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[Borderlands] Why are there so many Psychos on Pandora. : r/AskScienceFiction
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• 9 yr. ago
Bewan
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[Borderlands] Why are there so many Psychos on Pandora.

As in, I understand that Pandora isn't exactly the best place to live but that doesn't explain why there are so many people who have just gone completely insane.

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DasBarenJager
• 9y ago

Some of the companies that came to Pandora to mine its resources used prisoners and mental patients for manual labor. When the resources ran out and the companies left the planet it was more cost effective to leave behind much of the used equipment and all of their "labor force". The now free prisoners and psychopaths over ran the remaining population of people who moved to Pandora to make a fortune for themselves similar to people who flocked to California and established boom towns during the gold rush. When the companies left Pandora the whole world went to shit.

[deleted]
• 9y ago

Sounds a little bit like Australia!

lordlaneus
• 9y ago

No, you're thinking of Elpis

[deleted]
• 9y ago

It actually does.

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[deleted]
• 9y ago

That explains the Mad Max vibe

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BuddhaFacepalmed
• 9y ago

They were remnants of the off-world convicts that the Dahl Corporation brought in as slave labor, both to work as miners for Pandora's emerging mineral industry, as well as a cover for Dahl's efforts to find the Vault before Atlas did. When a Vault Key Fragment was discovered at Dahl's Headstone Eridium Mines, it had a surprising effect on many of the convict workers there. Most went crazy and many were physically mutated as well, growing into huge, muscular parodies of humanity, or stunted to dwarf proportions. Many of the "psychos", as they came to be known, donned face masks portraying the object of their collective fixation: an upside down "V" emblem.

Deightine
• 9y ago

In parts it is due to social isolation, constant predation by varkids and other species, and ultimately the atmosphere of Pandora. Even before the vaults opened there was Eridium present in the atmosphere and its effects are largely only studied by Hyperion. Aside of Maliwan, of course, although their experiments tend toward the destructive.

It is not a coincidence that Dr. Zed once asked the vault hunters to help him deal with a Psycho found wandering around near Sanctuary suffering from the effects of Eridium poisoning, only to discover that the Psycho had eaten a chunk of the material. Zed immediately wrote it off as being common; bandits eating unrefined Eridium in hopes of getting "slag powers." Many of the Lost Legion would come to be seen as heavily influenced by Eridium, some displaying symptoms in their skin similar to that of a Siren after what can only be seen as a very prolonged period of exposure. When visiting certain remote outposts, it's also possible to run into Psychos in places like Hunter's Grotto that have "gone native" so to speak, and are openly roaming around slagged.

One of the well known vault hunters is a fellow by the name of Krieg, he's arguably the best-case-scenario outcome for a Psycho you could ever run across. Mainly because he has the slightest amount of impulse control. He was also a Hyperion science experiment that escaped, during the period where Hyperion was focused on slag experimentation. Is that a coincidence? Not really. It's also the same time when Skags and other creatures started showing up with the various E-Weapon elemental types in the wild. Some due to experiments that escaped, others by exposure to slag runoff in places around the Wildlife Preserve or Eridium Blight.

Another case example of someone unhinged in the Psycho way crops up when looking at a young lady named Tiny Tina. Her parents and herself having been sold into captivity by bandits, her parents were experimented on with slag. She herself may have been as well, until a grenade she snuck into the Wildlife Preserve was used to extricate her. These events contributed heavily to her requesting the help of vault hunters in dealing with one Fleshstick, if I recall his moniker correctly. However, like Krieg, Tina is an outlier... For every arguable success, there were no doubt countless failures, and through Hyperion's typical laxity in security, many of those failures escaped. In some cases, they were no doubt released to seed the landscape with obstacles.

So even if the only effect on long-term Eridium exposure were the buildup of a neuro-active heavy metal analog in the synapses of the brain, it's going to lead to a lot of individuals being chemically/biologically unhinged. Toss on some trauma, social isolation, pack-style dominance challenges, and so on among the various bandit tribes, and you have recipe for intense mental illness.

Now if you will pardon me, I have a meat bicycle to get back to.

Bewan
• 9y ago

This explanation is amazing. You are a great person! :)

Deightine
• 9y ago
• Edited 9y ago

Coming from an Eridian expert, that's a rather pleasing compliment. Might I suggest stronger access controls on your materials in the future? No telling when a clutch of Psycho midgets will try to break in and make off with your artifacts. For all we know the cargo cults have been burning piles of the stuff in effigy to Marcus this whole time, further polluting the atmosphere. We should probably not encourage that.

Edit - Besides, we're technically peers. I just focus on living alien life. But there have been rumors that I may need to start searching the moon...

Bewan
• 9y ago

Of course, however engineering tech on Pandora can become...complicated. Furthermore I'm worrying that my spot might not be safe much longer. There are rumours the Eridians are returning...and I don't think they're all too happy with me extracting their priceless artifacts out of the dirt.

Deightine
• 9y ago

Let me know if they do. That'll make my job a lot easier. Be sure that if they hem you in to record a last minute echo for me. It would be a wonderful help with my research.

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mack2028
• 9y ago

The stuff the other guys said but also, have you noticed they have the same 3 or 4 voices and morphology? Did you notice the devices that can bring people back to life by making a digital copy? Did you notice the company that always seems to profit from the gangs of psychos scrounging around the wasteland?

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ingebeastly
• 9y ago

COME TO ME MY PASTY CAKE

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kofteburger
• 9y ago

Pandora is space Florida.

ehpuckit
• 9y ago

My secret theory is that one person hacked the rebirth machine to just clone a bunch of people over and over. This also explains the respawns. So really you're just killing the same ten copies of one psycho over and over.

primegopher
• 9y ago

To add on to what other people have said, the official reason is that the particular combination of gases in Pandora's atmosphere is highly probe to driving people insane. The only people completely unaffected by it seem to be the main characters.

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tuckmyjunksofast
• 9y ago

Because you have to be a psycho to survive on Pandora longer than 5 minutes.

andycoates
• 9y ago

There isn't, its just the gun seller guy over exaggerating for the sake of telling a cool tale