Something that I can’t wrap my head around is that GearBox cut Maya’s funeral from the game and Ava remorse. Instead they just have her blame Lilith for the death and the game agrees with her.

It’s like they wanted the audience to hate the character. I don’t get what Gearbox was even thinking. Maya’s death only had an impact on the story and not the characters like Roland’s did. They barely bring up her death in the game despite her being a playerable character in the 2nd game.

For Roland’s death they took it seriously. They didn’t add cringe jokes or the villain editing a shitty video of his death to post online. His death had weight on everyone in sanctuary. It was important to the story and the characters.

For Maya though, it was just ‘she died, here’s a cringe edited video of her death lol. Anyway, go to this planet now and progress the story.’ This was a fan favorite character and they killed her off as if she was a side character. As if she was nothing but a means to give Ava siren powers. It’s terrible.

The fact that gearbox flat out scrapped the funeral for Maya is insane. The fact that they seemed to think Lilith was the blame for the death, when Ava literally broke orders and went into the vault, which lead to the twins killing Maya is insane. The fact that they seem to think people would like this version of Ava and even had her become the leader of the crimson raiders is insane.

Borderlands 3 in honestly has one of the worst written stories in all of gaming.

I really, really wanted to love Borderlands 3. Especially after the Commander Lilith expansion, which I adored. (Brick and Mordecai's whole thing 😭 and Hector! Good villain!! And he had so many parallels to my OC Bool. Big magic, both me and the new writers of the series stumbling on basically the same villain.)

And I know how hard writing can be. I imagine writing for a game is way, way harder, with the limitations of the genre and everyone meddling. So I don't want to blame the new writers.

But damn. For me, BL3 was a bunch of disappointments, one after another. Starting with the characterisation of Vaughn. Was so looking forward to that unlikely little nerd coming into his own as a bandit leader on Pandora. But he was just an annoying joke.

The Maliwan CEO was dull as dirt....the new characters were mostly unmemorable......most of the jokes didn't land for me.....Troy and Tyreen having muddled, watered down characterisation in spite of being Exactly My Type, boy/girl evil siblings, and wishing I could have loved them more....rghh...stupid little things, my own fault for speculating, like hoping we would acquire characters from the previous games onto the ship and their rooms would have environmental storytelling, or even little vignettes together that you could hear as you walk past. But nah....

I also had mixed feelings about the way Brick and Mordecai were handled. Of course I was touched that they made a home together with Tiny Tina, because, holy shit, what more could you want? But the monkeys paw of this is that Mordecai seemed really, really sad. It's been a long ass time since I played BL3, so maybe I'm misremembering, but he really bummed me out. Also if you talk to him enough times, he makes a remark about not being able to date anyone because Brick and Tina make it difficult to bring women around, and I dont know, man, I dont know, I'm not proud of it, but I just want my otp to be canon, alright? I'm only human, and that voice line really got me down.

So much of this wasn't the creators of BL3's fault. Just my own expectations. There was some stuff that was objectively bad (lots of long, drawn out Bad Stuff happening during cinematics while my characters should be able to interfere with events, but we have plot paralysis I guess. Overall weak plot. That shit fucking scene at the end where Tannis, TANNIS, WHO I'VE KNOWN FOREVER, BEEN THERE FROM THE BEGINNING TANNIS, is like ????? What's going on I don't get it????? And Ava, BABY AVA, has to explain shit to her? And I think Ava becomes the boss after that?? Nah man nah....nothing against Ava but she ain't next in line.)

But ye I can acknowledge it was mostly my own fault for expecting too much 😞

Borderlands 4 plot the after-party for Wainwright and Hammerlocks wedding so wild that someone opened a vault by accident releasing a new siren power Phasetime (an excuse for the writers to rewrite time and save Angel and Maya) and the new siren is a trans girl whos egg finally cracked bc she got siren powers

i feel like ava is undeservingly hated as a character in borderlands 3. i get she's a lil "annoying" or whatever but she's a kid. she's impulsive, impatient, somewhat self serving but like. all teenagers are like that, she's not the only one.

she's an orphan, she left her home planet to survive, she had to trust maya (who she barely knew!!) to keep her alive. maya brought her to athenas, which was soon invaded and she had to abandon yet another home. goes to live in sanctuary with more people she barely knows, and just wants to be involved because she IDOLIZES maya and wants to prove her worth to her. maya fucking dies (not ava's fault and I'll defend that stance tooth and nail) and she's an orphan again and has to bear the guilt of her mentor's death. idk man ava deserves a hell of a lot more empathy than she gets.

i think gearbox is setting up her to be a PC in BL4 or at least i can hope bc i really want to see her grow and evolve. i think she has a lot of pressure on her re: maya and lillith's gifts they bestowed but i think she's gonna be a very capable leader in the future.

