Just a warning right away, this piece is not going to shy away from talking about the story contents of the recent Horizon: Forbidden West DLC, The Burning Shores, and any other content from the Horizon franchise. They’ll be talked about without any spoiler warnings, so if that’s something you want to avoid, we suggest you turn back now. Thank you!
So, The Burning Shores came out recently and gave us a big shakeup at the very end of the story, which I won’t mention since we’re right under the spoiler warning, but from the title of this piece, I am sure that you could give a pretty solid guess as to what I may be alluding to. And at first I found the idea fun, but the more I’ve sat with it, the more conflicted I end up feeling, so I’d like us to take a moment to talk about the way that romance has been handled for Aloy and where we may be going in the future.
Before we talk about The Burning Shores, let’s just go over how things have played out up to this point, though. Aloy is a character that has a lot going on and she’s also someone who seems to have her priorities pretty rigidly set. Considering she’s one of very few that has a true understanding of the history of the world she lives in, it makes sense that she feels a lot of the burden of responsibility to fix the problems that world is currently facing. She’s also one of the few in general that could do anything about it as her gene print allows her to get into certain places that others would not have access to in the first place.
In fact, the entirety of Aloy’s growth in Forbidden West’s story was focused around her (somewhat reluctantly) gathering allies who she could share that burden with and realizing that she could indeed share that with them. By the end she’s reached a place where she actually is placing a higher value on the people around her and is more willing to trust, share, and delegate compared to her determination to do everything on her own at the start of the narrative.
Given all that, Aloy is a character that simply hasn’t had the time to have a romantic connection with anyone, despite the fact that over the course of the content of the first two games many a character has tried their hand at chatting her up. There’s been plenty of opportunity to give her someone to have that kind of a relationship with. So let’s take a look at some of the more common candidates so far that fans have considered ripe for a possible relationship with the redhead. This won’t be exhaustive, to be clear, there are plenty of folks who like the idea of small side characters getting that honor, so we’re just going to stick to some of the more major ones.
Erend
First off we have Erend, best seen as the “drinking buddy” of the suitors. This bulky Oseram fellow is one of the major persisting characters that we meet earliest in the series. He’s jovial, aside from some clear baggage that he has to work through regarding the death of his sister and his position as a vanguardsman. He’s straightforward though, well aware that his best utility is as a big guy who can hit things hard, which he thankfully enjoys doing.
Erend flirted with Aloy from the very beginning, wanting to share a drink and stories with her right away. That casual flirting on their first meeting did give way to a deeper relationship over time, though, and by near the end of the first game’s story, you can actually sit down and have that drink with the guy if you want to, though the tone is more casual that romantic. At a certain point it feels a little like Erend realizes he doesn’t have much of a chance and is just happy to have Aloy as a friend, which is a nice, but the door is still open there enough to lead to some fans of this pairing. He’s also the one who was most outright hurt and upset by Aloy’s sudden departure between the two games, adding fuel to the fire.
Avad
Sun King Avad is another possible suitor, and perhaps the one that was the most forthright about it in Zero Dawn, basically outright asking Aloy to be with him. This is soured somewhat though, by the fact that the woman he loves has just recently been confirmed dead and it’s unclear if he’s truly interested in Aloy for Aloy or if he’s a bit mixed up and just attracted to the qualities that Aloy shared with Ersa. The game’s aware of this, though, and gently deflects him with that fact, which he takes quite well, proving that he’s a great emotionally mature person since he’s able to recognize this in himself. Still, he and Aloy do have really good chemistry and it was something left open to consideration once he’d had time to process his recent loss.
Avad wasn’t around much during Forbidden West. He’s busy being king of Meridian after all, which isn’t on the map of the second game, though he does show up in the prologue for a little while. He’s forthright enough to ask Aloy (who has just been away for six months with no word now) if she would consider coming back to stay with him for a while after she’s finished with her whole mission to fix the world. It’s even mentioned that he’s had possible suitors himself but he finds himself “always trying to make them into someone they’re not”. Given the time, his feelings do feel more genuine and the game gives you options on how to respond to him ranging in sentiment from this really isn’t a good time to why would you even ask that.
Varl
Then we have Varl, another member of the same tribe that Aloy hails from who was a companion for a second of the first game and then becomes one of the longest lasting companions in the second. He’s a sweet guy that a lot of people saw potential with in the first game.
Unfortunately Varl is taken off the table in the second game in general. Firstly, he’s paired off with Zo, a new Utaru character. We don’t get to see most of their romance since Aloy is unconscious through their meeting, but their affection for each other is clear and they have good chemistry that it would be hard to watch get broken up. Zo even ends up pregnant by the end of the game, so they were pretty deep in it to find time for some hanky panky while also prepping to save the world. The other reason Varl is off the table, though, is the way that he’s killed late in the second game, which is something the world of Horizon hasn’t demonstrated an ability to come back from.
Varl is off the table, but for a time he was a consideration, so it’s worth remembering the place that he had had among the roster for a while.
