Outcast and Outspoken: Aloy’s Social Re-Integration in the Horizon Series by TJ Rowley
xx words, ~x minutes reading time
Issue 8, Summer 2025
Playing Horizon: Zero Dawn (PlayStation 4: 2017) for the first time, I felt that the heroine Aloy was far too well-adjusted for an outcast who, until she was seventeen years old, had only ever spoken to two people. When we meet her, Aloy is an outcast from her tribe, the Nora, and lives outside of society with only her adoptive father, Rost. For others in the tribe, speaking to Aloy is against Nora law. In the post-apocalyptic future, the wilds teem with animal-like machines, but humans have little technology beyond bows and arrows. We join Aloy proper when she is about to enter Nora society for the first time; outside a few unpleasant exchanges, Aloy navigates her new social relationships as smoothly as she climbs a rockface. For a character with such a unique backstory, this felt like a missed opportunity.
Examples abound of the adverse relationship between isolation and social connection. Teens isolated from their school peers during COVID-19 lockdowns are lonelier and are likely to have trouble re-connecting after lockdown.[1] Long-term prisoners released back into a new and unfamiliar society can feel displaced, disaffiliated, and stigmatized unless they have strong social support.[2] Children from fundamentalist religious communities—as ex-fundamentalist Mormon Tara Westover explains in her memoir—may commit terrible faux pas when they enter mainstream society because they haven’t learned the same history as their peers.[3] People who feel socially isolated are likelier to see the world as punitive, to be socially anxious, to cope with stressors by isolating themselves.[4]
Each of these examples weighs against the Aloy we see in Horizon. She is a spellbinding protagonist, but it is the traits we love in her—her wit and snark, her sincerity and empathy—that seem least likely to be held by someone with almost no social exposure. Contrary to Aloy’s experience, society is slippery, and unless you keep a firm grip, you’re likely to fall away.
The Social Butterfly Opens Her Wings
Aloy ought not to have any social skills at all. Her only social outlet is Rost, her adoptive father. His primary role—for Aloy and the player—is as an instructor in a tutorial. He teaches Aloy how to survive alone, and the gameplay reinforces his lessons: her forced independence is why she has the skills of a warrior, medic, and craftswoman all at once. Rost’s only social lesson comes when Aloy is seventeen, and moments before she begins a competition called The Proving to earn her place in Nora society. Aloy plans to win the competition, and with it, the right to demand the Matriarch leaders identify her mother and reveal why she was outcast. Waiting until they are upon the gates of the Nora settlement, Rost delivers the only social advice we see him give: “There will be people celebrating, and feasting,” he says, “More than you’ve ever seen in one place.” His lesson is, one supposes, better late than never.
From then, Aloy enters Nora society. Imagine this frame for Aloy’s first interactions with the Nora: there are many times more people in the village than she has ever seen before; the loud crowd hard on her ears; their voices too numerous to tune out; their social cues unfamiliar, their ostracism of the outcast palpable; the experience more overwhelming than any machine Aloy has faced in combat.
Yet in the game, she enters Nora society with little social awkwardness—albeit, with many questions. When one man lies to her, Aloy has the social nous to know he is dodging her questions.[5] When one of the guards insults her, Aloy has the wit to joke that he must be the guard of the latrine.[6] She meets the hostility of another competitor—who years ago threw a stone at her head—with hitherto unseen sarcasm and pithy insults: “Confidence is quiet. You’re not.” For a person who has never met another woman let alone a whole crowd, Aloy is a relative social butterfly.
In fairness, players can choose dialogue options with lesser or greater signs of social discordance. When Aloy lays to rest in a communal lodge, another occupant asks what she thinks of the lack of privacy. The player can choose Aloy’s combative response (“It’s loud and it stinks and the people are idiots. All these people who kept me out. And now here I am, stuck inside with them.”), a compassionate response (“It has certain charms”), or an insightful response (“comforts and distractions,” she bristles). But in all cases, Aloy settles down to sleep—surrounded by more strangers than she has ever before known.
From there, Aloy wins The Proving, becomes a member of the society that had cast her out, and earns the right to freely wander the lands. As a sort of knight errant in search of quests, Aloy interacts with many other human tribes, each more far-flung and unfamiliar than the last, and each time with little social disharmony. She has questions, certainly—the player can pelt many characters with enquiries about society and history—but Aloy navigates almost every interaction seamlessly, doling out help and earning both friends and a glimmering reputation through her remarkable deeds.
