The Naive “Post-Racial” Future of ‘Horizon Zero Dawn’

‘Horizon Zero Dawn’ is naïve in its progressivism, and to sing its uncritical praises is to underestimate the ability of video games to tell better stories.

“Survive!” Rost urges Aloy with his dying breath in Horizon Zero Dawn.

In the role-playing open-world Horizon video games Zero Dawn and its 2022 sequel Forbidden West, Aloy is the protagonist and a motherless outcast of the Nora tribe. Rost is her guardian and father figure. He names her, rears her, and teaches her to be a capable and wily hunter in the hope that she will win welcome into the tribe through a coming-of-age ritual. But more importantly, Rost teaches Aloy to survive.

Aloy’s postapocalyptic Earth is a mix of the tribal and technological in the 3000s. Clothes are visibly made from hide, and hunting is mostly by spear and bow. These must prove sufficient to defend against highly intelligent, predatory machines, which have replaced large animals. Rost’s first lesson to Aloy—and the games’ first lesson to the player—is that all machines are dangerous. Horse-like Chargers and warthog-like Bristlebacks roam fields, and T. rex–like Thunderjaws are giants that launch heavy artillery at the player when noticed. All of them are aggressive and can kill humans. Under Rost’s guidance, Aloy plies her bow and spear, becoming an expert hunter of machines. She learns to stalk the tall grass, leap between trees, and scale steep mountainsides. In a training montage, we see her grow from an unsure child to a capable young warrior.

This theme of survival in Zero Dawn and Forbidden West fascinated me. As much as Aloy lives in a dangerous world, she doesn’t listen to Rost. She doesn’t believe that all machines are dangerous; she instead learns to tame them. She runs headlong into brewing wars between tribes. Willing to break rules and boundaries, Aloy delves into dangerous ruins to figure out the history of the world she lives in and prevents it from devolving even further into chaos. It’s almost inevitable in the narrative arc, but the outcast becomes the savior in the Horizon games.

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Survival isn’t guaranteed for those in the margins.

In the early days of the pandemic, many people, including world government officials, spoke of the pandemic as a “great leveler,” affecting rich and poor alike. Though the sentiment wasn’t just held by white people (I’m sure some people of color claimed this about the pandemic too), a lot of people of color I know—myself included—raised our eyebrows. We know catastrophic events hurt the most vulnerable first.

The pandemic was never a “great leveler” between rich and poor; neither was it a racial leveler. An apocalypse, which means revelation in Greek, doesn’t fix racism or any other societal ill. It just reveals what’s already true. The privileged—also myself included—worked from home, sequestered from the dangers of an airborne virus. In the US, those who had to keep working in person, in rideshares and restaurants and other service industries, were primarily Latinx and Black. The Covid death toll reflected that.

As I prepared to move to Washington, DC, in the middle of that first pandemic summer, I played Zero Dawn every day. The more I explored its postapocalyptic world, the more I was troubled by the imagination that birthed it. In the tribes of Horizon, there was no racial tension or suggestion that race structured the world in any way. The Nora were a blend of races, with three women of ostensibly different races in charge of the matriarchal tribe, but the games never actually called the women white, Black, and Asian. The game portrayed an apocalyptic society with racial equality, an idea that increasingly feels impossible to accept.

Zero Dawn is one of Sony’s best-selling titles, with over ten million copies sold in two years. It’s also one of PlayStation’s most critically acclaimed, receiving six nominations at The Game Awards in 2017, including Game of the Year. (It lost to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, one of the greatest games of all time according to many, including me.) Critics praised the game for being progressive; the Guardian called it “the feminist action game we’ve been waiting for” and Aloy a “brave, independent, multi-dimensional heroine to lead this highly satisfying mission.”

Many championed Zero Dawn given the comparative lack of female protagonists in video game titles, the misogynist culture at the core of a number of video game companies, and abusive behavior toward women prevalent in the industry. “Plenty of games have strong female characters,” Kotaku said. “Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the first to take the next step, setting its heroine free in a truly progressive world.” But Zero Dawn is naive in its progressivism, and to uncritically hail it as a beacon is to underestimate games’ ability to tell better stories.

Both Horizon games certainly reach for a kind of feminism, but it’s a feminism limited by its whiteness. Aloy becomes a warrior and pulls the world from the brink of extinction with miraculous strength and smarts. She gets to be a badass, but she’s still a skinny, pretty white woman who alone can save the world.