Prediction for Borderlands 4 (from someone who hasn't finished 3)

(this post is full spoilers for as far as I've played to)

There are definitely still people who admire Handsome Jack. Especially if they're not on Pandora and haven't witnessed his evil first hand, they might still believe Jack was doing good. So I believe that somebody is going to salvage the AI core from the Handsome Jackhammer and use that to create another Handsome Jack. Whether he's in AI form like Tales or if he gets put into a body like the failed versions of 2 DLC I don't know. Either way, Jack will be back and holding onto that AI is going to majorly backfire on Rhys and Hyperion. Maybe Rhys will be a major focus?

Jack is the best villain this series has and I think the studio knows that. That's why he's been William Afton-ing so much. Out of the games I've beaten (1, 2, Presequel, Tales) he's supposedly had a role in all of them (even if he's not directly featured in 1 he was written into the story) and so it would be stupid to retire a character like him so soon!

Honestly I would have expected that plotline to be 3. I'm not particularly fond of the Calypso twins, they're annoying and feel kinda overpowered? Like Jack was great cause you didn't know what he was actually capable of and everything he does is his own cunning.

The twins however:

Aren't even super charismatic but have a loyal cult willing to die for them (why?)

Are overpowered. While you don't know what they're capable of the answer is yes

Are annoying as all hell.

Are literal influencers?? I feel like there's some metaphor there.

Are overly in-your-face with their sadism. Literally showing you clips and edits of Maya dying seconds after she died? Ugh.

Did I mention how annoying they are???????

And this one's a problem with the game itself but it doesn't even give you time to morn? Like you go back to sanctuary, there's one conversation about Maya, and suddenly she doesn't matter anymore. It's time to save Hammerlock. Love treating a woman's death as character development for someone else (or worse, pure shock value) but when a man dies? Oh we were stuck on Roland. Literally a whole mission (even if it was just running around Sanctuary) surrounding his death and it creates a heavier atmosphere the rest of the game. Suddenly it's not such a silly looter shooter, there are actual consequences to the characters' actions. Maya's death so far? It's just been for her apprentice to realize vault hunting isn't a game and to shock the player. There's not been any acknowledgement of what happened since. I dunno, maybe it's cause all I've done since was rescue Hammerlock but it bothers me.

I bit the bullet and just watched a silent walkthrough of psycho krieg and the fantastic fustercluck and It feels like they actually decided to go back and read what the fuck DID actually is and write krieg to be more nuanced but they also hired a guy whose job is exclusively to make really stunted whedonesque jokes to ease off the tension at incredibly inappropriate times. Also I’m pretty sure gearbox has completely fucking forgot who tannis is as a character other than an autism caricature to the point of even contradicted the backstory established for her in borderlands 1. I really like how we got to see Maya as a character in this one, I feel like I’m anything else her characterization is really flat in comparison to the other vault hunters. In general I feel like everyone involved in writing this DLC didn’t play or doesn’t care about borderlands 1, spoilers ahead; I think it was a really weird decision to make psychos violent evil screaming cannibals because hyperion pumped them full of violent evil screaming cannibal juice instead of pandora just being a former penal colony where corps dropped their worst convicts and decided to fuck off when the money dried up leaving them to fend for themselves, I’m pretty sure the masks and buzz axes are supposed to be mining equipment used by them in prison labor. I also think Tannis is comically underqualified as a neurologist cause the whole “vaulthalla” thing is honestly just a really ok metaphor for dealing with PTSD which uh like, I’m pretty sure is a prerequisite for Pandoran citizenship at this point though handwaving it as “medicine is Tannis’ weird new hobby and she’s only really qualified to do geochemistry” makes a lot of sense. Also seeing all the really dogshit side quests that boil down to “press the X button 5 times” or “walk to this location and walk back” make me really glad I ended up not buying this shit. On the bright side I like the psychedelic imagery and I think this + the better parts of Wonderlands I hope it’s an aesthetic they go forward with (but obviously like, improving from the dogshit they’ve been serving up since BL3’s release)