Undoubtedly, we enjoy Aloy’s arrow-sharp wit; when a creepy merchant named Fernund asks her to come closer, she reminds him that her “eyes are up here.” He pretends he was looking at her spear, and asks how she uses it to override the machines. “You stick the pointy end into the machine,” Aloy answers flatly. But her quips come at the cost of showing her disquiet: navigating society is hard enough as a teenager, harder with no social training. And harder still if, as the next section discusses, one’s only social training comes from outdated books and videos.
Aloy And Frankenstein: Learning Society from the Outside
When she is six, Aloy discovers a piece of technology called a Focus, which accesses a digital library of the pre-apocalyptic world. In some sense, Aloy learning about society from this library is like us learning about modern society by reading Beowulf (circa 1000 A.D.). But in another sense, it is also like learning about modern society by reading the future: because Aloy is part of humanity’s second rising (after the previous civilization destroyed the world with its advanced technology), the forebears she listens to are all vastly more technologically sophisticated than her contemporaries. It is here we see another missed opportunity: to have Aloy misunderstand her contemporaries because her social understanding is both too historic and too futuristic.
To see the opportunities, we can draw parallels between Aloy and Dr. Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Though conventionally-beautiful Aloy hardly shares the grotesque features that set Frankenstein’s creature apart from society, Zero Dawn is clear that it takes just a look for the Nora to tell that Aloy does not belong.
Consider that both Aloy and Dr. Frankenstein’s creature are products of brilliant but morally-compromised scientists, not natural births. Frankenstein’s creature remarks, “I was created apparently united by no link to any other being in existence.” This is also true for Aloy, who is the clone of long-dead scientist Elizabet Sobeck.
Both Aloy and Dr. Frankenstein’s creature result from scientific pursuits that threaten the human race: Frankenstein creates a female companion for his creature, only to tear apart the bride-to-be when he fears the two creatures might replicate and wipe out the human race; Aloy is a genetic clone created to restart humanity because it has been wiped out by self-replicating machines.
The unnatural means of their creation is the reason both Aloy and the creature are outcasts. For Aloy, she is the product of a motherless birth, discovered in a scientific base from the old word, leading some of the Nora’s Matriarchs to conclude she is the creation of the “Metal Devil.” Unknown science is also the origin of Dr. Frankenstein’s creature—Frankenstein tells the novel’s narrator, Walton, that he can’t reveal his secret means of conceiving the creature for fear others will make his mistake.
With these parallels established, we can compare how the creature and Aloy react to their societies. In Frankenstein, the creature learns about society by watching an isolated family in the countryside. The creature eventually builds the courage to reveal himself to the family, but he finds only the blind old father. They talk—until the family returns and chases away the frightening visitor. Here, we wonder: might Aloy have ever tried to similarly surveil the Nora from afar? To meet with one of them? One doubts even the strict Rost could contain someone as resourceful and curious as Aloy if she tried. And how would she deal with the inevitable rejection by the Nora? Frankenstein’s creature gives one possibility; enraged by the family’s choice to abandon their home to escape him, the creature burns their cottage down.
One social advantage Aloy has over the creature is that she has the added guidance from Rost. But he himself is an outcast, and the only skills we see him impart to Aloy are survival—not social—skills. (Not to mention his gruff demeanor suggests he has few social skills to teach). Without access to society, both Aloy and the creature learn about humanity from texts—the creature, from the books he finds, and Aloy, from the digital library on her Focus. In that digital library she finds the last recordings of the long-dead inhabitants of a bunker. The content of each recording is anachronistic: one recording gives a father’s birthday wish to his son, another Catholic prayer, another references the (now undoubtedly lost) Macchu Picchu. But we are led to believe that Aloy watches these recordings repeatedly; in the second game, she confesses that she watched the birthday wish recording “a lot…Whenever I wanted to take my mind off things.” But none of these would make much sense to Aloy or apply directly in Nora society.
Here, then, is another missed opportunity in Zero Dawn: for Aloy to only understand social interaction primarily through the lens of the millennia-old texts available to her. In Frankenstein, the creature’s only written sources about society are hundreds or thousands of years old. He learns about the virtue of the “peaceable lawgivers” from Greek antiquity, but he also learns, from the character of Satan in his copy of Paradise Lost, envy toward the society that cast him out. Frankenstein’s creature finds Satan the “fitter emblem” of his condition than the Greek lawgivers, and resolves, like Satan, to destroy his creator. In short, the texts the creature reads frame his understanding of the relationship with his creator.
