Sylens
Voiced by: Lance Reddick (English)note
"Knowledge has its rewards, don’t you think?"
A mysterious traveler and researcher who is obsessed with learning about the Old Ones. open/close all folders
0-J
- 11th-Hour Ranger: In Forbidden West he joins the Base Team just before the final main story mission and unlike Regalla, who dies in the assault on the Zenith base if recruited, or Tilda, who tries to force Aloy offworld with her and is killed in the ensuing fight, Sylens chooses to stay on Earth as part of the Base Team to help fight against Nemesis... at least, for the time being.
- Affably Evil: Despite instigating several conflicts in both games, most notably creating Eclipse as well as manipulating several tribes for his own gain, he's nothing but polite to Aloy and her allies and genuinely helps her as much as he can.
- All for Nothing: In Forbidden West, he spent nearly six months creating a Tenakth civil war in the hopes of gaining the massive numbers needed to assault Far Zenith. Not only does Aloy ultimately avert it, she comes up with her own, better solution in the form of a horde of HEPHAESTUS combat machines, meaning that the whole war he started was ultimately superfluous.
- Ancient Keeper: A far more adept Disaster Scavenger than Olin. Has workshops located in the ruins of the Old Ones and is by far the most technologically savvy and advanced human in the post-Zero Dawn world.
- Anti-Hero: Of the Nominal variety. He is helping Aloy save the world, but he only cares about knowledge of the Old World and will found violent cults if it gets him any closer to obtaining it.
- The Atoner: Part of the reason why he helps Aloy is to help atone for the fact that he was the original founder of Eclipse before he learned HADES' true intentions. He's not remotely concerned about the harm he helped cause though, and when Aloy claims he is this he dismisses it.
- Bald of Authority: Starts off as Unwanted Assistance to Aloy, then progressively becomes more relevant and prominent as he earns more screen time, and ostensibly takes the lead in their mutual quest to stop the Eclipse. His baldness is also an important key to his identity. He has the dress and body markings of a Banuk shaman, but doesn't wear a headdress, which all almost all Banuk do, and their shamans have some of the most elaborate ones.
- Big Damn Heroes: He shows up personally with a trio of hacked Ravagers to save Aloy from being executed in the Sun Ring by Helis and the Eclipse.
- Black and Nerdy: He may be the last person on the planet who understands physics and calculus, though only through his interactions with HADES.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Sylens only cares about one thing: Knowledge, and not even for power or advancement or educating the masses, he just wants to learn for himself. He does not care for feelings, human connection, trust, or lives, and his alliance with Aloy is partly because she is the only person who can literally access the truth of the Old World and thus grant him more knowledge, and partly because she can stop the Eclipse and HADES from destroying the world again, which would also serve the purpose of ending their threat on Sylens' life.
- Brutal Honesty: Part of his charm.Aloy: The point is, every time I take a step forward, the answers slip farther from my grasp. You just don't understand.
Sylens: It's not that I don't understand, Aloy. It's that I don't care. - But Now I Must Go: After visiting the remains of GAIA, he'll arrive in person to speak with Aloy, tell her the truth about his former relationship with HADES, and say it's the last time he'll hear from her. When Aloy tries to communicate with Sylens on the night before the final battle, he doesn't respond.
- Byronic Hero: Ironically so, given his stoicism and empiricism. But in the game's final cutscene, as he confronts (the remnants of) HADES once more, you cannot help but wonder if he'll repeat the same mistakes he made before. As it turns out in Forbidden West, he's at least smart enough not to give HADES too much freedom this time, but Sylens continues his habits of manipulating others and keeping secrets. Which causes a fair bit of trouble.
