Fridge / Horizon Forbidden West

Remember, Fridge pages have unmarked spoilers.

Fridge Brilliance

• At one point Aloy is seen climbing a rock formation that doesn't exist in real life, rather than a case of the artists taking liberties with the landscape it can be more likely a case of the landscape being changed by the various A.I.s along with natural shifts over the last 1000+ years.
• It seemed strange that in the previous game, it reset to before the final mission after finishing it (with no Playable Epilogue). With the release of Forbidden West, now it does from a narrative perspective: Aloy left Meridian immediately on the same night of the celebratory party held after defeating HADES, with her trip to Elizabeth's childhood home occurring as more of a 'side-trip' happening as she rushed from ruin to ruin looking for a back-up of GAIA for the next six months- it's a plot point that both Varl and Blameless Marad were unable to contact Aloy because she vanished before the phenomenon with HADES's transmission to Sylens occurred. There simply wasn't time for a Playable Epilogue.
• It took six months for Varl to catch up to Aloy, despite the fact that Aloy was spending time diving into ruins and Varl was going so fast he didn't even have time to shave. The answer becomes clear at the end of the prologue: Aloy was riding machines for much of that time, which Varl obviously couldn't do.
• The first thing the new GAIA does is create a communications network for Aloy and her companions. Because she was grown from MINERVA, the communications subroutine.
• A question regarding how Ted Faro was able to become the Old World’s first Trillionaire when his technology was literally made to last forever is answered in this game when Aloy meets Alva, a member of the Quen — planned obsolescence. Her tribe unearthed Focus devices centuries before, but Aloy quickly discovers that her own device is much more advanced than Alva’s, both in design (Alva’s Focus covers a good portion of her head versus Aloy’s sleeker version) and in that it’s incapable of reading data formats created after 2050. Aloy can open files for Alva, but doesn’t seem to be able to give her device an update to read them herself.
  • Aloy has apparently figured out how to update Quen devices by the time the Burning Shores DLC takes place in the post-game, as she sends Seyka’s Focus an update instead of providing her a new one.
• No one ever comments on Beta's name. This is likely because, if you don't know what the word actually means, it sounds like a diminutive of "Elisabet."
• Dr. Somptow's last advice to Ted Faro before committing suicide was that the reactor the Thebes bunker had would keep him going until the side effects and mutations fixed themselves. As Aloy and the Quen discover several centuries later, they never did. Given Somptow's growing resentments up until his death, however, it's entirely possible that he deliberately gave Faro the idea, perhaps knowing what it would likely do to him in time, and that he's that much of an egomaniac that he'd unwittingly damn himself without hesitation.
  • Somptow was terrified of what Ted would do to Kanya. We're not actually told what his last advice was, just Faro's already-unhinged rambling that "Somptow said the reactor can give me what I need... to grow strong again", which seems like a comment that the geothermal reactor would give him as much power as he needed, and maybe that he needed time and energy. Unraveling in isolation, Ted probably conflated personal energy with electrical energy, and if he'd been in his right mind he wouldn't have thought cuddling up to a reactor would fix him.
• The Deflector Shields Far Zenith equip themselves with were not only foreshadowed in the previous game (Aloy's Game-Breaker Shieldweaver armor, which was explicitly described as a prototype if you read the data points), but their weakness was also equally telegraphed as something that could be replicated even with the relatively "primitive" technology on Earth — HEPHAESTUS created towers in the Frozen Wilds DLC that emitted a frequency which negated the advantage the Shieldweaver armor gave Aloy, forcing her to either fight sans protection or take out the source of the signal.
• In the beginning of Zero Dawn, one of the audio logs Aloy can discover records a woman making peace with her untimely death, because being with her (same-sex) lover gave her a moment of true happiness. It stands in drastic contrast to Tilda's behaviour at the end of Forbidden West.
  Ella Pontes: And maybe that's all I need, you know?
  [...]
  Tilda: So I'm not asking- you're coming with me.
• The origin of the spiky carving motif that the Tenakth etch into old world ruins. What inspired them? The garbled image tearing occurring on the degraded JTF-10 exhibits in the Memorial Grove (before AETHER's removal restores them).
• In the previous game, Nora bigots imagined that Aloy was a child of the Machine Devil, born to destroy the world. She wasn't, but Beta can be said to fulfil that fear; she was created because of NEMESIS, raised by A.I.s, and forced to assist in Far Zenith's genocidal plans. That ignorance of context, combined with the bigots' hatred and paranoia, divorced what they really saw (since Brin shows that precognition exists in this setting) from what they thought they saw. Like the Carja with their Leaves, or Banukai's worshippers, they extrapolated from only a small fraction of the truth.
• Why would the Carja spend money on a pretty statue mere months after one of the greatest disasters to ever hit their city? Because they're Carja, to whom art is serious business.
• Most of the allusions to Greek mythology are pretty on the nose: GAIA is the Titan of earth and fertility, HEPHAESTUS is a blacksmith, etc. But there are subtler ones to Egyptian mythology; Sobek is the crocodile god and tied to fertility. What does Elizabet Sobeck do? She saves humanity by being the architect of a reborn world. Pharaohs were the leaders of Egypt and believed to be the center of the world that could do no wrong. What is Ted Faro's biggest weakness/failing? He's an egotistical tyrant.
• The Cauldron KAPPA has a quite clever Double-Meaning Title in its name. Kappa is both the name of a Greek alphabet and the name of a Japanese mythical water turtle-like creature, fitting for a Cauldron that has water as a primary theme and has what's basically a mechanical Sea Monster as the boss at the very end.
• Similarily, the Cauldron GEMINI is an odd name out among other Cauldrons, which so far are all named after Greek alphabets. It's the only Cauldron that the previous GAIA created that has two cores. In Latin, the word 'Gemini' famously translates to 'twins'. The symbolism gets even better when Aloy and Beta, who are both clones of Elisabet Sobeck and are basically twin sisters, have to work together in the Cauldron to trap HEPHEASTUS.
• After GEMINI, when Tilda is selling the "Zeniths want to reboot the Earth using GAIA" story to Aloy, she claims that Gerard calls the plan a "clean install". Think about it: Gerard is a financial magnate, in charge of large corporations, no way he would call the plan something like that. On the other hand, it is the exact terminology a software engineer would use, which Tilda is, that's how she made her fortune - subtly foreshadowing that the story she is selling is bullshit, she made it up.

