наши сердца из стали, капитан

rhack shippers i

[writingdose]

“I want to write a fic about this but I don’t think anybody will be interested in it” ummm hello excuse me ma’am what do you mean you don’t think anybody will be interested in it??? YOU. YOU ARE INTERESTED IN IT???? write it because YOU are interested in it and YOU want to write about it. fanfic writing should always be first and foremost about YOUR enjoyment, not other people’s.

[serpentasha]

ДЛЯ СЕБЯ Я ЕГО И В ГОЛОВЕ МОГУ ПОСМОТРЕТЬ, КАКОЙ БЛЯДЬ ИНТЕРЕС

[characteranalyses]

Character Analysis: Rhys (Tales from the Borderlands)

Who is Rhys?

Rhys starts Tales from the Borderlands as a middle manager at Hyperion who's already bought into the fantasy of what Hyperion success is supposed to look like. He wants promotion, prestige, recognition, and proximity to power, and he's spent enough time admiring Handsome Jack that the admiration has started to shape his whole sense of what competence and importance look like. The game introduces him as awkward and funny, but it also introduces him as deeply invested in status. He's not some ordinary guy who accidentally wanders into a Vault story - he begins as somebody who wanted to climb.

That ambition is a huge part of what makes him interesting to me. Rhys is much easier to like if you lean only on the jokes, panic, and social awkwardness, but the game gives him a stronger and uglier core than that; he can be kind, but he can also be greedy, vain, and far too excited by the chance to matter. His relationship with Jack is the clearest example; he doesn't fear or resent Jack, he's drawn to him. Jack represents exactly the kind of power, certainty, and mythic success Rhys has spent years wanting for himself.

His role in the story depends on that temptation. Fiona brings a more grounded survival instinct, Sasha brings sharper moral friction, and Vaughn carries a much more obvious collapse under pressure - Rhys is the one who keeps getting asked what kind of person he becomes when the door to pwoer actually opens. The game puts him next to money, tech, corporate authority, vault mythology, and Jack's ghost in his head, then keeps testing how much of him really wants to turn away from that. A lot of the tension in his arc comes from the fact that turning away doesn't come naturally.

He also fills a useful place in Borderlands more broadly because he lets the series look at ambition from the inside rather than only through someone like Jack at full scale. Rhys isn't yet a tyrant, fully formed, or especially imposing on first impression - he's insecure enough to still look malleable, which makes him a better vehicle for questions about greed, admiration, self-invention, and moral compromise than a character who already knows exactly who he is. The game keeps returning to the same problem with him: he wants to be impressive badly enough that he's always in danger of becoming the sort of person he ought to hate.

Psychology

Anxiety fits Rhys very easily. He's tense, self-conscious, easily overwhelmed, and constantly trying to manage how he's coming across, especially once events start moving outside anything he can control. A lot of his humour has a strained quality to it, like someone trying to keep his own panic from becoming the dominant tone of the room. He talks quickly, second-guesses himself, latches onto plans because he needs something to stabilise around, and can swing fast between overconfidence and visible stress when the plan starts slipping.

He's also highly image-driven. Rhys doesn't just want to succeed, he wants to look like the kind of person who succeeds. Hyperion has clearly taught him that importance has an aesthetic, and he's very responsive to it: titles, office politics, cybernetics, executive proximity, and all the small signals that say somebody's moving upward. That doesn't make him shallow in a simple sense, but it does mean he's unusually vulnerable to external measures of worth. He wants legitimacy, and for a long time he looks for it in the same places Jack did.

Jack's influence lands so hard because it plugs directly into that need. Rhys doesn't have a strong, settled inner identity at the start of the game; he has ambition, nerves, and a set of aspirations shaped by Hyperion's culture. Once Jack is literally in his head, the fantasy becomes much harder to keep at arm's length. Rhys can see the danger, and some part of him is still fascinated by it, which is what makes the obsession compelling. Jack isn't only a villain haunting him, but a model of the kind of man Rhys once thought he wanted to become.

There's also a real selfish streak in him that the fandom often sands down too much. Rhys is capable of loyalty and affection, but he's not naturally selfless. He can be opportunistic, can get carried away by the promise of advantage, and often needs other people to drag him back toward the human cost of what he's doing. Fiona and Sasha are especially important there - withuot that friction, he has a real tendency to talk himself into morally dubious decisions if they look smart, profitable, or impressive enough.

His selfishness doesn't make him cold - in fact, a lot of his mess comes from the opposite problem: he wants too many things at once. He wants to be decent, to be safe, to be powerful, for his friends to stay with him, Jack's approval and freedom from Jack's influence at the same time. Rhys is constantly pulled between ego and conscience, which is why player choice can shift him so visibly without making him feel like a completely different character; the instability's already there.

