical appearance, a lot of makeup, skimpy clothes, more interest in clubbing and malls, etc... This is just to say that maybe there is a cultural component there, but I am probably drawing it from unfair assumptions.
One thing that I have noticed though, is that women tend to be more relational, and the men I know not so much. At least the men I know are more solitary, maybe more individually centred, while the women I know are more social and focus on friendships and community. This has concerned me, but the men that I have pointed this out to have said they are fine like this. It makes me think that it might make it more difficult for them to express emotions, to find real companions and community, but it's also not my place to force them to reach out like that. Not all these men have focused on work, nor have they been confident, so I wouldn't consider that an explanation. I have also seen more women in my life have "drive", as you say, so I can't make a relation there! We might just have very different networks/experiences here.
But, I should say, the way my mother and father talked to me was very different than they talked to my brother. It was more protective and limiting for me. So I think that does play a part in some of my insecurities...
Now, it is quite interesting to see that the comments on your video so far addressing this topic have veered into something very different ahah
Yes, I also remember my parents being more limiting with me than my other male family members.
I am not a woman, but I think that men, in general, tend to keep other people at a distance and are less eager to pursue emotional connections. It doesn't mean that men see no value in those connections, only that they will not try to form connections that will just break anyway, they will have more acquaintances and less true friends, but they value those few friends a lot, more than brothers even.
About the generalisations you've made about women in the USA and UK, generalisations that I kind of made too, it more of a big city thing, and as a society we are failing our young, both boys and girls in different ways. The stereotype of the girl forever pursuing shallow ideals of beauty dictated by media and peer pressure, having little to no interest in anything else other than looks and social status is something that is culturally imposed on them, by both sides of the political spectrum, and it leaves very little room and incentive for young girls to pursue what they really want. As Mike pointed out on the video, he observed this behavior, but seems to be purely cultural, and as Simone says, women are forced into a position, into roles. The same happens with men, of course, but in different directions, but generally men are allowed to be individuals way more than women. When it comes to clubbing, that one is incentivised for both men and women nowadays, making both pursue the same kind of shallowness.
People that are more Conservative might say that women need to be housekeepers, mothers, be pretty and that's it, while people that are more Progressive might veer in the complete opposite direction, but both sides fail to allow women to be who they want to be. Sure there are things that come from nature, but social pressures may affect women more due to how women tend to integrate more than men with a wider social network.
It also happens to men but not on the same way. Young peopleare feeling lost these days, told that they can be anything except who they want to be.
@@williansnobre can you say more on what you mean about clubbing and shallowness? When I go to the club I feel totally free and I absolutely love to dance so I think it's hard for me to understand the shallow part of your comment.
@@mana-uv7cz It can be different for each individual, but what I meant was the culture, incentivised by media, of going out, dancing and drinking without restraint.
It can be something that makes people feel free, sure, and with balance it is liberating and opens yourself to new experiences and new people, but without balance it can be negative, as going out, dancing and drinking only to come back home alone or worse, with bad company. A momentary happiness followed by a long period of regret and anxiety, an endless and fruitless search for something that can't be found there, this is the kind of shallowness that I am reffering to, the one pushed by media, specially the music industry.
I'm not saying that this is everyone's experience, but this is way more common than it should be. By the way you asked I presume that for you the experience is positive, so hey, more power to you.
@@williansnobre yes it is positive for me. But I wanted to understand what you meant simply cause it differed from my experience and not because I thought you believed everyone had a negative experience. I do get what you are saying now because some songs at the club are very shallow if you listen to the lyrics.
According to the novella, Fire of Prometheus, written by Yoko Taro, the machines were given intelligence by P-33, the boss from Nier replicant. I think that's what the picture book is referencing.
It is. That is an essential part of the lore, I kinda hope they make an breakdown of the side material that was made around Nier Automata because there is a lot of it that adds some essential context to the lore and Fire of Prometheus is a major piece as to how the machines gained sentience.
@@jenniferrannila1414 they won’t lmao it’s always gonna be the old “this isn’t a LORE podcast” which I get but in order to understand why the machines got “consciousness” you literally have to understand that it truly came from p33. Even going into the book Taro wrote there’s even more thematic stuff that really makes both games come together. But again. That’s lore. Not story telling lol as they’d put it. Which honestly gets a bit annoying but I get it. 🤐🤷🏽
When you talked about how your brother's kids being really stereotyped to their gender, even though they were raised to not be. It remembered me of Anima and Animus and how the only way of being complete is understanding the other side. So by being exposed to both male and female """things""" the kids were able to be better at the side they identified the most.
Hi! Latina woman here to provide some perspective. I really want to commend you for opening up a conversation about women and inviting us to join in. It's very interesting. So my first thought is talking, being with friends, and shopping from my perspective are all hobbies and skills that could prep you for a job. Fashion has many jobs, all jobs require social skills and the ability to make friends are important in social work jobs since you have to find creative ways to connect with people who are different from you. I agree with your explanation of Simone's philosophy and I do think this kind of nurturing is one of the main reasons women enter more social and caring type jobs. I also think at least in my culture I was very much so expected to take care of my family in other ways my male cousins were not. My mom did praise me for cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and translating for her. I felt better about myself when people noticed me for these things, but it did take up my time. meanwhile I did have a huge interest in video games that I would sometimes get chastised for. My mom always let me play, but she wished I took more care of my appearance, she loves shopping and wished I would go with her more often. I also had interest in music, but I would only pursue that interest in school. I wanted to do dance as well when I was younger, but my mom felt nervous about me dancing with boys. She said she didn't trust them, and that attitude only grew as puberty went on for me. So yes I think you bring up very interesting points that align with at least my experience. I feel like we live a society where the socialization is so ingrained that it's really truly hard to know how much influence nature has.
