#hfw scorcher

[risavulpes]

I have so much to say about this one. But I'll keep it short. Sending everyone into the new year with some strength from Kotallo.

[robo-dino-puppy]

horizon forbidden west | kotallo 4/?

[mattaytchtaylor]

Recently finished commission for @maimedmarshal and their OC Valruun!

[driver270]

Can *anyone* please explain to me how the hell that Scorcher heart that was initially as big as Kotallo's head ended up becoming bigger than Aloy's torso after it's brought back to The Base?

[maimedmarshal]

"Heart of a Scorcher" Chapter 10 - Ash and Blood excerpt The pair landed painfully in the sand below as the platform behind them exploded in an inferno. Pieces of scorched wood rained down upon them and Aloy curled herself more tightly around him. 

"I know," she told him as she sat up, pulling him with her. Aloy gave the boy a quick shake by his shoulders. "I know you're scared. But you cannot stop now, do you hear me? Not until this thing is dead. That is an order," she snapped when he only stared at her without comprehension. "You will not stop moving until this machine is dead. Do you understand?"

Finally, she noted some flicker of understanding. Looking behind her, she could see the Scorcher casting around for where they'd gone in the chaos. Quickly, she turned back to Valruun. "Do you understand?" she demanded. "Say it!"

The boy's nostrils flared with panic, but he nodded. Another shake of his shoulders had the words spilling out of him. "Don't stop moving. I understand."

Satisfied, she yanked him to his feet and shoved him away from her. "Go!"

Time to take down the big bad wolf.

"HEY!" she called out, waving an arm to capture the Scorcher's attention. "I'm right here! Come and get me!"

[eule1983]

[singingkestrel]

Horizon Forbidden West machine headshots compilation 2/5.

Longleg - Burrower (team screech)

Scorcher - Dreadwing (team ears)

Widemaw - Bilegut (team big mouth)

Fanghorn - Grazer (team antler)

Scrapper - Scrounger (team did-we-really-need-two-different-machines-for-this?)

[h0riz0nstuff]

Before I hastily finished my NG+, I still did all the Kotallo side missions for his arm. So now I have tons of combat pics, which was very fun to do because you see so much more when you're not actually really fighting, just scrambling around to let your companion fight while the machine(s) is(are) focussing on you ^^; You can't even go too far away because then you don't have a lot of camera angle options. So you need to stay close. It's really fun and teaches you to dodge a lot :b I do it on Story difficulty, tho. Otherwise I would die too much. One problem tho is that companions and NPCs really suffer from Dead Eye Syndrome, which makes some pics a bit awkard.

Why do you look so completely blank while fighting for your life ? xD

Ah well. I also did First Forge so I have a lot of pics of Erend fighting Asera.

[charger-lens]

kotaloy monthly prompts - september '23 hunting/hunted/thrill of the chase

[thymineeee]

can i pet that dawggg?

,, How to Train Your Machine ”

[robo-dino-puppy]

knockdown!

(this is from some shots i was taking to help fill in cards for entries in the Horizon Database! if there's ever anything you wanted to know about horizon gameplay, it's probably there. XD it's put together by members of Arktix's discord server and it's an awesome resource!)

[horizon-forbidden-sheesh]

Writing Process: Preamble

*Ahem* SO! I was recently honored with a question about my organization process for writing. And, boy howdy, am I just tickled pink to tell you! I've never felt so seen!! Let's do this thing.

Let me start by sharing that IRL, I'm a copywriter/project manager for print & digital design work. So when I started writing my first-ever fic, I organized it much in the same way I would a website build.

But tbh, when I started The Marshal, I didn't really know I was writing a fic. In fact, I was only working through my typical video game process. In that I'm extremely anal note-taker, and it's just the way I live my regular-degular life. All my books are annotated to the Nth, I’ve been keeping a (rather inconsistent) diary since I was 17, and I’m a religious bullet journal-er with very specific journal preferences (grid paper, always).

My practice of video game note-taking goes all the way back to drawing maps of Luigi's Mansion as a kid to try and optimize my speed runs, and progresses into tracking daily decisions for BG3. I’ve also got entire pages in my bullet journal dedicated to developing backstories for all my Cult of the Lamb cult members, and my Notes app has several installments of history & lore from various Civ V games. It’s simply how I prefer to play.