- The Chessmaster: Sylens might be as good a strategist as he is a scholar and programmer. He aids Aloy repeatedly on her quest all while covering up his prior affiliation with HADES until before the final battle, where he tells her everything and gives her a spear that will supposedly destroy it. Instead, it transmits HADES to Sylens, who then captures it, traps it inside a unit where it cannot cause trouble, and then interrogates it thoroughly. Sylens thereby learns of Far Zenith, that Nemesis sent the signal to Hades, and that both will be on their way. So, he devises a plan of arming Regalla and her Tenakth rebels with devices to control machines so she can overthrow Hekarro. He also has them test special weapons against a Zenith to disable her force field and continues to assist Aloy in finding a backup of GAIA once she catches onto what he's done. (she also finishes HADES for good). Sylens also arranges for the Zeniths to find Aloy and (hopefully) contain her so she doesn't interfere with his plans. The end result would be Regalla's forces and the Zeniths killing each other and Sylens free to commandeer the Odyssey and escape Earth before Nemesis shows up. This doesn't go as expected; the Zeniths have their clone of Elisabet Sobeck, so they have no need for Aloy, and Aloy herself stops the Tenakth rebellion to prevent mass casualties and finds another way to get an army. Still, Sylens ends up free to take the ship as he'd planned. Notably, his plans to sideline Aloy as the Zenith's prisoner would still have allowed him the opportunity to rescue her in prime position to have a chance to flee Earth with him and the GAIA terraforming system, demonstrating that Sylens was trying to save Aloy from the oncoming disaster, despite the risk and her considerable intelligence.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: He has basically betrayed everyone he's ever worked with, although to very different degrees. To his credit those he's really screwed over frankly had it coming.
- Cold-Blooded Torture:
- Inflicts this one HADES in the interim between Zero Dawn and Forbidden West - even though the 'torture' is just showing HADES images of flourishing life and cute bunnies, it is enough to degrade HADES to a fragmented shell of its former self, making even Aloy feel Sympathy for the Devil when she finds the result.
- Also doesn't shy away from admitting that Aloy's suggestion of what to do with Ted Faro - namely "Scooping up his remains and picking apart his brain" - would only be the start of what he would do to him.
- Deal with the Devil: Sylens made one with HADES, forming the Eclipse for the corrupt AI and making the cult's Focus network in exchange for the knowledge HADES possessed. Once Sylens outlived his usefulness though, HADES put a kill order out on him. By the end of the game, Sylens has HADES' remains at his mercy, and is intent on getting the information he was originally promised — and to discover what made the AI go haywire in the first place.
- Deuteragonist: Due to him being the Mission Control and his involvement with the Eclipse and HADES, his role in the story is almost as important as Aloy’s role. The last cutscene in the game even focuses solely on him and HADES.
- Didn't See That Coming:
- He didn't expect the Faro Plague literally wiping all life out of Earth, clearly thinking the Zero Dawn managed to stop them.
- He admits to Aloy that he had no idea that the Zeniths had their own clone of Elisabet Sobeck instead of capturing her like he planned.
- He's also shocked to discover that, in spite of them having access to all the knowledge of the Old Ones, the Zeniths are a group of selfish, borderline-psychotic manchildren who don't give even a single shit about helping the humans on Earth and only care about ensuring their own survival.
- Dramatic Irony: The Banuk's cable piercings are the one belief they have with no fact or practical use justifying them, so of course they're the marking sewn blatantly and irrevocably onto Sylens' skin. Every time he looks in a mirror, he's reminded of the superstitions he hates.
- Enlightened Self-Interest: He sees this as the best basis for a partnership and the reason why he reached out to Aloy when he discovered HADES reaction to her. It seems every possibly 'heroic' action he has stems from this trope rather than some magnanimous impulse.
- Establishing Character Moment:
- When Aloy tracks down Olin dealing with Eclipse Cultists, Sylens out of nowhere disables all of the Focuses nearby and starts giving lots of orders (and no explanations) immediately.
- Further when he finally shows his face to Aloy at Maker's End, he chastises Aloy for angsting over the search for her mother when she just discovered how the world ended, and again when Aloy asks his name instead of something grander, while irritatingly deflecting all important questions about himself. This tells you Sylens' basic character: sorely lacking in empathy, highly secretive, always thinking about the big picture at the expense of smaller issues, and valuing knowledge above all else.
- Everyone Has Standards:
- Self-preservation aside, this is a big part of the reason he helps Aloy to begin with. (That and he's learning so much from her, at a faster rate than he ever has before by himself).
- While certainly lacking in the empathy department, he disapproves of senseless killing, citing the previous Sun Kings’ Red Raids and slaughter at the Sun Ring with disgust.
- He finds Ted Faro an incredibly disgusting individual for condemning humanity to ignorance by destroying APOLLO and murdering the Alphas. When talking with Sylens face-to-face near the end of Forbidden West's main quest, Aloy inquires if he would have scooped up Faro and picked his brain as he did to HADES. His response? Sylens: "For a start."
