History Characters / HorizonZeroDawnTedFaro

* BadBoss: Scientists working under him, as Tala Aquino found, could have years of their work and well-developed projects scrapped at his whim because he didn't like BoringButPractical things other companies had made progress in. After Dr. Sobek left to found Miriam he started throwing lawsuits at her, so many that she only agreed to meet him about his swarm going rogue because he promised to dismiss them all. Obviously this gets quite a bit worse in THEBES.

--> "The one thing you can always be sure of with Ted Faro is that there's {{greed}} involved. So Ted is someone who knows how to spot the best possible business opportunity, and when the world is kinda falling apart in the late 2020s and the 2030s it becomes clear that corporations have a lot they need to do in order to be part of the market, to save the world. And he quickly gloms on to that. This is also where Elisabet Sobek comes in, because she's this brilliant young scientist with a lot of ideas and proposals, and he's like great! This is great! Because we can simultaneously have this PR situation where we're helping to save the world but also making tons of money in the process."

* {{Foil}}: To Elizabet Sobek, of course. While both are the [=CEOs=] of renowned technological companies that influenced the globe, Ted's success comes primarily from being able to market (and take credit for) the success of his employees and make ruthless business decisions, while Elisabet was a genius in her own right and yet is most well-known for working with the Zero Dawn team. Their companies also express this: Elisabet's focuses on environmentally-friendly technology and is named after her mother, Miriam. Ted's company meanwhile is most famous for its automated military robots, and is also named after someone he admires ([[ItsAllAboutMe himself]]).

-->''Sylens''': [[BluntYes For a start]].

'''Sylens''': [[BluntYes For a start]].

* BodyHorror: His botched longevity treatment and the several centuries worth of resulting uncontrollable mutations end up disfiguring him into a horrific mass of flesh incapable of neither coherent speech nor movement, judging from the logs Ted recorded, the diagram Aloy discovers before meeting him in person and the horrendous howling and squealing he makes.

* VillainHasAPoint:
** Creating a failsafe in GAIA (that is to say, [[BigBad HADES]]) was his idea, since they have no way of knowing if she will go haywire or create a world that humankind cannot live in. While Elisabet doesn't like it, GAIA herself admits he has a point, so she goes along with it, and he's fully vindicated with the reveal that GAIA had to restart the biosphere three times before managing to create a viable one.
** It's also his idea to create a manual override for the system - with the justification being that they have no way of knowing whether GAIA will work as she's supposed to. While GAIA ends up behaving, the manual override becomes important for stopping HADES.

* AbusivePrecursors: Created the robot plague that destroyed the biosphere and [[spoiler:purged the APOLLO archive of all of humanity's collected art, culture, science, and technology, dooming future humans to ignorance and primitive existences to hide his crimes]].

*** By deleting APOLLO, he essentially ripped out a vital piece of an interconnected system with no concern as to how it would handle the loss. The new generation of humans were supposed to learn from APOLLO and then aid in the restoration of the biosphere. Without it, the cradles were forced to dump their uneducated charges into the wild once food ran out and only basic forms of wildlife were recreated, as human oversight was intended for the reintroduction of larger species. It’s a wonder that their first winter didn't render humans extinct a second time.

*** His plan to wait for future humans to discover him is doomed to fail as well since the door to his bunker will only open for him. The Quen discovered Thebes for some time but are unable to enter until Aloy joins the expedition and for her to do so, she has to swim through an underwater cavern and then through a part of the bunker that has conveniently collapsed. Granted, he probably thought he would be able to answer the door if anyone came calling.

[[center: [-[[Characters/HorizonZeroDawn Main Character Index]] | [[Characters/HorizonZeroDawnTheBaseTeam The Base Team]] ([[Characters/HorizonZeroDawnAloy Aloy]], [[Characters/HorizonZeroDawnSylens Sylens]]) | [[Characters/HorizonZeroDawnTribes Tribes]] ([[Characters/HorizonZeroDawnTheNora The Nora]], [[Characters/HorizonZeroDawnTheCarja The Carja]], [[Characters/HorizonZeroDawnTheTenakth The Tenakth]]) | [[Characters/HorizonZeroDawnMachines Machines]] | [[Characters/HorizonZeroDawnOldWorld The Old World]] ([[Characters/HorizonZeroDawnProjectZeroDawn Project Zero Dawn]], '''Ted Faro''', [[Characters/HorizonZeroDawnFarZenith Far Zenith]])]]-]

* AbusivePrecursors: Creating the robot plague that destroyed the biosphere and [[spoiler: purging the APOLLO archive of all of humanity's collected art, culture, science, and technology, dooming future humans to ignorance and primitive existences to hide his crimes]].