Aloy is also a genetic clone of Elisabet Sobeck, a doctor who designed an AI that saved the world from extinction centuries before Aloy was created. Sobeck was the original mastermind of the GAIA AI (who Sobeck designs to be a Black woman). As the clone of Sobeck, only Aloy can reboot GAIA’s system, which has stalled, and save the world.

Sobeck designed GAIA to repopulate an Earth that lost all organic life. By preserving a “snapshot of human genetic diversity” in GAIA’s programming, all races are represented and mixed in the society that is rebirthed. In Horizon, racial diversity was preserved, though people do not experience racism.

The multiracial world of Horizon is not incidental. Both games make it a point to highlight the racial diversity of the people in Horizon over and over through the rainbow of friends, allies, and enemies that Aloy makes throughout both games’ main stories and side quests. But this multiracial makeup of the tribes is never addressed explicitly in the main story of the games—only implicitly via audio snippets scattered throughout the world.

Affinities in Horizon fall under tribal lines, and characters navigate tribal xenophobia. Aloy is an outsider, first because she is an outcast, and later as a Nora branching out of her homeland. But these prove to be statuses she can supersede by literally being the genetic key to saving the world. In Horizon, no one talks about race. No one comments on the fact that the three matriarchs of the Nora tribe have different skin tones. No one explains why. Is Horizon’s world supposed to be post-racial in the sense that race simply doesn’t exist? Did the apocalyptic events in Horizon fix racism?

Ignoring race has never been a solution for racism. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Indigenous writers have commented on the appropriative nature of the games using tribes, face painting, clothing, rituals, and songs as superficial cultural texture. Some have critiqued the use of “braves” as a description of the Nora’s warrior class. So many of the aesthetic options in both games feel over-the-top appropriative, like the Banuk Werak Chieftain from Zero Dawn’s DLC or Forbidden West’s face paints. The games draw from Indigenous cultures to build the supposedly post-racial tribal society, but there’s no clear acknowledgment of the Indigenous culture to which Horizon’s world owes so much.

By ignoring real-world inequities, Horizon’s world became increasingly unbelievable to me as I played. I cheered less and less for its hero. Horizon relies on a single white woman to save the world and its many colors of people, and people like me—a Southeast Asian American man—are a crucial part of the scenery but not the core narrative.

Is Horizon’s world supposed to be post-racial in the sense that race simply doesn’t exist? Did the apocalyptic events in Horizon fix racism?

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I found more words for my unease through Octavia Butler’s own take on the apocalypse in Parable of the Sower. As the world became fascinated, obsessed even, with the apocalypse that was the pandemic, Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel shot into the Times’ best seller list for the first time.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I simply couldn’t read a book. It was like there was a magnetic field pushing anything in print away from my hands. All the poetry, fiction, and essays I tried felt flat and uninteresting, unimportant even, in the global chaos. Parable of the Sower was the first book I was able to read in the pandemic because it felt urgent. I would play Zero Dawn into the evening and then read a few chapters of Parable of the Sower at night before bed. The two worlds became conversation partners for me as I processed the pandemic.

Butler’s protagonist Lauren Olamina grows up in a protected neighborhood in Robledo, California, in a speculative 2024, as the US becomes unstable due to climate change and wealth inequality, eventually electing a president who promises to “make America great again” by returning the country to worshiping a Christian God. The harsh temperatures, broken infrastructure, and disappearance of jobs have created a country where it is more common to be homeless than housed. In Butler’s apocalypse, it’s unsafe to be poor, to be Black, to be brown, or to be a woman.

Olamina is Black, initially wealthy, and raised in a protected community with education and a family. But when she is eighteen, pyromaniacs invade the enclave and burn it down. After her home is overrun and her family disappears, Olamina has to go on the road and find a way to survive. She makes her way north and begins building a community with those she meets on the way, introducing them to her religion, which she developed throughout childhood and calls Earthseed.

Butler unflinchingly draws the lines of racism into her apocalypse. Walking on the highways north, Black people are more vulnerable and targeted by others because of racism. People segregate into respective races and protect their own and are suspicious of those who don’t have the same skin color. Interracial couples are isolated and targeted by groups of all races. Olamina is vulnerable as a woman and intentionally presents as a man to avoid trouble.