- Sylens does not like the Quen, seeing them as a civilization that took the endless potential of Focuses and "shrouded the knowledge they unearthed into mysticism and taboo, creating a pantheon out of corporate shills."
- At the end of Forbidden West, he has the opportunity to flee the Earth with APOLLO and spend his life learning, while leaving the Earth to be destroyed by NEMESIS. He doesn't even make it all the way up the steps before deciding it's a bit too far and turning back, with the caveat that he still plans on leaving, but only after helping humanity as best he can.
- The Extremist Was Right: In Forbidden West, his plan from the end of the first game, to basically do the exact same thing before but with more safeguards, works perfectly.
- He does extract immeasurably valuable information from HADES without causing any additional problems, including finding a way to circumvent the otherwise invulnerable Zenith shields, something that would have been impossible if he hadn't included a backdoor in the override of the spear Aloy used to defeat HADES. He also left it neatly packaged for Aloy to eventually permanently dispose of with her Master Override.
- While his plan to sacrifice the Tenakth in a suicide attack against the Far Zeniths is ultimately rendered unnecessary by Aloy, it's made clear that it was genuinely the only option before Aloy found an impossible alternative.
- Fatal Flaw: Two of them, in fact.
- Lust: He empowered HADES because he covets its knowledge of the old world, ultimately being the cause of the main conflict within the first game and thus the near destruction of the world. The only lesson he learned, as shown in Forbidden West, is to be smarter about it.
- Pride, due to his supreme confidence in his own intelligence, he fails to account for things that fall outside of his plans. This nearly gets him killed several times and he’s completely blindsided by Far Zenith's actions because he couldn’t fathom that having access to all of the knowledge and history of the Old World still doesn’t make you a good person, assuming that they were either benevolent or outright enlightened when he tells Aloy to talk to them. He’s genuinely disturbed when they turn out to be petty (if god-like) manchildren.
- Foil: Blue to Aloy's red. Both are rebellious and inquisitive outcasts of their own people, searching for truths in the Old World despite the superstition of their cultures forbidding them from doing so. But where intelligence and curiosity motivate and inspire Aloy, they harden and isolate Sylens. Aloy is willing to make room for emotion alongside her intellect; Sylens detests any form of sentimentality. Aloy is also a young girl, where Sylens is an older man.
- For Science!: He is willing to do almost anything and everything for the sake of accumulating knowledge. Unsurprisingly, he's utterly furious when he learns that the ignorant state of the world is due to Ted Faro destroying all knowledge from the past just for his own pride.
- Friendship Denial: No, Sylens is not staying on Earth to help Aloy out of fondness for her, even though she is probably the closest thing he has to a friend. No, he is not staying because decades alone on a ship would be awful for anyone, even him, and even with APOLLO to satisfy his curiosity. And no, he is not staying on Earth because his cold demeanor softened for a moment at seeing Aloy surrounded by those she loved, while he would be choosing no one with his path. He's only staying "for a time" to give them as much of an edge as possible. Time will tell if he's truly bent on leaving when shit hits the fan, or if he'll stay for the long haul.
- Graceful Loser: When Sylens finds out the GAIA Prime bunker will only be accessible to Aloy due to her being the clone of Elisabet Sobeck, instead of being frustrated, he eventually conceds that he miscalculated the bunker security and Aloy has no fault in there.
- Hazy-Feel Turn: Prior to the start of the game, he formed the Eclipse for HADES in exchange for more knowledge, and while he did have some moral reservations about what they were doing, he didn't abandon them until HADES betrayed and tried to kill him. He allies with Aloy to prevent the apocalypse, but his obsession still remains a priority for him. In The Stinger, he's captured HADES and is back to continuing his pursuit of ancient knowledge.
- Hypocrite: His desire for knowledge combined with his own secrecy and manipulation of others can lead him to this. He hates how Ted Faro destroyed APOLLO and all the knowledge within, and how the Quen have isolated the use of Focuses to the upper class, but he refuses to share his own knowledge unless he can get something out of it and sometimes destroys knowledge (setting many of his devices to self-destruct so no one can figure them out, for one) to keep his secrets. He angrily condemns others for denying him knowledge, but his actions and M.O. are to deny others knowledge for his own gain. He even planned to steal APOLLO for himself before he realized that was a step too far.