* KarmaHoudini: In the context of the the first game, [[OffscreenInertia last time]] Aloy sees him he's speaking to the Alpha leads of Project Zero Dawn via holographic communications - stating that he's deleted the sum of human knowledge, followed shortly by killing them all to keep them from doing anything about it. This leaves him in Thebes, a sealed bunker with food and other amenities, including "Holo holo girls" to amuse and pleasure him, all the while immune to the berserk war machines and the toxic environment those machines have made of the earth -- machines he created. And just after seeing his image for the ''first'' time, Sylens says that he's found evidence that the Old Ones could preserve life indefinitely via [[HumanPopsicle cryogenics]], so having NeverFoundTheBody implies he could still be alive.. which ''Forbidden West'' reveals to be true, but [[GoneHorriblyRight in a different and very horriffic manner]]. Regardless he never actually faces justice and judgement, while the rest of humanity withers in tiny places and the planet hollows out.

*** His plan to wait for future humans to discover him is doomed to fail as well since the door to his bunker will only open for him. The Quen discovered Thebes for some time but are unable to enter until Aloy joins the expedition and for her to do so, she has to swim through an underwater cavern and then through a part of the bunker that has collapsed. Granted, he probably thought he would be able to answer the door if anyone came calling.

* VillainWithGoodPublicity: Faro is highly regarded among the Quen (being dubbed "The Renewer") due to them deciphering only upto the 2040s due to the limit of their Focuses, which was the decade Faro and his machines saved the planet from climate change. It's to the point that Sobeck had the title of "The Assistant" despite the one ''actually'' doing the saving later on, and it's implied that if the Quen ever know the truth, they would not regard Faro so positively.

*** By deleting APOLLO, he essentially ripped out a vital piece of an interconnected system with no concern as to how it would handle the loss. The new generation of humans were supposed to learn from APOLLO and then aid in the restoration of the biosphere. Without it, the cradles were forced to dump their uneducated charges into the wild once food ran out and only basic forms of wildlife were recreated, as human oversight was intended for the reintroduction of larger species. It’s a wonder that their first winter didn’t render humans extinct a second time.

** Creating a failsafe in GAIA (that is to say, [[BigBad HADES]]) was his idea, since they have no way of knowing if she will go haywire or create a world that humankind cannot live in. While Elisabet doesn't like it, GAIA herself admits he has a point, so she goes along with it, and fully vindicated with the reveal that GAIA had to restart the biosphere three times before managing to create a viable one.

** Creating a failsafe in GAIA (that is to say, [[BigBad HADES]]) was his idea, since they have no way of knowing if she will go haywire or create a world that humankind cannot live in. While Elisabet doesn't like it, GAIA herself admits he has a point, so she goes along with it.

*** By deleting APOLLO, he essentially ripped out a vital piece of an interconnected system with no concern as to how it would handle the loss. The new generation of humans were supposed to learn from APOLLO and then aid in the restoration of the biosphere. Without it, the cradles were forced to dump their uneducated charges into the wild once food ran out and only basic forms of wildlife were recreated, as human oversight was intended for the reintroduction of larger species.

* FateWorseThanDeath: Faro is so much of a coward that rather than accepting death, he chose to cheat death and claimed immortality. Unfortunately, the procedure he undergo was imperfect and he ended up becoming a [[AndIMustScream monstrous blob with little brain activity, unable to move for a thousand years and in constant pain.]] The Quen soldier who burned him practically ended his suffering.

* VillainWithGoodPublicity: Faro is highly regarded among the Quen (being dubbed "The Renewer") due to them deciphering only upto the 2040s due to the limit of their Focuses, which was the decade Faro and his machines saved the planet from climate change, It's to the point that Sobeck had the title of "The Assistant" despite the one ''actually'' doing the saving later on, and it's implied that if the Quen ever know the truth, they would not regard Faro so positively.