How might the same principle have applied to Aloy? Having heard in the recording of the Catholic prayer the existence of God, Aloy may have concluded that her miraculous, motherless birth was a divine creation. Or, having seen humans that look like her, with technology sophisticated enough to permanently record their images and voices, she may have expected the Nora to have a similar level of technological sophistication. Might she have been taken aback when she found none of that technology in the Nora village? Might she have concluded that the technology existed, but was being repressed? (The latter possibility is later presented in the second Horizon game, in which the leader of a tribe called the Quen restricts advanced old-world technology to the social elite).
Aloy And Beta: Twin Studies
One counterargument to my thesis that Aloy develops social skills far too quickly is that she, as the clone of a genius polymath, is genetically predisposed to quickly pick up new concepts. However, the second Horizon game, Forbidden West, shows us that not even genius genes can replace social exposure.
In Forbidden West, Aloy discovers that she has a genetic twin, Beta, who like Aloy is a clone of Elizabet Sobeck. Both have the same green eyes and red hair. But unlike Aloy, Beta is neurotic, fearful, and maladjusted. Recall that when Aloy first entered society, she was socially adroit enough to detect lies, trade insults, and sleep in communal living quarters amongst more people than she had ever known. By contrast, when freed from her captors and introduced to Aloy’s base—and, for the first time, to society—Beta hides in the basement, where she remains until the closing stages of the main quest. How is Aloy’s genetic twin so different?
We learn that Beta was raised without any society at all; she and Aloy form, in some sense, a twin study about social isolation. Like Aloy, Beta learned about society through texts. But unlike Aloy, texts were Beta’s only source of social instruction. Created by “benefactors” who never showed their faces, Beta learned about society only through a virtual reality headset. Eventually, one benefactor—the “first real person who ever bothered to speak to [her]”—secretly introduced her to paintings, books, and media. Those lessons stopped and the benefactors revealed themselves and marched Beta off to serve her function (the details of which aren’t relevant here).
Aloy is uniquely critical of Beta once they meet, remarking that though they look alike, Beta doesn’t act “anything like me…or Elisabet, for that matter.” “I’m out there in the wilds, risking my life every day,” she says on another occasion, “and all she can do is hide in there and tell us how hopeless it all is.” What is the reason the two are so different?
Aloy eventually settles on the answer: she had Rost. That is, his fatherly influence was basically sufficient to integrate Aloy into society. Rather than it taking a village to properly socialize a child, Horizon argues that with the right person, it can be enough to have a society of two.
Can The Outcast Find Love?
With Rost gone after seventeen-year-old Aloy wins The Proving, Aloy has no one else in her society of two. Concurrently, she is thrust into the Nora tribe and into contact with boys and girls her age. Teenage years are troubling, even for the well-adjusted. But in Aloy’s case, we do not see any evidence that she interacts with anyone her age from when she is six until she is seventeen. She goes through puberty without meeting—let alone having the opportunity to develop those complicated feelings for—anyone else.
Once Aloy enters Nora society, she is resolutely disinterested in matters of the heart. Aloy’s insatiable curiosity drives her to reach into depths of the underground ‘cauldrons’, but strangely not into the depths of romance. This is a strange omission; even Frankenstein’s creature longed for a bride.
Aloy’s disinterest in romance leads to comical flirtations from the men and women she meets. The third male she ever meets—the first two being Rost and a boy she saves from a stampede when she is a child—makes a pass at her.[7] Her reply to his flirtation is confused: “What are you talking about?” Aloy eventually catches the eyes of the “Sun King” Avad, who is the most politically powerful man in her world. He begins confusing his feelings for a murdered lover with feelings for Aloy and asks her to stay in his Kingdom: “It’s hard to imagine where we’d be without you,” he says, “and I don’t want to try.” She rebuffs him. Avad tries once more in the second game; after gifting her a tiara, a new spear, and a statue in her honour, Avad asks if Aloy will return to him after her mission is done. Not even a Sun King, however, can light Aloy’s interests.
