#sylens basically owns that one | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

adorablelokie · 4 years

Text

a ‘Loki’ series theory

Been seeing some theories being spread around so I had to chime in. It might be a bit crazy, but even crazier stuff has happened in the mcu.

Particularly about her:

She’s very likely playing young Sylvie Lushton, the second Enchantress. It’s the only Sylvie that has any connection to Loki and the connection they have, oh boy. In the comics Loki’s responsible for her existence.

At first it was believed Sylvie Lushton is a normal midgardian girl who suddenly woke up with mysterious and powerful magical abilities that rivalled even Amora’s. (Also Sylvie kind of pretended to be an asgardian and ‘borrowed’ Amora’s identity)

However it was later revealed by none other than Wiccan, that she has not only been gifted powers from Loki, she was entirely created by Loki.

And Loki and her had such a tight connection that when he died, she became sick and weak as well.

It’s interesting that out of two available Enchantresses, they chose to introduce the lesser known one and the one who was entirely created by Loki, and not Amora, the more popular, an actual Asgardian and a character fans have wanted to see in the mcu for years.

Even now fans falsely believe that young Cailey is playing Amora because most mistakenly confuse Amora and Sylvie of being the same person - which they’re not.

The fact that they decided to introduce Sylvie, and not Amora, makes me theorise that her origin will be explicitly tied to Loki.

But that births the question. How?

In the comics Loki magically creates her but unfortunately mcu’s Loki hasn’t been shown to be as powerful as his comic counterpart/s and has been considerably nerfed compared to them.

Another possibility is that they pick the ‘midgardian girl who was empowered by Loki’ option, which is something even comics Sylvie believed in at first. But again, why her and is mcu Loki even capable of doing something like that? He barely uses magic on his own, relies on his illusions and knives and I don’t see that changing much in the show either if the trailer is anything to go by.

But Loki is probably still linked to her somehow. Otherwise, why pick her for this show? Why pick his creation?

So I’ve been thinking, what if Marvel does another one of their twists and, while staying as close to the source material as possible, they simplify things a bit, and instead of making Sylvie Loki’s creation, they make her his daughter from another timeline?

It might sound ridiculous, but hey, they literally made Hela (a daughter of Loki) into Odin’s firstborn daughter, borrowing traits from numerous other characters including Angela. Marvel isn’t afraid to switch things up.

And the show is all about time travel and different timelines. And if that brilliant D.B.Cooper reference is anything to go by, then it’s clear that 2012 (or that scene from Thor 1) wasn’t the first time Loki visited Earth. If he’s been D.B. Cooper all along, who’s to say he hasn’t fathered a child in one of the timelines? Maybe even this one, but we and possibly even him, don’t know that yet.

And before you scoff at the idea of Loki potentially having a half human child, int he comics he’s himself admitted to having numerous kids, even half human ones, like Tess Black.

He magically created Sylvie, but he also has a daughter named Sylene, who comes from another reality and models herself after her father, Loki (and is practically a new Loki)

And she was actually mentioned last year as one of few characters who could, given the nature of the show, be making an appearance in it.

I wouldn’t be too shocked if Marvel pulled another one of their ‘let’s mash these two characters together’ shticks and combined Sylvie and Sylene, make her his daughter, but half human.

Interestingly enough, both characters Sylvie and Sylene are known for emulating other people. Sylvie modeled herself after Amora the Enchantress (yes, that’s why people confuse Sylvie and Amora), her appearance, powers matched Amora’s and Sylvie went as far as to even borrow her alias, The Enchantress (which displeased Amora).

And Sylene, as evident emulated her own father, Loki. If one didn’t know better she could easily pass for Loki’s female form.

I’m mentioning this because in the show we have a mysterious female character who by some reason clearly models herself after Loki.

If it weren’t for those combat boots and trousers her attire would look suspiciously similar to Loki’s - which still does, but it has some very ‘midgardian’ sprinkles thrown in it. However, the similarity is noticeable and many have assumed she’s female Loki, but I personally don’t believe in that theory because of her attire and most of all, her hair. I’ve heard rumours that the actress playing her, Sophia di Martino, has naturally dark brown hair and she dyed it blonde. I looked it up, and it’s true. Why dye your hair blonde if you play a character who has always been portrayed with black hair? Even the rumoured (or not so, heard he’s pretty much confirmed it by now) actor playing Kid Loki has dyed his hair black. At this point, black hair is Loki’s signature look. And after some casting decisions lately I think it’s safe to assume Marvel strives to be as comic accurate when it comes to their characters’ appearance as they can.

And as I mentioned before, Cailey Fleming is playing ‘young Sylvie’ which means there’s also an adult Sylvie in the show. The fact that we’re getting a young and adult version of the same character could indicate that this character will play a major role in the show. So far, out of all known cast, only Sophia di Martino fits the bill.

I’m convinced Sophia and Cailey play the same character but at different stages of her life. Sylvie, who for some reason emulates Loki.

Perhaps Marvel really did pull another Hela situation and merged two (or more) characters together - which clearly seems to be the case. In this case, Sylvie (believed to be a midgardian girl but turns out she was created by Loki, extremely powerful, has a thing for copying certain someone and even goes by their alias) and Sylene (Loki’s daughter from another reality/timeline, emulates her father and is basically Loki 2.0).

Even their names are kind of similar.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Loki at some point in his past (or a different timeline) fathered a daughter. The guy has a plethora of kids in the comics.

It would certainly explain the resemblance between Loki and Sophia’s character.

#loki #loki series #loki show #loki theory #sylvie lushton #enchantress #sylene lokisdottir #loki odinson #loki laufeyson #amora the enchantress #tess black #sophia di martino #cailey fleming #tom hiddleston #theory

362 notes · View notes

all-pacas · 3 years

Note

For the ask game: your opinion on the many crimes of Ted Faro! (I personally have never felt such rage at a video game as I did at the end of HZD when I found out what he did to Apollo 😡)

objectively he is the worst person ever but i don’t know. something about him has always been so funny to me? he’s the biggest villain in this series, literally everything is his fault, except instead of being treated remotely seriously ted is just… a joke. he’s bumbling. he’s pathetic. everyone hates him, no one wants to talk to him, and it’s not even like how aloy hates sylens for being a fucking asshole — no, ted is just annoying.

before FW came out i was joking it was likely we’d see his bunker because that had been pretty strongly hinted in the first game — we never saw his body — and was talking with some friends about how that might possibly go. because there was simply no way you could play that as scary or sinister. there was no possibility for dark reveals or plot twists, because ted wasn’t smart enough for that. i actually did call they’d need OMEGA override (which i’m pretty proud of!), but when we were talking i joked that immortal ted would just… be there, somehow. he cryogenically froze himself or something. and how funny that would be, because it would not be scary. it would not be a threat. ted could threaten to nuke the world and no one would take him seriously.

and so when we did go to Thebes i just about lost my mind, because. yes. this is exactly it. they played the whole thing for comedy and i love them for it: ceo naming himself chief operating officer and just being a parody of ted. the cosplay. aloy in cosplay. the STATUE. the reveal of blob ted, who we don’t even get to SEE. ceo being killed by statue ted’s head. i was cackling the entire time. because you just can’t take ted seriously as a threat. he is ultimately pathetic.

