Consequences of Unchecked Hubris. The Lore of HORIZON: ZERO DAWN! (pt. 1)

Hey! Future Tiptoe here.

I'm not going to mention specifics, so as not to spoil anything for folks that play the sequel to this game that recently came out. But I'll be sure to let Past Tiptoe from June 2021 know that a certain part of Gaia was activated a few times to perform a certain function, so that Past Tiptoe from June 2021 can retcon her information with February 2022 information. Disregarding understandings from June 2021 should be paramount when considering the future of February 2022.

Do you get it? Don't be that person. It's tiring. And it's becoming a problem for this video from June 2021. Keep spoilers and future game information out of your comment.
-Tip

The story looks more like foreshadowing rather than fiction

I love that Project Zero Dawn had it’s programs named after the ancient Greek gods (except for YOU, Minerva). Ancient Greece being considered the birth place of our western civilization. And so to name something after their gods is showing that, once again, ancient Greece will be basis of civilization

incredible!

It's just so weird to me when I hear a multi-million or billion dollar company try to tell a story about greed and over extensi mean like how tone deaf can you be

Actually Gaia didn't get it right on the first try. It took many tries with her learning with each attempt until she got it right.

Is there a website where it explains Horizon for idiots such as myself?

According to forbidden west Hades was needed and did its function multiple times until Gaia got it finally right

The part about Hades never being needed was incorrect. In Forbidden West, it is explained that before the current era, the biosphere had been “reset” 3 times.

Love to know that Ted Faro was one of those sticky IPad kids. explains alot of his behavior lol

Horizon Zero Dawn is probably my favorite post-apocalypse setting of all time. It isn't necessarily my favorite piece of post-apocalypse media, but as far as the settings themselves go, yeah, absolutely.

your hostility to automation just cause the games lore says so is proof of whats wrong with games with this type of lore.

The flesh is weak, It will be shreaded.

You talking about Operation: Enduring Victory. Even tho it’s fictional but just how you describe how humanity fought like hell until
The very end. It makes me feel so proud lol but also quite emotional. Great Story Telling!

The Elysium part confuses me. Why do they need to be sterilised? I mean, they’re in a shielded location underground, not at risk from the swarm; would it have taken so much more effort to set Elysium up to survive long term under strict population control? It may be a difficult and uncomfortable life, but why not? Based on the technology we have seen from this period they could have been equipped with all they need to last in a sustainable state for goodness knows how long.

Fallout managed it and Zero Dawn isn’t Vault Tech evil. I imagine Ted Ferro would have also tried to screw them over too, but as a concept I think it’s still sound.

I love the video dont get me wrong. HOWEVER you did get a few facts wrong.

First of all hades reportedly had activated several times in the past.

The bunker faro fled to was called thebes. and there was so important lore you couldve included.

and also the faro kill switch was a bit more complicated then he just wanted to prevent his mistakes

Finally faro wasnt a shell of himself. he became even crasiers becoming almost a cultist.

Great video. just wanted to say this!

I think I just found my new favorite gaming lore channel on yt! This is just professional level writing and storytelling! Loved every minute of it! Keep up the good work, you are amazing!

I did not expect this story and game to be so good. I've gotten 100% on this game on every difficulty, and I'm playing through again because I refuse to buy a playstation lol, so I still have to wait for Forbiddan West...

"All Mother Mountain" is Cheyenne Mountain in today's Colorado. You can find this from the coordinates given in the hologram Aloy witnesses when she reads the Shadow Carja's focus and encounters the directive being given to kill her. It is under Cheyenne Mountain that the North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD, has it's headquarters. Presumably, the name of the Nora Tribe derives from this, somehow.

