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lord-radish · 2 years

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So I've been mulling over some thoughts regarding Borderlands and the arc villain Handsome Jack. Specifically, how the third game - an interquel between the first and second games - introduces this moral ambiguity to the character and tries to flip the script by having the character go through something big and become the larger-than-life persona that he is in Borderlands 2.

My understanding is that when the game came out - which, granted, will be nine years ago later this year - this sparked furious debate about whether [X] character/s are actually responsible for the awful state of the world in Borderlands 2, if Jack would have become that massive villain in the first place had the events of the Pre-Sequel not happened etc.

And the thing is, I get that people are going to find the moral ambiguity and that omnipresent "what-if" situation much more engaging on a personal level, especially in fandom. Fandom, in my experience, tends to be a place where people band together into camps and feed the theories and outstanding elements that they like the most about the work. That's cool, and I don't mean to trample on anyone's passion or make an incendiary call-to-arms going to war with dissenting opinions or whatever. I'm not a fandom guy any more. That's not my bag.

But I do want to share my personal opinions on this whole moral ambiguity angle that the Pre-Sequel introduced to Handsome Jack after the fact that may read like a club to the back of the head. That opinion being that I'm personally not a big fan of the idea of "ooh moral quandary ahh hidden depths ohhhh if only things were a little different" in regards to Handsome Jack, and I don't really buy it from Borderlands as a whole.

I think Jack was a ticking time bomb, and even if the events of the Pre-Sequel sped things up significantly, Jack would have been just as evil in the long run because of his blatant egoism, his disinterest in the well-being of others in service of his own wants and goals, and his incendiary and impotent rage that he directs at others for not receiving the respect and power he clearly wants. And I think it's a more interesting take for a franchise like Borderlands to go down that "what-if" rabbit hole, and come out the other side saying "yeah he would have been a piece of shit either way".

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I'm going to keep this as spoiler-free as possible.

First of all, he has a history of self-serving and narcissistic behavior spanning years before the supposed "fallen hero" arc he goes through in the Pre-Sequel. Even before the PS Vault Hunters meet him, he's guilty of false imprisonment and forcing an innocent person to commit unethical acts under duress and against their will for most of their life. He built a death laser so he could nuke human settlements from orbit, entirely of his own accord. He harbors anger and resentment at those who have power over him - and granted, those people are pieces of shit to him and everyone around them, but Jack is no different in his dismissal of those "lower" than him and his willingness to sacrifice them for his grander, self-serving plans. The seeds are clearly already there despite his posturing of himself as the hero.

Secondly, his actions during the game. Are some of them necessary, if not the most kind? Sure. I love AI characters and I dislike the Skipper stuff that ends up happening, but I'm not gonna get hung up on that as "this makes Jack irredeemably evil". The thing with the scientists, at best, is a character being ruthless and taking the shortest possible route to the most desirable outcome. Those scenarios have been argued up and down, it's been done to death.

But I don't think you can really excuse the death laser he built to nuke bandit settlements from space, which he built using the remains of a biological doomsday weapon, without anyone's knowledge or input. And I think the general disdain he feels for those "under" him was always destined to end up manifesting in Jack blurring the line between "reasonable people trying to preserve their way of life" and "bandit scum who need to be wiped off the face of the planet".

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When he ends up wanting more resources and power from Pandora and Elpis due to his ability to leverage his existing power to obtain it, and subsequently facing increasing resistance from the people whose lives he's ruining for his own self-centred "greater good", I think the end goal was always going to be Jack refusing to see them as human and wiping them out with a doomsday weapon as long as it gets him what he wants. That line between "person" and "bandit" was always flexible, and it depended on whether people were useful for his ends or a hindrance to him.

In the Pre-Sequel, you see what happens when Jack decides his greater good is worth more than the lives of those beneath him - where his supposed heroism is still the focus of his character. I didn't get hung up on Skipper or the scientists earlier, but even without bringing the inherent good or evil of those acts into it, they're clear examples in a pattern of behaviour where their lives are forfeit to achieve Jack's needs.

This character trait of sacrificing the little guy for his own ends is emphasised in each of those events that underline Jack's supposed "start of darkness", but it's an innate part of his personality from the start, not the unfortunate downfall of a good man forced to make hard decisions. The aforementioned false imprisonment of a person and manipulation of their behavior under duress, which occurred over a decade before the Pre-Sequel, proves that this is a behavior that he repeats to prop himself up and get ahead - whether he consciously sees his behaviour as evil or not.

