thinking about. in campaign of carnage there’s two quests back to back where the VHs murder around fifty people because torgue just tells them to.
one being to kill exactly 21 bandits because the alcohol in pyro petes bar had been poisoned. so the solution was…to kill them before the poison does.
the game acknowledges this through the mission log where the VHs just shrug their shoulders and go. “well, we’re still getting paid.”
and the second is torgue sending you to go kill a bunch of bandit video game reviewers (?) because they left a bad review on a game he liked. which haha funny gearbox joke whatever. but the quest objective is literally to Leave No Survivors. over a video game review.
the VHs have always been on the side of corporate interest, even when it’s less about pandoran politics and more - “oh our super rich ceo friend is paying us money to kill people he doesnt like in his vault competition that is an active detriment to the population around it.”
and sometimes this feels like a BL2 VH specific issue? bc theyre the most vicious out of all of the games (even when playing the Bad Guys™ in TPS), and there’s not even an excuse of necessity that you could argue for the BL1 and BL3 VHs.
Makes me little sad when I remember b.orderlands is hella bigoted sometimes because I genuinely love so many of the characters they botched/forgot about due to bias….. Kat Jr, Yvette, Fiona, Sasha, Aurelia, Mordecai to some extent, Nisha, Helena Pierce, Captain Scarlett, The Calypsos, and you know what, Leda too. So much lost potential because they want to prioritize all the wrong things and analyze None of them. Like sometimes I get mad Kat got like 30 minutes of screentime and question why they wouldn’t utilize him more, but then I remember this is the same team that made big game hunt (antiblack and antinative) and the enemies in pirates booty (orientalist) and I go Ohhhhh yeah these people like are white and stupid I forgot….
And like, obviously this is all bad, even Pandora as a concept feels kind of orientalist in its foundation just from how loosely people are willing to throw around the world “savage” in this game when referring to desperate people in a desertic planet, but I don’t know. There’s so much to like. I just often get upset over how much of it is hidden underneath layers and layers of unchecked biases against minorities the (mostly western, mostly white, mostly male) writers clearly were not thinking about while making this game and this world. I’m always going to be invested in it and I will always like it, but I feel it’s important for me to remember that these were choices made consciously by living breathing people who knew what they were doing and should be held accountable for them.
Also because I don’t wanna have any of the racist stuff, you know ? I don’t want to leave it in as I’m taking apart and expanding this world, or at least not leave it unchecked. I think the game would be way better if it took a very specifically anti-racist stanced and invited the player to think “Hey, isn’t it kind of fucked up you’re mowing down several people in the name of profit and material gain ? Or that you’re technically always siding with corporations even when they’re supposedly opposing you ?” Because I think these are genuinely interesting questions. But so long as the priority in the game is “Fun looty shooty game where you kill people indiscriminately don’t ask questions about it PLEEEEASE”, I don’t think it’ll ever progress past it.
Anyway maybe this game would be better storywise if the writers read Orientalism first. And The Capital by Karl Marx at the very least. You wanna be anticapitalist ? Then act like it you fuckass videogame that costs money !!!!
(with fists clenched. visibly pained.) sometimes characters are just meant to die. sometimes there are no alternatives to the end of the story. but also sometimes they are just a female character written in 2012.
by FAR my favorite part of angels character is how determined she is to stop jack once the curtain falls. its instant, theres no hesitation.
she knows exactly what needs to be done and she gets straight to the point about it. her outburst during the raider meeting. threatening to airlock the helios engineers. cursing out jack over the radio. if shes going down, shes going down swinging.
idk where this post is going. i think its funny that she yelled at roland that one time.
as much as i like the angel is a jakobs theory, there is also a very big appeal to me of her Not having that outside connection. existing only to jack and the player.
and i think it goes hand in hand with the concept of angel surviving the control core as well. it’s an idea im obsessed with, but i also think a lot about the alternative. mainly about the aftermath of her death being handled properly, and being mourned alongside roland.
she was born, she lived, and she died, and there are just a select few who knew her. everyone else will only have second hand memories.
continuously annoyed by how often borderlands displays the casual brutalization of women. oftentimes even faceless, nameless women at that.
im specifically talking about BL2s false sirens here. it is a few lines of dialogue in a side quest at the beginning of the game and yet i still irritated by it every time i play it.
in assassinate the assassins, roland sends you after a group of hyperion workers that have infiltrated bandit groups in an effort to hunt down lilith. instead, these men murder random women to dress up their corpses as sirens for the off-chance of making bank through hyperion. it is, by definition, femicide.
according to jack, they murdered at least a dozen women. note that these are likely bandit women, which means they have no means of protection from corporate interests, not even from the raiders. they only intervened because one of their own was being targeted.