Talanah
Talanah is a character only found in side content in the games, but her striking character design and attitude made her a fan favorite side character. The sidequest content with her is lengthy as well, so there’s plenty of time to get to know her over the course of it. She’s capable and can hold her own as well. She was even the focus of a comic that was meant to bridge the six month gap between the two games as well, where she got a new companion to interact with Amadis.
Amadis is where the gears get a little stuck, though, as he’s obviously something of a romantic interest for Talanah on some level, this content even becoming part of the second game as her sidequest line there concerns a search for him after he went missing after going off on his own in the Forbidden West. It doesn’t end up coming together for them as the guy has a lot of baggage and Talanah respects herself enough not to play second fiddle. While fans might love the chemistry between Aloy and Talanah, it’s also unlikely she would have been a canon candidate as she’s got her own Right person-Wrong time thing going on with someone else.
Petra
The last holdover from the first game that people have had as a consideration is Petra, an Oseram woman who is a lot of fun. She banters well with Aloy and the way she talks is easy to interpret as flirty if you want to. The only stumbling block is that she is a fairly minor character, all things considered. You only meet her in a sidequest that’s not required to finish the game and if you miss that sidequest then the only place you will see her is briefly at the final battle of the game.
She’s less missable in Forbidden West, though. You meet her at the first town where she gives you the lay of the land and some background of the current circumstances while being a little more playfully flirty, but after you wrap things up, she spends the rest of the game hanging out in the same place in the tavern in that town, lacking relevance. Petra is a really fun character, and she goes along well with Aloy, but her status as ascended side character who’s kept away from the main plot makes it hard to see her as entirely viable.
Alva
Alva is the first of the new characters in Forbidden West, a little more perky than most which makes her a character people either really enjoy or they don’t. She’s not someone with a super strong fanbase for putting her in a relationship with Aloy to be fair, but she’s still an interesting character who matches Aloy’s energy when it comes to discovering secrets about the past.
The two don’t outright flirt or anything like that, but there are a few moments that people have interpreted as shyness from a crush on Aloy. She’s one of the more up in the air characters, though, since she doesn’t have the same expression of this sort of things that a lot of other characters who are outright attracted to Aloy do.
Kotallo
Last, but certainly not least, Kotallo, the one-armed Tanakth gentleman introduced in Forbidden West that came out of nowhere to endear himself to the playbase in a big way. Initially standoffish towards Aloy in their first meeting, after being saddled with each other for the sake of getting some things handled, they warm up to each other and he ends up as part of her crew. There’s even some fn sidequest content to be found in order to build him a prosthetic.
Kotallo’s a fan favorite and the subject of quite a lot of potential talk of a romantic partner for Aloy among fans. The pair match each other’s energy very well. Despite him only coming in in the second game, the way that characters were hanging around longer in Aloy’s base and could be spoken to at any time gave more room to allow him to develop than some of the characters from the first game (though a good handful of those got the same treatment as well).
Herself
And we cannot forget that some theorized that there would be no romance at all for the red-headed huntress. Aloy is a character that clearly just has a little too much going on to get deep into a romance at the moment, that’s true, but it’s not an uncommon interpretation to read Aloy as Asexual or Aromantic on top of that, given the way that in many cases the characters that are pursuing her are given little more than a deflection for their efforts.
As Aloy hadn’t made clear any preference, this was certainly something that could be considered, even if there were some lines here and there that could be read as her flirting back to a character if you really wanted to. Those who ascribe to this reading of her are perfectly valid to view her that way and even if I don’t, I can understand where they’re coming from.
Meet Seyka
So, with all that groundwork laid out… let’s get into what happened with The Burning Shores.
The Burning Shores’s marketing was partly focused on getting us interested in a new character that would be debuting with the DLC. That character was Seyka, a Quen woman who both wore a Focus like Aloy and could hold her own in a fight, things that until this point had seemed mutually exclusive for the Quen, as their Focus carrying diviners weren’t characterized as strong fighters and their warriors weren’t allowed Focuses. That alone was enough to make her interesting, but then she was given a cool character design on top of that, which had interest and attention from the fans.
It made sense that she was a focal point of the marketing as it turns out that due to the way the main story of the DLC runs, she is your companion in every main story quest on the titular Burning Shores. She was going to be a big part of the experience for the players. However, there was another reason for this… Seyka was serving as perhaps a canonical love interest for Aloy.
It is not a bad thing that Aloy likes Women
Predictably, there are plenty who would be upset with this just on the face of Aloy turning out to like women, but honestly, if that’s your gripe then you really haven’t been paying attention. The world of Horizon has always been one that’s very accepting and open. There are plenty of characters of all sorts of different sexualities and both games also have characters that can be read either as gender non-conforming or outright trans (though it’s not stated in the game, likely because the people of the era simply don’t have the same language for these things as we do). Guerilla has not been shy about making their world inclusive or varied, so it’s not entirely a surprise that they might go this direction. In fact, Elizabet Sobek, the woman who Aloy was cloned from, had already been confirmed to have a canonical romantic relationship with another woman, one that had ripple effects into Aloy’s life in Forbidden West.
