#horizon forbidden west kotallo

[traveleroffarawayplaces]

Alva: how does Beta and Aloy get out of this?

Kotallo *tiredly*: they don’t, they just make a bigger mess to cancel out the first one.

[cannondisabledcharacters]

Today’s disabled character of the day is Kotallo from Horizon Forbidden West, who is an amputee

[Image Description: 3D model of a man with short brown hair and brown eyes. He is wearing a woven sleeveless gray crop top decorated with blue and yellow beads. He is also wearing a shoulder guard on his right shoulder, a white head piece, and wooden beads around his neck. He has tattoos and face paint that are predominantly white and blue with triangular designs.]

[cozy-possum]

Fashav: What are we doing on the ground?

Kotallo: You hit your head and got knocked out, I laid down next to you so everyone thinks we were relaxing

[demiclar]

Horizon Forbidden West Thoughts!

So I’ve been playing Horizon Forbidden West for like a week straight, but now I’m on a week long road trip so I can’t play it, so here are my thoughts!

I haven’t finished it yet but I think I’m pretty close to finishing it so spoiler warning here!

Okay so first and foremost, Kotallo, I fucking love him.

Like pls marry me? Right now? Idk how old he is but omg I love my grumpy stoic warrior man I cannot even explain it. I love him. When he asked Aloy to help him with a ‘personal matter’ (and looked at his arm and closed his eyes) I almost shrieked. I would do anything to help this man feel good about himself and his arm. Also I think it’s soo great that they’re including this kind of representation in the game, it’s great!! Especially in a warrior society, you’d think there would be a lot more people missing various limbs (assuming they knew how to save the person losing said limb) so it’s cool that they’re putting in stuff like that. Also I love that he was allowed to start off as pretty closed off and a bit of an asshole because understandable! He’s going through a tough time! But then he sees that Aloy wants what’s best for the world and for the people around her and she’s willing to go to such lengths to help people and she’s more than willing to knock some assholes down a few pegs, just seeing how he starts to trust her and how he becomes more and more willing to fight beside her is super awesome. I haven’t finished the quest with him and his arm yet but I can’t wait to! I had to stop before they went to test the arm.

Speaking of representation!! I love how random the representation in the game is! Like it just comes up, randomly, which is exactly how it works in real life. I know some people would complain that there’s no reason that those characters (the ones I’m thinking of are a trans Tenakth woman and a gay Tenakth man (but I’m sure there are some I’m forgetting)) had to be LGBTQ or that they had to mention that they were. I’ve heard people make the argument, you could replace this character with a straight white male and there would be no difference to their story or their function in the game, but does there have to be?? A member of a minority doesn’t have to go through some struggle specific to their identity to make them valuable to the story. For example, Aloy doesn’t have to go through a struggle specific to being a woman to make HZD a valuable feminist game with a woman as a main character. Just showing that these characters, people from minority groups, exist is valuable because hey, not everyone is a straight, white, able bodied person.

 Also I think it’s interesting how the game interacts with people’s racism concerning people from other tribes. Like stuffy Carja are wildly racist, but the characters thoughout the story repeatedly prove those assumptions and false judgements wrong. While I was playing and interacting with everyone and listening to their dialogue back at the base, I was a little upset that Aloy didn’t speak against Erend’s racist attitude towards Kotallo and she didn’t do anything to point out to him that he shouldn’t think that way, but now I think I understand it. Aloy as a character has a thing for showing people why their views are wrong rather than telling them that their views are wrong and explaining why. That is, unless she gets really angry or irritated. I think with Erend, Aloy would rather him learn that his views were a bit biased by giving him a space to interact with Kotallo and understand that the Tenakth aren’t viscous, bloodthirsty murderers. Also, while the people in this universe have faced a great deal of racism and hate related crimes, they don’t have the political atmosphere to discuss things like racism and anti-racism. Aloy could disapprove of Erend’s view of the Tenakth but she doesn’t have a political agenda in the back of her mind pushing her to be anti-racist. She has a very strong moral code, but the discussion isn’t the same. Also, Aloy is literally trying to save the world, so maybe a few biased comments can take a backseat until no one is trying to hunt her down and kill her.

I started to read (but didn’t finish reading) an article that talked about how the franchise perpetuates orientalist views and the racist classifications of East and West but I don’t necessarily agree/ think that it’s a bad thing? Let me explain because that sounds bad. The people in these games have been brought into the world without conversations about things like racism. With Apollo being deleted, they don’t have access to humanity’s mistakes, so they don’t have the political foundation to have more liberal perspectives that we’ve come to understand as politically correct. In their world, their biases likely kept them safe from conflicts between tribes over land and resources, etc.. It would be better if they collaborated but we can look at history and understand that it’s pretty unlikely for people to exist without those kinds of tensions, particularly because they haven’t had the time or technology to connect to one another and realize that their perceptions are wrong. 

