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Representing Bestial Violence, Performing Feral Justice- Animal-Machine Rendering and Biopolitics in Horizon Zero Dawn

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2026, 32(3), pp.139~189
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2026.32.3.004
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : September 5, 2026
  • Accepted : October 18, 2026
  • Published : October 31, 2026

Doohyun Kwon 1

1연세대학교 비교사회문화연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article examines the representation of bestial violence and the possibility of performing feral justice through the hunting of machine animals in Horizon Zero Dawn. In this game, machine animals are beings created to restore ecosystems after the collapse of civilization, and at the same time they are positioned as prey and as sources of components for humans. Nicole Shukin’s concept of rendering, which considers animal representation alongside industrial processing, reveals how their lifelike forms are coupled with the procedures of attacking, dismantling, and retrieving. Whereas film viewers consume the product of rendering without directly controlling the process, in the game the player carries out extraction with their own hands at the very moment of consuming the representation, so that the double logic of representation and processing is completed within the player’s single body. This coupling has taken shape in the arrangements of hunting games from Duck Hunt to Monster Hunter, and in interfaces such as the adaptive triggers that convey the resistance of a drawn bowstring to the hand. Building on this history, Horizon Zero Dawn has the player hunt bodies designed without a natural original. The article compares, by analogy, the logic that classifies beings as threats and resources with the classificatory politics of settler colonialism, as that logic is coupled with the game’s control scheme, and analyzes the transfer of animacy, in which the animalization of things and the objectification of animal bodies proceed together, through the discussions of somatechnics, animacy, and tranimacies. Bestial violence is the violence that, within this transfer, takes animal difference as the ground for identifying targets and divides and uses those bodies according to human needs. Even override, which turns prey into helpers, is performed as a managed crossing that concentrates in humans the authority to set the direction of the relation. Feral justice contests this order, in which nonhuman survival and relations are determined by human needs alone. In encounters where combat is not compulsory, the player can check a machine’s route with the Focus, a scanning device, and pass by without attack or extraction; the device that makes machines legible thus also serves the choice not to use their bodies. The possibility of counter-affective play lies in withholding attack and extraction after identifying a target in individual encounters, even as the game’s extractive structure persists. It is through this practice of withholding that the coloniality of being, which renders self-evident the authority to dispose of nonhuman bodies, is put into question.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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