“Hey soldier. If you’re hearing this, I’m in trouble. Right now you’re the only thing standing between this city – hell the whole planet – and Handsome Jack’s Army. I left info about my whereabouts in my safe. You can use it to store anything you need. This is your home now. Good luck.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
He drops this recording on his desk and leaves.<\/p>\n
When you show up later and check the safe there’s a threatening message from the Firehawk, who has apparently kidnapped Roland. Firehawk says, “Come to [my base] or people will die.” The Firehawk is using a voice modulator to disguise their voice, which makes no sense. Everyone talks about how dangerous the Firehawk is and how Roland is probably dead if the Firehawk has captured him. <\/p>\n
So apparently Roland had a message from his own kidnapper. Inside of his own safe. And before he was kidnapped, he somehow made a note urging you to listen to this recording.<\/p>\n
<\/div>This part of the game drives me completely crazy. See, one of the reasons I analyze games is because I have to<\/b>. Once I see that something is wrong, it won’t stop bugging me until I dig down and find the problem. This plot feels like something is horribly wrong and broken, but once you get through it you’ll find all of the discrepancies will be accounted for. It’s like the opposite of fridge logic<\/a>. It’s something doesn’t make sense until you overthink it later. But because it feels dumb and broken at the outset, it still makes my story alarm go off. <\/p>\n The quest has you go charging into the Firehawk’s lair (as luck would have it the place is under assault from bandits at the moment so you have someone to shoot) and when you get to the end you discover the Firehawk is actually Lilith from the last gameIf you pitch-shift the original recording from the Firehawk you can hear it really was Lilith’s voice.<\/span>.<\/p>\n What you learn along the way is that Sanctuary used to be inhabited by this gang of bandits called the BloodshotsNot that they would FIT. Currently their forces fill both the dam and Frostburn Canyon. And Lilith has presumably been killing them for months. I doubt that modest little Sanctuary put a dent in their housing problem when they were at full strength. I dunno. Maybe this is where the leader lived?<\/span>. Roland kicked them out and made it into his base of operations for fighting Handsome Jack. Lilith kept the bandits busy while Roland fought the Hyperion Corporation.<\/p>\n So let’s go through these “plot holes”…<\/p>\n Why did Roland have a message from his kidnapper in his own safe?<\/b><\/p>\n The Firehawk didn’t kidnap Roland. The note is there to get you to seek out the Firehawk, nothing more. It’s a contingency plan. If Roland goes missing, he wants someone to make contact with Lilith so she can take over.<\/i><\/p>\n But why not just have a message that says, “If anything happens to me, go see the Firehawk”?<\/b><\/p>\n Roland and Lilith didn’t want anyone to know they were working together. They didn’t want Hyperion going after Lilith, and they didn’t want the Bloodshots harassing Sanctuary. (Not wildly successful, that last one.)<\/i><\/p>\n Okay but what’s the deal with giving herself a superhero name and using a voice modulator? It’s obvious that this was done so that her appearance could be a surprise for the player, but there’s no in-universe justification for doing it.<\/b><\/p>\n Actually there is. Sort of. Lilith faked her own death. It’s not really explained why she needed to do this, although there’s an optional side quest that reveals Handsome Jack wants to capture her. As we’ll learn later, he’s using a siren to “charge” the vault key. (We’ll get into that later.) Maybe he wanted a backup siren? Or maybe he wanted to double his key-charging throughput? Whatever. The point is, she wanted Hyperion to leave her alone, so she faked her own death.<\/i><\/p>\n I’m not sure that totally works, but fine. But that still doesn’t explain why her message was so threatening. “This is the Firehawk. Come to Frostburn Canyon or people will DIE!” That’s a really strange message, given the goal. Why not just say, “Hi. I’m the Firehawk. Come see me in Frostburn Canyon?” And why doesn’t Scooter know? He’s friends with both Lilith and Roland!<\/b><\/p>\n Again, you have to extrapolate, but it seems like Roland is worried about Hyperion taking the city, going through his stuff and torturing information out of everyone.<\/i><\/p>\n This is a really complicated plot by the standards of the series. And as far as I can tell, all of this backstory gymnastics is just there to justify the surprise reveal when you meet Lilith. It’s a cool moment to be sure, but I don’t know that it’s worth going through such a convoluted setup.