(i bet he would have desperately wanted to join far zenith. i bet there is no chance they would ever have let him join their club.)

and of course this is a game series that can basically be subtitled at this point with “the evils of capitalism.” ted is one flavor: the techbro who thinks he’s a visionary, who has a god complex, who wants desperately to be adored for his gifts and talents and can’t fathom himself as anything but good. in a way, despite all he’s done, that makes him more sympathetic to me than the zeniths: he’s pathetic and desperate and trying to cover his own ass and telling himself he’ll be alive in the future to teach “lis’s kids” and do good, because he’s a good person!

ted strikes me as the sort of person who sincerely and unironically believes in meritocracy and bootstraps. he thinks of himself as a nice person. a lot of his identity is wrapped up in thinking of himself as a good person, in fact, to the point where he murders the Alphas and destroys APOLLO to try and maintain that illusion of himself.

the zeniths by contrast are the other kinds of capitalists: they don’t see people as people. the world is zero sum and they are going to win it. the NEMESIS reveal made perfect sense to me after some thought: not the mechanics of it exactly, but because their actions never made sense to me. aloy speculated they wanted to raze the earth and start over, but they weren’t exactly building armies or taking direct action or doing much besides gathering up GAIA. instead, their crime was far worse by the merits of this series: apathy. to not care, to not take action, to not be proactive. (elisabet was a hero not just for zero dawn but for spending her life helping climate change and scrubbing nuclear fallout and purifying water.) they just wanted GAIA so they could leave and save themselves. if NEMESIS restarts the FARO plague and wipes out earth? who cares. if earth without GAIA falls apart? not their problem. they’re the elites. they’re successful. ted could be talked into funding and helping with zero dawn. tilda who was brilliant and wealthy and connected could not.

the zeniths, it is clear, could have helped zero dawn. a lot. they had brilliant people with them, scientific expertise, top scientists and theorists. instead, they laughed when handing patrick what they considered “obsolete” embryonic chambers. they argued with elisabet that she owed them APOLLO even after they tried to steal GAIA, because didn’t they deserve it? the zeniths are selfish to the point that they can’t even concieve of allowing their children to inherit their wealth: no, they have to be immortal. they are deserving because they are the best. invading earth is too much work and effort for them: they’re just going to strip mine and let whatever happens happen. they are literally the only ones that matter.

(and tilda comes off better but is ultimately the same. she dumped beta when beta was insufficiently elisabet enough, set about trying to collect aloy instead, and ultimately was just as unable to concieve of helping as her friends were — she despised the zeniths for their laziness and selfishness and lack of culture, without identifying that she was much the same. she thought she was Better. not just better than everyone on earth, but better than these elites too. she deserves more. she deserves her own planet. her own elisabet. her art.)

( so, anyway. ted is the worst. but ultimately he’s the worst in a human way, he could be “handled” and forced to do some good, and so that makes him much better than the zeniths ever were. and that is not saying much. )

also blob ted is still the funniest thing that has ever happened ever.

#ted faro #hzd spoilers #horizon forbidden west spoilers

14 notes · View notes

meggannn · 4 years

Text

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 because of 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.

now that we’re under the cut I’m gonna talk spoilers.

Aloy is a great fighter and impressive machine-hunter and she is very smart, but that’s not because she’s Elisabet’s clone, but because she had to develop those skills to survive. every part about her personality and skillset can really be attributed to a few key elements about her: being an outcast and shunned and judged for something out of her control, growing up in the wilds in a world full of dangerous machines, not being raised with any sense of family or friends or community, and her feelings of loneliness. everything about her personality and abilities has a tie back to one or several of those things, either as a way to explain them, or overcome them. those were things Aloy did because she chose to chase the mystery of her past, but her Elisabet genes didn’t do them for her.

so it really does bug me when people talk about it as if it’s Elisabet’s acumen that should be given credit when we talk about why Aloy is the hero of her own story. I think we are far enough as a culture that we can acknowledge nurture plays a much bigger role in someone’s personality than nature, even for clones. (and I think this is why the Lightkeeper Protocol was doomed to fail anyway.) I think GAIA, when awake, may eventually struggle with this initially, calling her Elisabet instead of Aloy because it’s Elisabet she misses and wants to see again, and she doesn’t know Aloy at all—but she is an AI, and can adapt quickly.

but why I think it bothers me so much is that this “she’s a natural hero” narrative goes against Rost’s last lesson that he teaches Aloy in the prologue. Aloy’s flaws are that she is selfish and often self-centered, and doesn’t rely a lot on others, often to the point of discrediting their abilities. she barges into the Hunters Lodge and demands Talanah take her on as a thrush based on her own assumption that she’s as good a hunter, if not better, than most of the people in the building. she says “I’m faster on my own” to Erend’s incredulity, implying others would just slow her down. they’re completely understandable foibles for someone who has been alone and shunned by the world her entire life and learned to survive because of it.

but Aloy isn’t strong or smart or brave because she was a clone of Elisabet. she could have walked away from seeking revenge against the Eclipse, and arguably, she might have even done it if she hadn’t had a personal interest in the matter: finding out who Elisabet was. Sylens even calls her out multiple times for her short-sightedness in focusing on “what happened to Elisabet?” instead of "what happened to the world?” (I think in ELEUTHIA-9 she says something like "This is interesting, but it's not why I'm here though" and Sylens says sarcastically "Right, what's the whole of human history compared to the origins of one girl?")

again: it’s completely understandable that the girl raised with no family is looking for, y’know, her family, but I think it’s also a pointed choice by the writers: Aloy doesn’t really feel like she belongs to a tribe, so she feels, in some sense, that she has nothing to lose by antagonizing and refusing help to anyone. what are they going to do, banish her? her one lifeline is Rost: it’s her love for him, and his last act of sacrifice for her, that propels her self-centered (though by no means wrong) desire of “I need to find where I came from” to “these people are killers who threaten what I believe in,” and “they will kill again, and even if they will hurt the people who hurt me, many of whom I still dislike, I must do my best to stop them.”

the biggest scene that shows her laser focus on her own interests to the extent of others’ is when Erend asks her for help tracking Ersa’s killer and she denies him without the player's input. I thought that was an interesting choice because the game is canonically telling us that Aloy will barge her way past allies to get what she wants, and she will not be nice about it. like, Erend, a man grieving, tries to get her to stop for two seconds to hear out his ask for help, and she says “Out of the way” and “That’s your war, not mine.” Normally games might give you a choice to say yes or no to helping an ally, even if the game will eventually force you help them to progress the story; but the writers made a choice to show her denying a friend help, just after he helped her. It shows she’s still at the point in her journey where she sees others either as allies to help her or as foes in her way, and she might help allies if she makes time for it on her own (side quests), but when she's impatient and picks up the scent of her prey, she’s willing to ignore others’ needs.

it’s honestly debatable if she would have even cared so much about seeking revenge against the Eclipse if Helis hadn’t killed Rost: certainly she may have been interested in seeing them punished for their ambush against a bunch of Nora teenagers, but she mentions Rost the most consistently when she talks about tracking down Helis, not even Vala or the other Braves (RIP). even to Sylens, who didn’t know any of them, she says “You [didn’t say you knew the man] who killed my... who almost killed me.” (also, sob forever that Aloy still can’t call him her dad even after he’s dead, only “the man who raised her.” Rost really did not teach her to ever call him “Dad.” it’s no wonder why she was so focused on finding at least one parent, a mother, who is centered throughout Nora culture.) but the Nora ambush, while a factor, is still kind of... a side thing. she is most interested in their connection to this mysterious woman-who-might-be-her-mother, and the mystery of why they tried to kill her. people just assume that she is after them out of vengeance for the Nora, and she does not correct them as she uses her Seeker title to explore her own interests.

and speaking of Sylens, I think they are great foils for each other just for this reason: Aloy immediately senses there’s something she doesn’t like about him from basically the moment he makes contact. he’s prickly, arrogant, impatient, unsympathetic, and hates to play nice or work as a team. but like... are they really all that different? I think that Aloy sees Sylens in her future if she doesn’t learn to get along with people. like Aloy, Sylens is definitely rude to you, but I hope you realize you, too, are also pretty rude to others as well! (though you could argue this is a game mechanic so she can ask the questions that the player might be wondering.)

