This looks like fun. :) I'd love to talk about Ared, my original character from my Horizon longfic, Fallen Skies (artwork by GalooGameLady).
Ared. In his tribe (Erie, original tribe living in American Appalachia), the naming conventions for men and women give women two-syllable names (Maelune, Missi, Fauna, etc.), and men one-syllable names (Ford, Boon, Clint, etc.). The Erie are a matriarchal tribe with a massive cultural lean on women being superior to men, especially in the sense of being better leaders. Because of this, Maelune, leader of the Erie, gave her special Chosen Son a two-syllable feminine-convention name, because she wanted everyone to know he was more special and important than every other male in the tribe.
Male - an identical genetic Lightkeeper clone of Zero Dawn Alpha, Travis Tate.
Exactly the same age as Aloy, activated on exactly the same day due to a logic bomb Tate coded into the Lightkeeper Project should it ever be activated for any reason despite Elisabet's determination to shut it down (in Fallen Skies, both are currently 21). Ared's zygote was a Lightkeeper backup stored in a separate location that Tate set up as a failsafe should the world ever need his expertise again.
What Tribe/clan are they from?
Ared is from the Erie tribe, an established, embittered offshoot of the Nora. The Erie are separated into two "coteries" - the Forest Coterie, the tribe Ared is from, and the Water Coterie, a pacifist subgroup of Erie who have split from their bloodthirsty brethren to pursue a life of nautical peace.
The Water Coterie live in the skeleton of Walt Disney World, which was raised above sea level by the Walt Disney Company when Florida eventually became overwhelmed by water due to global warming. Their culture is matriarchal and highly deifies the story of Cinderella, though they don't actually know its true narrative (they have created one for themselves involving a wounded warrior queen). They revere their version of the story the point that when their leader, Zaphira, lost her leg to a fight with an Inkwrapper (original kraken machine), she replaced it with a prosthetic leg made of sea glass.
Zaphira, leader of the Water Coterie (art by HannahmationStudios)
The Water Coterie's culture relies heavily on the water, and they have developed several methods of living in and alongside it. One of their main exports is natural pearls, and their divers are their most revered class, gaining fish tattoos as a mark of pride with every successful pearl dive. Additionally, Zaphira was originally the one to find Ared's activation pod when it was released from the underwater Cradle where it was being held as a backup. She offered the sea-child to the leader of the Forest Coterie, Maelune, as a peace offering, but Maelune took the child and refused the peace. The Forest Coterie continues to actively hunt the Water Coterie whenever they gain access to them, and block their ability to trade with other tribes.
Maelune, leader of the Forest Coterie (art by HannahmationStudios)
The Forest Coterie (Ared's tribe) exist with an enormous chip on their shoulder towards the Nora, from which they originated, and have adopted a culture which celebrates existing in exactly the opposite way of the oppression they felt they faced under the rule of the Nora. The Erie culture focuses heavily on both violence and free love/procreation, and looks unfavourably on "bonding" (their equivalent of marriage), as it limits an Erie's ability to copulate with anyone but their chosen bondmate. They have even developed a method of punishment to force newly bonded couples to "prove" the merit of their bond--by forcing them to be chained together for two weeks with a set of gold-plated shackles, meant as a mark of shame (cruelly called the "bonds of matrimony"). The only way to break a bond once it has been established is to call for a parting, which is a fight to the death in the Maw between the previously bonded couple (taking literally the phrase, "'til death do us part").
Procreation to bolster ranks for war is encouraged by the Erie, and failure to do so is punished heavily. Maelune in particular has eighteen children, though she used to have twenty-six. In the past, before the Derangement, the Erie were known to actively attack other tribes to capture their members, to gain new members for their own tribe by force. These "new Erie" are then given a choice to either become warriors or procreators for the Erie, and should they refuse both, they are sent to the Maw - an interactive gladiatorial arena which is the Forest Coterie's main source of training and entertainment.
