Future Imperfect

Loss of Innocence

So I recently had my Spring Break and played through Horizon Zero Dawn during it. It's one of best games to come around in a long time and I only hope that the next time I go home and start playing Mass Effect Andromeda that it measures up. I also hope that since they left it open for a sequel that a sequel actually comes someday. Anybody remember the post-apocalyptic RPG Rage because I do and I'm still here waiting for a sequel to that, there's actually been some movement on that front lately but after six years I'm not getting my hopes up. Anyways I already have some other chapter ideas in mind and I hope you like this. I was listening to City of Blinding Lights by U2 while writing this.

Aloy stood for a moment in the villa that served as the Shadow Carja's holding facility for Olin's family as she watched said family leave to start a new life minus Olin. Olin's wife had understood that he was dead without her having to go into the details and for that she was grateful. What words of comfort could she ever offer to someone who was never going to see their husband again because of her actions? What words of comfort could she offer a child that was now fatherless because she had allowed her anger to get the better of her for one moment? She assumed there weren't any words adequate for that situation.

Her life as an Outcast had been simple, she hadn't liked it but it had been simple. At the time it had been easy to hate the Matriarchs for what they had done to her, what they had done to Rost, and what they had done to all of the other Outcasts she had ran into. Back then it was easy to blame them for all of her problems and view them as the enemy. Now, after seeing more of the world and interacting with many different kinds of people she knows it was naïve to think of the world in such black and white terms.

She had set off looking for Olin hoping that he would provide her with the answers to all of her questions about the attack on the Proving and her origin. What she had found instead was a man who wasn't entirely innocent, but wasn't entirely guilty either and had not even a fraction of the answers she had been searching for. No, those answers seemed like they would only come from delving further into the ruins of the Metal World and seeing what clues had been left behind.

Olin had reasons for his actions, good reasons, but that didn't change the fact that his actions had caused the deaths of many members of the Nora tribe and perhaps beyond. Driving her spear into his chest and ending his life right there in the middle of that Shadow Carja dig site had given her a set of confusing feelings. It had felt good to get some sort of revenge on the people that had killed so many of her tribe. Her anger at the Shadow Carja and more specifically the man who had led them to the Proving in the first place had been quenched for a brief moment.

Watching as the two figures disappeared into the horizon, however, it all felt so trivial. Olin, many of the other operatives killed at the dig site probably too, had an innocent family in all of this that was now not going to have a father and husband around because of her actions. Was she really any better than the people she was killing if she was doing it for a "nobler" cause? She figured she already knew the answer to that question and didn't like it or what it said about what she had become.

The more she learned from her explorations of various ruins told her that nothing was ever quite as simple as it appeared at first glance. The Nora viewed the Old Ones as sinners who fell because of their own arrogance. That's why ruins such as the ones she was exploring were taboo. The Matriarchs operated under the mentality that if they kept people away from the ruins and anything else associated with the Old Ones then the children of this world were less likely to repeat their mistakes or at least what they perceived as mistakes. Were they really any better than the Old Ones? She figured the answer to that mirrored the answer to her previous question.

What she had found at the ruins of Faro Automated Solutions as well as the other ruins she had stumbled across in her journey so far didn't show the kind of blanket arrogance that the Nora Matriarchs described, yet another mistake and fallacy that could be attributed to them. The Metal World was full of just as many different kinds of people as she had come across in her current travels. Ted Faro and Elisabet Sobeck represented the two opposite ends of the spectrum but they were only the extremes much like Avad and his father were.

People like Sylens further complicated the picture. He obviously had some sort of dark past that he was hiding from her, but also seemed to be trying to make up for it in his own way. And maybe people like him were the norm instead of the exception. Things weren't black and white so it only made sense that people weren't black and white either. There were numerous shades of grey for people to fall into. Perhaps the question wasn't so much whether someone was good or evil, but which shade of grey they fell into. How many shades of grey was someone like herself removed from becoming someone like Sylens or someone like Olin? Of that she couldn't be sure.

By that logic maybe no one was truly innocent and maybe everyone else throughout the world already knew that. People like Sylens and even Erend to a lesser extent didn't seem to have as many regrets about any said action they had taken or could take in the future as she did. There were things that were wrong certainly, things that Sylens was trying to atone for, but he didn't allow his guilt at that cloud his future decision making. Had she really just been so sheltered all her life that she never understood that?

Maybe she had been an innocent, naïve girl thinking that winning the Proving and becoming a member of the tribe would solve all of her problems. Maybe she had even been an innocent, naïve girl when she had first set out on her journey to find Olin despite everything that she had seen at the Proving. Maybe seeing the bulk of her tribe cut down in front of her by masked men she didn't even know the origin of should have been enough to wake her up to the realities of the world.

One thing was for sure now, no matter where this journey ended up taking her or what she uncovered along the way she would never go back to being that girl, she couldn't. It was possible for some of the Nora to still cling to the Matriarchs' teachings and their own naïve views of the world, but that wasn't possible for her anymore. She had killed a man, not in combat and not in self-defense, but only out of a burning need for some sort of justice for what had happened to her people and one blinding burst of emotion. She wasn't that innocent girl anymore and for all of her thinking, as the sun disappeared below the horizon signifying the end of one day and the potential for another, she couldn't decide whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe she would never know. Maybe she didn't need to.