- I Choose to Stay: In what is his first unambiguously heroic, unselfish choice in the series, despite originally planning and having an opportunity to flee Earth on the Odyssey, Sylens ultimately decides to stay to help Aloy fight Nemesis.
- Ignored Epiphany: When Aloy suggests tentatively that his actions to halt HADES are a form of atonement, Sylens throws back at her that he would do the same things again albeit put in more safeguards. He does exactly that in Forbidden West.
- Implied Death Threat:
- At the end of The Frozen Wilds, if Aloy completes the optional conversations with Ourea and others about his past with the Banuk and his shady reputation there, Sylens sternly tells her not to inquire about his past. Aloy asks if he gave the same warning to the bounty hunters who were sent after him and who never returned. He tells her that she's getting the warning he didn't give to the hunters.
- Near the end of the Forbidden West, when Tilda asks how his Anti-Zenith shield device works. His response is a simple "Care for a demonstration?"
- Ink-Suit Actor: He greatly resembles Lance Reddick who did motion capture for the role.
- Insufferable Genius: Not only is he most likely the best-educated person on Earth, but he's one of the smartest as well. Additionally, he knows the most about the world's secrets, and he's aware of it. However, he's also arrogant, abrasive, and even at his best is a snarky asshole. His posturing tends to grate particularly on Aloy's nerves, in addition to his casual rudeness. Aloy knows how to be one in kind right back at him.
- It's All About Me: There's no bones about it: he's a pretty selfish guy. He's not completely without morals or empathy, but they're secondary to his pursuit of the Old Ones' secrets.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: All Sylens does really is for the best of Humanity, in so far as he's concerned. He's abrasive, rude, manipulating and treats people as tools, but it's in the goal of advancing Humanity as a whole. It's often done in a cold, detached manner. He worked to stop the threats of HADES and Far Zenith, and while he was willing at first to leave Earth to Nemesis, he wanted Aloy to bring GAIA so they could make a new Earth. Indeed he devoted significant efforts towards luring Aloy to the Forbidden West through HADES in order to turn her into the Zenith's prisoner, because his own plans ultimately would have had him rescue her during the assault on their base and allow her the choice to escape Earth with him, showing that despite his callousness, he valued Aloy enough that he was trying to save her. Ultimately he's convinced to stay for a time to help defend Earth when he watches Aloy and her friends.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Downplayed. Even though he's not particularly social and is Aloy's most mysterious and morally ambiguous ally, there are occasions where Sylens' conscience just shines through. He's slightly less abrasive in person. But his final conversation with Aloy before the two of them part ways has him reveal that he would do what he did all over again, despite the suffering and destruction his actions caused, showing that at the end of the day, he's just as arrogant as Eclipse when it comes to consorting with powers he cannot hope to control, as befitting its founder.Aloy: You're making it really hard to like you.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Sylens is a jerk, make no mistake, and he is willing to cross barriers that prevent him from truly being a hero - but he's pragmatic and forward-thinking enough that he can at very least slide into Nominal Hero territory.
- While his presentation is extremely tactless, he does have a point that Aloy isn't paying attention to what caused the end of the world (which all things considered is a big deal and something that is coming up yet again in a different form) and focused on her own personal troubles.
- Even though he made sure to include a backdoor in his spear that allowed him to download and save HADES for undoubtedly selfish reasons, the first question he has for it is who exactly woke and corrupted the GAIA subfunction, which is a very important question, considering they almost caused the death of all life on Earth again.
K-Y
- Karma Houdini:
- He's responsible for helping HADES create the Eclipse, and empowering them with a Focus network. Even his Heel–Face Turn is prompted mainly by self-preservation. Yet he ends the game with HADES, his key to the details of the past he wanted all along, in his control.
- In Forbidden West, he's responsible for teaching the Tenakth how to control machines, contributing significantly to the ongoing chaos in the region, as well as running dangerous experimental weapons testing that kills several Oseram supporters in using its capabilities, not to mention almost gets Aloy killed when he lures her into a trap and summons Far Zenith to the location, but by the ending of the Final Battle he's gotten almost everything he wanted and Aloy gives him the chance to walk away consequence-free. Granted, a good deal this is because Sylens was preparing to combat the threat of Far Zenith through whatever measures he could and ultimately planned to protect the Earth's legacy from a long-term viewpoint, but it's still noticeable that he's twice now escaped the consequences of his choices simply because the circumstances made those choices the best options possible.