One thing I find terribly interesting in this story is the author's flub of having their altruistic, collectivist heroine and her followers sabotage the Odyssey. Now we can point out that the Zero Dawn Project didn't directly cause the Odyssey disaster, but why did the Zero Dawn Project withhold the whole Gaia package from the Odyssey Project? It couldn't have been material gain, as the Zero Dawn Project was already on a no-expenses-spared budget. Were they worried about copyright infringement? Were they worried about "competition" from the Odyssey Project? How? Odyssey was all about leaving the whole solar system and Earth to the Zero Dawn people. What happened to "to each, according to his need?" Certainly, a mission to a new star system could have used a terraforming AI to help render an alien planet more hospitable to human life. Zero Dawn not only withheld a copy of Gaia that they could have easily given away, but they boobie-trapped their their data to sabotage the Odyssey Project for trying to take it. The only conclusion to draw was that their actions were driven by spite, or envy. It's funny in a weird, discordant way, how the authors try to give Zero Dawn's scurrilous behavior the veneer of ethical action by having Travis Tate's recorded message berate the Odyssey Project people with the Seventh Commandment proscription against stealing, but if anything, the Christian fundamental rule was "love thy neighbor." In fact, the collectivist, socialist impulse animating so many is often cited as a Christian heresy. It is a kind of bitter poetic justice in the story to consider that had the Zero Dawn Project shared a copy of Gaia with the Odyssey Project, it would probably be reasonable to suppose that there would have been a copy there, at their headquarters, when Aloy went looking for it. At this point, it could be argued that the whole incident was contrived to advance the plot by having Aloy fail to acquire Gaia at this juncture, but even if that were true (no reason to doubt that it is) it was still a poor artistic choice for a plot device, because in the first place, there are essentially endless alternatives that could have been invoked to produce the same plot turn that did not involve contradicting the moral stature of the original heroic Elizabet Sobek. This was definitely some mistake that crawled out of the subconscious contradictions of the authors themselves.

Not that it destroys the game's enjoyment potential (much) or playability, but the philosophy behind the game's story is a collectivist fantasy of Platonic "philosopher kings," well, queens, mostly, in this case, centrally planning nature and the entire future of the Earth...and the game attributes satanic hubris to Faro? Irony. It's a kind of anxiety-fantasy of Postmodernism, to create a God (Gaia, in this case) in the image of Man. Aloy, then, is a New Age female messiah, daughter of the Mother of the Goddess (Sobek) and the Goddess herself (Gaia), who must redeem the project and save Mankind and the world. Faro (A play on "Pharaoh," for those who didn't catch it) becomes the serpent/devil of the "Paradise-Recreated" (or Built Back Better, if you will) story. You can even see this religious thematic undertone in the game's almost fetishistic exposition of the vast implacable human sacrifices and (pragmatic) forced associations (such as the abduction/conscription of the Project Zero Dawn workers) upon which the narrative (not to mention this video's author) obsessively dwells. You can see the subconscious hobgoblins of Conformity and Unity (by any means) which bedevil the IDs of the latter generations on full display, if you know where to look. The game is definitely the product of the emerging Twenty-first century Occidental cultural shibboleths.

The science is a bit stretched in this game. It doesn't make it less enjoyable, with suspension of disbelief, but it is a bit implausible or outright impossible. For example, biomass would not have enough energy density to allow the swarm to use it to both fight other militaries (themselves customers of Faro's and possessors of Chariots) and also, even if unopposed, strip the Earth of life. There's just not enough energy density in biomass to allow anything using biomass to strip the planet of life. In other words, to power the machines of the swarm, it would take more energy to strip all of the life than the biomass provided the machines in the first place. When the machines of the swarm finally ran out of useable (keyword: usable) energy, there would still have been plenty of life on the planet left. They might have succeeded in killing all or most of the macrofauna, including humans, but to entirely sterilize the planet, as the game posits, would have required more energy than the biomass conversion could possibly have provided.

In addition, the swarm were military machines. Their objective would have been to destroy the enemy and achieve the dominance of territory. Where would it even acquire the directive to sterilize the planet of all life? Improbable, at best. It would have killed off any human opposition long before it has hoovered up the last erg of bio-energy in sterilizing the planet.

There's a lot of pop-science underpinning premises in this game. This is science that the popular culture believes is plausible, due to misunderstanding the concepts and their applications, but actually isn't. Re-teraforming the globe more than once in only 1000 years, for example, not to mention the mere decade to achieve the "Claw Back." These things are science-fantasy, as in, not just technologically improbable or unlikely due to the contemporary capabilities involved, but actually impossible from a physics perspective. Nature doesn't work that way.