Fridge Horror

• Damn near everything about the entire Far Zenith situation. Just to start with: The first person Aloy interacts with is an immortal juggernaut with an invincible forcefield who rants about how much he loves killing people in VR, but implies he's still killed plenty of people in real life. It's hard to tell whether it would be better or worse if those killings were old, or more recent.
• The Tenakth get the red pigment for their tattoos from a place called Bleeding Mark, where they extract the pigment from a red mineral. A datapoint in the area reveals that Bleeding Mark was once a cinnabar mine. Cinnabar, a mineral that contains a high percentage of mercury. It's possible that the entire tribe is suffering from low-key mercury poisoning.
• Even though APOLLO is restored thanks to Far Zenith's off-world copy, the last thing Samina Ebadji (its creator) heard before she died is that the biggest accomplishment of her life was destroyed by the same loon who doomed humanity in the first place.
• When Aloy first arrives at the entrance to Thebes’ reactor room, there’s no audible indication that Ted Faro, or what became of him, is right there. It’s only after she plays his last voice recording, however, that she starts hearing loud fleshy sounds from behind the door. Despite the heavily mutated Faro’s scans showing minimal brain function and the likelihood that his mind is long gone, the implication’s that there is still some shred of humanity left for him to recognize and react to his own voice.
  • Audio files in these games aren't generally audible to anyone except the person accessing them with their Focus, but Aloy does speak out loud a few times while listening to Ted - he might have heard that, and she sounds like Elisabet, who he'd at least once before addressed after her death. Whether or not he heard himself, he doubtless heard her.
• The Quen's Ceo, walking confidently into the reactor room, doesn't ask "What's that" and assume he's found some weird science project, he says "Is that-", which certainly suggests that as horrible as Ted looks at this point, something about him is recognizable as having been the Renewer.
• According to Kanya Somptow, Ted took Grigori, Kanya, her father Narong, and a harem of girls with him to Thebes. Grigori was killed about a couple years in, after finding out Ted killed the Alphas. The same fate would befall Brianna, one of the harem. By the time Kanya and her father commit suicide, she's aware of the kill switch implanted in them and they were the only people left in the bunker with Ted. This could very well mean Ted killed everyone else in the bunker over the fallout of Grigori finding out about the alphas.
• During Beta's early life, her only connection was with Tilda, who went out of her to build a data channel where the two would regularly interact. However, considering that Tilda was in a relationship with Elisabet Sobeck, Beta's genetic blueprint, desperately wants a Replacement Goldfish (to the point of trying to kidnap and pontentially kill Aloy during the final battle) and the type of person she is generally, what guarantee do we have that Tilda wasn't trying to sexually groom Beta? It also makes Tilda rejecting Beta as a inferior copy of Sobeck and Aloy even more revolting.
• At the end of the story, in order to get past an army of Spectres, Aloy makes Beta release HEPHAESTUS into the Zenith (more powerful than Zero Dawns) printing controls, so it can build an army of machines to fight them, then it goes back to the cauldron network, except now, it has the knowledge on how to print machines much faster and probably more powerful than ever, the only glimmer of hope is that when they captured it, the code Aloy and Beta were removing made it slightly more amenable to humanity.

Fridge Logic

On the Headscratchers page.

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