Thinking about the kind of music everyone in Aloy's squad would listen to once APOLLO is back online is a hilarious exercise, for the record.
Based on a combination of research and pure vibes alone, Zo and Varl listen exclusively to indigenous folk music like Mahk Jchi, bands like The Cranberries, and things in the Enigma and Enya vein... when they're together, anyway. On his own, Varl listens to bubblegum pop (think early Taylor Swift, Sugar, Sugar, As Long As You Love Me, etc.). And he sings along to it very, very badly, which Zo pretends to be annoyed by because she finds his embarrassment entirely unnecessary but funny. (On her own, Zo loves Tracey Chapman and Melissa Etheridge.)
Erend, as we already know, listens to the worst techno metal you could imagine, but, after Zo's begging, he's branched out and found a love for classic 70s punk. (Cherry Bomb is his favorite after everything by Concrete Beach Party. )
Drakka likes slightly-scream-y metal with a fast beat like Riding the Eagle (on the nose, he knows it) and Dragonforce. Anything he can hunt to is good listening in his book.
Nil loves disco, especially The Bee Gees, to absolutely everyone's surprise (until Aloy thinks of the implications of Stayin' Alive and that it's supposed to directly mirror CPR and a heartbeat.) Beta loves Celine Dion to absolutely no one's surprise. (Nil will also listen to straight-up dance-club rave music with the bass jacked all the way up and an absolutely deadpan expression on his face. Somehow, this is scarier than if he was listening to an actual horror band. When Beta's overwhelmed, she'll listen to "music" that's genuinely just noise, and Aloy has to remind herself that killing her clone sister isn't a nice thing to do every time Beta plays her playlist loud enough for her to hear it.)
Kotallo enjoys classical symphonic music because it helps him focus and he admires the precision. This is the sole thing anyone in the group has in common with Sylens. (Sylens is also a fan of smooth jazz. The concept of knowing something with such technical proficiency that you break all of its rules and still succeed is something that reaches Sylens at his core. Also, not me imagining Sylens a la J.K. Simmons like, "Aloy, are you rushing, or are you dragging?")
Alva has genuinely eclectic taste and likes a little bit of everything. But she does have a special place in her heart for women who rap (especially Lauryn Hill) and what she considers underrated KPOP groups (think BVNDIT).
Gildun favors Motown classics and won't hesitate to sing along, though Marvin Gaye he is not.
The Hidden Ember crew all enjoy showtunes, but distinctly different ones. Stemmur enjoys real old school Rodgers & Hammerstein (Oklahoma! is his favorite), and Abadund (who loves Chicago and anything with a Bob Fosse touch) would very much appreciate it if Morlund would just listen to Defying Gravity instead of taking it as a personal challenge.
And it brings me no small amount of joy to imagine Avad sitting on his throne vibing out to Matchbox 20's Lonely No More and Santana's Smooth while thinking about how much he relates. Rob Thomas is his boy, period, but he has a thing for any late 90s/early 2000s emo pop-rock (The Goo Goo Dolls, early Maroon 5, Third Eye Blind, etc.)
(Talanah endlessly mocks him for this and will enjoy her non-emo 80s pop music on her own, thanks. She thinks she's having a love affair with Whitney Houston. Petra sympathizes but prefers Stevie Nicks.)
Fashav is a basic bitch like me who likes classic rock. His favorite singers are Bruce Springsteen, Steve Perry, and Joe Elliott, in that order.
Aloy herself, meanwhile, can't be bothered with music because it's a distraction... buuuuuuut she secretly quite enjoys folk music and old school outlaw country. She becomes irrationally annoyed with herself when she discovers that APOLLO's entire backlog of Johnny Cash comes straight from the archives of Travis Tate (or, more specifically, his mother).
many women are excited to get old and weird, but i have great news that it's fully possible to become weird now, before you get old. just imagine the heights of weirdness you will be able to reach in fifty years if you get started now. that's what I think
i fucking LOVE hfw rebels i killed one of their soldiers and upon seeing the body the guard was just like 'damn what do i do?' like idk girl you're in charge
In Horizon: Forbidden West, I think it's pretty well implied that when members of the GAIA Gang learn to "use their Focuses" then they're also learning to read. Yes, there are scrolls and parchments and other datapoints you can collected that signal literacy among the tribes, but I'd argue it's a specialised skill that most soldiers/warriors don't need.
