Let’s start with the Spoiler Chocobo for anyone who didn’t see the Sony State-of-Play for Horizon Forbidden West and wants to keep their minds pure or whatever.
I can’t believe I went off on a whole bullet-pointed rant on how Erend would be a great fit for Aloy, and then two days later and a day before the thing is published Sony releases footage of Horizon Forbidden West and Erend is there (!) and he has no eyebrows (!!).
Okay, fine. He has eyebrows. Sort of. They are very faint. Like someone spent his teen years in the nineties thinning out those eyebrows because that was the cool look then and now they don’t grow in anymore. Like someone was enjoying a little too much scrappersap (Oseram moonshine) around the forge fire. Like someone wasn’t paying attention to their surroundings and walked face-first into a bellowback. Or, I don’t know, have you ever seen those videos (there are so many why are so many men doing this) of guys lighting a roman candle and then putting it the front of their jeans so they can live out their dreams of having an Explosion Dick or whatever and then the obvious happens and the roman candle ends up pointing directly into their face?
I love the man, but he drinks heavily.
There’s a healthy amount of videos and articles out there highlighting things people are excited about from this new gameplay footage, so to avoid piling on I’m going to talk about something that grabbed my interest and doesn’t seem to be getting much discussion.
The Tenakth
Besides the five main tribes Aloy interacts with in the game, there are two other tribes that get brief mentions. There are the Utaru, who seem like a mild bunch living a grain-based life in what used to be Nebraska and Kansas and mostly keeping to themselves. And then there’s the Tenakth.
Based on Horizon Zero Dawn I was under the assumption that the Tenakth were solely from Arizona, which made a lot of fucking sense. The Carja consider the Tenakth to be brutal and aggressive, and this is coming from a tribe that spent ten years pre-game raiding all the other tribes for blood sacrifices. Basically, imagine if a bunch of coked-up Arizona State football players went crazy and decided to take over the entire college through nothing but brute force and biting. Then, they decided they needed to add to their tribe, so they just started raiding local middle schools for the scariest fucking thirteen-year-olds they could find. Then they started pushing north into Utah. And let’s get one thing straight: if Arizona and Utah suddenly had to throw down, who are you putting your money on? The people who can start drinking margaritas in 104 degree heat at ten in the morning and still walk a straight line to their lifted Ford F150’s complete with truck nuts by sundown, or the people who put a beehive on their state flag and cry every time a new company puts a rainbow in their logo for a month?
The only Tenakth you get to interact with in the first game is Ullia, and this bitch only knows hardcore. She showed up in the Sundom, immediately joined a group of bandits, got arrested, tried to eat a fellow inmate’s fingers, escaped and went back to the same group of bandits to cause more mayhem. When Aloy finally shows up to kill her because the warden is like, ‘I don’t want whatever that is back in my house,’ as she’s dying she tells Aloy she’s rad and she would have taken Aloy, a fully grown woman, as her daughter and then requests Aloy drink her blood so her memory can live on. Because that’s how Tenakth roll.
Apparently, the Tenakth own most of California, too, because they showed up in this State of Play and the ruins of the Golden Gate Bridge feature heavily at one point. They appear to be a tribe you can barter with, because one of the weapons is labeled Tenakth. There are different factions, so maybe the NorCal Tenakth are more mellow than the Arizona Tenakth? And by that I mean they try to get a machine to kill you first before they just lunge straight at your intestines.
The Squares
Free Heap
As I mentioned last time, Free Heap is run by Petra Forgewoman, so I wanted this square to both represent the settlement and her. While I want most of this section of the blanket to be simple designs in shades of brown and gray/silver, I wanted the settlement squares to pop a little, either with color or design. For Free Heap, I picked this square with the red circles in the middle to represent the forge. Surrounded, of course by brown and silver.
This square is very easy to do. It uses simple stitches mixed together to make it look more intricate than it actually is. I haven’t worked in rounds much yet so this was a nice start. It turns around crocheting a square around a circle is very easy, and just a matter of crocheting chains to get the ninety-degree angle.
Pitchcliff
In The Big Book of Granny Squares (still don’t recommend it), the color scheme was white on the outside and green on the inside and it was supposed to be a shamrock. Well, no one gives a shit about shamrocks in the distant post-apocalyptic future, but this design did look like something a bored smithy or ironworker might make in a little downtime. Nothing really happens in Pitchcliff besides a Glinthawk invasion and a murder investigation, and how do you represent that in a square? I can’t crochet a dead body. Yet.
This is the most complicated square I have done yet. Again, the stitches themselves weren’t hard. What was difficult here was the loops of the ‘shamrock,’ and then the stretches connect the center circle to the outer square. Lots of filling a smallish chain space with thirty double crochets, and then lots of slip stitches and chains that then had to be crocheted into with single, double, and sometimes treble stitches. And thank God I learned how to block for a side project I was doing, because when I was done with it this thing was floppier than granny’s hat after a summer church service with no AC.
Up Next: The Banuk
Yes, that’s right, with these two settlement squares I have finished the Oseram squares and we are onto the next tribe. A tribe that doesn’t dress entirely in browns so I am very, very happy.
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 