Strengths and Flaws

Rhys is quick-minded. He adapts fast, improvises well under pressure once he gets moving, and can hold together plans in conditions that should completely flatten him. He isn't physically dominant or naturally intimidating, so a lot of his usefulness comes from speed of thought, opportunism, and the willingness to keep trying another angle when the first one fails. His flexibility is one of the reasons he survives as much as he does.

He's also charismatic in a messy, human way. Rhys doesn't have Jack's force or Fiona's polish, but he can still be funny, engaging, and emotionally readable enough that people keep following him longer than his actual level of preparedness should allow. He gets underestimated because he looks awkward, and that awkwardness can work in his favour; people tend to see the panic and the goofiness first and miss how determined he is underneath them.

Another strength is that he can change directions when reality hits hard enough. Rhys is very capable of self-serving rationalisation, but he isn't so sealed inside it that nothing gets through; once the stakes become personal enough, once the cost becomes visible enough, he can pull back, feel shame, and make a better choice. Without that capacity, he really would drift much closer to Jack than he does.

His flaws are where a lot of my real interest in his characters sit. Ambition is the biggest one; Rhys wants advancement and recognition badly enough that he can become reckless, self-justifying, and bizarrely easy to bait with the promise of importance. He likes the idea of being the guy at the centre of something huge, and that desire clouds his judgment again and again.

He's also too susceptible to external validation. Rhys cares too much about what powerful people think of him and too much about the image of himself he can build through corporate or technological success, which makes him easy prey for Jack's influence and helps explain why his relationship with him is never only about survival - there's ego in it. Some part of him likes feeling more dangerous, singular, and advanced than he was before.

Greed is another real problem for him, and not just in the literal money sense; Rhys is greedy for status, narrative centrality, proof that he isn't some disposable office nobody. The Vault, the eye, the suits, the executive fantasy, the way he keeps leaning toward the bigger outcome rather than the safer or more ethical one - all of that comes from the same place. He wants more, and "more" often feels morally neutral to him until someone else forces the issue.

Relationships

HANDSOME JACK Jack is mentor fantasy, status fantasy, threat, parasite, and temptation all at once. Rhys' fixation on him starts before Jack is in his head, which is part of why the later psychological hold works so well; Jack represents the endpoint of Hyperion success, and Rhys has spent long enough admiring that endpoint that some part of him is primed to confuse power with greatness. Once Jack becomes an active presence, their relationship turns into a constant struggle over identity. Rhys wants Jack gone and his body back, but he also keeps circling the possibility of becoming more like him and aligning himself with him longer-term, and that contradiction is the whole heart of the dynamic.

FIONA Fiona is one of the people most important to keeping Rhys from disappearing into his own worst instincts. She's practical, skeptical, and much harder to impress with corporate nonsense than he is, which gives their partnership a lot of its energy. Their relationship works because they push against each other in useful ways; Rhys brings aspiration, tech, and a strange kind of earnestness, while Fiona brings reality, suspicion, and a much stronger instinct for the human cost of greed. She's often the person best positioned to call out when he's drifting too far into self-myth or executive fantasy.

VAUGHN Vaughn shows what Rhys looks like around someone who knew him before the Vault story made him feel important. Their friendship is full of affection, panic, and mutual dependence, and it does a lot to humanise Rhys without turning him into a saint. Around Vaughn, Rhys often looks more insecure, protective, and obviously soft. At the same time, the dynamic also highlights his ego; Rhys likes being the more composed one, the one with the plan, the one who can hold the line while Vaughn is visibly losing it. There's love there, but there's also a version of himself Rhys enjoys performing inside that friendship.

SASHA Sasha pulls on Rhys' conscience in a way that's slightly different from Fiona because there's more vulnerability in it. Around her, he often seems more eager to be seen as decent, brave, and trustworthy rather than simply clever, which makes the relationship useful for reading him. Sasha draws out the part of Rhys that wants to be better than his environment has trained him to be, but that doesn't erase the ego underneath. He still wants to impress her, still wants to look capable, still wants the emotional reward of being the man who comes through.

Just for Fun / Typology

MBTI - ENTP Ne is central to how he moves through the story. Rhys is quick, improvisational, idea-driven, and constantly hopping between angles, plans, jokes, and possibilities. He's at his best when he can keep adjusting on the fly, talking through a situation as it changes, and turning panic into momentum. His mental agility is a huge part of his charm and a huge part of why he survives.