Like, Varl mutters "That's a lot of glyphs" when he first puts on his Focus in HFW's intro. He, Erend, and even Zo talk about having difficulty getting through Focus documents on multiple occasions. In HZD, Helis records his personal thoughts and manifesto on thousand-year-old voice recorders, which has to be less efficient than a written journal for your average warlord-on-the-go. Not that they all start from scratch, necessarily, but there's a big difference between understanding CAUTION signs and reading summaries of historical events.
So we can say that a large chunk of the GAIA Gang learned to read as adults, yes? But did they learn to write?
That's not as well established in the Horizon series. So - headcanon time!
Writing is an entirely different skill to reading, as it's a productive skill while reading is receptive. The same goes for speaking and listening, respectively. We don't see the gang actively learning writing, but some of them do leave written datapoints behind. My headcanon is that they *do* learn to write, but at different times and with different skill levels.
(This is not a reflection on mental ability, btw. Oral history is a thing. Reading maths and diagrams is separate from reading text. This is just my personal HC because Guerrilla maybe didn't separate writing as a distinct skill from reading.)
Here's my list of the HFW characters' writing backgrounds, on a scale of "writing is as natural as breathing" to "getting along fine without it."
Beta: Taught to write very early in life, because she was created as a tool for scientific discovery. Received no praise for learning "basic" skills, even as a child. Exclusively trained on reports, essays, and proofs. Zero skill at creative or fiction writing, save for mental challenges and paradoxes she wrote for herself out of sheer desperation for entertainment. Effortlessly types on a full keyboard one-handed, Eureka Seven style.
Aloy: Angrily taught herself how to write after finding her Focus at age 8. No writing models, so she became extremely perturbed by the differences between standard examples on her Focus and snippets of adverts found in the wilds. Writing skills further separated her from the rest of the Nora; but it's a skill so she's gonna master it, damnit. She can write very well, but doesn't.
Alva: As a Diviner, she embodies one of the specialised roles that would require reading and writing skills. She learned writing when she began her Diviner training, which I assume would begin around age 11 or so - old enough to start thinking about the future, but young enough to manipulate into Ceo's vision of the future. Yes, this is an allegory for religion. Since all Diviners are taught writing in their tween years, abbreviations and slang developed during that time are not cringe but a mark of pride for your generation.
Zo: Easily the best student among the adult learners in the GAIA Gang. She may have had some experience in writing earlier, but whatever training she had was completed at the Base. Since she's repeatedly pulled in to help train other members of the gang, her grammar and spelling are excellent. Her sentences are straightforward - nothing too complicated, but still effective.
Varl: One of the few creative writers in the gang. Being part of the Nora, he would have experience with their songs and stories, both in evidence at the Proving ceremony. He learned to write while at the Base, and during that time he was especially interested in turning those songs into written works. At first, the interest was just to make nice things for Zo, but he developed a passion for it as he practiced. He gained the most out of the DEMETER files, just because he found that poetry didn't have to follow a specific pattern or even a specific grammar. His prose writing skills aren't great, but his poems are thoughtful and earnest.
Kotallo: An example of learning exactly what he needs to hone his skills, and no more. Like the rest of the warriors, he learned writing at the Base. It was effective to learn how to write clear instructions, so he did. But after that, there were more important things to focus on. Questions, dialogue, clauses and phrases - none of it. Kotallo writes exclusively in statements.
Erend: He had a hard enough time learning to read at the Base, so there wasn't a great deal of time to learn to write as well. He's excellent with numbers and diagrams - he's the captain of specialised royal guards, which means good organisation - but text proved frustrating. And, frankly, Erend knows that you need to take what enjoyment out of life that you can get. So, he has the barest of basics only. Rather than beating himself up over a skill he never needed before, he'd much rather beat you at a game of Machine Strike.
1st Doctor: "We must keep our time travelling a secret!"
12th Doctor: rides into battle in a tank, playing a guitar and introduces the word "dude" several centuries before any of these things were ever invented
I was thinking about Beta and how she wouldn't have any exposure except for a few weeks/months of old tv/holo shows she saw as a teenager, so she wouldn't have much/any early exposure to profanity...
And then I realized: she spent all of her childhood studying the Zero Dawn project. In the code.
Even setting aside Travis Tate content exposure (more on that in a moment), code comments can contain profanity. It's frowned on in professional life, but who's going to call you out on your code comments in the "resurrect all life after we're all dead" project?
Stress and deadlines tend to exacerbate this kind of thing too. Even Samina dropped some paint-peeling profanity in there, guaranteed.
Combine that with Travis Tate's probably baseline level of profane commentary (I'm thinking he gets biblical in his more angry comments) and I think you end up with a Beta Sobeck who makes Petra and Seyka blush and take notes.