Olamina’s experience of hiding and surviving is one I recognized. At the height of the pandemic, I intentionally chose clothing that obscured my Asian identity. Before the pandemic, I’d never been the target of violent hate crimes. Sure, I was misidentified as Chinese, and I was asked routinely where I was really from. But in that first pandemic summer, routine comments became threats, microaggression became aggression. A man in my local grocery store swore to beat me and my partner. Another man cut me off at an intersection and then stopped in the middle of a four-lane downtown road to get out of the car and threaten me and my partner because of our race.

Like Olamina, I think people of color know that an apocalyptic catastrophe means more racism, not less. If the pandemic was an apocalyptic event, it only revealed how bad things can always be worse.

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Every time I think about having a child, I wonder how they will survive in this world. When I talk to my partner about the possibility, the conversation with my partner usually goes like this:

First, I won’t drive the decision to have a child because my partner has a child-bearing body and I don’t. If we have a biological child, my partner’s person, not to mention body, will be irreversibly changed.

“Babies grow in a helix of hope and fear; gestating draws one but deeper into the spiral,” Maggie Nelson writes of her own pregnancy in The Argonauts. “It isn’t cruel in there, but it’s dark.”

If we decide to have a biological kid, they will inherit both of our immigrant traumas. They will never be able to speak to their extended family in a language they will fully command. They will understand their family even less than I do. They will also be Asian—and at least partly Indonesian like me—and therefore vulnerable to all the same things I went through as a child and as an adult. They may never fully feel at home in the US, where they will likely grow up. They may always be made to feel foreign, one of a very few in a crowd of other colors. What new threats will they live through?

Suppose we decide to adopt instead. Adoption is never a simple process. Transracial adoption is often traumatic and subjects the child to serious issues of identity and belonging. Even if we adopted an Asian child, the diasporic experience would be different, and the dislocation of adoption would remain.

This doesn’t even begin to breach another underlying question: Will I be a good parent? I am still in such a state of flux with regards to my own gender, my own religious background, and my own health that I’m fairly sure I can’t help guide someone else without leaving similar scars to the ones I received from my family.

If the pandemic was an apocalyptic event, it only revealed how bad things can always be worse.

What if we have a daughter? In fifty years, how dangerous will it be to even be someone’s daughter? How many times will she have to present as a man just to feel safer on any given street like Lauren Olamina?

Even if we throw up answers to all these conundrums and choose the joy and difficulty of nurturing a child, there is still the world that our child would inherit. Will they have access to clean water? How frequently will they have to deal with devastating brush fires or monsoons? How many times will they have to move because of rising sea levels?

The climate crisis continues to worsen, as world governments are ossified in their reliance on fossil fuels and other Earth-destroying practices. Things are already bad. Jakarta, where I am quarantining as I write this, is sinking twenty centimeters every year.

If I’m honest, I would truly enjoy raising and loving a child, but if the world is slowly sinking, what would my child inherit but our mistakes? Such are the narratives of both Horizon and Parable of the Sower: young women trying to deal with the consequences of the worlds they inherited. Neither of them knows their mothers, though they feel the burden of their mothers’ choices. In Horizon, Aloy has the responsibility of reviving and completing Sobeck’s project as her genetic descendent.

Whereas in Parable of the Sower, Olamina has “hyper-empathy syndrome,” a congenital condition likely caused by her mother’s drug use. She can actually feel others’ pain: If she sees someone break a leg, she falters with the dizzying pain. If she watches someone get shot with a gun, she can experience the pain of death. This makes it even harder for her to survive.

Horizon’s child inherits the responsibility of fixing the world, as a white woman, and passes with flying colors. Butler’s fictional child has to fend for herself when the adults around her don’t anticipate how bad things can get. They are both let down by a world that takes their parental figures away from them. But only one of them gets to save the world.

After two years of the pandemic, Horizon feels like a story, whereas Butler’s novel feels like prophecy. Horizon imagines how our children will save the world; Butler imagines how our children will have to survive in a world we have destroyed. If the world does head toward fulfilling apocalyptic ideas of the future, as Covid-19 and climate catastrophes like fires and flooding seem to indicate, all things will get worse, including racism. I think people of color instinctively know this, but a white imagination loves the temptation of a post-racial utopia as its apocalyptic future. It is a timeworn factory ever ready to produce another savior, and we know what that savior will look like.