Sorry to make the comment so long, but yes when you brought the notion of a woman's worth being tied to marriage it made me realize I never touched on that. So many stories and movies perpetuate that idea to women, but also so do our own histories. In my culture's history a woman was considered ready for marriage at fifteen and it was the mark of becoming a women. Coming from a colony the economy was always bad and many women in the past were either sold or married off very young as means of survival for the family. Today a quince is considered a right of passage and marks transition into a woman. My quince was 15 years ago and I did a very traditional one where I wore a white dress (appealing to the idea of marriage). Nowadays most people wear whatever color they want but the parties resemble what you would see at a modern wedding. Even with all the change overtime our culture still perpetuates the mark of becoming a woman with all the cultural markers you would find at a wedding. We even share a dance with our fathers and a boyfriend if we have one. So thought I would throw that in there to demonstrate yet another way society can implicitly put these expectations on women.
You made me realise that was another aspect of differentiated/gender language from my mother: asking me to care for my appearance, try to wear this, or not wear that, etc. I don't remember her ever saying that to my brother, but he was older than me so maybe I miss that. She still says it to me as an adult though! I find it is probably related to how she was raised as well.
@@nyxian_grid oh for sure. My mom would more so comment on straightening my hair, but she would also too influence clothing choice since she would buy a lot of clothes for me since I would choose to not go to the mall.
You bring up an interesting point of cultural expectations and norms very important in this discussion its a very nuisance topic. From my understanding of Latin and Hispanic culture women are very nurturing with in their family and traditional gender roles from older generations are instilled upon them.
@@The810kid Thank you!! I agree with that, our culture does value the idea that women nurture. I see that idea come up a lot when older people talk about the relationships of my younger family members.
Not a girl but am a middle school teacher, I think what you’re saying used to be more true but is increasingly less the case over time. If anything I’d say the average middle school girl is more driven to try new skills and the average middle school boy either thinks they’re going to be a pro athlete or professional gamer/streamer.
I find the stereotype among adults is that young girls are always on their phones doing nothing and boys are doing things but I largely find the reverse to be the case.
All personal anecdotes of course, but this is what I’ve observed over 10+ years in middle schools
Content warning: eating disorders etc.
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So the conversation around Simone and DeBeauvoir's thesis on womanhood really got me thinking about my own personal experience of growing up female, becoming a woman, and the ways in which my early life differed from the typical female experience. Firstly, Simone (the machine) and her desperate objective to be beautiful reminded me of my ongoing struggles with disordered eating: her expressing wanting to vomit is very much indicative of that, not simply the direct parallels to bulimia, but also a cloying need to undo what she had done when she felt out of control. We women often feel as if our agency is tethered to the expectations of patriarchy, whether that is cast upon us by men or other women. We all are preconditioned to expect softness, beauty, and unattainable perfection of being a woman. It's an impossible merry-go-round of upkeep and any woman would tell you that when we are not behest to others, we're just as content as guys are to let go and just allow ourselves to be imperfect and animal. The moment we feel others' gazes, we feel this bizarre need to perform.
I was very intrigued by Mike's discussion about the ladies in his young life who seemed to have frivolous interests. Oddly enough, I knew girls like that at that age as well, and me and my friends tended to avoid them - we (this includes my female friends) were definitely closer to Mike in being ambitious hobbyists. But as I get older I see there is a comfy middle ground in embracing simplicity and how being too ambitious can feel like a mill, always producing, and useless unless we're producing. I was such a tomboy when I was younger. Now in my 30s, I can appreciate my feminine side, the part of me that loves to schmooze, shop and play for the sake of release, rather than being commodifiable.
Really awesome comment, thanks for your honesty. It brought an interesting perspective.
I wanted to say a loud "YES" when you mentioned the need to perform when others' eyes are fixed on us. It resonated with me! I remember moments when I let myself feel free to play as/with the guys and judgement was swift.
Great comment.
hi, this is one of my first times for longer commenting/discussions. i’m usually nervous to have attention on myself but, you asked for more perspectives from women and feminine aligned people, and as an avid fan of you guys, i would like to try and offer some perspectives. i studied a lot of women and gender studies in university, and just have a huge interest in feminism and things of that subject. i would also like to say i’m not speaking for any other women who comment (obviously), but would love to hear more from others if anything. lastly, i’m still young and learning (starting grad school soon) and so some of my perspectives are what i know now in my early 20s. (also, when i comment from here on out, when i say women, its a general sense)
firstly, on the topic of women and ‘hobbies’/skills; i think that there’s definitely something in the concept of “becoming a woman”. in general society, women have been expected to have view things that can be seen as skills differently from a male perspective. i’ve noticed that while were listing the experiences with the past women in your life, there was this idea of practical skills vs emotional skills. i’m sure you guys noticed this, but there’s an idea that practical skills are more useful in the long run vs emotional skills.
learning instruments vs learning how to have a deep conversation with people, learning how to fix a tire vs learning how to fix an emotional connection. i think this relates to the idea of ‘becoming a woman’ in which women in society all grow and are taught/expected to focus more on things that would have had more impact in a traditional “family” home. women grow up, and they aren’t told things such as learning “skills” in terms like instruments and stuff. a lot of women, especially in my experience, will usually experience being told to focus on tasks/hobbies that focus on housework (living in the home).