- Lack of Empathy: He really doesn't have much concern for anyone else. Aloy actually has a chance to call him out on it at one point. He apologizes to her once for being cruelly honest about the fact that Aloy was born from a machine and says he hopes for her to actually find a human mother waiting for her instead, even though he pretty much knows that behind the vault's door no more humans can be alive. And even though when she actually finds her answers and is stricken, he mocks her anguish.
- Literalist Snarking: During a verbally brutal moment in the Zero Dawn laboratory, Sylens dismisses Aloy's hopes of finding out "who" birthed her, noting that it could have only been a "what." A machine. She calls him a bastard for this, to which he counters that his birth was legitimate, unlike her. Later on, Sylens himself admits to having been needlessly cruel in that conversation.
- Manipulative Bastard: From what little that we can glean about his past, Sylens is very good at tricking people into helping him, having set up an elaborate scheme to con the Banuk shamans into granting him access to their sacred grounds where he could steal their artifacts, and then basically founding the Eclipse in order to gain more knowledge and cooperation from HADES. Aloy is the one person he has difficulty fooling because she is his intellectual equal and has fewer strings to pull, but even then he uses quite a bit of coersion and lying to get her to comply with him.
- Meaningful Name: Silence, duh, as Aloy lampshades. Only HADES, the Eclipse, the Banuk hierarchs, the Sons of Prometheus, and Aloy (with her allies) know of his very existence.Ourea: When that name is spoken, secrets soon follow... or vanish, as the case may be.
- Minored in Ass-Kicking: Sylens puts more interest in intellectual pursuits than physical accomplishment, but you can't survive in a world post-Zero Dawn without knowing how to fight. During the final confrontation of Forbidden West, he leaps into battle right alongside the rest and takes down at least one Specter with his spear.
- Mission Control: He occasionally acts as this for Aloy through her Focus. Aloy is not happy about him spying on her, and pointedly removes it when she talks to Rost at his grave.
- Mysterious Past:
- The only hint of which tribe Sylens may have belonged to is the body modifications on his head and arms; they imply he's Banuk, but he doesn't indicate any personal connection to them.
- Frozen Wilds sheds some light on his backstory but raises even more questions. Tellingly, if he's involved in the storyline when Aloy enters the Cut he'll badger her about "wasting time" looking into his origins, claiming she'll gain nothing useful. Supposedly he's a shaman from the far northern, most remote edges of Ban-Ur who came south and impressed himself to the Banuk conclave of shamans with his knowledge and talent of machines... before desecrating their most holy site and stealing their most valued artifacts. No one they sent after him ever returned, and all of the people who originally vouched for him ended up missing. The Banuk aren't sure if he was ever really part of their tribe, and the Conclave swore oaths of silence to cover up his crimes.
- After learning this information, Aloy gets a chance to needle Sylens about what she found out. He gets very perturbed at her prying. When he tells her to back off, Aloy asks if he said the same thing to the Banuk hunters. Sylens says that he didn't even give them the courtesy of a warning.
- Never My Fault: He's very prone to criticizing Aloy for "wasting time" with things like the Renegades that are currently tearing up the West, but refuses to acknowledge that the reason they're doing so is because of actions he took. He also berates Aloy for wasting time in dealing with HADES and the Eclipse and instead focusing on personal matters, while he is the reason HADES is a threat to begin with.
- Never Recycle Your Schemes: Fully averted in Forbidden West, as Sylens is Genre Savvy enough to recycle his plans from Zero Dawn with the necessary knowledge and improvements to make them work the second time. He's able to interrogate HADES to learn about the Extinction Signal's origins through visual torture, is no longer tricked by HADES' captivating knowledge of the past, and never gives it a scrap of power so that it can escape. As well, he retries the rebel army plan with a middle party, the Sons of Prometheus, to give Regalla's Tenakth rebels control over machines for assured victory without them learning about him.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: He activates HADES so that he could learn advanced sciences like physics, calculus, and computer studies so as to better learn about the machines, and empowered the Shadow Carja, which not only results in the near-destruction of Meridian, but HADES eventually deciding to kill him and to end the world once again.
