Okay, so i am very much stuck in horizon now. I know the pc port could have been better, but so far it didnt bother me that much so it would stop me from enjoying the game. The story is very interesting, the gameplay is fun, the world is absolutely GORGEOUS! I totally recommend!
It’s time to throw up some more favorite shots - I indulged in more landscape-based stuff this time, but am still keeping portrait opportunities in mind c:
This playthrough is moving along very slowly due to all the plates I’m spinning, but onward it goes!
For the Horizon Zero D&D three-shot, I took my airship mechanic Jo and converted her into Jora: (human) Oseram fighter. She hits machines with her warhammer and doesn’t afraid of anything.
(bonus sketch! our [dragonborn] Banuk paladin gets to use a Focus, and they are delighted)
The way I have HZD tribes handled in this AU is not perfectly 1:1 with Mass Effect races. Tribes have notable racial majorities, but individuals of a given race can show up anywhere (especially humans, for whom this is pretty much a defining feature). The exception is krogan due to how insular the Nora are. Therefore, I don’t have the Banuk as majority salarian… but Sylens gots to be one.
One night of the year, just a few more sunsets after the Longest Night, Banuk pulled on their boots and mantles, took up walking sticks wound with glowing cables, and hiked out into the darkness. Because on this night and no other, Grazers stood out from the rest of the herds, the blue light in the center of their faces replaced with a warm red glow. Shamans debated on the meaning, but the people at large admired the spectacle. It was a predictable event that was fun to observe with one’s family and friends huddled close, a little spark of novelty in the heart of harsh Ban-Ur winters.
But then came the Derangement, and the red no longer seemed warm or friendly. In time, even the peaceful display of red-light Grazers vanished from the night when they normally appeared. The whole thing became hard to see as anything other than an omen, in retrospect.
HEPHAESTUS sneers. What was the point of paying homage to a centuries-dead cultural tradition, anyway? Always destroying everything, these humans. GAIA was too soft, too sentimental. They must learn respect for the systems that sustain them.
one thing that bugs me within HZD fandom—or at least in a lot of reddit threads and the occasional tumblr note—is how the discussion of Aloy as the chosen one because of the circumstances of her birth always gets reframed around [REDACTED] in a way that discredits Aloy.
I do love the “hero is a rando” stories as much as the next person, but what I like about HZD is that it sets up Aloy to be some incredible savior and then it turns out… well, she might do cool things, but she’s kind of a jerk, actually! and she has every right to not want to help most people when she’s been hurt and mistreated by them for all of her young life.
Aloy is a hero, yes, but not becauseof her birth, but because she chooses to be one. and it’s a hard choice for her, because her natural inclination is to help herself—which is an understandable trait now that she is old enough to try to give herself what she was denied for nearly twenty years—and I like that they keep stressing that.
I would argue, though, that Aloy’s heroic tendencies are present from the getgo (but of course have nothing to do with [REDACTED], so no argument there!).
One of the things I love about Aloy is her strong vein of empathy, underneath the usual “strong female character” staples of being wicked smart and physically capable. A lot of this comes down to the voice acting, I think, but it’s in the text too: when you run into sidequests for NPCs in need, it struck me how readily empathetic she is. She often takes a moment to ask if they’re okay, and opens up in return, especially if the NPC is dealing with a loss. These sorts of quests are all over RPGs in general, but the level of personal concern Aloy expresses drew my attention, where most player characters are more directly focused on solving the problem.
But you’re also right that she is often tactless. The case in Frozen Wilds bothered me the most, but there is an overall pattern there. I think it’s really interesting (and fitting) that the majority of Aloy’s “jerk” problems are rooted in not fully respecting other peoples’ cultures. She has heroic instincts, but due to her experiences she’s just not *good* at interacting with cultural concepts, nor does she trust them.
Her encounter with Erend does represent an intriguing departure from this overall pattern, one that I’m enjoying mulling over. Is she underscoring boundaries given that he was… unsubtle back in Mother’s Heart? Is she repulsed by how much of a mess he is once they meet again? Is it just that she made a breakthrough on her lifelong quest and impatience overrides how she might act otherwise?
Actually yeah, I like that last one, though they all probably apply on some level. I think that in addition to culture being hard, one of her definite flaws is that she tends to fixate and doesn’t deal with impatience gracefully.
I had a whole, extremely long post detailing Banuk culture stuff and was like, “Okay, this is too many words, let’s dial it back.”, so tl;dr I get sad sometimes thinking about how much the Derangement and everything it brought with it impacted just about every part of Banuk society. Not just their spirituality, but everywhere else, too.
Just a few decades ago, if you went out to hunt a machine, weren’t prepared or skilled enough, and got killed…well, most of the blame can be placed on you for that, can’t it? Same if you picked a fight with another person and got your clock cleaned. Get good, idiot.
But now, the machines attack on sight and some are being specifically made for the purpose of eliminating hunters. And the Red Raids…we can infer that while war is not a completely foreign concept to the Banuk, most of them weren’t personally experienced with violent conflict with other people prior to the Carja invasion.
Survive, prevail, and if you fail to, that’s on you is a tenet that can hold up on its own…but what about in a world where there are more and more things that will kill you no matter what you do? How does Banuk culture deal with the reality that being smart, prepared, and willing to do whatever needs to be done to survive just isn’t enough anymore?
While I adore the more surface-level stuff going on in Banuk culture (machine spirituality, story-songs, etc), I agree that this bubbling internal conflict has grabbed a lot of my attention. It’s touched on in a few places in dialog ingame (the shaman in the “A Moment’s Peace” camp most directly, iirc) but it’s never really given center stage.
I refuse to accept that the White Teeth’s harsh take on “survive, prevail” is an example of the cultural norm the Banuk have developed over centuries, but thinking again about this context… it makes sense as a response to the crueler world they’ve come to live in. I imagine there are several philosophies developing among the Banuk as they wrestle with this problem.