With that in mind, and keeping in mind that plenty of the tribes like to isolate themselves from others (the Nora don’t leave their sacred land and are pretty intolerant of foreigners coming into the sacred land, and the other tribes have started avoiding other tribes like the Carja because of the Red Raids) the racism present in the franchise makes a lot of sense. We also notice that racism between tribes that have had contact, like the Tenakth and the Utaru, is less intense than it could be. The Utaru are suffering under Regalla’s rebels, but they generally don’t think that all the Tenakth are bloodthirsty murderers. The younger Tenakth tend to think that the Utaru are just farmers and generally wouldn’t be good fighters, but they can be convinced to drop those perceptions. Obviously it’s not perfect, but they are more willing to be allies and to drop their biases than the other tribes who don’t have that same history with them. But, people like the Carja, Fashav for example, are able to overcome their preconceptions of the Tenakth by interracting with them and getting to know them as people, having direct contact with them. 

So I think it makes sense that there’s some racism in the game, but when you keep in mind the purging of Apollo, the racism in the game depicts the continuation of humanity’s flaws. The game is in no way saying ‘racism is okay, everyone should be racist!’ It’s showing that if we can’t learn from our mistakes, we’ll fall back into these regressive patterns of ignorance and biases, and this could be how that might present itself in this scenario. Aloy also notably doesn’t agree with a lot of those biases, and I think that probably has to do with how she was raised. Because Aloy was raised by Rost as an outcast, she didn’t have a whole community to inform her perceptions of the world, she just had Rost and his views. Rost, as a death-seeker, traveled the world and likely had to get to know people from other tribes and had to get help from them along the course of his travels, so he would be a relatively unbiased source and likely taught Aloy to judge people by how they acted towards her rather than how they have been described to her by other people. And! Aloy repeatedly gives people the benefit of the doubt and bends over backwards to help them even though they might have been cruel to her in the past. (Like all of the Nora, who cast her out at birth. She’s still bitter about it, which is completely understandable, but she’s still willing to aid the Nora and help them when they need her.)

But, that doesn’t mean I can call the game unproblematic. I think the article I started reading said something about Regalla and how she perpetuates the angry black woman stereotype, but I haven’t finished the game yet and I didn’t want to get spoilers so I stopped reading. Also, I think that it would be better for me to analyze Regalla after I’ve seen the full extent of her character and her character arc, so I wanted to wait on reading all about that. But I do admit, if they wanted to make an angry character starting a bloody civil war that isn’t supported by a lot of the characters in the game, they could have picked someone who wasn’t a minority to lead it. But also, as far as I know, Regalla gets redeemed at the end, so I’ll just have to see. (I don’t mean that I heard that she does get redeemed in the end, I mean I don’t know how it ends.) It’s possible that they didn’t want to make a Helis 2.0 character, but that doesn’t excuse the stereotyping.

Okay but I wasn’t aiming for this post to get so dark. Back to the things that I absolutely love. Varl and Zo, just omg! I love how Zo is this wonderful blend of warm and kind, but also a warrior who won’t take anyone’s shit. In some of the idle dialogue around the base, she talks about teaching Varl traditional Utaru songs, and she talks about teaching Varl to dance, and Varl is temped to take her up on the offer even though he has two left feet. But she’s also fully willing to attack Erend for saying she and her people couldn’t be good fighters. Zo’s devotion to her people is really honorable, and I think it’s neat that the story is showing her internal conflict about going back into war after deciding to leave it behind. Also I think it’s really nice how committed she is to make the base homey, like all of the rugs and plants she put in it was really really sweet! And Aloy has her own room! With her own stuff! That must be so nice for her because she’s constantly moving around, now she has a place that’s hers that she can come back to, it’s so nice! And I like how the writers were able to use it as a space to deliver Aloy’s thoughts and reflections. I think it would be cool if you could interact with the bed or pass time there because my girl needs some rest, but that’s okay. 

Okay this got really long. I might have some more thoughts later but I just had a really long political discussion and now I’m exhausted. Maybe more later, but who knows. Second spoiler alert right here, please please don’t spoil anything to me because I haven’t finished it yet. I’m at the part where Aloy just got out of Faro’s bunker (fucking horrifying that thing) so anything before that is fair game but please don’t talk about stuff after that! I’ve managed to avoid spoilers this long, I’d like to finish the game before I hear anything else.

But yeah! I’d love to hear your thoughts if you’d like to share them! I can’t wait to see how the game ends. I know I’m more of a destiny blog but Forbidden West has been 99% of my thoughts for the past week or so. I’m obsessed. Also I kinda liked Varl’s beard, not going to lie. I like him without it, too, but I liked the beard. My twin did not like the beard, but she was distraught when Varl and Zo got together (because she really likes him lol). But anyways! What are your thoughts? Are you/have you also played it? I’m normally a pc person so I had to wait until I got home and could use my twin’s PS4 to play it, so that’s why my thoughts are coming a little late.

[thisishowoursonggoes]

I love him