- Nominal Hero: Sylens is a cynical, misanthropic loner with no regard for the world he lives in. His only goal is the pursuit of knowledge, and he will go to any lengths to achieve this, including supporting violent cults and rebellions with the potential to wipe out entire tribes. However, he remains a valuable ally to Aloy and always helps her to save the world, but only out of mutual interest, because he lives in the world and obviously can't gain the knowledge he's after if it's destroyed.Aloy: I'm past trusting you with secrets.
Sylens: Good, that means you're wising up. Trust is for fools. It shifts and crumbles like sand — a poor foundation for any partnership. But mutual-self interest, now that is a solid bedrock upon which you and I might build a new science of understanding. - Not in This for Your Revolution: He cares nothing about tribal politics of any group. His own Banuk, the Carja of Meridian, the Shadow Carja, the Nora, the Oseram. He wouldn't care if any of them fell if he could unearth knowledge and information.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: He repeatedly pulls off unseen feats of badassery that only Aloy was able to accomplish before, like taking down a Corruptor single-handedly to salvage its override module, recruit not one but three Ravagers for an assault on the Sun Ring (and he even managed to control them to some extent, something Aloy never learns to do), or setting up a workshop in the GAIA Prime ruins behind a punishing gauntlet of angry machines. In fact, his entire life story is littered with such moments, enough to make him a Nominal Hero of Another Story worthy of his own spin-off.
- Pet the Dog: Every now and then he will treat Aloy with some semblance of kindness. At one point he'll apologize for being overly cruel to her as she starts to find out the truth of her parentage, though when she actually finds out he's immediately cruel again. Later, he'll offer Aloy his condolences once they discover what happened to Elisabet, though this one takes some prompting from Aloy beforehand.
- In Forbidden West, Sylens tries to console Aloy when it seems like the GAIA backup is useless for saving the world. Even his apparent betrayal of her to Far Zenith moments afterwards falls under this in hindsight when it's revealed that he was counting on them needing her genetic material to access the GAIA system, thus forcing them to take Aloy prisoner at their base whilst they assembled GAIA in one location. Sylens then intended to assault the base with an army of machine-riding Tenakth rebels, rescue Aloy and the GAIA system in the chaos and give her the choice of leaving the planet to escape the Nemesis A.I.s arrival. Sylens went to quite a lot of trouble to manipulate Aloy into a position where she could potentially escape what he saw as a doomed planet, despite the risk of her upsetting his preparations in the region first. At the end, he sincerely offers her the choice to join him in taking Far Zenith's escape pod and stresses that it truly is a choice unlike with Tilda. He then makes for it alone when she refuses but ultimately decides to stay himself (for a time) instead of abandoning the Earth to Nemesis.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Sylens's ultimate allegiance is solely to knowledge, and he's willing to commit some seriously questionable acts pursuing this goal (including being the original founder of Eclipse. Even though he saw the murders in the Sun-Ring as abhorrent he was completely willing to work with and use the people who were behind it and continued the practice.). However, he's rational, unlike Helis, and fully recognizes that global genocide is no good for anybody and immediately acts to oppose it.
- Quit Your Whining: He has little sympathy and even less patience for any complaints from Aloy. When she finally learns the truth of her birth and begins to despair over not having a mother, he irritably tells her that, one, she has two mothers that basically make her The Chosen One, and two, the entire world is in peril, so she should stop angsting and get back to fixing things.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Aloy being the emotional, caring Red to Sylens' cold, pragmatic Blue. They're literally color-coded that way, Aloy with her red hair, and Sylens with his blue Banuk piercings.
- Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: Some of his conversations with Aloy have this tone, with Sylens espousing Enlightenment values while Aloy expresses Romantic arguments.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Considered leaving Earth aboard the Far Zenith ship to avoid Nemesis. Hoping Aloy would come with him and bring GAIA to build a new Earth. Seeing Aloy and her friends makes him reconsider, for a time, so they have a fighting chance.
- Seeker Archetype: Incidentally, it's Aloy who bears the official title of a Seeker, but Sylens is the better example of this trope.