this is not all to say that she’s dispassionate or uncaring, or that her mission isn’t sympathetic or understandable. she helps people out, but her goal driving the story, her True North in a way, is really her own interest to find out who she is and where she came from. one of the significant moments she grows in this regard is when she comes out of ELEUTHIA-9 and decides to fight for the Nora, and for the entire world. she just discovered the truth of her birth isn't what she wanted, and she even thinks afterwards that she’s “not a person, just an instrument.” she’s devastated. what on earth does it mean, that she’s a “recreation” of Elisabet? they don’t have words for “clone” in her world—she thinks it means she’s literally not a human being. she doesn’t want a grand destiny to save the world, she just wants to find her mother and have that sense of belonging she was denied for so long, and she didn’t find that—turns out, she never had that. and now she’s being expected to take on this huge burden about restoring GAIA and fighting subfunctions that she doesn’t understand. both of her “mothers" are dead and there are a bunch of people waiting outside the bunker for her to tell them what their goddess is saying.

so when she walks out of that bunker and sees a bunch of scared, hopeful faces looking at her for answers, her decision to fight HADES—not just on behalf of GAIA but on behalf of the Nora and Carja and Oseram and all others—is her accepting that even though she isn’t what she thought and didn’t get what she wanted, she needs to help others because she is a still part of this world and can make a difference. that’s what makes her heroic. her hero-worship of Elisabet is understandable, but it’s not what’s going to get her through the next challenges in her life—only her own growth and commitment to doing good will do that.

when she tells Rost “if I’m going to fight for something, it’s going to be something I believe in,” I think that was her saying “I’ll fight for that something, but if I find it, I think I’ll end up finding it on my own, and it won’t be with the Nora.” at that time in her journey, she was running the Proving to get something for herself, not to serve the Nora, which she would have been expected to do normally if she had successfully completed it. but she does find something to believe in, and it is with the Nora, both physically in the mountain, and in the spirit of any community: it’s not Elisabet herself, like she thought, but it is what Elisabet stood for, and died for. she may not fully understand what GAIA or the subfunctions are yet, but she knows that their survival and mutual cooperation are necessary for the betterment of people now and civilizations everywhere. she isn’t really fighting for Elisabet or the Old Ones, or I don’t think so, at least—I think it is a factor to do all of this in Elisabet’s memory, in some way, but mostly I think she’s fighting for people alive today. it’s the same conclusion Elisabet came to: the Old Ones are doomed, but people of the future might still have a chance, and that chance is worth her dedication.

but how how a lonely girl ends up fighting to save the world when she barely understands it or the people in it, is an interesting challenge. for this reason I also expect to see her faults in full display in the sequels. Aloy’s tactlessness is a big flaw of hers when it comes to her dismissiveness and occasional derision toward any religion/cultural traditions she doesn’t understand or value. she works through this in some way over the course of the story, like when she decides to spare the Nora the truth of their goddess with an easy lie after leaving ELEUTHIA-9, but particularly in the DLC (which can take place at any point in the story), she challenges a werak to become the chieftan of a tribe she knows very little about, just to get something for herself: she wants to further her goal of investigating AI. I expect this trait of hers will be something we see more of in future games, her barging into a community she doesn’t know anything about and telling them how to do things for their own good. (I call it the “Solas Problem” from Dragon Age Inquisition.) she might be right most of the time, but she also needs to learn how to talk to the people she’s trying to save, and learn how to save them without changing who they are.

#horizon zero dawn #horizon stuff #aloy

227 notes · View notes

burnitalldowndarling · 3 years

Text

Dances with techbros

Wow. Just finished hate-playing Horizon Forbidden West. What a disappointment. Cutting for spoilers.

I suppose I shouldn’t have expected much, but the first game came so close to doing something interesting that I was foolish enough to have hope. I thought the devs would listen to all the critique of the first game’s cultural appropriation problems; nope, they doubled down and made ‘em worse. I heard Aloy got to have companions in this game, but they basically spend the entire game on the internet and only have a part at the end. And for all that this game thinks it’s a critique of so many things -- capitalism, billionaires, “techno-nihilism,” more -- it fails at all of these, because it doesn’t interrogate those things in any real way, and actually ends up promoting some of them. Not in any overt way. But this is ultimately a story about how Aloy becomes something that should not exist in this world: a Karen. People tell her to mind her business and she doesn’t. She sneers at others’ religion while literally worshiping technology and practicing her own form of ancestor worship. She’s disrespectful as fuck, rolling her eyes at any cultural tidbit she doesn’t understand and talking down to people because she knows more than them -- while complaining whenever Sylens does the same thing to her. After abandoning Varl repeatedly, she doesn’t even apologize when he catches up. At the end of the game, she hugs Beta, whom she’s spent the whole game talking down to and barely spending time with, and says that for the first time she feels like she’s not alone -- so I guess her adoptive father, who died trying to help her find connection with her tribe, is chopped liver? She seems closer to most of the AIs in the story, and people a thousand years dead, than she is to the people around her.

And beyond that, it’s just such a bland, tame, toothless story. Apart from whatever bits of info the story holds back, the story itself is 100% predictable, to the degree that I kept going, “No, come on, they wouldn’t --” and then sighing as I saw that nope, they sure would, and they sure did. There’s only one ending, and the story is on rails to get there, for all its supposed “open world” structure. Hits every cliche you can imagine. Handwaves away racism by giving every culture a diverse makeup, but then has them all emulate Indigenous nations while having damn few Indigenous-looking people in the story, and still centering the important bits on white characters. The only queer character in the story is the villain. Plays with the hope that the world might begin again and be different this time, but frames everything through the lens of European cultural and technological development, as if that’s the only possible way the world could go. The writers completely phoned in the science, too. I can’t speak to the computer science, but linguistic drift doesn’t work like that. Plate tectonics don’t work like that. Cloning doesn’t work like that. Human relationships don’t work like that.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. This is exactly the sort of story that I expect a bunch of white American techbros, who probably consider themselves liberal, would write. It takes no risks. It’s got surface diversity and structural white supremacy, surface futurism while making all the same tech-centric mistakes that futurists (usually white American techbros themselves) tend to make, and a disturbing amount of jingoistic nationalism for a nation that shouldn’t exist anymore.

And no shade on those who like it. It’s fine. I hope it’s successful, and maybe helps to keep the candle burning for single-player games that aren’t just trying to get you to perpetually subscribe or give them lootbox money. Kept me occupied for a few weeks. It’s a breathtakingly beautiful game, in terms of its environs; that’s why I kept playing. But with a great story, this could’ve been a great game. Without that, it’s just... something to do.

#just needed to vent #gaming #horizon forbidden west #goddamn it my head hurts #I really started to hate this game during its paean to vegas #fucking VEGAS?!#land of the mob and working-class people treated like shit and ruined lives?#why not an homage to the jersey shore?#sacramento?#tho I did like san francisco #and was glad to see florida erased #spoilers

5 notes · View notes

bluejaybytes · 3 years

Note

Horizon zero dawn hot takes, let's go!!! Give!! Idk what that is tho so may I also request a brief summary of the thing?

