Far Zenith and Tilda van der Meer - A Deconstruction of Villainy

Despite their incredible technological power, the Far Zeniths are some of the most pathetic villains I've ever covered on this channel.
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TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro
2:42 First Hints in Zero Dawn
6:51 Prologue: Rocket Launch Facility
12:17 First Appearance
18:57 Verbena Sutter
20:56 Gerard Bieri
22:20 Beta
25:59 Cauldron Gemini
29:26 Tilda's Art Gallery
40:46 Tilda van der Meer
48:48 The Fall of Far Zenith
51:14 Erik Visser
52:42 Final Confrontation
57:01 Nemesis
59:07 Walter Londra

[FirstLast-cgnk]

"immortality Made Them Weak." They're literally a bunch of billionaires who bought their way onto a ship to abandon the world, and one military officer too cowardly to stay behind and fight against the enemy destroying humanity. Immortality didn't make them weak, they were already weak to begin with.

[TheDarkMarioAndSonic]

One thing I wish you had covered was Stanley Chen. A man who had been tricked into losing everything, he decided to throw his last remnants of fortune into the casino in Las Vegas, believing he had nothing left. Miraculously, he won, and rebuilt himself in a single night. Seeing it as a second chance at life, he got back to work, becoming a billionaire over the next years. Unfortunately, due to a water crisis, Las Vegas was on the verge of collapse, until Stanley came to save it by introducing a revolutionary water filtration system, all for the mission of saving the city he believed had once saved him. Under his leadership, Vegas became a paradise of fun and enjoyment, until the Faro Plague. Tellingly, as he was fleeing, Stanley decided last minute to not turn off the pleasure district he built, hoping that, if anything survived, that they enjoy what it had to offer. A millennium later, Aloy does just that, revitalizing and turning that place into a thriving community of entertainment in a world that desperately needs it.

Stanley went with Far Zenith, since it was his only option. However, while the rest of his compatriots shut themselves away in hedonistic daydreams, Stanley Chen never lost his humanity. If you ask Tilda, she'll mention how he recreated his dream city in VR, and up until the very end, his doors were always open to any who wanted a night in the city of dreams. His story proves that not all Zeniths were terrible. There were those who legitimately wanted to do good with the gifts they had. That he died with the advent of Nemesis is one of the biggest tragedies of Forbidden West in my opinion.

[ViewTube_Emperor_of_Mankind]

Making the rich survivors of the apocalypse just incompetent, deceptive rich snobs is very accurate.

[Karlswebb]

“He’d been beyond anything like a threat for so long that all the reflexes of survival had weakened, atrophied”. - Abbadons Gate, the expanse books. This came to mind when watching this.

[TalesZuliani]

Rich people fleeing to other planet instead of helping others. Most realistic thing ever to be put on a videogame

[ApocK]

Far Zenith is pretty much what I expect a bunch of immortal techbros to behave like.

[samuelazzaro]

40:05 During a recent trip to Amsterdam, I visited the Van Gogh museum which is located extremely close to the museum where many of these paintings (if not all) are housed. There is a painting on display there known as Almond Blossom. This was a painting created as a gift for the birth of his nephew and was created in the middle of one of the darker periods in Van Gogh's life, when his mental health was in extreme decline. You can see such extreme joy in this painting, joy from a man going through what, to most people, would be a living hell, over this one bright spot in his life at the birth of his nephew. The fact that a painting like Almond Blossom wasn't saved by Tilda is a telling thing to me, as I feel like someone like Elizebet would have saved a painting with this background and meaning if she were to choose one. Tilda saved are representing how she saw herself and her love for Elizebet, but not art that could represent Elizebet as she very obviously was. Some who, even when going through hell, could see the slivers of light breaking through the storm clouds.

[MentalEdge]

Eric is laughably easy to kill. Part of it is that Horizons combat system is built around fighting machines, so human enemies end up boring and simplistic in comparison, but I also think it's intentional.

Without his shield you can kill him with the simple "arrow to the head" strategy that works on any old human, and simply breaking line-of-sight makes him completely impotent. He's in no great hurry to keep the pressure on the player. With a good sharp-shot bow the fight is over in less than a minute, with most of the time going to pulling the string until it does overdraw damage, then using slowmo to place your aim over his head.