Women fare little better with Aloy—at least at first. A spy named Vanasha compliments Aloy’s hair and unsuccessfully invites Aloy to her tent[8], and a forgewoman named Petra, sheened with sweat from her steamy labours, notes aloud that she thought Aloy would be “Thicker” but that she was still “very well struck.” Aloy replies that time for flirting is inopportune.[9] (Where and from whom Aloy learned the concept of flirting, we can only imagine). In the second game, the god-like final boss Tilda reveals she was once lovers with Aloy’s predecessor and genetic match, Dr. Elizabet Sobeck. At the climax, Tilda asks Aloy to escape the earth on a spaceship with her. When she is rebuffed like all the others that have pursued Aloy, Tilda tries forcing Aloy to submit by attacking her with a robotic exoskeleton.[10] Alas, Aloy’s heart finds even Tilda’s missile and laser attacks unpersuasive.
Even friendly hugs appear alien for Aloy. In the first game, she doesn’t hug Rost, the only person she has ever known personally, even when he says he is leaving her forever. In the second game, she gives exactly four hugs, and only when emotions are high: she hugs a friend (Talanah) when Talanah learns her quest to rescue her lover was for nothing; she hugs another friend (Zo) after her boyfriend is killed; and she hugs her adoptive sister Beta and later her male friend (Erend) after defeating the main antagonists.
It takes two main games, two expansions, and hundreds of hours of gameplay for Aloy to finally catch feelings. The second expansion, Burning Shores, introduces Aloy’s first romanceable character, Seyka. Headstrong, disobedient, self-reliant, and nearly outcast from her tribe, Seyka is very reminiscent of who Aloy used to be in the first Horizon game (“I don’t know where I fit in. I guess you know what that’s like,” Seyka tells Aloy, in some particularly on-the-nose dialogue). Seyka’s qualities fluster Aloy from the start, but Aloy tastes her own medicine when Seyka remains firmly focused on her mission to find her sister rather than Aloy’s attention.
At the end of the main quest, Seyka invites Aloy to join her where they first met. The pair discuss the meaning of “home”; Aloy says “home” is the people she wants to be with, and Seyka replies that that person is Aloy. “I was hoping you felt the same way,” she invites. The outcome of this romance is left—at least until the next game—to the player, who must choose Aloy’s response. Romantic gamers might choose to accept Seyka’s approach with a kiss, but options exist to rebuff her (with or without making Seyka the notable recipient of Aloy’s fifth hug).
But regardless of the player’s choice, Aloy’s understanding of “home” shows that her social ties have become her bedrock: her comfort, her source of meaning, the source of her drive. What scars social isolation left upon her, the right people have healed.
Conclusion
Seventeen years as an outcast, with only one person to talk to, and laws preventing anyone else from talking to her, ought to have more severely debilitated Aloy’s perception of, and integration into, society. Yet she enters her tribe scarcely affected by the crowd, the noise, stigma, and social complexity. Ironically, it takes a full game before we properly see Aloy’s difficulties with social integration. Before the end of the first game and the beginning of the second, the player learns that Aloy ducked out of the party held in her honour for saving the day in the first game, saying she was uncomfortable in large crowds. Her friend Erend later criticizes her for not saying goodbye. She spends the next months dodging her friends and doing risky quests alone, changing her mind only after a near-death experience. All of this is consistent with a poorly socialized person—but this mindset would have been appropriate for Aloy at the beginning of the first game, not the end of it. Opportunities to challenge Aloy included: to have her mistakenly apply the thousand-year-old society she sees with her Focus to her contemporaries; to have her attempt to surveil or meet Nora citizens, and react badly when they rebuff her; in short, to have her react as uniquely as her backstory deserved.
But Aloy also challenged my presumption that social isolation would beget social isolation. For one thing, despite being largely alone, Aloy is never lonely. She comes to enjoy the company of (certain) peers, but she is not lonely without them. She breaks the silence—for herself and the player—with cheers (as she leaps from a cliffside) and grumbles (as she gets water in her boots). She shows us that social isolation is both subjective and objective: one can feel lonely with many friends or feel content having none.
Where does this leave us? The forthcoming Horizon game will have to give Aloy challenges no longer solvable by the end of a spear. Given Aloy’s uneasiness with prestige or titles, Horizon 3 could force Aloy to contend with the ‘lone savior’ role foisted upon her. Or—given that some of the key characters in Horizon are self-aware A.I., perhaps Aloy will find herself on the flipside of the equation, and will have to learn how to integrate an outsider A.I. into human society.
In her concluding speech in the second game, Aloy says that she will need to spread the word and rally more forces to her side. Perhaps in the third game, Aloy the social outcast will have to overcome an even greater obstacle than rejoining society: uniting it.