so i think as you guys talked about it a bit, but yeah, from a male perspective, women wouldn’t have hobbies. but in a women’s perspective, these skills are being built because women are expected to be emotional available in where society wants them to mainly exist, in the home.
studies have pointed out that for young boys and girls in the classroom, younger girls are less confident to speak up than young boys in class, especially in areas that society today deem as male specific (math class, for an example). just something i felt was important to bring up in relation to this conversation. young girls feel like they can’t be as assertive as their boy classmates. you guys wondered “how many of the girls in class felt like they couldn’t be as assertive about the things they want to do”, and my answer is, probably way more than you think.
language is a very important factor here. i’ll use the classroom to speak on this, there have been interesting discussions here. the languages that teachers use on young studies, even unconsciously, is gendered. even if there are efforts at home to keep a child’s life gender neutral, the outside world is also enforcing these ideas of gender and expectations onto people. it’s a huge interesting discussion.
a good video/series to watch about this can be ‘Gender Neutral Education | Can Our Kids Go Gender Free’ which is available on youtube under the channel ‘Real Families.’
relating this to career, there’s a lot we can touch on here. a lot of it comes down to how the work force hasn’t been accommodating to women since the start, and even now. like simone speaks of, men have more choices, and it’s because of this that it seems like women (in a general sense) do not tend to have this sense to practice these larger skills. a lot of women have spoken about that this kind of drive to build practical/physical skills as they grow older and have more experiences. however, like you said, it’s a nature vs nurture type deal.
in my personal experience and studies; just like what you guys were saying, i definitely think that the idea of women being inherently nurturing is one that has been caused because of society and the norms placed for women. i also have noticed myself that, for women especially since a young age, there’s a very heavy importance placed on family, romance, love. (so basically relates back to the ‘hobbies’ of women being dating and friendships, motherhood, etc.)
it’s a lot of mixed things ( i just call it the patriarchy LOL) that honestly would take me hours and hours to type about, but these are just some things i wanted to comment. apologies if this ramble is just long and basically makes no sense, i have so many thoughts on feminism and these topics. and as you guys noticed just from the second sex, it’s one that can cause headaches, etc.
i would just like to also commend you guys on how you approach the subject and ‘the second sex’, very authentic and refreshing. love you guys, as always!
ps.s; also, casen spoke a bit on the idea of consumption, and this is definitely something that can be explored with more feminist texts. i recommend checking out the article ‘Hunger as Ideology’ by Susan Bordo!!
another recommended article is ‘Remaking the She-Devil: A Critical Look at Feminist Approaches to Beauty’ by Kathy Davis. here’s a quote from the article, which i find super relevant to today’s episode.
“The female body seems to be in constant need of transformation. Historically, women have gone to great pains to improve and transform their bodies in order to meet cultural requirements of femininity,”
until next time!
I like to think that the goliaths were called “Marx” and “Engels” because factories are part of the means of production! So in a way they claimed the means of production.
And ironically they are the factories themselves as well as as war machines.
For someone so immersed in Japanese culture, I'm surprised Casen didn't pick up on the word "senpai" immediately
Just a few thoughts:
1. Casen keeps referring to Eve as her/she, I don't think Eve's name is referring to its "gender". I feel this because when we see Adam and Eve's interactions in the cutaway scenes, Eve asks Adam: "Wouldn't it make more sense to call ourselves Cain and Abel?" To which Adam simply states "Eve" fits better and that Eve should be proud of the name, but never states that it's because of a gender-based reason. Eve also asks why they have to wear clothes, to which Adam responds that because of the book they're reading (most likely the Bible) that covering up (I believe he says "covering our crotches" though I could be wrong) was what humans did for reasons of decency. By that logic, wouldn't Adam think that Eve should cover their chest if they were female? Also, Eve has a very male-looking chest, yes I know there are all types of bodies, but...
Of course all this could be moot because they're machines and just might not have a "gender" at all.
2. On Mike's observations about the women in his life, I have a feeling I know what Mike is talking about. My niece is of a particular religion that promotes that type of "thinking" and she is a VERY opinionated and masculine in a lot of ways, but also very devout to her religion and it is something to behold seeing those two things crash into each other and the conflicts it has caused.
3. I suddenly want to listen to the KISS song "God of Thunder". Don't know why.
I think Casen might just be slipping up, which is easy to do when one of the characters has the name of one of the most famous female characters in the world.
@@Msoulwing Fair enough, I just thought it was worth mentioning. I always loved the Cain and Abel comment from Eve given how ironic it would have been, especially on Eve's part.
I was going to mention that last podcast, but he then called him "he" right after, so I thought it was just confusion.
I dont usually comment but have a lot of thoughts around Simone. Firstly as a woman, soon to be mother with a career and rural pastors wife there is a lot in here that has my head spinning.
1. I think this might be a way in how women and men think differently but I am really surprise where the anaylsis went with Simone. Immediately when seeing her story it's a gut punch. Another woman commented about ED's and I appreaicte her vunerability as the way it is described reflects the pain a woman goes through to recieve love from someone. Mike brought up how gaining skills helps you gain value in a society. And YET I feel the whole point of Simone in the game is that her value is being recived from a man (a robot man) The lengths she goes to get there are destructive and horrifying. And yet, it is a very real a unique struggle to being a female. While I appreciate where the conversation went I feel thay get's to the heart of what is being going on here.
