Saturday, August 14, 2021

Horizon Zero Dawn & Flawed Cultures

 Alright I’m going to be real with you the last couple of days this week have been a bit rough, especially since I woke up late (well, relatively so) on Friday and didn’t get time to do all the pre-breakfast stuff I usually do on weekdays, and then the minivan’s CD player hates all of humanity.


Anyway I’ve been thinking I was going to get the “Siege of Paris” expansion for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, but it turns out that it doesn’t really further the story, so now I’m on the fence and not sure what to do (but the season pass is on sale!). In the meantime I’ve been replaying this.


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Horizon Zero Dawn and Flawed Cultures


Maybe I’ve already written about this but my other idea was “Putting modern sensibilities in historical fiction” and I’ve definitely done something like that. I think. Maybe.


It’s been rough.


Something I like about Horizon Zero Dawn is that there are different cultures depicted in the story, and none of them are depicted as the “Good” one. You’ll notice that many times in fantasy or science-fiction, when there are different cultures, there are certain cultures that are meant to be the “Good” one, or a “Bad” one, or make one culture or another appear as better or worse than the others. Sometimes these attempts fall flat. During the rewatch of the BBC Merlin my sister and I pointed out that the Old Religion absolutely sucks and there’s no reason that any of this was sustainable, not least of which because they’re constantly using magic to mind control people and whining that their stick-mobiles are sacred relics.


I think what makes a lot of these fall flat is because the problems that a society is given by the writer, well, they’re things that are so out of the normal frame of reference that it feels artificial. In The Witcher III, for instance, Novigrad is burning mages and nonhumans in the street and everyone’s just fine with it. And to be clear, I’m not saying that public genocide doesn’t happen and get excused by the public--the Chinese government clearly demonstrates that right the fudge now--but it was a bit out of left field for its intended audience when it came out, and I think it feels less like a realistic thing to happen in the worldbuilding and more like an attempt to make the setting edgier.


Horizon… doesn’t feel that cheap.


Alright so our story starts with Aloy growing up as an outcast of the Nora tribe, a matriarchal theocracy of warrior-hunter people who distrust technology. There are exceptions, but for the most part they’re a very dogmatic society. And the player character, Aloy, questions them and their beliefs and dogma all the time, because having been raised as an outcast, she really doesn’t feel much attachment to the culture.


I think this is a brilliant way for an audience to get this perspective. If your viewpoint character was raised as a normal part of the society, it’s hard to make his or her critique of it feel remotely genuine, and not like the writer is imposing outside views on the character. Maddie Smith in Runemarks is similar in this regard, with the outcast protagonist--and the sequel Runelight shows the flipside, with Maggie who is raised as a normal part of the restrictive society and so never has a reason to really question it.


Also I think there’s a point in here somewhere about showing that a matriarchal society isn’t necessarily better and more tolerant than a patriarchal one, too.


And yet even though we are clearly not meant to sympathize with these aspects of the culture, we’re not supposed to hate these people either. Well, not all of them. Resh can go suck a brick. Aloy thoroughly rejects the idea of thinking of herself as Nora--she goes so far as to suggest being called “Aloy Despite the Nora,” instead of “Aloy of the Nora.” When they bow down to her as their savior at the end of the game, she’s disgusted. But she doesn’t hate them, just the way the society made them, and even then they’re not all bad. Rost and Teersa are fairly strict in following dogma, and yet aren’t bad people. Rost is willing to leave Aloy to avoid her breaking tribal law about talking to outcasts once she has a way out of her shunned status, and yet he’s the most heroic member of the tribe in the game. 


Teersa, one of the High Matriarchs, is fairly loyal to her religion. There’s a bit of dialogue I like in which Aloy presents some information that seemingly contradicts her religious teaching. Instead of declaring Aloy a liar, or deciding that her religion’s a hollow lie (which is how I think lesser writers tend to handle this kind of thing), she’s shaken, but she ultimately decides that there is something going on beyond her understanding.


The Nora are the main culture we really get to know, because that’s what Aloy grew up around and the story starts there. But we see the other cultures, and while there are plenty of good people in all of them, none of them are perfect either, and Aloy frequently calls out their BS. The Carja are recently reforming after being a brutal, caste-based warrior society that frequently enslaved and sacrificed people from other tribes. Their king is pretty progressive, but he can’t throw out all the old rules at once, and so plenty of sexism, classism, and xenophobia still remain among members of the culture. Also there are war criminals hiding out there. The Oseram that Aloy meets are fine, although they don’t understand a lot of social cues and have a habit of using their building skillz to make giant war machines. And it’s implied that the Oseram living the Claim, their homeland, have pretty strict ideas about gender roles. And the Banuk are nuts, even outside the whole ‘the shaman is weaving Machine cables through his skin’ thing, because they hold this crazy idea that if a hunter can’t survive out in the winter wilds for a few nights, then they’re just not cut out for living, y’know?


None of the societies are perfect, by a long shot. And they’re imperfect in ways that feel very human and not at all tacked-on or over-the-top. They’re things that a lot of people have to deal with today: cultures with strict gender roles, or people romanticizing a very troubled history, or perpetuating harmful mindsets in the name of ‘survival of the fittest.’ It’s all shown to us through the filter of a science fiction story, but I think it speaks to real life in a way that most speculative fiction doesn’t.


And I think that’s pretty cool.


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