#asgv

We have Lola, the cheery idol sidekick, reduced to a ruthless machine bent on wiping out all robots. Her focus on this task and her desparation to succeed are familiar. Quite so.

Mother being a parallel version of Lola, one grieving the inevitable death of Copen, is fucking brilliant. It makes me want to sob. It's so good.

Mother is, in my opinion, a great reflection of ASGV1 Copen. Both are grieving the loss of their parents, Mother's Creator and Copen's father. They're wrought with grief, but cannot process it properly. Instead, they cling to the remaining ideology of their parent.

For Copen, he clung to the fear of adepts instilled in him by his father. Mother, however, severely misunderstood what her Creator wanted. From what we see of the tower the game takes place in, the world is desolate. Humans went extinct. And Creator Copen built the robots in an effort to preserve the legacy of humanity, as well as with the hope of reviving it.

Mother hated the robots, because she thought their growing independance meant they aimed to "replace" humanity. Which is exactly what ASGV1 Copen thought about adepts.

They're both afraid that the legacy they've been given will vanish, and thus lash out. Mother has the addition of being a robot. Preserving humanity is a value programmed into her. And she cannot get rid of it, but she cannot harm her fellow robots either, not without a human to overwrite her commands.

I just. Like her a lot. Mother is also a great glimpse into the future. Let's not forget that she's Lola, beneath it all. Laix Lola is lucky in the sense that Ix Copen is a cyborg, and has been alive for more than a century. Creator Copen lived and died human, with a human lifespan. He might've even died young, from how his spirit looks.

It's questionable how old Lola was when her Copen died, and how long she spent without him. Both her and ASGV Copen could get worse in their extremism because they were allowed to go unchecked; Mother as the ultimate authority, and Copen with Nori's enabling.

ASGV Lola is also gonna have to face that loss one day, and we've already seen how well she'll take it. It's... tragic.

Especially how Mother idolizes humanity at the cost of herself and her fellows when Creater Copen's intentions were entirely benign.

Creator Copen is a version of Copen who loved humanity to its fullest. He recorded everything, recreated whatever environments he could, built robots in the image of humans, of adepts, and I think he built a robot in his own image so Mother wouldn't be as lonely.

There's so much that doesn't make sense otherwise. Why would he build robots to be siblings if he didn't think of his own dear sister? Why make them have mentors and give them hobbies and gimmicks and let them grow?

It's interesting, to think, that ASGV Copen was taught hate, but Mother was taught love, and yet they ended up the same way nonetheless.

And now I wanna talk about My Boy Ypsilon.

I've already posited the theory that Creator Copen made Ypsilon to keep Mother company. And yet, where do we meet him? Broken down, the only robot outside the tower. Mother hates this lad. And even so, he is desparate for her approval. He modifies himself and fights Copen again and again, but Mother doesn't care.

She hates him specifically because he looks like Copen, in my opinion. She already loathes robots for daring to replace humanity, so how would she feel about someone daring to replace her dear Creator?

The choice of her name is notable here. She is referred to as Mother by all, which makes the (lack of) bond Mother and Ypsilon share distinctly parental. Mother is, by all accounts, a neglectful parent. That's why I brought up Professor Kamizono in part previously.

We know almost nothing about the guy. He did experiments for Sumeragi, which doesn't say much about his moral code, and died when Asimov broke Gunvolt out of there, and yet... Copen's behaviour shows how much he wants his father to be proud of him.

Thinking back, it is his own father's gun that Asimov takes Copen out of the fight with in ASGV1.

It's just. The Same. all the way down. How Professor Kamizono treated Copen affected how Copen treats Lola affected how Lola treats Ypsilon.

I joked once that Laix2 is about not becoming your parents, but like, it is.

But it's also where the chain breaks, in a sense.

And here we have the True End of laix2. Creator Copen's spirit appears, because he cannot rest until he saves Mother from herself, because this isn't what he wanted for her.

She's lived for so long and she's so bitter, she wants to rest. And she gets to, together with her Creator, which is only possible because his love for her brought him back from the grave to help Copen out.

And then again, Copen only stormed the tower initially to save Kohaku. I joke about iX Copen being Chad Dad Copen, but c'mon! Do you see what I've been talking about!

The cycle of misery is broken through sheer parental love! For the True End, Copen throws himself through the tower twice to save Kohaku, and basically adopts the now directionless Null, all to get back to the rest of his family.

(Side tangent: Null's desire to find her purpose reminds me of ASGV2 Copen, actually. Once she finds her "purpose", she offers to basically kill herself for it, same as Copen by the end of ASGV2 throwing himself into a purpose he no longer believes in, because, in both cases, it is a "duty" assigned by a higher power. Null is neat but she doesn't feed my brainworms as much as Mother.)

Except, maybe. Yknow. Now Ypsilon's parent is dead. So here we fucking go again.

But maybe, the robots will accept change. Humanity as they dreamed of is gone, but it doesn't mean the end of life! In her final moments, Mother turns her room into a field of flowers.