I don't know if there is time to revisit this discussion but I think it would be valuable to have a woman's perspective in a video because there is A LOT to analysis from a woman's perspective with this section in the game. (Just listened to the part where Mike touches on jt at the end but would still love a deeper discussion on this)
2. In regards to the hobbies, I brought up being a rural pastors wife because of something interesting Ive noticed about the differences in the young girls Ive mentotrd in contrast to the ones now. These young ladies are STRONG. They have skills and hobbies from living on a farm and needing to work together as a family to make their farms run. They love hunting, snowmobiling, horses and some are even great mechanics. Do they talk about boys and worry about their appearance? Yup! But these ladies are mature and well rounded indviduals. And their mothers are some of th strongest woman Ive meet. On the outside a lot of people would see them as "trad wives" but they are knee deep in mud helping a mother deliver a baby calf and moving hay bales in haying season.
In contrast to the students I work with at Uni. Holy moly thats a differnt story. Thats where I see the infuence of social media, discontenment in singleness reflecting their value and deep struggled with their relationship to men that cut your heart.
The rural girls have these same struggles but a lesser extent because of how busy (and disconnected from the internet) they are and I also see them work out their relationship in a healtheir way ironcially because of the religion that in the past has downgraded a womans value. It actually elevates it and it is a work for both ladies to work on that their value doesnt come from their work or a guy but from a good God that loves them and elevated the place of a woman RADICALLY through Jesus in the Gospels. And that in turn helps them know they are a whole person creating healthier relationships.
I love church history but Augstine had some awful takes on woman. What the Bible actually says is very different.
Simone was not whole without the love she felt she needed. So she did what she thought she needed to do to recive it.
The role that beauty plays in this I am suprised also wasn't touched.
There is something in a female that says "I must be beautiful to be loved"
And since we arent immacualte everyday we feel that insecurity. It's a joke but I know Ive asked my husband "do you still love me?" Esepcially as I feel an ugly monster in the middle of morning sickness. And yet what I have learned from him and actually other men on social media is that for some reason they still love their wives and see them as just as beautiful (I know thats not true in every realtionship and there is deep pain with spouses concering this but these are the ones I observe that are in health)
There's a lot more I am thinking on with my own growing up as the odd duck teen that was more interested in hobbies then boys but I'll leave it to my personal processing.
The part about becoming a woman I am poundering more now in the transition into motherhood. It is another process in the body that feels even crazier then puberty.
If it's true it happens more then once in a woman's life and it's pretty brutal each time 😅
Really appreciate what you guys are doing.
I said already earlier on playthrough A that Simone is my favorite boss of all time, I love the conversation her second encounter sparkled. Great job, don't steer away from conersation starters like these and don’t be afraid to express your own experiences as honestly as in this one
loved the Simone DeBeauvoir part, great Episode!
I’m at the point where you guys are talking about the Spirits of Fire video short. You are right in a lot of ways but it is a literal story. P-33 due to the experiences it had from NieR: Replicant it rose from the Junk Heap and it brought the Machine’s intelligence because it saw them in an endless war, this is all part of the short story called the Fire of Prometheus thus the “Spirit of Fire”.
SPOILER: Route B reminds me of Nier's 2nd Playtrough when you can understand the shades.
Yes, B playthrough is always about seeing something from fresh perspective and understanding
Mike: "I had hobbies to further my carrer, while girls had hobbies that did not." When it comes to success in the workplace social skills are way more impactful than practical or intellectual ones.
When it comes to nature vs nuture. It's a mix and not in the clean 50% way, but the annoying stochastical spectrum one. Some people have a strong nature and nuture can't change it. Some people lack a strong nature and get impacted by nuture a more.
As Casen observed, this leads that people, that don't get their nature acomodated early, to overcompensate later.
The volcano is about beepy from the first Nier (P33) it was him who gave conscience to the machines.
The slow realization that American society isn't organized to support self actualization of people born with xx chromosomes is a helluva conversation arch, but a hugely salient one.
I think we can see how it goes both ways. Just look at phases of life: boys are supposed to act one way, girls another. And if they don’t the other kids can become real nasty to one another. Enter into dating and men are expected to make money and be over 6 foot. Women are expected to be homemakers and faithful. And it is a mess because of polygamy normalization. Enter into parenthood, the men are expected to make money, while the women are expected to take care of the children. But if divorce happens, women are heavily favored in custody, child support and alimony. Sometimes the father is restricted to seeing his kids for a few hours a week. It’s a mess and both men and women’s measured happiness has declined over time. There are other factors, of course( (the economy, inflation, single parent upraising) but I think most people would agree that feminism in the last decade or so has had a major hand in creating and changing a lot in society. Much of it is not better for both men and women.
I think your podcast are amazing, my fav by far its the one from FFX but every other podcast you do have the same quality, keep it up guys, much love
Gotta respect how you guys will hit us with Ayn Rand during one series and de Beauvoir in another. People assuming your politics spend way too much time in toxic spaces online and can't help but see the world through an "us vs them" black and white filter.
I, for one, appreciate how you explore so many different ideologies and schools of thought without judgement, even if it's something that I don't necessarily agree with 100% myself. People have become scared of hearing other perspectives due to modern echo chambers and social media. Ironic that the thing that was meant to bring us all closer together has driven us so far apart.
The event where the "God" emerged from the volcano and appeared before the machines did actually happen, and what it gave the machines was "consciousness", for the lack of a better term off the top of my hat right now, my understanding is that this is the catalyst that sparked the machines into becoming more than what they were originally made to be.
This is detailed in a short story called The Fire of Prometheus. Play NieR Replicant first, then read the short story for full context.
These comments are such a treat, I'll get myself later food and just scroll through these while eating. Thanks Mike and Casen for making this possible and thanks everyone for sharing your insights from your personal experiences!
