The Silent and Steadfast Feminism of Horizon

The trailer hadn’t even finished airing, but I already knew what to expect.

Last September, during Sony's State of Play event—a digital keynote showcasing new updates and announcements for all things PlayStation—we got our first look at Sucker Punch Productions' Ghost of Yotei, the sequel to their 2020 title, Ghost of Tsushima. GoT, an action-adventure game set in feudal Japan wherein players control samurai Jin Sakai, was a blockbuster success. It's one of PlayStation's best-selling titles, won the Game Award for Best Art Direction, and was nominated in six other categories including Game of the Year. You would assume that a sequel announcement would be met with universal exhilaration, but that wasn't exactly the case for Ghost of Yotei. Instead, the reveal trailer had a certain camp loudly throwing their pitchforks in the air—and not because they were upset about the game's teased mechanics, storyline or setting.

No, the problem, of course, was that the new protagonist was a woman.

Female protagonists have often drawn the ire of the "rah the WOKE LEFT is invading my games!" crowd, which once again climbed out of its hole with the reveal of GoY, flooding social media with the typical whining about how having a female protagonist would make the game historically inaccurate. Not only is this categorically false, given that there were plenty of female samurai in feudal Japan, but said crowd seemed to care little about historical accuracy when playing GoT, which took its fair share of creative liberties with the weapons and armor of feudal Japan in order to make the game more enjoyable. Clearly, it's not historical accuracy they were concerned with; that is just one of many veils that this (disappointingly large) subset of male gamers has used over the years to camouflage their misogyny and attempt to erase women and women’s stories. 

Yet these problems are not born out of, or limited to, gaming communities.

The representations of female characters in games themselves, from their designs to their narrative roles, have perpetuated sexist stereotypes for decades. Female characters, especially in older games, are often hypersexualized—scantily clad with comically large breasts and small waists independent of whether said attire and body type make any modicum of sense for that character thematically. Beyond the objectifying designs that these characters have had, they're also frequently reduced to background roles with little agency or engagement in the narrative. Sometimes they're hapless damsels-in-distress, like Princess Peach in various Mario games, other times hollow sex objects like Quiet in Metal Gear Solid 5, pictured below. The aptly-named Quiet rarely speaks, but players can watch her showering or have her perform a lap dance for no particular reason.

Sheer, torn tights over a bikini—perfectly functional outfit for counterintelligence operations in Afghanistan

While a chunk of games today continue to propagate imbalanced power structures through design or narrative choices, there has been a gradual but marked shift towards more inclusive content throughout gaming history. The first game to challenge this status quo in a meaningful way was Metroid in 1986, an action game where the protagonist—a bounty hunter named Samus who remains masked up until the very end—is surprisingly revealed to be a woman. It wasn't much, but Nintendo radically subverted audience expectations by having a woman not only in a leading role, but in the very traditionally masculine one of a gunslinging action hero. A decade later, the first Tomb Raider game would hit shelves, whose protagonist Lara Croft is considered one of the most iconic characters in gaming history. Although her design was criticized for catering to the male gaze (hourglass figure, revealing outfit), she was resourceful, strong, and independent—a badass role model for young girls everywhere. More importantly, she was visible; there was nothing concealed about her femininity (unlike Samus), which helped put the first real dent in the monopoly of male video game protagonists.

Lara Croft, while imperfect, paved the way for a host of excellent protagonists and games, including but not limited to Ellie from The Last of Us, Madeline from Celeste, Chell from Portal, Senua from Hellblade, Max from Life is Strange... the list goes on. But despite the abundance of robust woman-led stories in today's gaming landscape, few games have made the bold leap of taking a feminist undercurrent to the world at large. And perhaps none have done it better than the Horizon franchise.

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Guerrilla Games' Horizon franchise (comprising 2017 action-adventure title Horizon: Zero Dawn and its 2022 sequel Horizon: Forbidden West) are set in the post-apocalyptic 31st-century American West. Large robots modeled after wildlife dominate the Earth and (for the most part) coexist peacefully with humanity, which is scattered across a number of primitive tribes. 

I came for the robot giraffes and dinosaurs and stayed for everything else

Our heroine, Aloy, is discovered as a baby girl by elders of the Nora tribe inside All-Mother Mountain, the tribe's holy site. Believing the orphaned child to be a curse, they cast her out and leave her in the care of fellow Nora outcast Rost, who raises her as his own daughter. Fed up of being isolated as a child, Aloy learns from Rost that she may earn the right to join the Nora by winning a hunting tournament known as the Proving. She spends her whole childhood training for the competition, determined to learn the truth about her origins.

Horizon: Zero Dawn kicks into gear when Aloy comes of age and travels to the mountainous Nora lands to compete in the Proving, and it's here upon fully introducing the tribe that the game begins to unravel the first of its many feminist threads. As the player becomes familiar with the social organization of the Nora in these inciting moments of the story, they realize that it represents a rarity in gaming (and art in general)—the tribe is governed under matriarchy. This is unique enough by itself, but even more so given that the Nora are a tribe of hunter-gatherers—an occupation historically associated with men in both media and the real world alike. The tribe is led by three women known as the High Matriarchs, with numerous other women commanding positions of sociopolitical and military authority. Religion is also reconsidered; the Nora pray to a singular deity known as the All-Mother. 

Some argue that the game wastes potential since it scarcely emphasizes this uniqueness or unpacks the differences between the Nora and other, more patriarchal tribes like the Carja, whose politics and characters are central to much of HZD's plot. However, the quiet and unquestioned implementation of this social order combats the idea that representations of feminism in media must mandatorily involve overt discussions of femininity.

