#beta hfw

to celebrate finishing hfw and finally being able to unblock the spoiler tags, here's a couple doods i did in my 2 weeks of hfw insanity <3 (there is much more art to come) (this is a threat)

the whole game echoes themes of trust and support. aloy constantly shirks other’s attempts to reach her (varl and erend in the early game especially) and pushes them away. whoever, I wholeheartedly believe that the single thing that flips her “I work alone” mentality is the “elisabet and Travis” datapoint in the hades proving lab.

this datapoint is fucking FASCINATING. we see aloy immediately excited to see elisabet only to be let down by the conversation: Travis extending a simple invitation to Elisabet only to be shut down immediately (and rather coldly). I think this stats point is a wake up call for aloy in the early game, especially as Sylens makes his comment afterward: “the exceptional walk in solitude.”

but aloy never wanted to be seen as exceptional. she never even wanted to stand out. all she wanted to do was be accepted. I think this moment is something of a hard reset and she’s forced to ask herself if that’s how she comes across to others—harried and distant. it even comes up later when she’s grilling tilda on what elisabet was really like. you can hear the nervousness in her voice as she asks, “so when you met her, she was… what? Aloof? Distant?”

all of this to say that as aloy learns more about what elisabet was like and how she sees time and time again through the side quests in the game that pushing people away and not communicating leads to nothing but sorrow, you can see her mentally building up to the moment where she essentially accepts beta as part of her family. she refuses to be distant and she refuses to run away. and when she loses beta she risks it all to save her.