Just finished Horizon: Zero Dawn's main story and, god, what a ride. Let me make clear that I like the game and the story and I very much enjoyed playing as Aloy - she's one of the better game protagonists I've seen in a long while. That said, the socio-political implications of the backstory, the story of the end of the world, seemed to be a bit ham-fisted and awkward. Namely: the characters' morality seems to depend on their race and gender a bit too much. Let's get one thing out of the way: unlike Aloy, Dr.Sobeck is an extremely flat and boring character. Mostly because we learn so little about her except for the fact that she was literaly Jesus. Nothing subtle about that. She died for our sins. And she created a god to recreate life on earth. That god - GAIA - self-identifies as female and black. The extinction protocol attached to this god - HADES - very much male, explicitly so.
The main villain, the guy who destroyed the world and almost doomed the future generations by purging the knowledge databases, Ted Faro? Your typical tech bro, extremely white and male. In fact, no notable good person in the backstory is a white straight male. Travis Tate is a white male, and he is a depicted as a despicable degenerate. General Aaron Herres? Black. The other Alphas shown to us? Charles Ronson - black, implied to be gay, very much a good guy. Samina Ebadji - explicitly Muslim, kind and dedicated. Margo Shĕn - asian, positive portrayal. Patrick Brochard-Klein - asian and French, a bit stuck-up and short-tempered, but dedicated and overall a good guy. Again: the only two straight white dudes to feature prominently in the backstory are objectively the worst of the bunch.
It doesn't really stop there. Apart from Rost, who gets to be the "man in the refrigerator" early on, most of the prominent male characters in Aloy's story are, at best, kinda weak. It has to do with what I call "Shepard syndrome" - for your character to be the best at everything, everyone they meet should be a bit weak, cowardly or stupid, but still. Aloy meets some badass women, like Talanah, who is very cool. Erend and Avad? Both very nice guys, both portrayed to be almost comletely helpless without Ersa or Aloy to lead them. Avad's infatuation with Aloy as a replacement for Ersa is especially pathetic and meant to be so. Teb and Varl? Again, shown to be kind enough, but Varl is obviously dominated by his mother and Aloy, and Teb is, again, shown to be weak next to the mighty warrior that is Aloy.
So, the question is, ain't it a bit much? Like I said, I love Aloy, and I love me some badass female characters. But isn't all this a bit much, just a tad on the nose, when the only truly decent straight man in the main story is killed in the beginning, and the only two straight white guys from the past are the guy who killed the world and the guy who almost killed the world a second time and also jerked off to snuff reels? Compare it to, say, Assasin's Creed: Origins, where Bayek meets a lot of cool female characters: his wife, Cleopatra, Khenut and many others. I'm not normally bothered by all that stuff, but HZD seemed to go a little over the top. Or am I going crazy here, what do you think?