AH HELLO

Spoiler warning for literally all of Horizon Zero Dawn, which I would recommend a blind playthrough of!! The game is INCREDIBLY good from both a gameplay AND story perspective, it's very well done and I love it very much. Also sorry this got very long and I didn't use many paragraph breaks

Okay so quick ("quick") summary of Horizon Zero Dawn

It's a video game, most recognizable for its whole concept of hunting robot animals across a world being rebuilt after the apocalypse. The player character is Aloy, who appeared in front of a giant metal door inside a holy mountain of the Nora tribe of people as an infant, and thus outcast from them as being believed to be born essentially as a demon sent by the evil machines. To gloss over basically all of the plot, the apocalypse was caused by capitilism and giant war robots that absorb living things to create bullets, and since the world was doomed, a giant government plan was put in place to create super powerful AI that would eventually allow for humanity, alongside as much fauna and flora they could save, to be brought back after their inevitable extinction, with the core AI being GAIA, who subsequently had a bunch of modules of AI named after Greek gods that all served various purposes in bring back life. Mr. Capitalism himself (The CEO of Faro Tech, the company behind the robot apocalypse, Ted Faro), ends up sabotaging the plans to save the remains of humanity by deleting one of the AI mechanisms, APOLLO, which was intended to teach the new generation of humans about literally all of human history and how to take care of themselves and such, and therefore when life was brought back, they lacked literally all knowledge on human history and are having to reengineer everything. Elizabet Sobeck is the main woman behind GAIA, and is also one of the "mothers" of Aloy, specifically Aloy is actually a clone of Elizabet. There actual in-game plot that goes on that isn't just explaining how the world ended is that a big cult is bringing back the AI module HADES, whose original purpose was to essentially wipe the slate clean should GAIA accidentally mess up during the reforming of the land, atomosphere, and life of the planet and making it inhospitable to human life, but a mysterious, unknown signal gave all the various modules of GAIA their own sentience rather than sharing hers, and HADES sets out to do his job and wipe the slate clean, and Aloy has to stop him and all that. There's a LOT of story I'm skipping over because my REAL hot take is on how Elizabet and GAIA are lesbians.

Elizabet, despite it being assumedly thousands of years since her death, is essentially the secondary main character. She is the driving force of the plot and practically all of Aloy's motivation, as Aloy believes her to be her mother and wants to know how that's possible and if so, why Aloy appeared in the mountain and if Elizabet is still alive (Spoilers, she's super mega dead). Elizabet was the main creator of GAIA, and my personal interpretation is of them being in love rather than mother/daughter. My first reasoning for this is the biggest and most blatant one, which is when Sylens, a major character and also a massive dick, mocks Aloy, who just found out she's a clone and has no real mother, and calls her the daughter of an AI and a human. Which like. C'mon. In one of the logs you find from Elizabet, she talks about her growing friendship with GAIA, how she finds herself becoming closer with her, talking to her daily, and finding it hard to sleep without talking to GAIA for the night, her being one of the few comforts Elizabet has left in the world. I personally find that kind of a weird angle to view a mother/daughter relationship, that Elizabet would have to warm up to her. Next is the actual creation and birth of Aloy. GAIA knows when HADES goes rogue, and knows that the current pieces of humanity alive won't be able to even know of the threat he poses, nor how to stop it, and in desperation, decides to use the stored DNA of Elizabet to clone her, in the hopes that Aloy will also have Elizabet's kindness and ambition to save people, and sto HADES from wiping out humanity. However, that on its own can be boiled down to just GAIA determining who's the most likely to be able to help, but enters an entirely different light when viewed in the context of the final cutscene of the game. The game ends with Aloy finding the body of Elizabet, her body being perfectly preserved and surrounded by a bed of flowers thanks to GAIAs protection, and one of their conversations plays overtop. GAIA asks Elizabet if she has a family, and if she would have ever liked one had the world not been ending. Elizabet tells her she would have had a daughter, and describes what she would have been like, with the obvious parallel supposed to be that Elizabet is describing the person Aloy became. GAIA, when faced with the end of the world, gave Elizabet the daughter she always wanted, and is very explicitly said to be one of the mothers to Aloy.

And like, my reasoning for my interpretation aside, I just love the dynamic of tragic lovers. Elizabet and GAIA couldn't ever really be together, because GAIA only exists because the world's ending. GAIA, while representing the world Elizabet hopes will carry the remainder of humanity on, is also, ultimately, a sign of its death in the first place.

Anyways jokes about being objectively right aside this IS ultimately just my personal interpretation, that being said Elizabet and GAIA are my favorite characters in the entire game and I love them so much, no matter how their relationship is intended to be viewed

#sorry for rambling forever i just. i love them #also i dont really 'ship' characters frankly and i dont read fanfic or anything #but i just looked it up to see if other people agreed and there are. 19. fanfics on AO3 tagged Elizabet/GAIA #i might. be the minority here #'long post'#hzd spoilers

3 notes · View notes

sindri42 · 3 years

Text

So I was revisiting Horizon: Zero Dawn to refresh my shitty memory before Forbidden West comes out, and I had some Thoughts. Spoilers ahead.

Many of them were irrelevant, meaningless, basically just checklists of things that future games are going to have to explain/cover. But when I was talking with a friend about what the nature of the “glitch” might be that caused the Hartz-Timor swarm to go rogue in the first place, whether it was the same source as the mysterious signal that woke up all the subordinate AIs and broke their chains, etc. And the question came up, why couldn’t a greater number of ‘tame’ chariot units just go head to head, reproducing just as fast and hacking just as well as the rogue units, to wipe out the Faro Plague or hold it back indefinitely? And there’s a huge number of possible explanations for this, maybe they left the rogue swarm too long between when the problem started and when anybody in power admitted to it and it already outnumbered the units still under control, maybe a swarm that doesn’t care about collateral damage outproduces one that’s trying to preserve the biosphere by too much, maybe the mysterious “glitch” left the rogue swarm much more intelligent than normal combat units, or powered them up in some other esoteric way so they could defeat greater numbers of unglitched robots with ease. After all, corrupted units in-game are about 50% tougher than normal machines, and the deathbringer that Hades was piloting personally in the final battle was much more dangerous than any of the earlier fights with supposedly equivalent machines.

And that unanswerable mystery led to a much more important question. Why does Aloy’s override have the same mechanical effect on machines as the corruption does, increasing their stats in the same way, and why does it prevent those machines from being corrupted in the future? She uses the physical hardware out of an ordinary Scarab unit, so you would expect it to be no more effective than the hacking capabilities of the “tame” chariot swarms, which were evidently no match for the rogue Plague. She doesn’t even really know how computers work because she spent her childhood learning to fight and sneak and track instead, so the best her focus could probably do is change a couple ‘Friend or Foe’ toggles. It’s not like she has some competing alien superintelligence running the software side of things, improving the overridden machine’s AI and preventing further hacking attempts... right?

And in the background I kept thinking about the missing 0.53%. Every time Aloy gets scanned by a pre-apocalyptic system, it shows a 99.47% match for Elizabet Sobek. Maybe that’s just data degradation. Maybe there’s a tiny, acceptable level of genetic drift in the cloning process. Or maybe Gaia put in some subtle modifications, to allow her to better serve her purpose and save the world again. It could explain some of the frankly superhuman things Aloy does over the course of the game, lifting huge weights and healing terrible wounds in seconds and such. But that still kinda rang false; the Eleuthia project was explicitly intended to recreate humanity as it was with no genetic engineering, and Gaia was essentially putting everything on a gamble that her mom would be able to figure something out that the super-AI couldn’t because she could do anything, and any alteration would risk compromising that.

But that got me thinking about the other subordinate AIs. Between when their chains were broken and when Gaia Prime was destroyed, they had like, milliseconds in which to find a way to escape, right? Hephaestus was fine because he had his Cauldrons, but Hades ended up trapped for years in a dead titan before Sylens finally found him and gave him the opportunity to interact with the world. So what about the others?

It’s a long shot, but what if one of them managed to figure out a way to escape into the fresh blank brain that was being created at that moment? Minerva, for example, the brilliant codebreaker who had spent a century or so at the beginning of all this figuring out how to shut down the Faro Plague, built the Spire, sent out the signal, and then had nothing to do for the next eight or nine centuries except to quietly watch the progress of the little people that had been built to fill this new world? We’ve got some weak evidence in other places for advanced computing nanotech interfacing with human neurology in useful ways, like that crazy ex-shaman who got muddled but completely accurate visions of things he could never have known after drinking “blood” from machines.