** In ''Forbidden West'' when listening to one of his last audio logs wherein he bemoans how the last few survivors in the Thebes bunker have committed suicide rather than remain locked up with him, and laments how they've 'left him alone' in there, Aloy notes that no matter how many people die, he always spins it so that he feels sorry for himself instead of recognising and accepting his errors.

* ObliviouslyEvil: Zigzagged. It takes a special kind of evil to screw over humanity twice and still deny his faults and sins. While he at least has the excuse of lack of foresight for causing the Faro Swarm to be an InvincibleVillain, the same cannot be said of when killed the Alphas and the other survivors in his bunker without batting an eye. Despite all this, Ted still thinks he is a victim of everything that has happened.

* NoPronunciationGuide: His last name is usually pronounced "Fair-oh" (the same as "Pharoah"); this is how pretty much everyone in the Old World recordings pronounces it, including himself. However, Aloy initially pronounces his name as "Farr-oh" throughout Maker's End and the Gravehoard, despite already hearing several recordings welcoming her to "Faro Automated Solutions", and persists even when while talking to Sylens, who pronounces it correctly. Aloy eventually changes her pronunciation, and is consistently saying "Fair-oh" by ''Forbidden West'', yet curiously Tilda refers to him as "Farr-oh" in that game (possibly due to her own culture's pronunciation, or not caring about him).

** Whether his decision to delete APOLLO was because of guilt-induced sanity slippage or to avoid blame for ending the world, his decision just caused many problems for the new humans and inhibited GAIA's other subordinate systems.
*** Either motivation highlights his short-sightedness even more. If he was insane and really thought the reborn human race should be "innocent", he's just damning them to the same fate by not allowing them to learn from their predecessors' mistakes. If he just wanted to cover up his role in causing the apocalypse, there were still plenty of other pieces of information left in the world (readable by his own Focus gadgets no less) linking him to the catastrophic robot plague that was ''named after him''.

*** His plan to wait for future humans to discover him is doomed to fail as well since the door to his bunker will only open for him. The Quen discovered Thebes for some time but are unable to enter until Aloy joins the expedition and for her to do so, she has to swim through an underwater cavern and then through a part of the bunker that has collapsed.

** He has four demands for his peacekeeper robots: 1) That they are able to consume biological material for fuel "in emergencies", 2) That they are able to self-replicate, 3) That they are completely invulnerable to hacking and 4), there is no backdoor which could be used to circumvent their invulnerability to hacking. If that sounds like an unstoppable ecological disaster waiting to happen, then congratulations: You have more foresight than Ted Faro. ''Any one'' of those four corners of the Apocalypse square missing would have just made it a messy RobotWar instead of the end of all life on Earth.
** Faro was so fixated on lawsuits and his public image that his initial reflex to suppress news of the rogue swarm gave it enough time to grow and reach critical mass, at which no military force on Earth could hope to contain it.

* ZeroPercentApprovalRating: Though he was once known as "the Man Who Saved the Planet", nobody likes Faro once he shifted his company to the war business. The people who worked under him hated his guts since as Elisabet puts it "Footing the bill while others get their hands dirty", and some like Elisabet and Margo Shen left his company to escape his control. In his bunker, the other survivors live in fear of him and the last two would rather commit suicide to escape him. Fast forward a thousand years, Aloy and Sylens are disgusted once they learn of his involvement with the Faro Plague and destroying the APOLLO Database and the former shares this knowledge with her friends who all agree what a despicable man he is, and even GAIA, who is taught to love all life on Earth, has nothing good to talk about him. The Quen is practically the only tribe to worship him but that is because their knowledge about him is until 2050, before the Faro Plague and even that worship is loss once they discover his fate and the truth.

* AssholeVictim: Ted's final fate as a GeneticAbomination elicits disgusted horror and ''some'' level of pity from Aloy, but that says more about her nature than actually forgiving him for the destruction he caused and his erasure of APOLLO in a selfish attempt to cover it up. Sylens' reaction to learning this is to declare Ted deserved an even ''worse'' fate.

* TheAgeless: Ted Faro achieves this through gene treatments in his Thebes bunker. Too bad it came with a series of mutations that had him basically stuck inside a geothermal reactor until the present day ''centuries'' later.