thinking about general herres horizon: zero dawn today. about the man who agreed to and executed project enduring victory, knowing it was a futile effort except to buy time for zero dawn to bring back new life one day in a distant future the people fighting would never see.
about how even though he must have believed it was the only way to ensure humanity didn't go extinct, he still saw lying to the world's civilians to get them to fight a losing battle as the crime that it was, and specifically asked elisabet to keep a recording of his confession to that fact in apollo's archives so that the humans who took this knowledge could learn all the better not to let this kind of atrocity be "necessary" ever again. to not make the same mistakes. the way he gently refuses elisabet's small attempt to ease his conscience with a reminder that it was necessary this time.
and then i think about ted faro, the man who could not stand the idea of his legacy being spoilt by his own actions. the man who wiped apollo clean and robbed the new generations of humans of all that knowledge just to keep his memory from being "he who ended the world."
and i believe we are meant to hold these two things up and examine them together, actually. i think they're in conversation. hm.
