cant think about nisha watching hyperion take over her friends bodies for too long or i want to explode.
wilhelms change from the way he is in TPS and BL2 happens VERY quickly. by the time they raid new haven you can tell he’s lost most of himself just by his voice. and then he (unofficially) gets poisoned by jack and set up as bait for the vault hunters. a god-killer made expendable.
and nisha will never know ‘just’ timothy, if she was even allowed to know his name or true self in the first place. his entire livelihood is to pretend to be someone else and, if need be, die in his place. and then he just disappears one day without a word, completely cuts contact. and thats if she sees him at all after the elpis job is done.
i dont think she ever considered claptrap her friend but that doesnt mean shes blind to how worthless his entire product line was to jack. this is someone who did an equal amount of work for hyperion that she did who still gets shot and ditched somewhere out in the tundra after years of mockery. going into his brain and seeing his emotions first hand didnt even pull an ounce of empathy.
its not even just her friends. felicity was their saving grace and they (they! nisha took part in this.) cannibalized her programming for the next generation of loaders. gladstone and the rest of the hyperion staff were obviously innocent and are murdered anyways off of impulse.
and she thinks its funny. of course she thinks its funny. its probably fucking hilarious for her but girl!! snap out of it!!
oh this isn’t going to end well…
Do you have any characters you feel aren't talked about enough? Either narratively or irl, for me Felicity will always be "that one character with the most interesting influence on the story that just gets sidelined in favor of other things"
oh there are plenty!!
felicity is a really good example, though it think it is partially by design that she is wiped so cleanly from the games memory. she only ever really existed to a handful of people, her narrative purpose is a warning sign that goes ignored. (wilhelm, claptrap, gladstone, all people who were involved in her death eventually becoming just as expendable to jack and hyperion.)
however i DO think that her death would have stuck with aurelia specifically and if the writers had any care for her character it would have changed how she acted in BL3. and from a fandom sense absolutely yes she needs more attention. i need to draw her myself one of these days.
and i feel pretty much every BL1 character would be very popular if introduced today, or if they had lived past the first game. outside of that, helena pierce, steele, and baron flynt had potential to be very important to the surviving cast and its not really seen through.
uhmm who else. the fact that wilhelm isnt more popular is a little bizarre to me seeing as how he’s so heavily attached to hyperion. i think he was underutilized by the games as well, sacrificing him for the plot in a lackluster way and not really giving him anything to stand out against the other VHs in TPS.
he is VERY interesting to me though, and had the potential to be very threatening.
sir hammerlock is unironically one of the best characters in the series and he has such a lasting presence between BL2 and 3 and there has been almost complete radio silence on the fandom’s end.
he is very unique to me! and very charming, and i wish that was felt more by the rest of the fandom at large. he was the perfect introduction to BL2. story wise i think he sits very comfortably, and as far as borderlands characters go, he gets more attention than most. but i am starving for more fan content.
i think im cheating a little bit by putting angel on this list but i genuinely do think she should have been mourned properly by the characters (and by the game, from a meta standpoint). shes popular enough as it is within the fandom, but i dont really feel her impact as much as i would like within the games themselves.
her being mentioned in BL3 and FFS dont really count to me, mainly because they seem more like misery baiting than properly addressing and mourning her circumstances. she just gets flattened down to this sad, dead little girl. and she was more than that!
i guess my biggest issue is that its hard to make narrative connections. borderlands has kind of an object permanence issue with its characters when theyre not on screen.