The characterization of the Nora tribe sets the stage for Aloy's own development as a feminist character throughout the rest of her journey, which quickly takes her beyond the borders of Nora territory after she wins the Proving. Although many video games portray strong female characters attempting to stand out in patriarchal societies by unexpectedly living up to hypermasculine ideals like strength, intellect, or perseverance, Aloy moves beyond this idea. Her interactions with other characters almost never highlight her gender, despite Aloy earning a reputation as one of the most skilled warriors in the world as the story progresses. Her power in the Horizon games is derived not from her femininity, but exclusively from her talents as a Seeker of the Nora. Neither does the game use said femininity as an impediment; when characters attempt to attack or offend Aloy, they raise issues of class instead of gender, disparaging her "savage" upbringings. Blogger thegenrefield thus argues that "social (and, by the game’s end, a degree of cultural and political) inclusion is an assumed process rather than something deserving of a spotlight."

The world of the Horizon franchise establishes Aloy as a strong person rather than a strong woman.

To that end, the game repeatedly prompts the player to reconsider gender roles within occupational contexts; the women of Horizon are often leaders, war chiefs, guards and weaponsmiths, which has the welcome side effect of also opening up the men of the world to a wider representation. Men are still present as capable warriors or kings, but they are equally proficient caretakers, weavers, or artisans. Per Lauren Woolbright, "Gender is far less at issue in these future societies than it is in our own ... In spite of its being post-apocalyptic, this game is a picture of how things could be."

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Horizon frequently uses the nuances of Aloy's relationships with other characters to establish and underscore its illustrative feminism. Some of the ways it does so are quite fundamental—it doesn't task Aloy with being representative of all women as the token female character in masculine spaces, and permits her to be the primary narrative agent (not always the case, even for some of gaming's most celebrated female protagonists like BioShock's Elizabeth or The Last of Us' Ellie). However, it further reinforces these feminist undertones by contesting notions of amatonormativity. Romance is entirely de-centered in the Horizon games—romantic relationships play no role in Aloy's journey, despite her garnering the attention of many suitors, male and female, throughout the duology. This is a noteworthy departure from the stereotypical norms of game narratives, wherein the narrative progression of female characters is commonly tied to a romantic arc, often heteronormative, that can sidetrack or even supersede their original quest (if they were granted one in the first place). 

Nonetheless, Aloy's lack of romantic endeavors does not entail her loneliness. She is often surrounded by a strong cast of friends, and her friendships are a principal focus of her character development in HFW—she must learn that she doesn't have to do everything alone, contrary to what the isolation of her childhood led her to believe. Melissa Allen discusses how amatonormative standards devalue intimate friendships; she writes, "when the most important relationships are platonic and not romantic, they are automatically viewed as less important and more juvenile than romantic ones." Horizon’s feminist stance contests this notion by depicting fulfilling platonic relationships that are able to catalyze the same narrative progression that we normally expect to come from romantic relationships for female characters in video games.

Aloy grows much closer to her friends Varl and Erend throughout the events of Horizon: Forbidden West

Another interesting aspect of Horizon’s approach to feminism is how it establishes two side characters, namely the AI systems GAIA and HADES (spoiler warning—skip to the next section if you wish to avoid!)

One millennium before the events of HZD, brilliant scientist Elisabet Sobeck creates GAIA, a program tasked with restoring life on Earth after humanity's impending extinction at the hands of a collapsing biosphere. GAIA has a host of subroutines intended to aid in its mission, such as ARTEMIS, dedicated to rebirthing animal life, POSEIDON, dedicated to detoxifying the oceans, and HEPHAESTUS, dedicated to manufacturing mechanized creatures to maintain the environment. One of these subroutines is HADES, a failsafe designed to cause a controlled extinction if GAIA's terraforming efforts fail to make Earth hospitable for humans, allowing GAIA to start from scratch. Back in HZD’s present day, HADES mysteriously breaks free of GAIA's control to become independent. GAIA attempts to self-destruct to shut HADES down. This fails to destroy HADES, but does incapacitate GAIA, causing her to lose control of her subroutines and destabilize the terraforming process. As a last resort, she creates a genetic clone of Elisabet that would one day be able to destroy HADES and restore GAIA to full functionality. That clone... is Aloy.

While this is a riveting plot point, it also raises a compelling question about how cultural norms defined in the real world can govern the fictional universes of games where said culture doesn’t even exist. GAIA, the avatar of life, is portrayed with a feminine voice and appearance. HADES, in stark contrast, is the representation of death, portrayed with a masculine voice and appearance. For all of Horizon’s attempts to subvert gender roles and expectations in its worldbuilding and characterization, it’s telling that these AI systems are named after—and portrayed as—gendered representations of life and death stemming from real-life human mythology. 

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I’d be lying if I said that thirteen-year old Manny cared about anything beyond killing a robot T-rex using a bow and arrow imbued with lightning when he first stepped into the world of Horizon. 

But with the social climate today—both within gaming and more generally—dipping further and further back into misogyny and prejudice, it feels especially pertinent to explore how games can exemplify resistance to the dominant power structures in our society. The Horizon games are some of the most impactful media I’ve engaged with over the past few years, and revisiting the franchise with a more critical lens helped me realize why Aloy—and Horizon as a whole—resonate so deeply with gamers of all backgrounds.

It’s challenging to write an article so deeply entrenched in feminism; there is a level of tact and care with which you have to approach such an analysis (especially as a cishet man). I hope only that I have done it justice, not just for anyone who will hopefully want to check out the amazing world of Horizon for themselves, but also any women and girls who may feel like video games do not welcome them.

I think Elisabet Sobeck says it better than I ever could.

To see more of what I’ve been playing, check out my Playlist account.