palominocorn | (no subject)

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The fact that Aloy is a white (conventionally attractive, skinny, able-bodied, young) woman who goes around disparaging tradition and culture and wrecking people's religions in the name of saving the world all while carrying around a (justified in universe) complex about her own genetic superiority, it, uh.

It bad.

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Especially considering how much those cultures and religions are native-coded, especially visually, while there's like been, what. A total of three characters played by native people?

Like, Guerilla Games, please hire a goddamn sensitivity reader. Especially since your game is set on a colonised continent.

I really do want to like this game! But some of both the writing and gameplay decisions are so AAAAAARGH.

My spouse just finished The Eye of the Earth and... it would've been so easy to show Aloy at least trying to work within the bounds of the Utaru culture?

Like. Show the debate between the Chorus members. Some are on Aloy's side and some are not. Have her show respect for their culture. Or heck - have flashpoints! Fist lets you smack talk the religion, heart lets you work within the bounds of it, and brain lets you look for loopholes. With the leaders responding to the choice.

I am very frustrated with the writers re: Aloy's personality generally. Like it could be a great setup for "desperate people do desperate things against their morality, which later haunt them as they try to make amends" payoff but I doubt they're going for that.

Yeah, like, Aloy's cynicism and lack of respect for the people around her made sense in the first game because she was a deeply isolated young adult, and the start of the game sets her up to have that struggle and then it's just like "being a bitter disrespectful atheist strongmanning everyone into giving her what she wants is good, actually". I don't get how people say that this game has better writing than the first one, it's just... hrrrghngkgjgnj

In the first game she was lashing out at the Nora a lot of the time - like, against the very tribe that had thrown her out for reasons beyond her control. In this one she's just. Going to tribes she's never interacted with and whose traditions she doesn't bother to learn and telling them their religion is bad, which. She's a white woman. The Utaru are a mishmash of Black, Native American, and I think Pasifika. It's racist as SHIT.

The other thing that's annoying me is that the first game had a whole story arc about how individualism is bad and that you need allies to beat big threats. And now she's being a big jerk to her friends and insisting I WILL DO THIS ALONE again?

Yeah there was a compelling kernel of her falling back into bad habits at the start, but god, it just keeps going. Like to be clear, I don't think Aloy's treatment of the Utaru is supposed to be sympathetic, she's meant to be kind of frustrating and running extremely high on emotions and putting way too much on herself, but that doesn't excuse how fucking bad it is. The first game had this same issue and it got fixed not at all.

Something something scientific atheism as an evangelical religion?

Yeah but like. Horizon is not made by an American studio, is the thing. The racism is actually very European sort of ignorance of native history and disregard for the after-effects of colonisation. So it confuses me that the very bitter anti-religion that Aloy presents is even there.

Maybe they were going for her being unlikeable and frustrating until. Later. But, like, if that's what they were going for, they did a little too good of a job of it :/

Huh. To me the fact that it came from a western European studio made sense? The Netherlands have a long and ugly history of colonialism and their population is majority nonreligious.

Here in the US the dominant religion is evangelical Christianity (like 80% I think) - as loud and obnoxious as the atheists here get, we're actually not the dominant group by a long shot. It makes for a different cultural context even when you're in non-explicitly religious spaces.

... huh. That. Like I associate that kind of dismissive highhanded atheism with post-Christian American atheists I guess? That's not what our atheists are like, our atheists are all tired.

Oh don't get me wrong there are plenty of those around, but they're a minority compared to the Christians.

Like "replace Jesus with some combination of technology, money, or hobbies" is IME a very common ideology among atheists. But the US would not be the kind of hellhole it is without a massive evangelical population.

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