Ti fits the way he handles problems and jutsifies himself. Rhys likes systems, tech, clever workarounds, and the feeling of thinking faster than the people around him. Even his moral compromise often has a Ti quality to it; he can reason himself into bad decisions if the internal logic feels neat enough and the payoff looks big enough, which is one reason I pick it over ENFP. He has warmth and plenty of feeling, but the core of his decision-making still feels more analytical, opportunistic, and self-justifying than value-led.

MORAL ALIGNMENT - True Neutral His relationship to order is too opportunistic and unstable for a clean Lawful or Chaotic reading. Rhys likes systems where he can rise inside them and ignore them when they become a problem. Hyperion appeals to him because it offers status and structure, but he's never loyal to structure as a principle. At the same time, he isn't driven by rebellion for its own sake; he'll absolutely work inside hierarchy, exploit it, flatter it, or abandon it depending on what gets him where he wants to go.

Morally, he sits in the middle more comfortably than in either direction. He has too much selfishness, vanity, greed, and susceptibility to power for a clean Good reading, but Evil also goes too far - Rhys has too much guilt, capacity for attachment, and ability to pull back once somebody he cares about becomes part of the cost. He keeps landing in a messy space where decency and selfishness are both real, and where the deciding factor is often who's beside him and how much pressure is being applied to the part of him that wants to matter.

Conclusion

Rhys works best when he's read as a genuinely funny, anxious, ambitious man whose better qualities never fully cancel out his hunger for importance. He isn't just the harmless dork the fandom sometimes prefers, and he isn't simply a mini-Jack either; he lives in the much more interesting space between those two possibilities, where greed, insecurity, charm, fear, and conscience keep pulling against each other.

His Jack obsession is central to that - it isn't only about manipulation or trauma after the fact. Rhys was already primed for Jack because Jack embodied the kind of success Rhys wanted, and the whole game keeps asking what it means to admire a monster before you fully understand that you're doing it. That leaves Rhys as one of the messiest protagonists in the series in a very effective way: clever, likeable, self-serving, funny, frightened, and always in danger of becoming worse if power starts to feel too good in his hands.

[serpentasha]

❤️

[vvvermw]

malignancy

[serpentasha]

Это невероятно

[sarkyfancypants]

Eridian Watcher: War is coming, and we need all the Vault Hunters we can get

Maya: Dead

Pickle: Dead

Aurelia: Dead

Typhon: Dead

Timothy: Unknown

Fiona: Unknown

Sasha: Unknown

Rhys: Unknown

Vaughn: Unknown

Fl4k: Unknown

Moze: Unknown

Zer0: Unknown

Athena: Unknown

Janey: Unknown

Marcus: Unknown

Krieg: Unknown

Axton: Unknown

Salvador: Unknown

Gaige: Unknown

Brick: Unknown

Mordecai: Unknown

Tina: Unknown

Honestly I was hoping for this "war" to reunite the characters we've all come to know and love, but by the looks of the sate of this franchise I've lost all faith that they've just forgotten about this ginormous plot hole/cliffhanger and just don't care anymore.

So much has been retconned or thrown out the window entirely that the franchise now looks like a monster wearing the flayed skin of a loved one that died long ago and is now persuading me into spending money in microtransactions.

I am convinced at this poing that this promised plot device will be shoehorned in some $100 dogwater DLC as Borderlands slowly turns into a gacha game *gestures angrily at the mobile game that has shown up all of a sudden*

[serpentasha]

Покажу вам красоты нереальной.

Лысый он выглядит очень смешно, парик пока в планах 😁

[jjaegerb0mb-was-here]

dark harry and his harem of horcruxes

for free high res download: kofi ! go to gallery and enjoy

for a small bonus: twitter !

[serpentasha]

🤩

[serpentasha]

Овидий в своих стихах такой:

[serpentasha]

Quod pectus, quod crura tibi, quod bracchia vellis,

quod cincta est brevibus mentula tonsa pilis:

hoc praestas, Labiene, tuae — quis nescit? — amicae.

Cui praestas, culum quod, Labiene, pilas?

//

Ладно, ты грудь ощипал и выщипал икры с руками.

Ладно, в газоне твой хрен бритый коротком торчит.

Так для своей, Лабиен, усердствуешь — знаем! — девчонки.

Вот для кого, Лабиен, жопу усердствуешь брить?

(перевод - книга "Марциал не по-детски")

[serpentasha]

Марциал, 63

Spectas nos, Philomuse, cum lavamur,

et quare mihi tam mutuniati

sint leves pueri subinde quaeris.

dicam simpliciter tibi roganti:

pedicant, Philomuse, curiosos.