- Shadow Archetype: He's essentially Aloy's anti-social characteristics and intelligence, but with none of the heart. Both of them are naturals at using Old World tech and understanding their ways, but while Aloy is set on learning about it to understand her place in the world, Sylens does it out of a never-ending lust for knowledge. Both have contempt for the spirituality and social norms of the people they interact with, Aloy at least has respect for the sanctity of life and is willing to help out however she can, while Sylens is too apathetic to help anyone unless it benefits him personally, often with catastrophic results.
- Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Sylens' actions become essential to Aloy in discovering her true origins, yet he was barely shown in Guerrilla's marketing for the game. Justified, as he is a Walking Spoiler.
- Small Steps Hero: Inverted - Sylens is by all accounts a Big Steps Hero; he doesn't care what he has to do to increase his knowledge, and while his motives seems to be to rediscover what was lost so he can lift humanity out of their tribal dark ages, his immediate actions in that pursuit tends to cause immediate problems that he really doesn't care about solving.
- The Sociopath: He checks all the usual boxes. No empathy or conscience, manipulator, desperately trying to feel fulfilled, incapable of forming an emotional attachment to others, even an overinflated sense of self. He doesn't care one bit if Aloy finds out he helped HADES form the Eclipse or Regalla gain the ability to override machines nor does he care if the Zeniths wipe out the Tenakth if Regalla had her way and took over after killing Hekarro. All that matters to him is slaking his thirstless desire for knowledge. Though his case might not be as severe as others, since he does stay on Earth to help Aloy and her friends fight off Nemesis instead of taking off for another planet like he originally intended.
- Sparing the Aces: He offers Aloy the opportunity to escape Earth with him- not because he enjoys her presence or wants to save a life, but because he feels she's "earned" it for all she's done.
- Spanner in the Works: Far Zenith are an Outside-Context Problem to every human in the Zero Dawn world except Aloy and Sylens, and until the time of Forbidden West Aloy believed they'd all died centuries ago. In their ideal scenario, Far Zenith would have arrived on the planet unannounced, swiftly located all the scattered A.I.s of the GAIA terraforming system, rebuilt it and left the planet in a few short months, with the locals utterly unable to stop them thanks to their technological advantages. They certainly weren't prepared for one of these 'savages' to have been expecting them and moreover, creating countermeasures to defeat them. When Tilda discovers that Sylens has successfully invented a way to deactivate Far Zenith's shields she admits that he's a 'remarkable man', despite the clear animosity between them. Indeed, Aloy's plan to defeat Far Zenith ultimately still has to piggyback upon the preparations Sylens has put in place to defeat them, and it's generally implied that his strategy would have worked— just with massive casualties, which Aloy couldn't stomach and thus decided to derail in order for them all to Take a Third Option.
- Sunk Cost Fallacy: Completely averted; in Forbidden West, it's shown Sylens' greatest redeeming quality is knowing when he is pursuing something that is costing more than it gains and swallowing his pride to try a better way. He realized HADES was uncontrollable and only wanted to let it live to figure out why it reactivated, not anything dumb like give it a new body. When Aloy derails his plans with the Tenakth rebels to give him no choice but to back her own plans to defeat Far Zenith, he corroborates despite considering her actions foolish and needlessly risky because he recognises that Aloy is smart enough to have thought of a viable alternative even if he hasn't.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:As shown in Forbidden West, Sylens may have many faults but he learns from his mistakes. He made sure HADES was very securely sealed away before he interrogated it further, and as it turns out, his precautions worked out for the best. He got intel on what caused the sundering of GAIA, a locale with a high chance of a surviving GAIA kernel in storage, and also left HADES neatly packaged for Aloy to deliver a final Coup de Grâce with the Master Override so the reborn world can be rid of it forever.
- Sword of Plot Advancement: In the final interaction between him and Aloy, he grants her his personal weapon, Sylens' Lance, which is a major upgrade to her spear that can give shock damage when used with a heavy attack, just before the Final Battle. Aloy further upgrades it with the Master Override, which enables her to stop HADES.
- Taught by Experience: Had to spend his life doing this. Forbidden West shows he does this very well as he enacts all the safeguards he said he would when dealing with HADES and when preparing to face the Zenith's he takes time to work out every possible move as well as doing the same thing he did with the eclipse only with more safeguards again.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: While he and Aloy need each other to fight spoiler:the threats they face, they spend most of their dialogue bickering.