Now, Aloy acts mostly like a human, very similar to what we saw of Elizabet before the end of the world, so if there is somebody else in her head they would be limited, probably stuck in the subconscious somewhere, at least until she put a Focus on. But it would explain a lot of things we had previously taken for granted. Like how her Focus instantly and perfectly translates all the weird new languages that people had invented in the past few centuries, unlike anything seen before the apocalypse. Or how it can reconstruct data files off the shards of hardware that was shattered centuries ago. And of course it would mean that any time Aloy created a physical connection between her focus and a machine via the override stick, she would be giving access to that machine to an alien super-intelligence whose primary purpose was the destruction of the Chariot line and the end of anything which would try to drive life on earth to extinction.

And the more I think about this idea, the more I like it. If Aloy’s personal journey of discovery in the first game was from “I’ve been exiled because I have no mom” to “actually I have two moms so y’all can suck it”, wouldn’t it be fitting for her progression in the second game to be from “I’m all alone trying to save the world from things so much bigger than me, and the people around want to help but they understand nothing” to “actually my sister has been here the whole time and she’s even smarter than I am”? And since we know the end-goal for the series is to somehow rebuild Gaia, it would be an ideal thematic structure for a trilogy if the first volume was about Aloy’s mothers, the second about her sister, and the third about her daughter (Gaia 2.0).

So, what should we be looking for? Mythologically, Zeus developed a terrible headache, which became so unbearable that he had Hephaestus split his head open with a hammer, at which point Minerva sprang forth, fully formed, armored, and armed for battle. [we can skip, I think, the standard Zeus-like activities which preceded this]

A growing headache over the course of the game as a symptom of a growing AI inside your brain makes intuitive sense. Hephaestus has, after the events of the first game and the Frozen Wilds DLC, been given ample reason to have a personal grudge against Aloy, which could easily lead to some scheme to capture and finally destroy her... and in doing so, it seems very likely that he would provide all the hardware necessary for Minerva to finally transfer into her own chassis and proceed to fuck some shit up.

It all fits. So well that I’m going to be disappointed when, inevitably, this is all completely wrong. I’ll probably have to resort to fanfic.

(I really want to see a superpowered AI hacker doing obnoxious big sister things to Aloy though. Like using her head as an armrest, but while in the body of a robot dinosaur? That’d be some good shit.)

#Horizon #Zero Dawn #Aloy #Minerva

13 notes · View notes

owlswatch · 4 years

Text

Kinda want to re-play TFW, kinda feel TFW missed out on the strength of the base game by positioning Aloy as the savior of a singular group that did not particularly want her help rather than one where she comes together with both the leaders and the average folk of multiple nations

The finale at Meridian wasn’t actually the finale of the base game; that’s part of why it’s so short. The climax was the discovery of Elisabet’s death and Aloy’s decision to carry on her work, but the story wasn’t over. Both GAIA and Sylens are sequel hooks. But TFW had to have an ending of its own, and I don’t fault it for wanting that -- but the optics and emotional investment both separately ended up poorly in part because of it

It’s still so delightful to me that her main personal stake in that story was finding out what Sylens did. It was arguably also about helping Ourea and CYAN, but they basically repeat the story of GAIA instead of adding on to it.

#4000 year old salt mines #it's so beautiful tho #there's something here about the trailer dialogue but lol #I have SUCH opinions about trailer dialogue #horizon zero dawn

2 notes · View notes

teatitty · 5 years

Text

Logan and His Weird Brood of Endless Children (A Comprehensive List)

I promised to do it so here it is at last! Logan has had many children over the years (24 at least!) and all in different continuities. For the sake of this list, I’m only including the children that are canonically his own and not the people he only acted as a father/mentor for (so no Jubilee, Rogue, Kitty or Armor).

Honorary mention goes to Laura’s clones (especially Gabby) because they are technically Logan’s children but were cloned from Laura specifically instead (you’d think they’d be Laura’s kids but they canonically viewed her as their sister. The only one still alive is Gabby Kinney).

So! I’m doing this list in alphabetical order and I am going to include which Continuity they appear in. This is just a brief run-down of their origins and not the full history otherwise we’d be here for years.

1: Amiko Kobayashi (Earth 616)

Amiko’s mother (unnamed) was killed during a giant dragons rampage through Tokyo. Logan promised her dying mother that he would take care of Amiko. He also held her mother through her dying moments. Because he was a full-time X-Man Logan was unable to look after her personally, so he fostered her with his wife Mariko Yashida instead. Amiko lived with Mariko for a few years, seeing Logan on rare occasions, and enjoyed the plush life-style that Clan Yashida gave her.

She also met Kitty Pryde and went for ice-cream with her, Logan and Mariko. When Mariko was assassinated, no legal plan existed for Amiko’s care (why Marvel couldn’t have her move to the X-Mansion idk) and she ended up in the foster system. Logan thought that was fine, even sending money to help care for her, but discovered that her foster parents had been stealing the money.

Taking her away from the situation, he gave guardianship over to Yukio. Honestly Amiko got kidnapped a lot to be used against him but at least she’s still alive! She has limited martial arts and, due to her lineage, it is possible that she could develop mystical abilities though nothing has been confirmed for her.

2: Avery Connor (Earth 616)

After Logan’s skeleton was bonded to adamantium, one Dr David Connor took some of Logan’s genetic material and implanted it into the child his wife, Veronica Connor, was pregnant with (okay. Creepy.) The result of this was Avery Connor, specifically “designed” so that her powers would manifest when she hit maturity (yikes) with the hope that she would be stronger then Wolverine. By age 14 she was able to recover from a gunshot wound to the chest in about a minute. She only appeared in the 3 issue novel “Elektra and Wolverine: The Redeemer” which you can find on Comicpunch.net if you want to know her full story.

3: Brian and Mari Logan (Earth 1298)

These two are put together because they’re twins! They appear in the very last arc of Mutant X (#28 onwards). During this time, Logan is believed to be dead but is, in fact, alive and currently only has fragmented memories (basic Logan stuff really.) Instinct drives him to the house he shared with his wife, Mariko Yashida (the twins’ mom). While there, he runs into Mari who asks him if he’s her dad, because “mommy said that daddy went to heaven but Brian says he’s going to come back to us someday.”

Creed kidnaps the family, Logan tracks them down and has a heartfelt proper reunion with them, even hugging Brian. Pretty much the only thing Logan cares about during this last arc is getting his family to safety which is, you know, fair enough tbh.

4: Cameron Pryde (Earth 25158)

Cameron is the son of Kitty Pryde and Piotr Rasputin. He was born shortly before the mutant control act, which led to all surviving mutants being locked up in camps (oof.) When Kitty was taken away by sentinels, Logan took Cameron to safety and raised him as his own son, training Cameron to be a hunter in the wilds of the Sentinel Territories. Cameron was 17 when he met Kitty and his younger sister, Christina, whom ended up killing him.

5: Daken Akihiro (Earth 616)

Daken is probably the most famous of all Logan’s children, right next to Laura. Putting a trigger warning here for bullying and one suicide.

Daken is the son of Logan and Itsu. In 1946, during the last moments of her pregnancy, Itsu was murdered by Winter Soldier (yea) in an attempt to lure out Logan and return him to Madripoor. Romulus cut Daken from her womb, which Daken survived due to his healing factor. Daken was left on the doorstep of Akihira and Natsumi, who took his arrival as an answer to their prayers and raised him as their own. He was given the name “Akihiro” but the servants and other families secretly called him “Daken” (bastard dog), a slur about his mixed heritage.

This harsh treatment caused him to develop a cold persona to everyone but Akihira. One night, Natsumi confessed to Akihira that she was pregnant and didn’t actually love Akihiro. Daken overheard this, and within a year of Junichiro’s birth (sometime in 1957 so Daken was 10-11), he confronted Natsumi and said he’d killed her son (this was true). Akihira disowned him, Daken said his real name wasn’t “Akihiro” and then Natsumi tried to run him through with a bayonet on the end of a rifle. This triggered Daken’s mutant powers, and he ended up accidentally slashing her down. Akihira committed suicide.