What I enjoy most about Route B is that you have to play as 9S, the character who most adamantly affirms that nothing that machines do has any meaning, to learn that there is intent and motivation behind every single one of the big boss battles that we're fighting.
The paradox there is something I find deeply fascinating.
The tangents, debates, and discussions these two go through. XD "we should be able to do this in a single episode" Spends entire episode diving into a single character and her real works inspiration. "okay maybe a second." Love it!
Something about eternity you guys mentioned last time, I think it's like if I was a primary school kid trying to explain my views on Nier, I would only be able to explain to a very limited extent. Whereas if I was a high school kid, I would be able to explain a bit better.
And if I was a college student, I would gain more understanding to life and hence relate more.
But, even though I'm an adult now with a lot of life events happening in my life, I would still hold a different view for the game than to Yoko Taro, as he's the one made the game with his idea in mind.
We just know too little about eternity, so in our view, we think it could be like this way or that, could be boring or out of things to do and driving us mad, that's only because we are analysing something that's not made by us, we can't comprehend yet, but the idea was planted in to human.
Just a thought. Is like asking a kid from China who's never watched any US tv show to write an essay about Life in the US to his classmates
BP 33 from Nier crawled out of the delapadated factory and gave the machine emotions that he learned from Kail.
I grew up in 2000s in Finland and where I was from most of the girls in our school had hobbies and passions. There was definitely also those who wanted to do more stereotypically feminine things but I think they were less than 50% of our school. Culture might have huge consequences for the way young girls approach the world.
I never felt or even thought personally that girls would be the 'second sex', things change! Freedom of choice for self expression is awesome
I have the same experience and I'm Swedish. I don't think you can compare us in the Nordics with how things are in The US. In general it's much more conservative there and their society is much more based on religion than it is here.
Plus, these guys are mormons and mormons in general aren't exactly known for how well they treat women and how supportive they are of women who want to break away from their traditional role as the weaker sex. Just to be clear, though, I don't know these guys or what their personal views are. I'm saying this more in regards to what he said about his experience regarding his then girlfriend's (and other women's) lack of skilldriven hobbies. I don't find that particularly surprising.
@@roaringviking5693just FYI Mike grew up Mormon but doesn't follow it anymore. I can't speak for Casen though, not sure where he stands.
Many people who read deep into the lore of the series probably already know, but the part where 9S speaks about the god appearing from the volcano, is actually in reference to Beepy from Nier Replicant. He managed to break out of the junk heap and it was due to him being humanised by Khalil in Replicant, he was able to reach the machines the tenets of being more human. Probably over simplifying but I think that's the general idea. The rewards and nods they throw in for people that read deep into the side stories are awesome.
Although I'm a girl, I suppose I didn't have an entirely stereotypical female upbringing, as I tended to play with boys and was shun by my female classmates. I wasn't really a tomboy, either, but I preferred action over talking in circles. I've always been of the mind that women were made to compliment men and vice versa. We're different, but we... how would one say it in English... fill in the other's weaknesses? We have different roles, which are very noticable in a family. When a kid falls and hurts itself, the mom's there to comfort the kid, while the dad's there to teach the kid not to fall over again and pick themselves up. If that makes sense?
Sure, I'll never be as driven and work-focused as a man, but I'm also not really interested in beauty or socialising. My hobbies tend to be very self-centric which do not involve spending time with others, like sports that require coordination+leadership. Like drawing, reading, writing, playing games, studying endangered languages and certain periods of history, historical reenactment, crafting various things and such. And even if someone was to ask me what my hobbies are, I probably wouldn't answer at all, because I get a little embarrassed. Because I'm not a great artist or an amazing writer or a scholar of history. They're personal, not something I'd share with another person.
i mean, there's men that spend 2 or 3 hours at the gym every day, purely for improving their physical appearance
So I’m a guy, and cant (and don’t want to try) to speak to the experience of women, and the limitations they experience. But I can speak to my own experiences growing up in a religion and religious community.
So, I’m from Utah, spent the early part of my childhood in the religion in the religion, the latter part of my childhood out of the religion but still surrounded by those in it, and then in adulthood still geographically there, but socially and culturally more and more removed.
What I have found is the more culturally removed I’ve gotten, the fewer elements of gender and sex i personally see as being biologically ingrained imperatives, and the more “nurture” elements I see reinforcing both behavior and socioeconomic trends/choices/outcomes.
In my view, this also informs topics we see in current political “culture war” hot topics and wedge issues, but it’s not limited to these (nor are these the best topics for exploring the underlying questions at hand).
People inevitably are forced to contend with defining themselves against the larger societal and historical forces at play in the times they live, right? You can’t escape context, even if you declare yourself immune to it, you will always be encompassed by it. Albert Enstein, Karl Marx, and Harvey Milk are all products of choice and circumstances both. Socrates plopped down in Central Park might have had a lesser influence with the same basic ideas.
Anyway, all of that is to say that context shapes meaning, but is also a product of shaped meaning; it is an understanding of meaning itself. And so these external, non-intrinsic, environmental, CONTEXTUAL factors to shaping what a person is, can be, become, is inherently fluid, changing, and subject to constant reinterpretation, both by the person themselves (as they are being shaped, in the process of forging the person they are becoming), but also by the outside observer, trying to understand this person.
The forces that shape you are themselves in the process of being shaped.
In Japanese 2B is a lot more softer in general, like for the call me Nines thing she is more like "...not yet" rather than a "I'm good", and in other quests in English she is like "not my problem" in Japanese she seems embarrassed about the topic and doesn't say anything.
