so... the happy together trailer huh. you know, when gearbox invited all to a celebration of togetherness, i didn’t know what to expect. news on sanctuary 3? or even the state of the missing borderlands2 vault hunters, perhaps? needless to say, this trailer is an absolute joy to watch. and even better, it allows for some great displays of character and relationship analysis between Flak, Amara, Moze and Zane. so i’m going to be doing that now!
tl;dr: this trailer is very good at showing the personalities of the characters, as well as their relationships with each other.
so i’m going to be conducting this in the order of the trailer, so here we go.
firstly, claptrap opens a chest to reveal what is almost a toy race track, complete with bandits and explosions, as Pandora should be. The camera pans through the chaos, and stops upon the new Vault Hunters. From here, the analysis begins.
Zane, front and centre, stops firing for a second to look back on everyone else, but specifically to Amara, before he starts dancing. From this we can infer that Amara is the ‘leader’ of the group, as Roland and Maya were of their respective groups.
As he goes about staring his dance, Amara lowers her gun and looks at him, as if to question what the hell he’s doing. She’s the first one to do this, with Moze dropping her gun off screen, and Flak doing so when they are again visible on screen. You may call this the Zane Tolerance Scale, in which Feral Grandpa annoys Amara the most with his antics, and Flak the least.
Again, Zane stops specifically in front of Amara, and holds his hand out as an offer to join him. Amara, in response, stares at him and puts her hand on her hip - she’s used to this from him, almost amused by this, as you can see by her smile there. This seems to imply that Amara and Zane are a sort of pair, and play off each other rather well (Zane with his more silly nature vs Amara’s more serious nature), with Amara maybe even enjoying it a little. Though she seems to have no intention of taking him up on his offer.
...so he takes her by the arm and makes her do it anyway. What’s important to note here is that Amara goes along with it anyway. I think this is absolutely adorable, quite frankly, and shows a more playful side to Amara.
The camera then pans over to Flak, and then we get a short solo dance sequence, along with their skag
They sort of.. hobble along, in a very pleasant way. Their skag spins around in doughnuts at Flak’s feet as they dance along. As we don't know much about Flak at this point, we can only really infer from this that they are rather happy and kind, especially to their pets as their skag is doing tricks!! how cute!!
The camera then does a flip, and now we’re on Promethea. We see a Spiderant and a Skag attacking bandits, and then we see Flak walking towards Moze wiht a rose in their hand.
They take Moze by the hand and she jumps and twirls around, a smile on her face, while Flak sidesteps alongside her. Like Amara and Zane, it appears these two are almost opposites of each other (Flak, seemingly calm and soft-spoken vs Moze, who seems to be more excitable and reckless).
And again, you can kinda see that Moze is absolutely elated, she’s so excited to be there, and Flak is her support. This is my favourite frame in the entire trailer, by the way.
After this amazing frame, Moze spins out of Flak's arms, and skips into Iron Bear. Flak jumps on the back of it, along with their skag, who sits snuggly on the back, tucked into the turret.
From here the camera spins to another scene (another planet - Eden-6?), in which Iron Bear absolutely destroys a collection of bandits. And then we see Zane, stood behind his Barrier.
He jumps and waves to Moze and Flak, happy to see them, as he dismisses his barrier. From here, he turns around, and summons his Digiclone and starts dancing with him instead.
Spinning around in a circle , with a big doofy grin on his face. Like... you can tell this man is a) a dumbass, and b) acting like half his age. God bless.
There's a really nice transition, and we get a solo scene with Amara. She’s dancing around a circle, on a planet we haven’t seen in a showcase as of yet (possibly Athenas?).
We get this blessed smile as bandits surround her. She looks around, and then shrugs her shoulders as she looks behind her. From here we can see her enjoyment of the wild side of Vault Hunting. She’s happy to be fighting these people. From here she casts a Phaseslam.
And again, after some smooth transitions, we get to the final scene, with the group on the podium. And this is where the final bit of analysis comes in, in how each person walks in a circle.
Amara struts very confidently, showing that she is a driven leader.
Moze marches around with her knees high, almost in a mocking fashion, both showing her military background and her playful nature.
Flak almost seems to waddle, showing them to be, for lack of a better term, Large And Friend™
Zane is almost leaning back and stumbling a little bit with shorter steps, conveying is sillier nature and perhaps his drunken tendencies, as established in previous gameplay.
And with that, the box closes, and the trailer ends.
So, in conclusion, I'm so excited to see what other kind of lore they can build for these four idiots. Not to mention, the push to show them as a close knit group is so much more than what we got before. Hell, they’re even called a family on the Borderlands website.
And now, all we can do is wait to see Flak gameplay in August, and then the game’s release on September 13th.
