Close Reading - Horizon: Zero Dawn: Metal Flower Mk I A

Above: a defeated machine in Horizon: Zero Dawn

Hello, and welcome to the reading poems from Metal Flowers series of posts. For the Metal Flowers, I want to go by the order the game gives them in the collectibles inventory. That means I'll start with the flowers grouped as Mk I, and when I complete them I'll have a post with a brief meta-analysis discussing what this group of poems represents for the game. Once I complete all three groups of Metal Flowers, I'll do a final wrap-up post discussing the context of the Metal Flowers that the player does not gain until late in the game, which will provide a reframing of how to understand these poems and their selection for the game.

Each Metal Flower can be examined further and provides an embedded fragment of code, revealing that these poems are somehow part of their programming. When you begin the game, and the first time you encounter Metal Flowers, Aloy (the main character) can be completely unaware of ancient art, the concept of programming code, and more (she may also be somewhat familiar with the concepts by the time you find one if you start collecting late game, but her familiarity does not approach the familiarity you could expect of any present-day person). The very earliest you can acquire a Metal Flower is immediately after the prologue. At this stage Aloy has obtained her focus and learned as much as she can about how to use it for her immediate life needs: hunting, survival, and interacting with machines. She has at this point encountered holograms, text logs, and voice logs and is, as a result, capable of understanding much of what is said in any given piece of ancient data she encounters, but she lacks the context of our world to understand certain concepts (one example the game calls out specifically is the idea of a corporation).

So, setting aside that the game is open world and Aloy may find Metal Flowers at any given point in the game's narrative after she has achieved adulthood, I will assume for the sake of these posts that Aloy has not come to understand what Project: Zero Dawn is. Every Metal Flower can be obtained before that point of the game, and that means Aloy's fullest exposure to ancient poetry can occur before she understands the mechanism by which these flowers appear. I'll get into what these flowers mean as a whole and their connection to Project: Zero Dawn once I complete these posts. Metal Flower Mk I A contains this embedded code fragment:

Code fragment downloaded: /// [function: true] {{Light of the moon}} {{Moves west, flowers' shadows}} {{Creep eastward.}} [function: true] ///

To Aloy at this point, the code is meaningless, but the poem itself is entirely understandable. It presents a clear series of images. Moonlight moving west indicates the movement of the moon at night from the rotation of the Earth. Aloy is aware that the world is round and comments about how she knows this in the game when another character condescends to her about how she likely believed the world to be flat. As the moon moves in the sky, the shadows its light casts from the flowers move eastward, toward the coming dawn.

I begin with the physics because it is the sort of thing Aloy would probably immediately appreciate, given her penchant for tinkering and, limited as her ability to truly parse it is, scientific thought. She's a young woman who devours knowledge and has an insatiable curiosity about the world that preceded hers, and she struggles as an outcast to comprehend the Nora tribe's decision to cast her out at birth (indeed, she often argues strongly against all the superstitions of the various tribes in the game, and may be fairly described as a materialist. That said, she does appreciate beauty and sentiment, as demonstrated with the Nora blessing before the Proving.

The poem in this Metal Flower is short and striking, a single image of impersonal action and natural consequence. The nighttime setting of the poem prompts thoughts of silence, of yearning for day, of the moon and absent sun as a dyad with similar properties. After all, the sun also casts its light upon the flowers to create shadows, and as the sun sets in the west those shadows lengthen and creep eastward to the rising moon. Nature is a thing of cycles, of balance. And that is an idea that Aloy will find appealing as she learns more about how our world came to an end and gave rise to hers. But more on that at the end of the series.

Some of the context Aloy doesn't have is that this poem was written by Yosa Buson (1716-1786) during the Edo period in Japan. Buson is considered one of the three great masters of haikai no renga poetry of that period, and Buson was particularly known in the Meiji period for his striking imagery.