Also I find krieg even more relatable now because he also had the moment of having his delusions justified in one small event that caused his mental health to get severely worse and getting extremely attached to people that put up with and understand his quirks that make other people uncomfortable. (Also lol I realized he has the exact same backstory as an old borderlands oc of mine, the one that I’ve had as an icon for a while now, though idk I should probably change it at some point.)

Little bit of a rant, cause I'm back on the Borderlands!AU hell wagon, Borderlands is one of my Special Interests so of course I'm hyperfocusing on the lore again, and continuity errors bother me

Spoilers for Borderlands 3, said rant, and pet death mention under the cut

I was writing some more of Gabe and Dabi's Borderlands!AU, cause I had to put my Heart Rat, Eris, to sleep last week, the night before I was supposed to get home from my trip, and I'm still incredibly heartbroken about it, and for some reason my go-to coping mechanism is writing hurt/hurt, no comfort, we march into the thorn bushes naked to feel better /j /ij /lh

I was thinking about making Hawks another Siren for story purposes (screw genders, we're all hermaphrodidic frogs in this house /j /lh /ij), so I went to go look at the list of known Sirens...

And I think I just realized there’s a canon timeline issue if there’s only supposed to be 6 Siren’s at a time, with the 7th and final one locked away for everyone’s safety.

Because at the time of Borderlands 1, we have:

Lilith, with Phasewalk (who was a Siren from a young age)

Steele, with an unknown power (who had the rank of Commandant in Atlas’ Crimson Lance)

Maya, with Phaselock (who got her powers as an infant, and given to the Order of the Impending Storm)

Amara, with Phasetrance (who has had her powers since childhood, first using them when she fought a bully)

Angel, with Phaseshift (who got her powers as a child, and was at the very least in her mid-to-late teens while helping the first batch of Vault Hunters) and

Tyreen and Troy, with Phaseleech (who it is implied got their powers from Nyriad, seeing as the ancient Eridian-Speaking Siren had locked them in the Vault on Nekrotafeyo where the twins were conceived | As up until this point all Sirens were women, it is assumed that the only reason Troy is a Siren is because he was Tyreen’s parasitic twin, and somehow ended up absorbing some of Tyreen's Siren abilities as well)

They were all, or at the very least should have been, Sirens, so there's the 6 right there.

By my math (apologies if I'm horrendously off here, I'm going off my memory and 2 minute google searches through both fandom wiki and the Borderlands threads on Gearbox's Forum site, so something's bound to be off), there's:

About 5 years between Borderlands and Borderlands 2 (Mentioned many times in-game)

There's about a year between End Game-Borderlands 2 and the Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary DLC (Lilith mentions Mordecai had been sober a full year so he could properly raise Talon, who hatched shortly after Handsome Jack's death)

Then 7 - 8 years between Commander Lilith and Borderlands 3 (Off-handed comment from Vaughn about the VR torture devices only really being used to play games from 7 years ago, making reference to Borderlands 2 VR | Tiny Tina has 'World's most dangerous 13-year-old' in her Borderlands 2 Title Card, and 'All grown up. Still insane.' in her Borderlands 3 Title Card. Presumed to be around 20 as Gearbox has yet to give an official age)

So 11 years minimum, 15 years at max, and both those numbers are if we fudge them as far as canonically possible. And all of these lovely ladies, and Troy (with the obvious exceptions of Angel, whose power passed on to Tannis, and Commandant Steele, whose power is probably currently sitting in some poor teenager at this point, can't wait to meet you in Borderlands 4!) are at least in their late 20's - early 40's during the events of Borderlands 3?

So here's where my issues show up

There’s a couple of comics set during Borderlands 1 (Borderlands: The Fall of Fyrestone and Borderlands: Tannis and the Vault), that introduce another Siren: Asha, with some kind of Animal Control ability that I cannot find if there was ever an official name given or not, other than Animal Control.