I cannot speak to the experience of womanhood, but I agree with Simone's idea that nobody is born as man or woman. These are roles that are constructed and projected onto us. We are what we are constructed to be, and self-realization comes when we reconcile the differences between what we are told we are vs what we know ourselves to be.
As a child, my worldview was innately queer. I had no conception of boxes of identity nor of arbitrary binaries until they were forced upon me. I am the youngest of five children, with three older sisters and one older brother. I felt far greater kinship with my sisters, with their behaviors and interests, than with my brother (though video games, fantasy, and sci-fi united us all, I am happy to say). In identification with their interests, I figured I would try on their clothing as well - my sisters' dresses, my mother's church shoes, etc. It didn't take long to for me to be put in my place.
The message I was given was this "There are boys and there are girls. You can't do this or wear that because you are a boy." This didn't stop me. "Then I must not be a boy." This revelation seemed like the only logical conclusion. I was then rejected with violence. This taught me that gender is something rooted in optics, in performance, in something shallow and image-based, or in what we consume in a consumption-driven society.
I came to detach from the notion that my outward appearance is any representation of my internal self. I am nonbinary, and while many nonbinary people identify somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of gender, I simply do not identify with gender at all, and it is liberating. Even amongst queer people, many deeply tie their identity to their appearance, how they present themselves. For others, it is tied to their body. All these conceptions are valid, but they are not for me.
As Simone de Beauvoir writes, and as the battle with the Simone machine so beautifully articulates, a person's gender is something that merely exists through the lens of another person perceiving it, as well as through our consumption. If not perceived, then perhaps it does not exist. I do not care to be seen or perceived as anything, and with that I have finally found security in my sense of self, and it has been incredibly freeing.
I'm a woman, and introvert, and spent my teenage years trying to develop skills. Reading, writing stories, typing speed (even on my school lunch break), plenty of little 'mini' hobbies. Very little socialisation, but boy did I wish that I could know how. Beauty was a lofty aspiration, and I would probably be lying if I said I didn't think about it. I certainly became obsessed with clothes and hair, etc, although I considered it my "art". I remember noticing the difference between what boys were allowed to do and what I was allowed to do once puberty hit, and I became fairly bitter and feminist. I didn't want children. I read "The Bell Jar". It's frightening how much I identified with the main character...the behaviours of men and women didn't make sense to me, but I navigated it, because I was there, and eventually changed my mind, as it happens and had children. I was adamant I would go right back to work... and as soon as I had my baby in my arms I couldn't think of anything worse. So nature got me in the end.
Things made a lot more sense to me when I learned about evolutionary psychology, and the theory of how this impacts people's behaviour. I want to stress that I don't agree with all of evolutionary psychology nor do I think it applies to all people or situations, but I do find it to be a plausible explanation more often than not.
I feel that what Mike has observed about women is accurate and can well be explained by evolutionary psychology. Women seek beauty, and men seek beautiful women who are also intelligent because it denotes health and strong genes. Men in very early times did not have to stick around or care for children if they did not wish to, but women breastfed, and bonded with their young. Women needed the protection of men, not only for themselves because they were physically weaker, but also for their offspring. The explanation given for women to be more sociable than men is because in the past they needed to form strong bonds with other women in order to help them with childcare and other tasks. Any mothers present can vouch for how necessary this is. Being cast out of a social group, in early days almost always meant certain death, because it was extremely difficult for one person to survive on their own. It can be easy to see these behaviours of women to be a result of oppression from society, or plain old vanity, but if you take away these notions and look through the lens of biology, this behaviour could be viewed as a life-or-death necessity.
As for the concept that men have more freedom to pursue skills and contribute to society in a meaningful way, although this is true, men are equally restrained. They are considered less attractive to women if they can't provide and protect. Beauty in a man is less attractive to a woman than the ability to provide and protect is, from the evolutionary theory perspective. Therefore, building skills, making a show of intelligence, of ability and skill in general, is very important to men because without it, they may not pass on their genes to any young. They are expected to achieve, and if they cannot do so, then they feel no sense of self worth.
The idea is, that the human brain hasn't changed or evolved since very early times. Whether or not men or women intend to mate, these behaviours are presented as subconscious acts.
Simone's explanation as to how a woman comes to be, as I've interpreted it, that is to say a woman is a construction of society, it is a very negative view of the human race, hence thematically consistent with the rest of Nier Automata. She indicates that society has at some point decided what a woman should be, and the woman shapes herself to be that way. This is the conclusion that she has arrived at. Despite nature and nurture being so closely interwoven that you can't tell one from another, women don't typically struggle with their femininity to the same extent as Simone does. They usually feel they succeed and compete as a woman to an acceptable level, and do so organically and often without even realising, but Simone does not. Because she can't be a woman. No matter what she does, she will never be human and hence cannot ever grasp what it is to be a human, let alone a woman.
Why is everyone so negative about Emmanuel? Come on guys, give him a break! All he needs is encouragement! Emmanuel Can!
Most straight men do not find most women's interests, interesting.
Many of the interests listed in the video for women are in fact skills, but men do not think highly of them. You can make a career being a match maker, as a make-up artist or making make-up tutorials, or work in the fashion industry. Some people literately get paid to shop for other people. Also, many of the social skills women are taught can be used for social media jobs and social work.
All of the above doesn't even take into account how pregnancy can effect one's view of life and career.