Перевод (русский):

Ты глядишь на меня, когда я моюсь,

Филомуз, любопытствуя, зачем я

Окружен возмужалыми юнцами.

Филомуз, я отвечу откровенно:

Защищают они от любопытных.

Перевод (смысловой):

«Ты смотришь на нас, Фило́мус, когда мы моемся, и постоянно спрашиваешь, почему у юношей, что со мной, такие большие члены. Скажу тебе просто, раз спрашиваешь: [они] трахают в задницу, Филомус, любопытных»

[serpentasha]

Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,

Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,

qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,

quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.

nam castum esse decet pium poetam

ipsum, versiculos nihil necessest.

qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem,

si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici

et quod pruriat incitare possunt,

non dico pueris, sed his pilosis,

qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos.

vos, quod milia multa basiorum

legistis, male me marem putatis?

pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.

Вольный русский перевод от regenta:

(понравился больше любых других вариантов)

Отмудохать бы вас, эй, придурки!

В рот и в жопу, говорю, пидарасы!

Ну, стихи мои, пусть, неприличны.

Так и что с того? Что я, развратник?

Что стихи-то, говорю? Хрен бы с ними!

В них ли дело? В них ли суть, обормоты?

Жизнь-то чистой должна быть у поэта,

А стихи… Да чем больше в них соли,

Тем и лучше они, тем пикантней,

Тем скорей они проймут не младенцев,

А ленивых мужиков, волосатых:

Вот тогда у них, может, и встанет.

Вам не нравится, какой я мужчина?

Отмудохать бы вас, пидарасы!

[serpentasha]

Ганимед. А где я буду спать ночью? Вместе с моим товарищем Эротом?

Зевс. Нет, для того-то я тебя и похитил, чтобы мы спали вместе.

Ганимед. Ты не можешь один спать и думаешь, что тебе будет приятнее со мной?

Зевс. Конечно, с таким красавцем, как ты.

Ганимед. Какая же может быть от красоты польза для сна?

Зевс. Красота обладает каким-то сладким очарованием и делает сон приятнее.

Ганимед. А мой отец, как раз наоборот, сердился, когда спал со мной, и утром рассказывал, что я не даю ему спать, ворочаюсь и толкаю его и что-то говорю сквозь сон; из-за этого он обыкновенно посылал меня спать к матери. Смотри, если ты меня похитил для этой цели, то лучше верни обратно на Иду, а то тебе не будет сна от моего постоянного ворочания.

Зевс. Это именно и будет мне приятнее всего; я хочу проводить с тобой ночи без сна, целуя тебя и обнимая.

Ганимед. Как знаешь! Я буду спать, а ты можешь целовать меня.

Разговоры богов // Лукиан

[serpentasha]

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.

Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Catullus 85

Подстрочный перевод:

(Я) ненавижу и люблю. Почему (я) это делаю, быть может (ты) спрашиваешь?

Не знаю, но (я) чувствую что [это со мной] происходит и (я) страдаю.

Да, можно любить, ненавидя (Брюсов)/Зеркало теней, 1912

[phenikas]

look at this loser

[serpentasha]

I love him i wanna ruin him

[serpentasha]

Предпоследний квест выложен!

Команда бордердендс принесла:

Великолепный арт с Катагавой и Рисом

https://archiveofourown.org/works/80418656

И текст: макси на 32к, джекорисы, тимрисы, модерн-офис-ау, исцеление и обретение себя ;)

Предел прочности

https://archiveofourown.org/works/80418806

[serpentasha]

Хочу напомнить тем, кто мог пропустить, какая красота у нас на выкладке 🤭

[yizhidaedra]

Regarding why Rhys possesses those electronic devices (for a technician, the extent of his bodily modifications seems somewhat excessive (so I fabricated the following image……↓😋😋😋(I really, really like how calm he was when he hurt himself)

[serpentasha]

АЫАЫАЫАЫАЫАЫАЫАЫАЫА

[serpentasha]

Предпоследний квест выложен!

Команда бордердендс принесла:

Великолепный арт с Катагавой и Рисом

https://archiveofourown.org/works/80418656

И текст: макси на 32к, джекорисы, тимрисы, модерн-офис-ау, исцеление и обретение себя ;)

Предел прочности

https://archiveofourown.org/works/80418806

[serpentasha]

Wanted to write a Jack who's head over heels for Rhys—mission accomplished! It's not quite what I planned... but it came out fun and surprisingly spicy. Feel free to come take a look 🤭

Summary: Rhys killed a man. Jack is very happy about it.

Loyalty

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