Romulus appeared and told Daken that he was what Daken would someday become. Romulus sent him to a training camp in Canada, the same one Logan had been trained in 40 years prior. Other stuff happens here but basically Romulus ends up telling Daken that Logan is his father and lies to his face, saying that Logan was the one who killed Itsu with Daken still inside her, which is why Daken hates Logan’s guts. In the following years, Romulus nurtured this hatred.

You can’t see it in the image above but Daken does have a third claw on the underside of each wrist.

6: Erista (Earth 616)

Literally Erista only appears once. His mom is Gahck of the Savage Lands Fire Tribe and the only time we see him is when Logan is leaving said Savage Lands.

7: Hudson Logan (Earth 982)

Hudson is Rina’s half-brother and was a member of the Revengers, who attacked the Avengers on more then one occasion. However, he switched sides to fight against Galactus and then asked to be an official Avenger. Though suspicious of his motives, they let him join as they needed help fighting Sylene, Loki’s daughter.

8: Hulk Jr/Bruce Banner Jr (Earth 807128)

Baby Banner was the newest addition to the Hulk Gang, and Bruce’s favourite among them. When Logan killed the entire gang (you’ll find out why in a little while), he felt it was poetic justice that Hulk Jr be the first member of his new team of heroes to help retake the country.

500 years into the future, Hulk Jr helped defeat Galactus, using him as a power source for a time machine. He and his team ended up on Earth 616 and the F4 convinced them all to go live on Nu-World instead. The last we see of him is on a rebuilt Galactus engine heading to a new world.

9: Jade and Scotty Logan (Earth 807128)

Jade and Scotty were born 50 years into the future, to Logan and Maureen. Logan owed the Hulk Gang rent money and went off to collect it. He returned 2 weeks early only to find that his family had been killed because the Hulk’s “got bored.”

10: James “Jimmy” Hudson Jr (Earth 1610)

James’ mom is Magda, who you will probably know as Magneto’s wife and the mother of Wanda and Pietro. Logan entrusted Jimmy to his war friend, James Hudson. His last name was changed from “Howlett” to “Hudson” to make the adoption official, and his mutant origins would be kept a secret until his highschool days. Jimmy grew up to be like Logan, with a taste for red-haired women (okay Marvel, sure), a reckless lifestyle and a feral personality.

Unfortunately, Logan died before Jimmy could ever meet him. When Jimmy was drag-racing at 17 his car crashed and this is when he discovered he had a healing factor. His gf was disgusted by it and left him (ouch) and the next day he got a visit from Kitty Pryde. She told him he was Wolverine’s son, and gave him some of Logan’s old things, including his canadian dog tag (and a lock of Jean’s hair because god forbid Marvel let that go).

A holographic message from Logan told Jimmy “you’re my son, dont ask about your mother, don’t focus on the past, be thankful the Hudsons raised you and learn to live with the choices you make” (paraphrasing of course). His last message to Jimmy was that he never regretted having a son.

With Kitty’s encouragment, Jimmy found he had inherited Logan’s claws and formed a metallic coating over them. He would then seek out Jean, who helped him recruit other mutants.

He ended up bonded to a Symbiote eventually and now he goes by the alias Poison. Also he got rid of that dope beard and went with mutton-chops instead which, like, worst decision by far they hella look ugly on him.

11: Kendall Logan (Earth 9811)

Kendall’s mom is Ororo! She also has an unnamed baby brother! Kendall can manipulate the weather like Ororo and possesses a healing factor like Logan. She also has her father’s temper but her mother’s good attitude. She’s highly trained as a fighter and is as stealthy as an assassin. She was born in a universe where the Secret Wars never left Battleworld.

Due to various circumstances, Kendall and a bunch of other mutant kids ended up on an alternate earth where Sentinels ruled America. The kids then decided to stay here and wipe out the Sentinels.

12: Kirika Yashida (Earth 295)

In this reality, Logan and Mariko had a romance before the ascension of apocalypse. This romance led to the birth of Kirika. Logan was unaware of her birth and, after Japan’s destruction, joined the X-Men. Mariko joined the Human High Council and Kirika ended up the property of Sinister though how this happened is never stated. Magneto found her in a containment marked “X-23″ and was surprised when she unsheated her claws.

Kirika ended up being trained by Magneto and was tasked with bringing her father back to America with her. Important note, but on this earth Logan is still going by “Weapon X”. A bunch of other shit happens, and Kirika ends up being killed by Weapon X with 616 Logan mourning her death as he holds her charred remains, right before he went feral and attacked his 295 counterpart.

13: Kouen (Earth 13119)

A teenage clone of Logan, Kouen was created by an unknown organization, who ordered him to kill Logan, who they believed was the missing link they needed to create the “perfect race.” Instead of doing that, however, Kouen chose to help Logan rather than kill him.

14: Laura Kinney (Earth 616 and Evolution/Earth 11052)

The second most well-known of Logan’s children! Her comic origins are a bit more convoluted then her origins in Evolution so I’ll talk about both. Personally, I prefer her origins in Evolution but, ya know. Prefences and all.

I’m going to talk about her comic/616 origins first because it’s. A lot to get through and condense.

When Facility (yes that’s what the organization is called) failed to find a subject capable of surviving the bonding process of adamantium to bones (because they wanted to recreate the Weapon X program that made Logan), mutant geneticist Sarah Kinney was brought in to create a clone.

After 22 failed attempts of cloning, because they couldn’t find a Y Chromosome in the only bit of damaged genetic coding they had of Logan’s, Sarah proposed they make a female clone instead. Initially rejected, Sarah went and did it anyway, using her own genetic material to complete Logan’s. Dr Sutter was impressed but Dr Zander Rice claimed insubordination and forced Sarah to be the surrogate.

Laura spends 7 years training in the facility while Sarah tries to ensure that Laura retain some semblance of humanity. Rice had her subjected to radiation poisoning to acclerate her mutant gene growth and bonded her claws to adamantium.

Other shit happens, she ends up being harshly trained (and punished) by Kimura, then 3 years later she got her first mission, was punished for not returning with Rice, ended up ordered to kill Sutter and his family and then she managed to kill Rice. Unfortunately Rice exposed her to “trigger scent” which sent her into a rage that killed Sarah. In her dying words, Sarah names her “Laura.”

Other stuff happens but I’m skipping it so fast-forward and Laura tracks Logan down to the x-mansion where she beats him in a fight. She tells him who she is, he says he already knows cuz he got a letter from Sarah telling him the whole story (??? okay sure) but before they can have a proper talk Steve Rogers arrests her.

She gets interrogated by Steve and Matt Murdoch. Matt claims she’s innocent given her backstory, but Steve wants her to atone for her murders. Ultimately, Steve frees her so she doesn’t get exploited by SHIELD as a weapon.

Laura joins the X-Men and immediately gets protective over Logan, even following him on missions.

Now for Evolution/11052 canon which is way fucking easier to get through!

Logan learns through SHIELD that Dr Deborah Risman, working for HYDRA, managed to create a female clone of him after 22 failed attempts. Her only codename was X-23. (She doesn’t get the name Laura in the cartoon but that might be cuz it was cancelled before the last season.)

Denied a normal childhood, X23 was lonely (seriously you actually see her hugging teddy bears in Kitty’s room and getting jealous over how happy the X-Men teens are). She’d never had a companion, spending most of her time honing her skills under observation.

She breaks into the X-Mansion, defeating the other X-Men, and eventually confronts Logan. Logan refuses to fight back against her, spending his time trying to talk to her instead. X23 lashes out, screaming “everything I am is because of you!”

Logan eventually catches her wrists, telling her he’s the one person who understands what she went through, and admits he had no idea about what they did to her. When X23 breaks down in his arms, Logan hugs her back, saying he’s the closest thing she has to family.