It isn't new, it isn't an issue caused by his betrayal, it's a pre-existing condition - and that selfishness and self-absorption is only further emphasised when he goes off the deep end. I genuinely believe that whether he was betrayed or not, those exaggerated negative aspects were always destined to manifest were he to gain the power he desperately wanted.

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And as such, in my opinion, the people who betrayed him were right to try to kill him pre-emptively. I think the person who gave him a motive speech about how he deserved to die was right. Even if it backfired and turned him into the villain he was in Borderlands 2, I think they were right to try and nip it in the bud.

Now, before I get ahead of myself - I'm not saying that the betrayers have the moral high ground. This was an assassination attempt. A necessary one in my opinion, but incredibly underhanded and dirty of them and deserving of some consternation.

I do have one issue with that, though. With Pre-Sequel being the third Borderlands game, released after the second game but taking place before it, this particular moral quagmire feels kind of forced after the fact? Like we've had a game with those betrayer characters being a part of the resistance against Jack, and now ooh, here's the secret hidden story they didn't tell you where they were the bad guys and they made Jack who he is. That's not hacky at all.

But I can respect the angle they're going for regarding Jack, because I personally believe that despite the basic posturing they're doing to paint this "fallen hero" narrative, the actions of Jack before, during and after the Pre-Sequel all point towards him being the exact murderous, selfish bastard he becomes. The betrayers actively made the Borderlands universe worse by driving Jack off the deep end - they made him stronger by trying to nip him in the bud. But I maintain that their logic for trying to do so - that he's an egomaniacal narcissist who'd only abuse absolute power to his own twisted ends - is totally sound.

In the Pre-Sequel, you kill a kid's dad because you beat the kid in a moon buggy race and the dad fires on you for making his son cry. In the first Borderlands, you're literally an amoral bounty hunter mowing through mountains of corpses on a twisted treasure hunt. In Borderlands 2, you ruin lives multiple times and you shoot a person in the face because they asked you to. Borderlands characters aren't exactly fountains of morality in the first place, so I kind of resent the idea that Jack or the people who betrayed him have to be painted in an objectively "correct" light.

Jack is a power-hungry piece of shit who should have been put down before the events of Borderlands 2. The people who "created" the Handsome Jack you see in Borderlands 2 by attempting to do just that? They did so in an unscrupulous and messy way that betrays their later posturing as the Big Goods of the Borderlands universe. That being said, the actions you commit as them in Borderlands 1 are hardly anything to aspire to.

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The Borderlands universe is ugly, dirty and gritty down to the last speck of sand. Trying to answer the question of "what-if" is a fool's errand in my opinion, because the answer tends to be the most pessimistic and depraved option available.

What if Jack hadn't been pushed too far in the Pre-Sequel? He would have become a power-hungry fascist anyway, and he would have had a death ray that's 10x as powerful as it ended up being. His disdain for people who get in his way - because they're opposing his will as "the good guy" - would have led to him dehumanising them and wiping them off the face of Pandora at his own discretion. He was always going to be that piece of shit from Borderlands 2.

Can the people who betrayed him really maintain their moral righteousness knowing that their actions created the exact threat that they had to eventually destroy in Borderlands 2? Perhaps not, but I don't blame them for trying to do what they did. They're hypocrites to some degree, absolutely - I kind of hate just how far they take one of the characters to tell you the truth, but that reflects poorly on their character now. I'm not going to tell you that [X] character did nothing wrong. Of course they did, both before and after what happened in the Pre-Sequel. You played Borderlands 1, you know just how dirty their hands got. The idea that they were idolized as heroes come BL2 was kind of a joke.

But what I believe most of all is that Jack was going to make his power-grab one way or the other, and all of Pandora would have suffered from that eventually. He was already manipulating the narrative to get his way before you ever knew who he was. The assassination attempt was, to some degree, justifiable. Its failure absolutely hastened Jack's descent into villainy, and was responsible for the events of Borderlands 2. To claim that one side or the other is the "correct" or "moral" choice is stupid; it's layers of shit all the way down.

