The lament[s] of the (post)human: Existential voice and/in NieR: Automata (2017)1

Theories of voice have almost exclusively focused on the human voice, generally ignoring or only very briefly accounting for other, nonhuman voices. In this article, I am interested in the voice outside of the assumed (and strictly) human – simply put, posthuman voices. I use these posthuman voices to address a larger phenomenon: that of existentialism in popular culture. What I call the ‘existential voice’ – a voice rooted in song and creation as a way of positioning selfhood within the world – has permeated science fiction since its literary inception with Mary Shelley’s . In more recent years, the topic of overt existentialism has become a recurring and increasingly common trope in various screen media, such as Blade Runner (1982, 2017), Ghost in the Shell (1995, 2017) and Rick and Morty (2013–present). In this article, I examine the use of the posthuman existential voice in postmillennial popular media. Drawing from voice studies, feminist posthuman studies and existential philosophies, I focus on the voices heard in PlatinumGames’s to examine how the ‘existential voice’ is employed in the gameworld. In NieR: Automata , we have entered a truly posthuman, post-Anthropocene world, wherein androids and robots vie for and question their existence. I demonstrate how the many voices in this game play a critical role in addressing the game’s overtly existential narrative. I conclude my article with a consideration of the ethics bound up in posthuman existential voices.