Ted Faro and the Faro Plague - A Deconstruction of Villainy

Ted Faro accidentally killed everyone on earth, and then purposefully erased all human knowledge.
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00:00 Intro
02:52 Ted Faro's Backstory
05:52 First Hints of Disaster
09:22 A Glitch in the Hartz-Timor Swarm
15:13 Elisabet Sobeck
20:34 The Time of Ashes
28:34 Ted Faro's Final Mistake
36:17 The Bloody King of Thebes
38:42 An Immortal Curse
41:53 The Death of Ted Faro
43:51 Conclusion

[Boreasnorm]

I always liked the headcanon that Ted didn’t delete Apollo in order to “protect” the new humans from their mistakes. He just didn’t want to be remembered as humanity’s destroyer.

[amharbinger]

I think the most horriflying thing about Horizon is the Faro Plague isn't even a Smart AI, they just followed their base line orders; replicate, consume, replicate. The thing that killed Earth wasn't even conscience.

[kamikazelemming]

"Hey, have you noticed anything... odd, about the killer robots we're making?"
"Odd? In what way?"
"They use flesh to make more killer robots."
"So?"
"Ted. Are we the baddies?"

[harrisonlee]

He absolutely watched whole cities be consumed by the horde of demonic robots and Tweeted "Concerning. Looking into this."

[Talon]

Once, is a mistake. Twice is idiocy.

Three times is a pattern and a problem.

[bnkosu]

Ted Faro’s statue of himself in Thebes genuinely pissed me off as much as him killing the Alphas did in the first game.

[abdeljadan]

Something to point out: When he is found (like he wants to be) by a cult that worships him (best possible scenario for him), even they're disgusted by what he's turned into, and their leader's first reaction is to light him on fire. It would be poetic, if it weren't for the Ceo's second reaction: cover up and lie about it.

[LesisMoreArtworks]

Ted Faro being kept alive but in pain for hundreds of years, only to be killed off by one of his future admirers in Forbidden West was one of the most satisfying moments in the series in my opinion. The Horizon Games are so underrated I swear

[samuelazzaro]

A part you missed that really sums up Ted Faro as a character are the two inactive (but functional) scarab drones he kept in Thebes. He wiped out the alphas and Apollo to "protect future generations from poisonous knowledge, " but was literally incapable of understanding the hypocrisy and risk of saving two of the very robots that destroyed the world. And remember, these are not statues, they are inactive but fully functional models. I love Ted Faro as a villain because he isn't evil in the traditional sense, but he is a monster through his inability to ever replace his ego with empathy, no matter what has occurred.

[hailtheprince]

My personal theory for why we never actually got to see Faro's "final form" onscreen is because showing that degree of Resident Evil-esque body horror likely would've bumped Forbidden West's rating up to M, and I would guess they had to keep the rating at T to keep the game as accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Still, I think the vague holographic image coupled with the... sounds... do a good job of getting across that whatever he's become, it isn't pretty.

[Shadowlolz]

It breaks my heart to see Samina just shatter when she hears Apollo was destroyed in the hologram. The greatest amalgamation of human knowledge since the Library of Alexandria. A seed of a new tree of life and culture eradicated

[alicenolfi]

What truly scares me about Ted Faro is that he never takes responsibility for what he’s done, or feel any remorse. He’s got this bullshit narrative in his head that he is always right - or, if he causes damage, it’s not that bad. And because he’s always right in his own eyes, he never learns from his mistakes. Because, as far as he’s concerned, he’s never done something bad enough to learn from. Talking to him is pointless because he simply doesn’t see the same reality the rest of us do.

[IronForce-ffqx]

Incompetent villains are kinda underrated in my opinion. They are not someone we ‘Like to Hate’, they are someone we ‘Just Hate’, but that doesn’t (always) mean they are badly written characters (ex: Joffrey). It’s just that we are invested in them in a different way that even ourselves sometimes might not fully understand .

[joshuawilliams]

" Jesus Liz, you don't have to threaten me..."
After making it clear that she did in fact have to threaten him to do it.

[set]

There's something particularly aggravating about how some bastard that dropped out of school deciding they can destroy foundational knowledge that was meant to serve a new generation of human beings.

Trying to hide away his heinous actions or not, there can be no greater insult to humanity's collective intellect.

[OrbZero]

I loved the plot line that made the Quen worship Faro. They simply could not access newer data because of the devices they were using. Like having a computer that can only read floppy discs while the new data is only on CDs. CDs that told the story of the Faro plague.

[fireandiceforever]

Actually, when the swarm was on the small scale on that island with the dolphin and the mango trees, it could have been stopped since it wasn't to the point where the swarm could self replicate faster than humanity could destroy them, but since Ted Faro's solution to the glitch was to cover up his mistake and hire "the best lawyers to defend him in court". He accidentally gave the swarm the time it needed to replicate enough Horus' to become unstopable

[RotalHenricsson]

"Imagine working for this company and your CEO anounces these changes"
wait a minute...
incompetent leader of AI-developer reverses company-course to develop weapons.
Refuses to elaborate further.
Kills the world.
...
Ted Faro is reverse-Iron Man

[IrishWarrior]

The horror when you find out Ted Faro killed Humanity twice over,
First in body by accident with his self replicating robots
Second in spirit when he consciously wipes the Archive of all Human knowledge.

Its a true testament to the writing skill of the Horizon team to write such a chilling apocalypse story with such a horrific villain.

[nathanfrancis]

One of my favorite things about Horizon is they basically worked backwards from really cool concept art of giant robot dinosaurs existing with tribal humans. The writers did a hell of a job making that a believe reality with amazing lore.