October 2024

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im gonna be honest ur posts pose a bit of an Issue for me bc like my rewrite has a plotline that involves lilith doing some shady shit in the name of the greater good and. in the light of the whole settler colonialism thing. is there a way to differentiate her attitude from jack's because i really dont wanna come off as "she's just as bad as him" guy number 172

I STRUGGLE WITH THIS TOO…To me the distinguishing factor is that the raiders don’t act with the same all encompassing anger that jack does. I don’t think there ever could be a true “just as bad as him” argument because he wants and has the means for total annihilation. no bias, no care for the individual, he says himself he wants every man, woman, and child on pandora dead. its his end goal, quite literally nothing matters more than that.

whereas the crimson raiders have tunnel vision in regards to what they want and everything else is just white noise - the bandit casualties are just a byproduct of what they’re convinced they Have To Do, but their deaths are not the underlying goal. these people are violent criminals, so who cares if they die? they were in our way.

the raiders have a scale for who is important and who isn’t, and the scale has some leniency for bandits. (that service = fondness cycle we’ve talked about before.) jack has no scale. it doesn’t matter what can be offered to him or what can be done for him. everyone is the same because everyone is a bandit and so everyone should die. so on and so forth.

the best example i can think of is how lilith handled the children of the firehawk:
she uses them as a shield, and tolerates them because of it.
this tolerance grows to fondness. she’s flattered by them killing in her name.
(its only bandits dying, after all. there’s no real value lost.)
and then she intervenes whenever they start burning sanctuary citizens.
(people who are decidedly Not Bandits, and deserve her protection.)

jack would have just killed everyone at first glance. the bandits, the settlers, the vault hunters, and everyone else within a five mile radius if he could. lilith, if incentivized, can see the humanity in her enemy. which is something that jack outright refuses to do.

i think comes down to generalized apathy versus abject hatred. someone can be made to care. it is a hell of a lot harder to convince someone to love or even tolerate someone they hate.

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why is it that i feel like if the cov didnt exist the crimson raiders would probably misidentify a lot of non pandoran people as bandits because the bandit designation is so weirdly arbitrary and bandits on other planets would obviously not behave the same as those on pandora. that is if the orientalised (and therefore homogenized) nature of the bandits wasnt a thing

oh, yeah absolutely. even the pandroan definition of bandit is meaningless because of how much it varies between individuals so the raiders being faced with outside populations would be. something.

thank god maliwan and the cov are color coded because otherwise i think they’d get confused /j

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guuuh i've been looking at your posts and as someone who used* to barely think about a lot of the stuff the raiders did (*thanks to you /pos) it really opens up a layer of "what the fuck you guys" because i really do like the raiders but it really shows a double standard with them and adds a layer of moral grayness to it. things you'd think are just black comedy (lilith and the cotf) get a lot darker because of the origin of the bandits.

it's funny to me that while the line "...these are human beings, with lives and families and--" was meant to be like "eh whatever they're mooks in our fps game they were gonna kill ya anyway" it checks out a lot more when i read some of your rewrite posts. wish borderlands actually had this level of thoughtfulness when it came to the bandits in these entries.

!!! that line is always in the back of my head when i talk abt the raiders. they hit you with it right at the start, and as simple as it is, it really sums up their collective views on the bandits.

to me the most frustrating thing about borderlands is when it is just barley self aware. a brief flash where it looks at the camera and goes “hey, this is the funny part!” and the funny part is. racism or classism or the total dehumanization of an entire population of people. whichever it feels like on that day.

a lot of that is done by handsome jack because that’s his job as an antagonist, but its done in equal measure by the crimson raiders. and the game is aware of this! it just doesnt actually do anything with that commentary except try to be funny.