According to the comics, Asha was employed by Marcus as an attendant in Fyrestone, greeting the Vault hunters as they come through the town and helping them get set up, as well as close friends with Claptrap. Two months prior to Roland, Mordecai, Brick and Lilith being dropped off in Fyrestone, Nine-Toes had rigged a bus to explode on arrival as part of his first attack on the town, and Asha was thrown into a coma when she was hit with shrapnel. Claptrap sent her to New Haven to been cared for by Tannis, finally regaining consciousness just before the Vault Hunters leave to fight Sledge. The only time we ever see her use her Siren abilities is when the final piece of the Vault Key is eaten by a Rakk Hive, leaving Tannis, Asha and Claptrap to rescue the nearly defeated Vault Hunters. Claptrap gets badly damaged, Asha reveals to him she's a Siren, she disperses the Rakk swarms, letting the Vault Hunters launch a bomb into the Rakk Hive, killing it.

Asha's status has been listed as unknown, and I cannot find anything about if the comics are canon or not. But that is still 7 Sirens during Borderlands 1.

So, as I was playing through Borderlands 3 on stream, back when it originally was released, I came across Nyriad's Audio log, "Warning":

You. You know now all that I know. This was an epitaph, not for myself, but for the world I knew. I have brought ruin to the Sirens, murdered the Eridians, and imprisoned a primordial force of the universe. Perhaps I have earned your hatred, or your sympathy. But that is not why I write these words. I have told you the truth, no matter its hard edges. Before I can put my fractured mind to rest, I must pass one more warning.

You must never find the Seventh.

(I could not find the written transcript for this Eridian Writing anywhere, even on the fandom wiki, so I ended up transcribing it myself from a video. Many thanks to EruptionFang on YouTube for having the complete Eridian Writings Messages with timestamps so I didn't have to launch my game just to get it)

Anyways, I pointed out that I could have sworn I'd read something, probably around the time of, or just before Borderlands 2 official release date, saying that there were only ever 7 Sirens at a time, and was very confused as to when they'd changed it to only 6. Am I the only one that happened to? Is this another case of the Mandala Effect?

But back to my rant, did Nyriad think of herself as the Seventh? Or was she referencing another of her sisters? Cause if she was talking about herself, then I kind of wish Nyriad has been clearer in her warnings, y'know? Instead of being vague... But if she was talking about one of her sisters, then yeah, canon's wrong. The way she worded her warning kind of made me think she was referring to one of her sisters, so...

The other possibility is that the comics are not canon at all, in which case canon's correct. But I would like official clarification on that.

Can we please know, Gearbox?!? I'm begging you guys to give us a straight answer!

But yeah. Mini rant over. Thank you for coming to my TEDtalk.

sorry but literally its still SO SO SO fucking funny and iconic to me that this guy gets separated from everyone for the WHOLE SEASON all bc he refused to run when a freakshow gunman is spraying them w anti tank riflefire. like. that is commitment to the fucking bit. i respect him so much for going "i could easily die but its less devastating than ruining my cool guy image. goodbye"

Kuina & Ann | ALICE IN BORDERLAND (2020–)

not me getting jumpscared because i forgot there was a location called this in BL3, lmao

Raphael only sleeping with an incubus taking his form gives very much Handsome Jack Vibes, am I right gamers?

ALICE IN BORDERLAND Season 2 | Episode Four

Did I do this meme right

Them not remembering one another makes me want to fucking DIE

sorta redraw of the ceos scene from new tales but actually accurate because let's be real, none of these people aside from rhys would ever give a shit abt tediore

click for better quality, reblogs > likes

one thing about season 2 is that the kid arc should have gone to chishiya instead of usagi

his flashback obviously established him as a pediatrician and the whole arc would have hit so much harder if he was the one who found kota and helped him with his visa and then after the game when he was safe with the other survivors, kota hugged him and we got to see the stoicism break in chishiya for a second when he just awkwardly pats the kid on the back and leaves

and then after that and the king of diamonds game, we get the arisu/chishiya scene and the whole thing about making his own choice based on his ideals and being unselfish when he takes that bullet for usagi

i just think it would have hit harder than the kota arc going absolutely nowhere with usagi and arisu tbh