You can decide which option is less shit, in your own opinion, but I think it's a mistake to turn this into "sides". The world of Borderlands is miserable and amoral. Jack is a narcissistic, evil piece of shit, and prominent enemies of his eventual villainy enabled that villainy in the first place. But it would have happened eventually, so there was literally no winning this that didn't end up with Jack dying in the Pre-Sequel - and even then, the corporate wars that rage in the background of the universe and the desolation, depravity and slow, eventual death knell of Pandora as a whole ensure that no-one, anywhere, ever gets a happy ending. No-one wins, ever.

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So I hear people got so heated about this that Borderlands blogs has to ban asks about certain characters because of how controversial they were. Reading that was the impetus of this post, because I can't see how you see a nihilistic shithole game universe like Borderlands and start flaming people about who's responsible for the world being even worse.

It seems clear to me that everything was going to suck regardless of what happened. Like, did people woobify Jack and make it out like he could have become the hero he wanted to be if only things worked out better? Because everything from his backstory to his actions in PS before the betrayal spell out that he's an egomaniac with a superiority complex. Did people go "oh well Jack only did what he did in BL2 because they made him this way"? Because they didn't force him to imprison a character for most of their natural lifespan and commit unethical acts to prop up his ascent to power.

And hey, the framing device of the Pre-Sequel makes a solid case for the people who betrayed him being self-righteous hypocrites who are responsible for what happened as well, and that's equally as valid. Like I said, the Borderlands universe is a dirty, pessimistic place. But for their role in Jack's villany, I'm of the belief that at worst, they just sped up what was always going to happen to Jack.

[X] character, while a self-serving hypocrite, is no more liable for Jack's actions as Jack himself is, the same way Batman isn't wholly liable for the Joker stabbing a baby to death despite "creating" the Joker. There's more to a person than One Bad Day that leads to them stabbing a baby to death - they're responsible for their own actions, that's their own actions and aspirations manifesting an evil outcome. In Jack's case, there's abundantly more happening behind the scenes of his life that led to his evil than just being betrayed and left for dead. He was a piece of shit from day one.

Yeah, it's callous and awful that those characters tried to assassinate Jack. But to act as if it's all or nothing - that it was One Bad Day standing between a decent person, if not misguided, and a rampaging genocidal maniac - is absurd. At worst, they sped up what was already there. The characters were already murderers at that point. Everything is and was terrible, and no-one was getting out of it unscathed.

The idea that it has to be one way or the other is absurd, and that's what I really hate about media that tries to be clever by flipping the lens and going "oooh spooky who's the real bad guy?????", especially when it's after they've written the character as an abject piece of shit in prior media - like dude, no matter what, Jack was deservedly going to go to hell for everything he did. He is a villain, and he'd always been one. Making the "good guys" would-be murderers who drove him to the edge faster doesn't change that.

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That's my take, and I don't intend to supplant anyone else's viewpoint or anything. Please, redeem Handsome Jack in your fan works or answer that "what-if" question in accordance with your own viewpoint and values.

The simple fact is that I'm just not much of a "redemption arc" guy. I'm gonna be a basic bitch and say that Avatar: The Last Airbender nailed the redemption arc in a way that most media before and since just hasn't been able to do, but I'm also going to go out on a limb and say that the more Star Wars media exists that rack up Darth Vader's body count, the less I really care for his redemption. Like damn Luke, go the way of the Return of the Jedi manga and cut his fucking head off!

I like revenge. I like when villains are villains for the most part, and I think it's hacky to double back on something bad and go "well ACTUALLY here's a bunch of OTHER shit that happened that CHANGES THE CONTEXT OF THEIR ACTIONS". That's my bias, and I especially dislike the whole hand-wringing "things are not what they initially seemed" approach like what happened in Borderlands: the Pre-Sequel.

Basically, take all of this as one person's opinion whether it lines up with your own point of view or not. Discussion and enquiry is welcome, as magnanimous or as spirited as you'd like, though I would discourage anon hate because frankly I wouldn't treat you that way even if I disagreed with your point of view.

You know that feeling when you feel like you have a horrible disease that's going to give you a heart attack and ruin the rest of your life, but then you take a massive dump and you feel better than you've felt in about a month? That's basically what writing this post has been for me. The poison has left my body and I can breathe again.

#borderlands #borderlands the pre sequel #handsome jack

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