It was like... having a strength that was always there. That's still there. Even now, I hear him in my head when things get bad:
"When it looks impossible, look deeper. And then fight like you can win."
I have come to the conclusion that the role of a queen genuinely suits Aloy, looking at her character.
This "free spirit" label is just a superficial stereotype that contradicts her true canonical image. If we strip away this fan romanticization, Aloy was never free and never aspired to be. On the contrary, her entire life is a story of total captivity, dependence, and colossal pressure. From early childhood, she grew up with the stigma of an outcast, and as soon as she rid herself of it, she immediately fell into the grip of someone else's legacy. A mission to save the planet, which she did not choose, collapsed onto her. The canonical Aloy is not a wild bird, but a hostage to her DNA, locked within the framework of a two-thousand-year-old plan.
Instead of "freedom," her character is driven by a compulsive sense of duty. She literally does not know how to rest, relax, or live for herself. Every attempt she made to get closer to people or to engage in something other than the endless repair of a falling world was met with the thought: "If I don't do it, everyone dies." In the role of the Queen of Meridian, this deep-seated trait of Aloy—her obsessive, childhood-rooted obedience and hyper-responsibility—manifests not as "submitting to a cage," but as approaching governance as another vital mission that she is obligated to execute flawlessly.
Her agreement to become queen and share the burden of rule with Avad in our story is not the "imprisonment of a free huntress," but rather a logical step for a character who did nothing but take responsibility for others her entire life, except now she does it officially and not alone. Previously, the world expected salvation from her; now, it expects the wisdom of a ruler. Internally, she has not relaxed for a single second. For her, the lavish silks and gold are the same heavy armor that she wears constantly, because behind it lies that same immense internal tension: "If I make a mistake, thousands of people will suffer."
Avad, in turn, would become the only person with whom she could share this unbearable weight of responsibility. While she used to carry everything on her own, his authority and diplomacy now evoke a complex mix of feelings—a sense of relief that she is no longer alone, blended with the familiar inner resistance of someone who has relied solely on herself her entire life.
Ultimately, Aloy and Avad turn out to be much closer to each other in spirit and destiny than it might seem at first glance: both are involuntary hostages to their duty, whose lives were abruptly reshaped by external forces and tragic circumstances. Avad, who never sought the crown and was forced to take the throne after the bloody overthrow of his mad father, carries an unbearable burden of responsibility for the well-being of thousands of lives, sacrificing personal freedom for peace. Their union is not a classic romantic cliché, but a partnership of two lonely leaders, exhausted by colossal pressure, who hide similar internal scars beneath the external armor of status and obligations. By sharing power, they gain a luxury unique to each of them—the opportunity to finally ease total control, knowing that a person equal in strength of spirit stands nearby, capable of holding this world together with you.
By embarking on this path, Aloy chooses not a crown, not status, and not the golden cage of Meridian—she chooses an equal, a person capable of understanding her inner loneliness and sharing the unbearable weight of the world that she carried on her own shoulders for so long. The duty of the crown itself is merely a new incarnation of her familiar routine, as Aloy has been fused with the burden of total responsibility since childhood and simply does not know how to live otherwise. After the inevitable victory over Nemesis, she will hardly be able to suddenly become "free" and sit idle. For a person who can function exclusively in "mission / rescue / responsibility" mode, the idea of simply walking into the sunset and picking flowers is mental death. Without a clear, large-scale task in the post-Nemesis world, she would simply shatter from internal emptiness and an existential crisis. In this new reality, Avad’s marriage proposal looks to her not like a restriction, but like a clear, understandable plan and a new large-scale goal amidst the chaos and emptiness that will inevitably arrive when her global debt to the world is finally paid.
Moreover, by making this decision, Aloy chooses not so much the salvation of the world, but herself for the first time in her life, allowing herself to finally receive the sincere love and unconditional acceptance that Avad so noblely offered her. No matter how much she suppressed these feelings before for the sake of the higher goal, his devotion was truly priceless to her as an outcast raised in isolation, and deep down she desperately wanted to believe that she deserved the right to this personal, quiet happiness after the storm subsided.
And it seems to me that, in the end, family will one day become a much higher priority for her than the rest of the world and her endless responsibility toward it, because it is precisely in these relationships, next to a loving person, that the former outcast Aloy will finally find her most important, unshakeable support. Now, she consciously accepts this new crown and the heavy burden of power no longer for the sake of abstract humanity, but for the protection of that very close circle and the loved one who gave her a reason to live on. This path allows her to gradually shift the focus from global survival to creation within the circle of loved ones, where her personal happiness finally becomes a rightful goal.
jacobvanloon
vaporwave
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