<\/p>\n The writer has given Lilith a new magic siren power: She can now teleport things and people. This will become important later in the story. In the meantime, they recognize that this will become a giant plot hole if they don’t address it now. So Lilith tries to teleport the player to their next objective. She messes up, and the player only moves about ten meters. <\/p>\n So teleporting people is exhausting for Lilith, it costs her eridium to try it, and she’s not very accurate and can easily send you somewhere random. This is a good enough excuse for why she can’t just zap you past all of the annoying doors you’ll run into in the coming chapters. I appreciate that the storyteller took the time to clarify this instead of just waving their hand, “Bah. It’s a comedy game. It doesn’t need to make sense.” <\/p>\n The Firehawk didn’t kidnap Roland, but he was kidnapped. The Bloodshots nabbed him. Instead of killing him, they’re trying to collect the bounty from Hyperion. <\/p>\n You have to do some quests to gain entry to their stronghold, then blast your way through their sprawling complex in the dam to get to where they’re holding Roland. As you go, you hear the Bloodshots trying to collect the bounty for Roland. They keep negotiating their price down and Hyperion never replies. Just as you arrive at where Roland is being held, Hyperion shows up and kidnaps Roland from his kidnappers.<\/p>\n “And that’s how Hyperion pays ransoms!” Handsome Jack laughs as Roland is taken away.<\/p>\n Dude, it’s not a ransom. It’s a bounty. That you<\/b> posted. Dumbass. You even announced it in the first chapter of the game that you’d pay $1 million for whoever could kill the player, and added that you were still offering a reward for Roland. Presumably, the reward for Roland (who has been harassing Hyperion for months) would be much larger than the reward for the player, who hadn’t actually accomplished anything yet.<\/i><\/p>\n Jack is an outrageous, over-the-top cartoon villain, but he’s also kind of grounded by having a lot of the faults and shortcomings of your typical real-world tyrant. He’s got tons of wealth and power relative to the local populace, which means he can easily crush whoever he wants to. He then thinks that this makes him a military genius. He calls all of his foes bandits – even ones that do not engage in banditry and are in fact victims of same – so he can feel good about killing them. It feels like PR at first, but after a few conversations with him it’s clear he’s bought into his own hype and really does see his butchery as heroism.<\/p>\n His move here at the dam is obviously stupid. Why post a bounty and then kill the people who bring in the target? Hyperion has trillions. The Bloodshots were asking for just a few million. Roland is the biggest threat to the company plans. There’s no reason to refuse to pay such a small fee for such an incredible benefit except for foolish pride and bloodlust on Jack’s part. Heck, the robots and other war material that he spends stealing Roland are probably worth many times the “ransom” the Bloodshots were asking. <\/p>\n No sane person is going to try to collect on any Hyperion bountiesThere’s a sidequest later in the game where the player can collect on a Hyperion bounty for bandits, but I would NOT list the player character as a “sane person”.<\/span> in the future. Which means he’s just made things harder on himself in the long term for no benefit in the short term.<\/p>\n The difference between Jack’s stupid machinations and your typical bad guy machinations<\/a> is that this story doesn’t expect you to be impressed with Jack’s moves. Acting on pride and emotion are faults that are integrated into his character, and not an oversight on the part of a writer out of their depth<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is one of the things that makes him so fun to hate. He thinks he’s genius with a plan to save the world, but we can see he’s an incompetent jackass with a plan to exploit the world for his own glory. He thinks he’s witty, but he’s actually just an obnoxious dick. (His lines are funny to the player, but the humor comes from laughing AT him. As in: Can you believe this idiot thinks he’s being clever? It’s like, “What if an internet troll had control of an army?”) He does monumentally evil shit, carefully rationalizes it to himself, and then folds that rationalization to the fiction he’s building about who he is. He’s a blazing narcissist who lacks all notion of self-awareness.<\/p>\n I don’t know that we’ve ever had a villain like him before in games. He’s this ridiculous cartoon character and yet sometimes he feels more real and more human than the likes of The illusive Man, Comstock, Hiram Burrows, and Hugh DarrowIllusive Man is from Mass effect series. Comstock is the Villain of BioShock Infinite. Burrows is the villain of Dishonored. Darrow is from Deus Ex: Human Revolution.<\/span>. His villainy is shaped by all of these personality flaws, and they make him very fun to hate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For this next chapter, let’s imagine the world from Roland’s perspective: Roland is in his base in Sanctuary. He’s heard some radio chatter about a badass vault hunter coming this way. He’s eager to meet this person, but he has to leave town to talk to Lilith and for some reason he doesn’t just call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[609],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-borderlands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37973\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/div>Firehawk<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Bloodshot Stronghold<\/h3>\n
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