(Side note: No, I am not technically diagnosed with anything. Yes, I have found myself in repetitive, furious spirals, tearing out pages of my notebook over-and-over when the map I HAD to draw in pen was not 'perfect.' 💁🏻Is this OCD?🦋 Who knows. Who cares.)

Game Timelines have always fascinated me, pretty much since Ocarina of Time. I want to know how exactly long something took, what order it happened in, and whether it's technically 'feasible' within the parameters of the game. Peep my post about 'realistic' gameplay for more deets.

Mostly, I was trying to track where I 'camped' each night, because it was SUPER IMPORTANT that the events of the game took place within the ~3 month timeline GAIA sets before the environment collapses (super casual). So, the notes from my first play-through looked like this.

And then I met Kotallo.

And I started drafting journal entries from Aloy's POV to explore the internal monologue behind all those ✨faces✨ she was making.

(These ones. Infinite credit to @Diviner-Alva for doing the LORDT'S WORK.)

They looked like this:

If you've read 'The Marshal,' you'll notice some similarities.

After a few weeks of gameplay, I was pushing 20k words in 'journal entries,' and it just... wasn't cutting it. That was around the time I knew I had an bona fide obsession on my hands.

Writing exclusively in Aloy's POV left out SO MUCH OF THE STORY that was developing in my li'l head alongside my gameplay. I was imagining a whole burgeoning, slowburn romance as I picked my way across the Forbidden West. It mirrored the side quests (That Talanah convo??) and overall themes of HFW perfectly. (Also, um, the consistent controller rumble during the Scorcher cut scene?? Like, WTF? You're telling me Geurrilla didn't know EXACTLY what they were doing? Pfft.)

I can't tell you when exactly I finally took to the internet to feed my hyperfixation, but let me tell you that it was my first time discovering Ao3, and I spent the summer of 2022 devouring every fic in the Aloy/Kotallo tag. I felt like I had finally found my people. It even worked for a while! But the story playing in my head didn't exactly match any of the stories 1:1, and I realized after a while that no one else could write MY headcanon.

Still, there's a TON of overlap in a few of them: Medicine by HIMLuv is by far the closest, and my personal fave. I love basically everything Garbage_Dono has written. Obviously, I've developed a massive crush on Pikapeppa. (How does she do it so FAST? *awe, amazement, un poco envy*) There are some truly incredible writers out there, and I'm genuinely grateful to every one of them for creating a foundation that gave me the permission I needed to finally fucking WRITE. I denied myself fanfic for probably 20 years, imagining all the ways I would be ruthlessly mocked if anyone ever found out. I've had a-lot-a-lot of shame blocks to work through as I've been writing over the past year, and this story about opening up and trusting others feels deeply personal in a way I can't quite put into words.

That's how I made the decision to begin adapting the journal entries into a more organized fic. So, I started my second play-though and created this account around that time. It would be probably be another ~6 months before I got drunk enough to just press 'publish' on the first chapter in April of this year, over a year after the game came out.

Every other reference tool I've made, I created along the way. I intended to post more of them here on tumblr, but hey. Life Happens.™ And even tho it feels like the fandom had moved on post-DLC, there's still pleeeeenty of time. 😘

Anyway, I'm gonna clip this here, and get more into the weeds on organizational tools in another post. But it felt like I needed to talk about this first, because when I started really writing in the Fall of 2022, I already had a lotta documents under my belt that I needed to wrangle.

If you got to this point, thanks for reading this entirely self-indulgent post.

xo, Sheesh. 🖤

[maimedmarshal]

Literally crying, Quiche! It’s so jaw-dropping beautiful and I can’t thank you enough for being willing to challenge yourself with taking on the insanity that is the machine! You truly hit it out of the park and I couldn’t be happier! ❤️

Commission for @maimedmarshal, featuring a scene from her Kotaloy (accidental-teenage-adoption trope) fic, "Heart of a Scorcher" over on AO3 (click the picture)!!

I had so much fun doing this, especially with the way it challenged my mecha-drawing capabilities! This fic is awesome btw, go read it if you can!!

PLEASE DO NOT REPOST, REBLOG ONLY!

[hzdtrees]

Face-Off

[eule1983]

[singingkestrel]

Horizon Forbidden West machines 12/?

Scorcher.

When I threw a rock to get this guy's attention so I could snap his photo he cocked his head slightly to one side like a goddamn retriever. It was cute, and for a brief moment there I found myself almost liking him.

Then he leapt straight at my face, fires-ablazing, unadulterated hate burning in his headlights.

Stupid evil murder puppy.