#The musical leitmotifs are gooooood shit

[xamiipholia]

Since it’s been a year since Burning Shores came out, some thoughts on Seyka:

TL;DR: Great character, really happy with her as a love interest for Aloy. They do some really interesting things with her that I never really see addressed so I wanted to talk about them.

She is tangibly shown to be much more of a match for Aloy through gameplay. Compared to other npcs, she solves things faster, does more damage, is a much more formidable melee combatant, faster climber - she even has a fucking Valor Surge using her Focus that does pretty significant tear damage to large machines like Slaughterspines. Environmental storytelling- Seyka’s skiff has at least 2-3 Tiderippers’ worth of parts, meaning she’s been out on her own killing the things to build boat motors, and she has some ambient dialogue that strongly suggests she’s fought and killed Slaugterspines before. Is some of this npc tech advancements in Burning Shores? Maybe, but it feels intentional. 

Seyka has a natural probing curiosity about the old world that for the most part Aloy’s other companions didn’t have without some significant hand-holding from Aloy to get them started, and some of her close friend (but not base team) characters just don’t have at all. I don’t mean this as a moral judgement, everyone is different and has different strengths and priorities , but it’s absolutely critical that a partner for Aloy have that kind of curiosity - it’s such a big part of her character. While she lives in this new world, she’s never going to be entirely a part of it. Like she says, she finds belonging in individuals, and not really the tribes. I don’t really see Aloy settling down in Meridian or Mother’s Heart. She needs to have a life of exploration and discovery and Seyka seems cut from that cloth too, whether she was always that way or being marooned gave her a fresh perspective.

Seyka did risk death using the focus and decided to do it anyway- in Rheng’s notes he calls for capital punishment for her. The threat is never *too* present but honestly I think that’s a broader critique of the series and pretty consistent with the writing of conflicts in Horizon. I agree they could have played up the dramatic tension a bit, but this is a person who weighed the risk of a military execution by a totalitarian state and immediately decided it was worth it to save her sister and others. I think Aloy can intimately relate, given what she went through for Beta.

Even though it’s a DLC, she has a TON of screen time, probably comparable to Kotallo in HFW, and Horizon does SO much storytelling through gameplay and ambient dialogue. I think she’s given a LOT of narrative space to breathe. She’s also has her own musical cues and leitmotifs that do a ton of foreshadowing work through the DLC - in terms of musical cues and framing she’s very associated with the acoustic guitar, and the flute melody in ‘Her Sky, Her Sea’ has for Aloy and Seyka the same function that ‘It Can’t Last’ does for Ellie and Dina in TLOU2 - next time you play Burning Shores, listen for it. That and the guitar cues from ‘The Idea of Home’ and ‘For His Entertainment’ do a lot of emotional work. It’s great stuff.

Okay and lastly- YMMV on this one - I’ve def talked about it with friends before but I don’t think I’ve said it on Tumblr. I’m a firm believer that meta narratives and the way that stories are situated and created in our own world matter and that art deserves to be taken seriously and dissected. I love Horizon, but it, and Aloy as a protagonist, are absolutely drenched in white savior and colonial storytelling tropes. Every time I play Frozen Wilds, all I can think of is Jack Sparrow going “and then they made me their chief”. There’s a lot of iffy stuff in the games, as much as I absolutely love them. We’ll have to see how H3 goes, but Burning Shores is MUCH better about this and honestly Seyka is a huge part of it. The story centers itself on a queer woman of color who is pretty tangibly presented as Aloy’s equal with her own strengths and weaknesses throughout the story and takes the lead just as often if not more than Aloy does, which I find really refreshing. It doesn’t entirely fix Aloy’s white savior issues but I think it’s a really good move for the narrative that continues the themes found in HFW about community and connection.

Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds (2017)