Sources
Horizon: Zero Dawn (PlayStation 4: 2017).
Horizon Forbidden West (PlayStation 4: 2022).
Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores (PlayStation 5: 2023).
“Horizon Zero Dawn Full Transcript.” October 09, 2018. https://game-scripts-wiki.blogspot.com/2018/10/horizon-zero-dawn-full-transcript.html
“Horizon II Forbidden West Full Transcript.” February 20, 2022. https://game-scripts-wiki.blogspot.com/2022/02/horizon-ii-forbidden-west-transcript.html
Brooks, Isabel. “Young people like me are still feeling the effects of Covid – and they’re not all bad.” The Guardian. May 29, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/29/young-people-covid-work-studies-pandemic
Cacioppo, John and Louise Hawkley, “People Thinking About People: The Vicious Cycle of Being a Social Outcast in One’s Own Mind.” In Kipling D. Williams et al, The Social Outcast. New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2005. Pp 91-104.
Munn, S. Melissa. ‘Falling out of the rabbit hole’: Former long-term prisoners’ negotiation of release, reentry and resettlement. Diss. University of Ottawa (Canada), 2009. https://ruor.uottawa.ca/items/38f9188a-1133-40c8-b627-4cc50441dc5b
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. D.L. MacDonald, Ed. Broadview Press; 3rd Ed. (June 20 2012).
Westover, Tara. “What Happened After I Left My Survivalist Family and Went to College.” Time. Feb 15, 2018. https://time.com/5146171/tarar-westover-educated-book-mormon-survivalist/
Wong, Jessica. “Teens feeling disconnected, hopeless due to COVID-19 raises alarm for parents, experts.” CBC News. Jan 23, 2021. https://www.cbc.ca/news/covid-teens-mental-health-1.5884240
[1] Jessica Wong, “Teens feeling disconnected, hopeless due to COVID-19 raises alarm for parents, experts.” CBC News. Jan 23, 2021. https://www.cbc.ca/news/covid-teens-mental-health-1.5884240
[1] Isabel Brooks, “Young people like me are still feeling the effects of Covid – and they’re not all bad.” The Guardian. May 29, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/29/young-people-covid-work-studies-pandemic
[2 Munn, S. Melissa. ‘Falling out of the rabbit hole’: Former long-term prisoners’ negotiation of release, reentry and resettlement. Diss. University of Ottawa (Canada), 2009. https://ruor.uottawa.ca/items/38f9188a-1133-40c8-b627-4cc50441dc5b
[3] Westover’s particular faux pas was asking her professor what the Holocaust was. See Tara Westover, “What Happened After I Left My Survivalist Family and Went to College.” Time. Feb 15, 2018. https://time.com/5146171/tarar-westover-educated-book-mormon-survivalist/
[4] John Cacioppo and Louise Hawkley, “People Thinking About People: The Vicious Cycle of Being a Social Outcast in One’s Own Mind.” In Kipling D. Williams et al, The Social Outcast. New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2005. Pp 91-104.
[5] Aloy: “Stop dodging my questions.”
…
Olin: “It didn’t show me anything. I told you, it malfunctioned. Happens all the time.”
Aloy: “You’re not a very convincing liar.”
[6] Resh: Motherless chuff.
Aloy: What’d you say?
Resh: Find your bed, outcast, and dream of winning the Proving. That’s the closest you’re going to get.
Aloy: Oh, this is the bed-house? With you standing guard, I figured it was the latrine.
[7] Erend: “You’re smart, you’re obviously capable, and well, I mean, look at you…”
[8] Vanasha: More prisoners than royalty, don’t you think? Hnn. Love your hair. You and I need to chat, little huntress. The green tent down in Shadowside. I’ll be waiting.
Aloy: Uh, kinda busy.
[9] Petra: Huh. So you must be Aloy, then. I thought there’d be more of you.
Aloy: More of me?
Petra: Thicker, I suppose. More of a gearwheel, less of a ringlet. Don’t get me wrong - you’re very well struck.
Aloy: Do all Oseram flirt at the most inopportune times?
[10] Tilda: I loved Elisabet more than you could ever know. And I let her stay behind to die with the rest of humanity - a mistake I have regretted for a thousand years. Now, she stands before me again. Not some inferior copy… (Beta lowers her head) …but her best possible self. So I’m not asking - you’re coming with me.”