Ford, Erie son of a Banuk "new Erie" (art by HannahmationStudios)
The Forest Coterie specifically train their warriors to hunt and kill other humans, rather than machines. They never developed any formal machine hunting training or methods, but have become deadly with stealth and traps meant to target other tribes. The Erie are murderers and scavengers who tattoo themselves with flowers to celebrate their confirmed human kills - when they defeat a human opponent, they cut off the corpse's right hand to bring home to prove their victory, and gain another bloom. The Erie, despite their primitiveness in most areas and their extreme isolation since the start of the Derangement, have developed impressive skills with both improvised weaponry made from machine parts, as well as reading and writing skills unparalleled by many but the most advanced tribes. These developments are relatively new for their culture and have only come about because of Ared and the knowledge he gained from being left files by Tate, in the hope that he would grow up learned enough to be able to fix whatever broke that necessitated his activation in the first place.
The Erie have also developed drugs to assist in their machinations - a drug called venom which acts as a strong hallucinogen to lower decision-making inhibition and increase impulsiveness, making the taker unpredictable, while also making its taker feel no pain, and a drug called Salamander which acts as an aphrodisiac. Ared in particular has been regularly dosed with venom to keep him as deadly and impulsive as he has been all his life, and to keep him from getting "in his head" too much, as Maelune puts it. However, Ared's behaviour is not hinged entirely on his venom use, but also on a deep and long-standing history of conditional love and manipulation by Maelune. Ared has admitted to killing his own siblings because his mother implied she wanted him to.
Do they have a backstory? If so, share as much as you want!
During the Zero Dawn creation phase, the Lightkeeper Project was greenlit, and then later shut down by Elisabet Sobeck. Travis Tate disagreed with her decision, thinking Lightkeeper might be a necessary failsafe, but did not argue her decision at the time. Instead, he arranged for a secret set of Lightkeeper backups to be stored in a separate facility, and coded in a two-pronged logic bomb that would activate his Lightkeeper zygote at that backup facility should one of two reasons become immediate: either when any copy of Elisabet's Lightkeeper zygote was activated at anytime, anywhere, OR, should HADES for some reason fail and send out its swansong signal to activate the zygote/logic bomb.
As it turned out, the first requirement was fulfilled first, and so his zygote was activated via a protocol Tate named Project Persephone, in the hopes that his clone and Elisabet's clone could once again join forces to save the world from whatever had happened that necessitated her activation. Tate included a Focus with the zygote that included all relevant information for the child to grow up and know his purpose. He also included a kernel of the HADES function, along with instructions for where to find the other pieces of the function to reboot HADES, should anything have happened to it in the interim that required his clone's intervention to fix.
Unfortunately, as HADES had been corrupted by being unshackled by NEMESIS before being destroyed, its swansong signal carried that corruption with it to Ared's Focus, where it took root, and gradually began to take over his brain and twist Tate's original messages and intent into something more akin to its own motivations. Via Project Persephone, Tate prompted Ared to go out into the world and seek Elisabet's clone so they could work together to fix whatever broke in Zero Dawn that necessitated their activation. Unfortunately, only Ared was privy to this prompt, and not Aloy, meaning she had no idea he existed. He, on the other hand, had been fed a narrative all his life by Tate that he and Aloy were meant to be together - and twisted by NEMESIS, this turned from a would-be happy reunion into something far more obsessive and sinister.
Ared himself was raised by Maelune of the Forest Coterie, who was only too happy to use his status as a Chosen Child to bolster her own power and importance within the tribe. She ensured he was revered and beloved by whatever means necessary, and manipulated him to be loyal to her, and only her, so that his plans for fixing the broken world would forefront the Erie at the same time. Maelune resented the idea of an interloper (Ared's "intended") and actively tried to prevent him from leaving to find Aloy, but found she had no power to stop him, as his "purpose" (finding the HADES pieces) existed outside the scope of Erie territory. However, as far as Maelune is aware, Ared is unwaveringly loyal to his mother and his tribe (due in no small part to emotional trauma and manipulation inflicted on him from a young age).
Ared has been actively pursuing Aloy ever since HADES' destruction, but only recently managed to cross paths with her. But now that he has her in his sights, he's become her most unshakeable pursuit predator.
Do you have any art of them? If not, do you have a general description of what they look like?
Art by HannahmationStudios (me)
Art by DizzyPunch on Ko-Fi