Compare that to the other human boss fight in the game, Regalla, who will actually aim for Aloy's head and take big chunks out of your health bar unless you put some actual thought into the fight. Eric really does not put up a fight worth mentioning.

[Ehhhhhmm]

When Far Zenith comes up there are quite a few people who just go "bad villians, just comically evil" but i really like them, they are the literal worst humanity has to offer one could even argue that with all the technology they have inside them the probably aren't even strictly human anymore (Erik bleeds white when killed) which is a nice contrast to Aloy and her companions and Elisabet herself

[josephgravley]

Fun fact: Far Zenith was initially doing the whole space travel thing for the benefit of humanity, but a change in leaders shifted that goal into what we see in Forbidden West. And when I say change in leaders, I mean within the game itself.

[latrodectusmactans]

“They are also probably the most pathetic villains I have covered on this channel”

You know things are bad when G5 Iguazu is less pathetic.

[sevenlexar]

Honestly, I love these guys specifically BECAUSE they're pathetic. For all their immortality, all the years they've lived, all the hyper-advanced tech they have - they don't have any actual SKILL. They're the polar opposite to the folks down on earth - where the Tribals rely on skill and ingenuity and creativity to overcome beasts regularly multiple times their size AND power, the FZ's rely almost exclusively on their tech.
The moment they don't have their advanced gear, they topple like a tower made of wet paper. Take away the tribals gear, and they'll just slap together something else to fight you with. It's a wonderful little parallel~

[Widdershyn]

Tilda was revealed in I think like 1 frame of the trailer, at the end. Just enough to go "Who???"
But yeah. The Far Zeniths really feel like some depictions of vampires I've seen. Detached aristocracy who's lost connection with their humanity, and are just the purest form of the leeches they are.

[irystocrattakodachithatmooms]

"They gave birth to a child, locked it in a closet by itself then told it to do homework all day long." So their basically the Dursleys but even worse.

[maxleroux]

I don't blame Elisabet for breaking up with Tilda. Despite her own character flaws, she was smart enough to realize just how toxically codependent their relationship was becoming, so she broke it off before she let herself get too attached. Honestly, I think meeting Tilda also helped Aloy realize how she had been putting her biological mother on such a high pedestal, too.

[amharbinger]

Not all the Zenith's became weak after gaining immortality, as least from what we read and hear. Stanley Chen based on what learn from both his recordings and Tilda maintained his empathy. He left the water system on standby for others to revive Vegas hoping there was a future for Earth. Unlike the other Zenith's he wasn't isolated in his own VR world but instead invited others openly to join in his recreation of Vegas. I wish they kept him alive or had some Zenith's with his mentality in the game, adding depth and creating clashing ideals between the members. In a way, he helped Aloy by providing a new vibrant settlement for those who found Vegas.

[ravendelacour]

Just having come off a Vampire the Masquerade video, I can't help but see the parallels between the Far Zenith humans and Camarilla elders. Rich, immortal beings with nearly unlimited power who just sit on it and obsess with getting more and lack the practical skills to survive independently. You can even directly break down the big bad trio of Gerard, Tilda, and Erik into representatives of the Ventrue, Toreador, and Brujah mindsets. Own everything and everyone, preserve the shell of artistic beauty over reality, and beat up people to display status rather than for a practical goal.

[ugoeze]

The Hades program from Horizon Zero Dawn should be next on the list. It’s what I like to think as nuanced evil: it isn’t created evil, but rather it is just a product of its programming and it’s only a subcomponent of an overall program.

[samuelazzaro]

34:17 Also, she saved the art for its own sake. Its clear in the game that there was no plan to ever return to earth, and the fact that the vault is still intact suggests that it wasn't as though it was ever planned to be able to be opened by future generations, should Zero Dawn succeed. Art is functionally meaningless without beings capable of interacting with it, and Tilda's inability to recognize that this whole display is a just as much of a monument to her own perceived greatness as Thebes was, really says alot.

[gogongagis]

I was here when the video was called “A Deconstruction of Villain”