so. that whole poisoning wilhelm thing.
context:
so. that whole poisoning wilhelm thing.
context:
and we’re back. borderlands text posts part five!
its actually sick how you can see jack physically step over angel’s body in the cutscene where he grabs lilith. like nauseatingly sick.
hey chat i think we should beat this guy with hammers
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.