- By the end of their time together, they've warmed up to each other a bit, though Aloy finds her suspicions and doubts about the truly shady stuff he's behind more than confirmed, and its clear that their alliance is based, as Sylens himself says, on "mutual self-interest" rather than true feelings.
- Sylens is even less cooperative with Tilda; the second Aloy introduces the two, they show open hostility and distrust of each other. When Tilda questions the functionality of his weapon to disable Far Zenith's shields, Sylens is more than willing to give her a demonstration. This makes sense with the endgame reveals that Sylens knew about Nemesis and Far Zenith's reason for being on the planet the whole time. As far as Sylens is concerned, he's looking at a person who contributed to creating another disaster that threatens to wipe the earth barren again, and is part of the reason why he's trying to find a way off Earth before it arrives, whilst Tilda is heavily implied to have guessed Sylen's ultimate motives, but neither can call the other out on this because they both need the cooperation of Aloy's plan and assembled allies to stand a viable chance of reaching the escape ship in the Far Zenith base and thus both of them are forced to keep Aloy in the dark until they reach that point for their own objectives.
- Tranquil Fury: When he learns the true reason why APOLLO and all of humanity's knowledge are nowhere to be found his voice is dripping with venom.
- Tragic Villain: On his own, he could never able to touch the knowledge that is his birthright as a human being, that he climbed mountains, explored everywhere, and experimented decades to unearth...because he wasn't born an Old One clone. Admittedly, he didn't need the knowledge and he would've used it to slaughter and manipulate living humans so he could amass even more knowledge, but it's not like his genes show that.
- Übermensch: Of the Unfettered variety. Sylens believes himself above the conventional morality of the post-human tribes, and considers himself superior to them. Indeed at one point he tells Aloy not to let "primitive tribesmen" to stand in his way. This would be acceptable if he wasn't the guy who formed, created, empowered, and armed that specific primitive tribe he has contempt for. His unfettered nature and cynical view on interactions with others, where trust is "for fools", has led to him being a loner and prone to exploiting and betraying others.
- Virtue Is Weakness: He does not believe in trust, believing in mutual interest to be much more secure a foundation for interaction. As such, he ends up using other people frequently as if they are implements instead of people. Even Aloy is not out of such a reach, but Aloy being his intellectual peer makes it harder for him to use her and she coerces him right back. Deconstructed as well: In the process of cleaning up the mess caused by Sylens enabling HADES and creating the Eclipse cult, Aloy earns the trust of people throughout the region to stand against Eclipse, while Sylens is all alone with no true allies, just "mutual interest".
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Despite his many crimes, ultimately he does want to lift humanity out of the dark ages. He seems happiest when he is explaining something technical to Aloy (one of the few people who can actually understand), and he is horrified at Ted Faro killing APOLLO. He's also quite upset to discover that the Nora were sitting on one of the richest caches of Old World treasure, but they had no way to access it.Sylens: I had to dredge the pits of the world for Focuses to repair. And here sat a trove, enriching no one.
- What the Hell, Hero?: He's the only character in the game with the confidence and gravitas to credibly call out Aloy on her moments of teen angst, such as her complaining about not being closer to finding the identity of her mother after she just found out the cause of the fall of civilization. In turn she calls him out for his Lack of Empathy and above-it-all attitude, and his total lack of remorse about birthing the Shadow Carja and the many atrocities it has caused.
- Wild Card: Whether he's working for a cult to a god of evil, a malevolent AI posing as the god of evil, a terrorist faction ready and willing to cause a Civil War for revenge against an entire civilization, or the warrior that's willing to take them all on, Sylens makes it clear that his loyalties are to himself.
- You Are What You Hate: He reacts threateningly to any suggestion he might have had a tribe or a past or anything that connects him to the (supposedly) ignorant barbarians inhabiting the rest of the world. Not that there's anywhere else he could've come from.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
- Once he established the Eclipse and got their Focus network up and running, HADES contacted Helis and put a kill order out on Sylens. Sylens spied on HADES, so he was able to escape before the Eclipse could carry it out.
- Sylens returns the favor in Forbidden West by leaving HADES out for Aloy to actually shut down once he's stripped it dry of information.