Aloy’s sexuality was also something that had never been confirmed either, left pretty open for players to consider and speculate on in whatever way they felt. It’s why she had so many potential romantic partners in the eyes of fans and why other fans were able to read her as being entirely asexual if they wanted. Some took Elizabet as a hint, sure, but it wasn’t like Aloy had to have the exact same sexuality as her and while Elizabet was confirmed to be attracted to women, it wasn’t made clear if men were entirely off the table either.
My concerns have little to do with if Aloy is interested in women or not, but more to do with the way this relationship was presented and handled in the context of the wider story of Horizon.
The choice was never ours
To be upfront, there’s not really an issue with taking the choice of partner for Aloy away from the player, as much as some might not like to hear that. The Horizon games have never really been an RPG in the roleplaying sense. There are some points where you can choose Aloy’s responses, but these are little more than small changes in dialog in most cases, more a nudge than an outright deviation. There are a few points where you can choose if she kills someone, but these don’t have a big noticeable difference in the long run and one of the options from Zero Dawn had a canon answer in Forbidden West where the character turns out to be alive anyway. Aloy is a character in her own right, so this was something that it was never clear that the player was going to be able to choose for her.
All that being said, it was a flaw to have this relationship be something that is confined to the DLC contents of the second game in a few key ways.
Seyka is a massive part of the DLC content for the game. You spend a lot of time with her and get to know her pretty well all things considered. It’s an emotional journey to go on and she perhaps has more screentime than a few of the others that people consider potential suitors for Aloy. The problem is that despite this screentime, the way the DLC is laid out can make it feel like it’s still less time for them to have known each other. The main games feel vaster and wider with more time for the course of their stories because of this. Even if the in game minutes of one-on-one time with other characters is technically less, it can feel like more due to them being more of a fixture in the world and the feeling that the interactions have taken place over a longer timespan. The Burning Shores, on the other hand, feels like it takes place over a couple of days at the most due to the more concentrated nature of it, so it can lead to the feeling that this is something that came on much faster than with other characters.
It’s clear that the two each feel like they’ve found a kindred spirit in each other, being members of tribes that don’t fit into the mold of what is expected of those groups. The banter they have with each other over the course of the DLC does feel natural and builds up a lot to the big moment at the end. And it’s not like the option to go for it or not came out of nowhere either. The back portion of the story contents do have Aloy having a few moments where she’s clearly getting a little flustered to give a bit of buildup that this might be coming. Even with all that, though, that hasn’t stopped some from feeling like the relationship between the two is rushed into.
The Ambiguity of Seyka
To be fair, you don’t have to start a relationship with Seyka. The DLC ends with the two having an emotional moment of sorts with each other bathed in the light of a sunset and you have the choice to go for it, which ends with the pair kissing, or gently turn Seyka down with Aloy’s typical reason of just not being in the right place for something like that right now. That’s something of a problem in itself, though.
Guerilla has demonstrated that for some choices, they have a clear option in mind for what is canon or not. There is at least one option to kill in the first game where Aloy doesn’t in canon, given that the character is back, and your choices aren’t something that carries over between games, nor do they seem to intend for them to be. Unfortunately, though, even if we’ve been given the option to start a relationship with Seyka, there’s no telling for now what Guerilla is going to consider to be the canonical option in the future. Given the fact that Aloy and Seyka actually kiss in the DLC, we can assume that they’re going forward with that since no other character has been given that chance, but there’s also always the chance that they could change their mind and walk it back, which leaves me worried.
Putting this relationship in the DLC and making it optional means that it can always be walked back and changed in the futre if they so choose, which isn’t helped by how things leave off after this moment either. There’s no moment where Aloy indicates to Seyka to meet up at the base with her crew that she’s assembled, no moment where it’s clear that she’s going to be a companion like the others going forward. It’s unclear is Seyka is going to be around in the next full game at all or if she’s going to be forever confined to just the DLC content.
You see, a DLC character hasn’t really made the jump to the main game before. While there was brief offhanded mentions of the DLC characters from Frozen Wilds in Forbidden West, none of those characters showed up wholesale at all, not even one that would make sense to actually travel that far like Morlund. So far, the prerogative has seemed to be that they exist and are canon, but they also don’t have a place in the main ongoing story at all, even in side content. And I have to admit that because of that track record, I fear that Seyka won’t show up in the third game’s main or side content, which feels wrong for a character that has been set up as a romantic interest so strongly in the DLC. Guerilla are free to prove me wrong, but bringing her in in this way leaves me unsure of what they intend to do with her, which isn’t a feeling I want to have for a character that feels like she’s so important…
I’m left Uneasy
It feels like Seyka has been left ambiguous in a way that just sits wrong with me. I like Seyka and despite how it feels a touch quick, I do think she makes for a good partner, companion, and more for Aloy since they’re really able to run together and match what the other needs. They’re a good match, perhaps not my personal choice, but not one that I am at all dissatisfied with. The problem is that I just don’t know where this is going, how much she’s going to be around in the future, and if I should expect more.
I want to, but with the way things were wrapped up, nothing feels definitive enough, which I can’t help but let worry me. I want it to be definitive, but right now, it’s not.