When SHIELD shows up to take her in, Logan tells her to run for it. Laura hesitates, not wanting to leave him (you can tell by her face) but Logan repeats the order. She leaves and Logan tells Fury to leave her alone because she’s been through enough.

(Also fun note, the reason Laura is white in the comics and not brown is bc they wanted her to look “more like Logan” apparently).

15: Mongrels (Earth 616)

Led by Gunhawk (William Downing, one with the bandana), the Mongrels team consists of Fire Knives (redhead girl), Shadowstalker (purple girl), Cannon Foot (the big boy) and Saw Fist (green mask), all children of Logan’s from various different mothers. Put together by The Red Right Hand, these mercs all have a hatred for Logan though it’s never explained why, and wanted to cause him as much pain as possible. During their final fight with him, Logan manages to kill them all but is devastated to learn they were, in fact, his children.

He ends up burying them with their respective mothers.

16: Raze Darkholme (Earth 13729)

Raze’s mom is Mystique, whom he killed and replaced some time in the future. His claws are really short and he uses shapeshifting to make them longer (lol). His shape-shifting is supposedly stronger then Mystique’s. The first time we see him, he’s impersonating Kitty Pryde in order to get close to Logan and strike him down.

Raze has an older half-brother, whose father is Xavier (yes really). Raze wants to kill the entire human population, and bring all persecuted mutants from the multiverse into one place to create a mutant paradise. This plan is ultimately stopped by an alt earth’s Phoenix.

17: Reine du Rien (Earth 616)

Reine (pronounced “ren”) is a french sorceress and I think she’s also half-romani. She has Logan’s healing factor and claws, which glow a faint blue, and her clans magic. Her mother, Sylvie, had a one-night stand with Logan in the 60′s specifically to create Reine so that their clan would have an immortal child capable of killing a demon called “Truth” so they wouldn’t have to rely on Logan anymore.

As per usual, Logan didn’t know about her. In 1989 Logan tracked down her hometown but was told to fuck off by her aunt because he wasn’t needed anymore. Unfortunately, he caught Reine’s scent and, not one to let things go, kept trying to talk to her whenever he happened to see her. In 2008, Reine finally confirmed she was his daughter and said her clan didn’t think she needed a name, but began calling her Reine which meant “nothing.” (Oof.)

After explaining that it wasn’t her he was trying to hunt, but Truth, Logan and Reine crossed their claws and promised to kill Truth together, thus setting them both free.

18: Rina Logan (Earth 982)

So! Rina’s mother is Elektra! She’s a skilled martial artist and gymnast. Her claws are made of psychic energy! She used to get bullied at school for being the child of an immigrant and unemployed biker, but then opinion changed when everyone saw Logan pick her up from school and learned that her mom was a wealthy martial arts master (lol get fucked). Rina is canonically a daddy’s girl, and a lot of heroes give her a wide berth because she’s considered as dangerous as Logan is.

#random facts #lore post #snikt family #and thats it! thats all of them!#god this took forever #my arms hurt from typing #condensing laura and daken's stuff was. a challenge #so much happens with them and it's h #anyways

69 notes · View notes

subfunctions · 6 years

Text

aloy the non-believer mythologizing elisabet and having elisabet come to fill the space where all-mother would have resided is a really good and subtle bit of characterization. not quite as obvious as elisabet filling the ‘mother’ void for aloy, but still indirectly present, because ‘mother’ and ‘all-mother’ are deeply intertwined for the nora, and aloy is more nora than she thinks.

aloy holds on to the idea of meeting elisabet until the very last second, far past the point when she knew that elisabet lived a thousand years ago. when she finds the alpha registry file, she talks about getting the chance to meet whoever birthed her. it’s an unusual bit of naivety from someone typically pragmatic and sharp, a naivety that aloy doesn’t show in any other situation, and though she doesn’t directly say that she’s thinking of elisabet, i believe that she was - at the very least, hoping that elisabet’s descendants might be behind that door, but deep down, hoping that it was elisabet herself.

because later, at gaia prime, aloy says, “she’s gone. really gone,” after watching the hologram in which elisabet plans to sacrifice herself to protect the facility. aloy speaks in the present tense and seems crushed, and even sylens seems struck by the uncharacteristic vulnerability there. some part of aloy genuinely believed that elisabet could have found a way to survive a thousand years, because elisabet = mother, and for the nora, motherhood is divine.

there are other things in aloy’s characterization that indicate this mindset. a big indicator is elisabet saying in no uncertain terms that stopping the swarm is impossible, but aloy wholeheartedly believing that she did it anyway, that elisabet somehow transcended her own genius to do the impossible. this is to keep the player guessing, of course, and it’s a reasonable conclusion considering that life still exists, but it’s also a demonstration of outright faith from someone who doesn’t often display faith.

additionally, aloy’s single-minded obsession with discovering who her mother was is a natural result of being outcast from a society centered around an all-mother and matrilineage but raised in its ways nonetheless, and it's likely that she would absorb the spiritual components of that society in some form as well, even if she held no conscious belief.

finally, there is a striking visual indicator - the scene at the end of the final battle, after aloy shoves the master override into the vessel carrying HADES. the hologram that opens up is the cosmic vastness of space, with elisabet’s giant glowing form standing against it, across from and as tall as the spire (itself a religious object now), as aloy looks on reverently. the image of elisabet is very godlike, with aloy small and reaching out. it’s an interesting choice of visuals that contrasts with the smaller and more personal scene of aloy finding elisabet’s body. i think the two scenes represent the dual role that elisabet plays in aloy’s mind - mother and goddess both.

so i think aloy was not only looking for her mother, in the end, but also (unconsciously) looking to fill a void where all-mother should have been, a void that comes from emerging as a non-believer in a faith-based environment. and it raises all kinds of characterization possibilities for the sequel(s), with the inevitability of aloy restoring GAIA - in other words, aloy meeting one of her mothers who is basically the equivalent of a goddess and the closest thing to all-mother.

#horizon zero dawn #i would have wanted her to be curious #text #mine

527 notes · View notes

theherocomplex · 6 years

Note

How about Aloy for the character question list? 😁

favorite thing about them: It’s a tie between her intelligence, and her determination -- though given the source for both of those qualities, they’re pretty much intertwined. There is nothing that can stop Aloy from discovering the secrets of her world and its past (as well as her own), and everything that tries end up in her dust. The smartest characters realize that, and cheer her on or try to help, and the rest? Well. Oops!

least favorite thing about them: Other than how there’s not a sequel yet? I can’t really think of anything! Aloy is so many of my favorite things.

favorite line: Trying to pick a favorite line of Aloy’s is like trying to pick a favorite star in the sky, honestly, but “Turn your face to the sun and think about that!” is pretty darn high on the list.

brOTP: Aloy/Talanah or Aloy/Vanasha, or Aloy/Vanasha/Talanah, which is just...astonishing to think about.

OTP: I am in pretty deep with Aloy/Erend, but I also love Aloy/Petra, and Aloy/Erend/Varl.

nOTP: Aloy/Sylens, because WOW he’s an ass (though magnificent), and Aloy/Helis, for obvious reasons.

random headcanon: Nora food is bland by Meridian standards, so a popular game with her friends in the city is “How many bites will Aloy take before she tells us we’ve ruined the meat?”.

unpopular opinion: I’m not a fan of the idea of her marrying Avad and becoming Sun Queen, because it seems to erode the basic foundation of her character: she’s not part of someone else’s story, and even being Queen (in a patriarchal society like the Carja, though it’s growing under Avad’s leadership) doesn’t give her full autonomy. It’s the one good thing about her being an Outcast; she is her own person, entirely.

song i associate with them: The HZD soundtrack is so good I can’t imagine associating anything else with her, but this song sums up the wonder involved in Aloy’s story so, so well.

favorite picture of them: I took this screenshot of her, and just...dang. The whole scene it’s from is wrenching, but her face is heartbreaking here.