Curious if you are aware of the coincidence that the Nier: Automota Anime is currently airing. I find it interesting that it is consciously referencing Nier: Replicant, in a way that I don't recall the game doing. It's ongoing. It would be interesting if you can find the time to catch up and see if there is an elaboration, or a difference of storytelling via that format. Anime adaptions have a history of streamlining less obvious beats, or nuances the source material contains
The "religion" for the robots came from beepy(p33) the robot from nier. I'm referring to the flashback of the machines, the "god" from the volcano is p33, it's on fires of prometheus
The pods are the GOATs.
When you guys are talking about the god emerging from the “volcano” it’s really beepy from Nier, coming out from the depths of the factory and sharing everything that the child shade taught it. I think it does so by accessing the server, because it’s technically apart of the machines itself. But that whole storyline in nier replicant is actually the reason everything happens in nier automata!!!
Fun tidbit about the music during the hacking - keiichi okabe didn't run his music through a filter to get that sound he scored entirely new versions of the songs
Edit: I now realize me trying to contribute to the conversation gets figured out 20mins later, oh well.
I think the first vignette around the Desert Area could be referring to the birth of Adam. Substitute the volcano with the machine amalgamation, and the concepts mentioned are all things that will fascinate Adam. Considering how Adam and Eve will essentially rule over the machine network, they could be "gods" to the machines that are gradually developing sentience.
I do think it’s neat that lightning is perceived as “judgement from on high” as a form of smiting from high to low. But since the Aliens are underground-the god of the robots gives fire and life from beneath. Life the comes from the ground and so does their pain
Fantastic discussion in this video and in the comments!
Excellent video as always! Excited for Mike's thoughts on FFXIV
The first story, about the God that emerged from the Volcano, is a Novella from NieR Replicant - The fires of Prometheus. It's pretty much a summary of that novella in there
Speaking of Nature and Nurture of gender roles. I don't know if this is a rare case. My family is of chinese descent, and we live in Indonesia.
But me (male) and my younger sister both raised in rather liberal way (?) compared to another chinese-indonesian family that are relatively conservative. Our parents only taught us mostly of how to treat others how you want to be treated, but never asks us forcefully how to live our lives and roles. My sister ends up growing more on the mindset of "developing skills" even more than me, in fact, i'm more obsessed into being in relationships, or at least trying to find one. While i have some hobbies like reading, but my drive into developing skills feels lesser than my sister's.
In my childhood, i joined my sister playing and watch Barbie dolls, the same way my sister joins me in more boy-ish activities. This might what shape me and my sister to what we are now.
This is not only happening to me. In my circle of friend, i have a distant relative that has similiar way of upbringing. While he has drive to "develop skills", but it's way less than his older sister.
I'm not sure if this is a proof of Nurture being a heavier factor or just some rare case.
For an anthropological perspective on the "nature versus nurture" discussion you have here, I highly recommend a recent episode of the podcast *This Anthro Life*. It surveys a lot of the data we have on gender roles and expectations across cultures and through time, which demonstrates just how strongly these things are influenced by culture. That's not to say that there are no biological differences between the sexes, but there is tons of evidence that the gender expectations we see in our society (or any society) are hardly natural or inevitable. Social and cultural norms do an enormous amount of heavy lifting there.
Mike, I think both theses that you put into semi-opposition are correct and go together perfectly well, as long as you don't treat all girls as the same. "Most" girls simply naturally gravitate towards wanting to embody the image of a girl. But "some" girls don't. Those who don't will relate their experiences of feeling a nurtural pressure on them. But that doesn't mean that those who do, do so because of nurture, it _is_ their nature in their case so they don't mind whatever nurture there is, because it already works fine for them with what they want to begin with. These aren't contradictory, just different kinds of people.
As much of a pain as it might be to set up due how non-linear it is, would you guys consider doing a podcast on 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim in the future? It is an absolutely insane sci-fi story, one of the best I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. It pays homage to all of the classic sci-fi stories, in particular the ones of the 80s, while managing to masterfully tie them all together in an original story with one jaw-dropping plot twist after another. It is a masterclass in non-linear storytelling, and I'd really like to see you guys break down the plot and storytelling techniques used in the game, for two reasons in particular.
1. There are seriously not enough videos out there analyzing this very niche and relatively unknown game.
2. Much like with Xenogears, you only get to experience this game's mind-screwy rollercoaster of a plot for the first time once, then all you can do is enjoy watching other people experience it for the first time.
Again, might be a bit of a pain to plan out because of how non-linear it is, but I think this game truly deserves the State of the Arc treatment.
Excellent episode as always!
The hacking mini game is really fun. Just remember that you can aim at one direction while moving in another.
Almost forgot! I'll try not to spoil anything, maybe they'll talk about this in the Automata/Replicant talk at the end, but am I the only one who sees the connection, if only slight, between the robot eating androids and Episode Mermaid? I know the motives are different, but I feel there's definitely a connection, if for no other reason than to be a little Easter egg for fans.
Woah, good catch! Thematically very similar..
Yes there are many parallels I noticed between Simone's story and episode mermaid too.
27:17 It's funny to think that both 9S and 2B interact with people that contrast with their personalities. In 9S perspective, everyone is so rational and cold compared to him, while on the 2B playthrough, people tend to be more chatty and emotional compared to her.
1:26:00 When kids go to school and play and interact together, they correlate to the common denominator. In case of most children, it's the things they see on cellphones/TV all the time. It's pretty much inevitable to raise them any differently, unless you really get away from these external influences, by moving to another country for example.
For anybody that is interested in reading deep into the lore of the Draken-Nier universe, EruptionFang has done a fantastic breakdown of all the major facets and relevant content in a video thats over 6 hours long. Its brilliant and i would recommend watching and listening to it.