but because we are getting this dialogue from jack, who is a misogynist himself, the game treats this with humor. there’s not any actual weight given to these women’s deaths, and as a a part of an optional quest with no further commentary, they are ultimately meaningless.
on the topic of the hyperion assassins, their designs are flawed. hyperion couldn’t even care enough about the populations they’re harming to properly infiltrate them.
oney is what i presume to be a bloodshot nomad, but he has no specific clan markings. it made him originally unidentifiable to me because of it, added onto his unique head gear. he also is the only nomad in the game to not use his shield whatsoever. (aside from mad mike, who is also a bloodshot nomad with has no shield at all.)
wots design is an tossup between slab and sawtooth. the shape of it is slab, the shoulders, the mohawk, but its all in yellow. he also spawns with a badass sawtooth despite southpaw being bloodshot territory.
these are two clans who are at war with one another, and while some slabs DO wear yellow, it is only in segments of their armor, not all of it. he would absolutely be viewed as a slab by the sawteeth and vice versa.
reeth is also a combination of two different clans who are currently at war with one another. the bloodshots and the children of the firehawk. he would theoretically be a bloodshot, but he doesnt have the tattoos despite being swarmed with other bandits who do.
but fire enemies of his type are clan exclusive in this game, locked only to the cotf, unlike in BL1 where they are all over.
rouf is actually different to me. i think he WAS actually a bandit before turning traitor and working with hyperion. his bodytype is specific to rats, and hyperion is confirmed to work with them at least through the mines in lynchwood. his bright green outfit and respirator are also unique to himself.
he and wots also use hyperion guns. for…no specific reason, im sure.
and personally i find this all Very Fun. it makes them uncanny, where their appearances would be off to the bandits around them, but the differences would go unseen by the raiders or hyperion. it is corporation trying to get you to buy into a language they themselves do not understand.
because. realistically. they’d walk into their respective bandit camps and immediately get questioned if not shot at for what they’re wearing.
cant think about jimbo being both moxxi AND scooter’s father too long or i will want 2 kms. btw. theyre literally siblings. jimbo is going to HELL and so are the writers.
tbh i dont think angel would rlly be outwardly affectionate. i think at best she silently orbits people she feels comfortable with and every ten minutes or so this appears above her head.
if the writers at gearbox had any brains left in their skulls they would have made roland and angel mirror each other from the very start.
roland defected from atlas, angel rebelled against jack. but as roland detaches himself emotionally from his work to lead the raiders, The Mission is all angel has. it Needs to be personal for her. its about roland building a world he can live in versus angel dying for the one only she can save.
the shared relief they must have felt in the moments before their deaths, thinking their plan had worked. rolands hand feeling for her fading pulse being the first warm human contact in years. just. (explodes.)
they DIED side by side, they should have at least been buried together, if they were buried at all. angel should have gotten a statue. idgaf. <- clearly gives a fuck.
roland going from getting his leg crushed during the fall of sanctuary to climbing up control core angel with his bare fucking hands will always be crazy to me. dude. we have buzzards.
and what if. baron led the group of bandits that atlas hired to clean out old haven. rolling out the welcome mat, just so thankful to them for opening the prisons and giving him his army. of course he’ll help them clear the town. find the key. open the vault. it’ll be his pleasure.
and then steele butchers them all regardless. establishing the new hierarchy on pandora.
whatever power baron got from being warden or being a flynt becomes null the second atlas moves in. him being the “leader of pandora” is only allowed because it placates the masses and does not outwardly intervene with their plans for the vault.
and that is why steele makes him a figurehead, parodying the role he originally played for dahl, only this time he doesnt benefit from the power he got from subjugating his own people. its karma in the vilest sense, and it is still not him suffering the most from it, but the rest of pandora’s citizens.
looks around. is it safe for me to admit that i actually do think jacks idea of naming lynchwood “new new haven” was actually funny as fuck. like yeah nisha vetoed it but you KNOW hes still calling it that in his head.
every time i remember sasha and fiona were just kids when atlas took over pandora i want to explode. especially when taking into account where exactly they lived when all of it was happening.
hollow point is located in a cave under rust commons east, which borders both old haven and the salt flats as well. it means they grew up under threat of dahl. baron flynt. the kobb twins. vallory. AND atlas. quite literally the most politically strained territory on the entire planet.
thinking about. domesticity on pandora. lying in bed with the doors and windows open during hot summer days. teaching friends and kids how to drive runners. gun swapping and collecting. houses built out of old mining ships and shipping containers, new rooms being added once babies are born.
just,,,all of the love and life that gets drowned out with the VHs being so focused on fighting.
what team angel would have as a pokemon trainer <3 -
i think she’d struggle as the sole caretaker of any person or creature. especially with the typical give and take dynamic between trainers and their partners throughout the series. it gives her an uncomfortable level of responsibility that takes a lot of building up to to be confident with.