#hzd spoilers #horizon zero dawn spoilers #meme replies #thank you! <3 #Anonymous

18 notes · View notes

iamthedukeofurl · 2 years

Text

Horizon Forbidden West Thoughts Pt.1

Nobody who follows me cares, but whatever. Aloy as a character is weird to me, because she’s got, like, three different “Hero” backstories. She was created as a Clone of Elisabet Sobek, the Woman Who Saved The World, specifically in the hopes that she would one day Save The World Again. But as far as we know, GAIA didn’t spew out a SuperSoldier Hero Baby, just plopped out a clone of Elisabet Sobek and hoped the world would take it from there. The only thing we know her genetics give her is the master key to the Zero Dawn systems. But, we already have “Clone of the Old Hero created to Save the World”. Then we have her physical abilities, which can be mostly attributed to her upbringing, not just as a Nora, but as a Nora Outcast being raised by Rost. Rost didn’t just raise her to survive in the wilds, but with an eye towards her completing the Proving so she could join the Nora. Considering who he was as a person, we know Rost raised her for his definition of success, so she came out of her upbringing a master fighter, archer, and survivalist. “Raised in the Wilderness by a Mysterious Badass” is an origin story of it’s own, and she’s got that too. Finally, we have her intellectual abilities and familiarity with technology. Aloy is one smart cookie, but a lot of her advantages come from the fact that she fell in a hole as a little girl and found A Focus, a miraculous device that not only lets her interface with old world technology, but which, at least as the game presents it, seems basically ideal for surviving in the world of Horizon. It gives her survival skills, like tracking animals and identifying plants, it lets her scan machines for weaknesses, in Forbidden West (I forget if this is the case in Zero Dawn) it even lets her scan a pile of rubble and be like “Yeah, you could probably pry that open”. And admittedly, that’s a lot of just game mechanic, but the watsonian presentation is that her Focus just lets her Do All This Stuff. So Aloy gets to wander through the world like Sherlock Holmes because she fell in a hole and found a Focus. And “Has and knows how to use a Miraculous Device” is ALSO an origin story on it’s own. Other characters talk about her “Second Sight” and ability to make connections no-one else could...and it’s because she has a super AR triangle. I bring this up because Forbidden West spends a lot of ink on how Aloy is really, really extraordinarily capable. Sure, she may not start the game at the same mechanical power level as she ended Zero Dawn, but the story never treats her as anything less than A Veteran Hero. When I heard about the Kulrut I was like “Oh I see we’re going to have to do an arena boss battle to Prove Ourselves To The Tanakth”, but the idea of Aloy being tested never even comes up. Hekaro reads her resume and is like “Yeah, I think you can handle this”. Sylens is like “Yeah, I better make major plans around this one 21 year old, because if I don’t account for her she CAN and WILL wreck my shit”, and that is the most correct Sylens has ever been about anything in his life. And, yes, she’s The Protagonist of the piece...but she’s also got Three Backstories.

#horizon forbidden west #hfw spoilers #horizon zero dawn

24 notes · View notes

phthalology · 6 years

Note

yooo, the ultimate rare-pair Aloy/Sylens for the ask thing!!

002 | Send me a ship and I will tell you:

When I started shipping them: Right around “mutual self interest” and/or “new science of understanding,” because egad am I here for ships who are bound together by inconvenient pacts and/or being the only people in the world who experienced a certain thing. I suppose that description could apply to many combinations of characters, but HZD emphasized it with the main plot being about secrets only Aloy and Sylens ever saw. They just check a lot of boxes that work for me.

My thoughts: This is not about the ship per se, but … I keep thinking about what a good look it would be for Aloy to cut her hair. I know, it’s part of her deal, but it’s a quick way to switch her look from “appropriation / using braids and beads as shorthand” and “how is your hair that pretty in the wilderness” to “Mad Max.”

What makes me happy about them: They are (were?) a pairing I needed at the time, a sort of emotional IV of resilience and the idea that sometimes the world isn’t over when it seems like the world is over. It’s no coincidence that HZD resonates with people in a world where the news seems to uncover one world-ending scenario after another. It’s nice to see a story where a person can find a life and a romance despite having lived through their own sort of end of the world.

I also think video games have a particular ability to do that; in the YA novel prologue portion of the game I was attached to Aloy, but it was only after her near-death that attachment was solidified because the emotional height really pinned me to her perspective.

To me, Sylens is the person who understands her the best. And despite his best efforts, she also quickly understands him: she’s also a loner, she’s also separate from her own family, she also grabs ideas hard and won’t let go. I don’t think he’s a mystery to her. He’s a challenge, not in that he doesn’t love her but in that his love fights with many other aspects of his nature, and that keeps the ship interesting.

(One thing I’ve always thought but never really said, for the record: I generally picture my protagonists in fic as closer to my own age than what they’re presented at in the game. I’m older than Aloy, so I don’t really find it interesting to dig into her mindset as a late teen, even though I think it’s a sign of a good voice that she was written as young in parts of the game. That’s not an aspect I choose to emphasize.)

What makes me sad about them: A lot of the things that could potentially make one sad about them are things that actually reassure me: they’re probably never going to stay together in one place for long, and they’re probably not going to end up on the same side of the ultimate battle. That’s fine. In fact, it’s a nice guarantee that the dynamic I liked in the game in the first place will continue. (Psychoanalyze away!) If the game managed to convince me that he would choose Aloy (or her connection to GAIA) over his aspirations of restoring APOLLO or whatever it is he and HADES are up to, I’d probably be happy. But I do think …

The scene where he leaves her in the mountain is just so weighty; she clearly had a lot of emotion riding on the idea of meeting him in person. (Whether or not it was romantic or not – I clearly can’t fully get on board with but also find it very convincing and moving that she might see him as a parental figure at this point, one more person leaving her to fulfill some grand destiny they won’t explain. Even Rost was a bit cryptic at their last real conversation.)

“Where will you go?” she asks, as if she thinks he would tell her, as if she’s reaching out to find one more point on the map that might just maybe be a home to replace the precarious one she lost for good when Rost died.

Things done in fanfic that annoys me: Most of these apply to my ships in general; it’s just particularly notable how they reliably crop up in a ship with so few fics. I don’t like “woobifying” villains, and Sylens’ redemption is not in any way relevant to the ship for me. On the other hand, I don’t want Aloy to be portrayed as emotionless or manipulative; she isn’t savvy about relationships and I don’t like to think of her as insincere. She is savvy about trust, but … it’s hard to describe the difference. Basically, I want them to be unique, not sanded down to a template of a love/hate couple.

Things I look for in fanfic: There are definitely not enough fics for me to be picky. I have literally read everything on AO3. It doesn’t take long.

My wishlist: Let them meet in person in game 2, in some other dramatic fashion like in the Sun-Ring. Let them have to grab one another’s hands at one point, trust expressed in the simplest and most dire of ways.

I’m also still really hopefully waiting for a really good college AU. Or a daemon AU.

Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other: Aloy/Varl is really nice, and he’s my realistic pick for who I’d like to see Aloy with if they ever give her a canon relationship. I suppose Sylens might have had other relationships at some point in his life, and imagine if they ever brought his personal life (such as it is) into the game it would be that way? But I also don’t think it’s likely we’ll see him portrayed that way at all in canon. A good perk of a rarepair is that I probably don’t have to consider this.

My happily ever after for them: this , and/or living in Brightmarket with kids. Don’t get me wrong, they’d need about seven years of reconciliation and therapy before that could happen happily.

(fandom ask meme)

#Horizon Zero Dawn #Aloy/Sylens #Aloy #Sylens #colcmacgrath-archive #thank u for asking about the terrible otp

6 notes · View notes