Regarding the use of the name Engels - he's the boss of a factory that was originally used/owned by the humans (bourgeoisie) that has since been taken by the machines, a group that aren't given any autonomy by the others (the proletariat). He's the character defending the act of seizing the means of production.
Having majored in Biology, from very early on our hormonal make up will predispose us to certain actions and interests, of course that personality will be the primary decider but our chemical balance will definitely have a say in the matter and in a way will mold the personality accordingly.
Another interesting way to look at it, think of epigenetics as a series of switches, twins may have the same genetic code but will develop very differently if nurtured differently in which it could be explained by having different genetic markers in your code to be activated and deactivated according to different external stimuli.
Now I'm probably wrong but with boys and girls it wouldn't be hard to imagine that sexual genetic markers for boys and girls could be activated/deactivated with the nurture given, what I mean is, maybe there is a less needed amount of stimulus to activate a certain marker for a boy than a girl and vice versa.
Of course this is only speculation that would need to be proven/diproven with factual evidence.
I thought the Volcano was about Beepy
The settings section of the B playthrough was a recording of my actions and choices of my A story gameplay.
This further adds to the differentiation of 2B and 9S as being individuals and is also Yoko Taro's way to mock the player if they took the moment not seriously and fooled around. (This Happens two other times in the story when 9S is immovable and the player would have control of 2B during the A playthrough).
I am playing through the game on the switch with "The End of Yorha" edition. Is this not how those scenes play out in previous versions of the game?
Great podcast as always!
Pascal isn't just a philosopher. Pascal is also a programming language (named after the philosopher, of course). So the machine woth that name is very cheeky.
Isn't the god from the first 9S narration supposed to be a reference to P13? The robot from the first NieR. If I'm not mistaken, there's a short story called fires of Prometheus (or something like that) that explains his faith after being supposedly killed by the player in the first game.
Well this went down an unexpected but fascinating route into society and women
SPOILER: Was the volcano/mithology inspired by the robot (P-33) from Nier 1? Was he the god in this story? I think I read that somewhere.
Short answer: yes
Yes. There is a side story called The Fire of Prometheus all about the event.
GloatingSwines idea about Engels is probably right. Mine is that Taro picked the philosopher theme and has just gone with it.
The god that erupted from the mountain was actually Beepee from Nier Replicant
Yes.
If my memory serves me correctly, I remember the UA-camr Clements mentioning that the god in the volcano is supposed to be the big robot in the junk heap during Nier Replicant bursting out. I think. I don’t really know cause it doesn’t really matter.
That Second Sex stuff sounds fascinating, especially the “women aren’t born but made” notion. I’m not qualified to speak on behalf of anyone - barely myself to be honest - but I’ve seen lots of spirited and independent women, who were really cool and had ambitions, basically give up on all that and while not become subservient, definitely gave up on the things that meant something to them.
I think - again have to preface I’m a dumbass with only my own experience - people get ground down by this awful world and end up just wanting to be looked after. And unfortunately, this world like to grind down the women most.
Clements of Clemps?
Engels is literally a manufacturing plant. They are literally the means of production.
As a trans woman, I find de Beauvior's idea of "becoming" a woman very interesting. She essentially paves the way for the ideaology that validates us.
And i can certainly attest to my journey being a process. One that took many years and self acceptance to arrive at. Also, there is certainly societal pressure to conform to certain societal definitions of what a woman is. Though, to be fair, i tend to embrace them, rather than begrudge them.
So, there are a lot of Marxist themes present in the game and it's a huge disappointment that none of them were mentioned. In brief:
1) The most obvious: the currency used for everything in the game is gained from killing most commonly found 'people' in the game - the machines. It's not exactly the Labor Theory of Value or exploitation, but the idea that the blood and sweat of the average person is what turns the wheels of economy is pretty Labor Theory adjacent.
2) Alienation: when deprived of the ability to think of oneself of the director of one's own actions, high minded concepts such as life and destiny are rendered meaningless. 2B and 9S are not directing their own lives, YoRHa is. The Machines are not directing their own lives, the Aliens/Network is. Right up until the end of the game, most actors in the narrative are alienated from the work they do - whether it is the biding of YoRHa or the Network, and as cogs in much larger machines, struggle to define what 'life' actually is.
3) Class Conscious: Act 1 of the plot reveals that the machines, at some point, acquired class consciousness and overthrew their Alien masters. The machines no longer reproduce themselves in service of and benefit to the Aliens, but for themselves. This is hinted at in Engels' archive 110-B Record 0020.
4) Communism and Pascal's Village: This is a direct quote from Pascal - "Each machine is an equal, which means the traditional capitalistic acquisitions methods of the past don't work for us. Instead, our economy is focused trading materials according to one's need."
There are more but those are the important ones, in brief.
I know he's a controversial person, but Jordan Petersen did briefly mention the subject of Nature vs Nurture in society and how when gender roles are removed to a greater degree among the sexes it appears like the more innate differences between the sexes are enhanced. Whether or not this is true, I have no idea, but Casen talking about his brother's kids made me think of it.
Perfect timing! I just finished episode 4. Great breakdown so far!
Yes. Yes.
Dude... Casen is so smart. He should be on a PhD programme somewhere. He would make a great English lit, anthropology / psych / philosophy or religious studies prof.
I love the music in this game and I really like how they handle the change between peaceful, battle, hacking, etc. The music usually stays on beat and changes to the alternate version as you play. I'm not sure if this was the first game to ever do it this, but I think it is the first one to do it in such a well done way.
Still haven’t caught up with the last one lol!
I hope anyone reading this is having a great day.