Discussing Morality on Pandora
Heyo! First of all, this is an open discussion, so if you have points to add and so one feel free to reblog, answer or send asks to do so! I’ll try to update the post as much as I can without making it spammy. What’s this discussion? Well, I’d like to come to a simple enough conclusion about what constitutes good and evil in the Borderlands universe, more specifically Pandora, and how to see a person as good or not by those standarts.
Before we go on: I’m a graphic designer. Not an ethics professor or anything. So if you’d like to contribute with academic theory and so on, go ahead!
The one definition we’re gonna work with is: of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; Now, let’s start with something imoral, wrong. Something that’s a pilar for our present society, a reference of evil and a reference many Borderlands-centric dicussions use to talk about its characters: Murder. Why murder? Well, Borderlands is a pretty violent game, with murder all around, done both by villains and heroes. So how come there are villains and heroes? Well. My starting argument is: Murder doesn’t matter. Lifes don’t inherently have value like that. In our society, we have set rules that tell us the value of human life. Religion; don’t kill another cause they’re made by god(s). Laws; don’t kill another cause we’re all valuable members of our society etc This things - exclusing problems with a captalistic worldview and we’ll get back to that - tell us that human life has value on it’s own and therefore should not be terminated. But in the borderverse, there’s no religion as far as we know, and although certain details imply there might be a justice system in some planets, what’s just in Pandora, a planet that doesn’t even seem to have an overarching organized society, and actually seem to thrive in small settlements, towns and clans? The highter powers we ever got over Pandora were the megacorps. Atlas, Dahl, Hyperion... Pandora was always under the all seeing eye of something other than a god. And this corps - see here’s where we get back to our own mostly captalistic society - see human life as expensable. There’s no value in a life with no purpose, and the purpose has to be contributing to society’s machine in some way. And even so, many of these lifes can be replaced, making them all the more easy to ignore. This brings us to a galaxy, or universe, or whatever Pandora is floating on, filled with “human” planets. As far as we know, all the megacorps are run and worked by humans. As far as we know, there are way too many humans. Enough for a corporation to try to mine a planer and leave the miners behind when the operation goes wrong. Enough for a man to experiment on people in search for more power and profit. And enough for Vault Hunters to run around laughing as they vanquish human obstacles in their pursuits. What’s the point in all this? Too many humans make almost any work easy to substitute, at least to the higher power’s - the megacorps - eyes. Pandora specially, having basically all of it’s colonization history being of explored people and corporation wars, never got to have a socio-cultural environment that never allowed for the intrinsic valuing of human life. Not only that, but Pandora is a dump planet. A literal border at the edge of civilization, where many people go when they have nowhere else to, or when they have to hide and so one. It’s hard to believe there will be day when no one will be moving to Pandora and adding to their numbers. All these factors take away from the possibility of seeing human life as valueable and improper to harm. Murder doesn’t matter because human life doesn’t matter. At least, not how we see it. I mean, if it doesn’t matter, why are the Vault Hunters and the Crimson Raiders trying to save Pandora and (most) of its people? Because they’ve assigned their own value to these lifes. Just as Jack can pin everybody down as bandits to moon shot erase cities out of the map, the vaulties and raiders can see the people as potential for the planet to get better, as human interaction and connection. - we’re not here to discuss the whys and hows of human value that deeply; but if you’d like to see me touch deeper on this let me know (tho I think it’s an ok summary). What murder and human life not mattering means is that they’re not could standarts to withhold to our heroes and villains of Borderlands (so far. BL3 has the potential to make this so much more complicated...). But then, what is the standart in a godless, moraless land where murder is... “Eh”? It’s personal. Morality in Pandora is completely personal. Borrowing much from its aesthetic and feel from the western genre, Borderlands also borrows from its themes, specifically those of a personal code of honor. There’s only frontier justice at the border lands. When we as espectators - and players - see a code, we internalize the person that holds it has their own morals and limits. The sheer having of principles already raises one moraly over others; it’s the act of setting a limit for yourself not matter the urges. With that in mind, what are common values in the personal codes we see around Pandora and the borderverse, and how do they define who we fight and who we support? Here are my takes: Empathy - the hability of needing no reason to understand the struggle of another person and wanting to help and ease the struggle Loyalty - following those you’re allied too to the very end, staying true to your word, risking yourself for others Truth - even if your truth is yes, I like punching people in the face, we seem to align more with those who admit even to their worse sides Bravery - to stand for others and strive for something better What’s interesting here is that if we look at Jack, for example, he pretends to uphold most of his values - trading empathy with Love - through an ends justify the means mentality, but ultimately betrays every single one of these values while maintaining them for the people around them, creating an egoistic divide between his reality and that of others. It’s pretty neat! That’s how we see him as a villain - he’s saying all the things he’s not actually doing! (Though, he might think he is! Wether he’s crazier than he looks, extremely manipulative and abusive, or a mix of both, is left for our own headcanons and interpretations!) Finally, my last point is cruelty. Two points I’m gonna explore here are: Jack scooping out a man’s eyes with a spoon in front of his kids, and; Brick severed from the Raiders for extreme cruelty. Why is Brick here not seeing as much of a monster as Jack is - even if he comes to the point of letting us just kill slabs because they’re dumb? Because what matters most in Pandora is not human life, but how this life is lived. Those that make life worse by all means, for personal gain or no reason at all, are bad. And those that try to make life better, for personal reasons or not, are good. With, of course, layers to that. As the westerns had their heroes build codes to face agaisnt the deliberate and abstract laws of their lands; Borderlands let’s us debate how solid personal codes actually are and urges us to think about what we’re condoning - and who are the true heroes. (there might be none!)
IN CONCLUSION/TL;DR:
Borderlands and mainly Pandora work under a personal justice/code of honor thematic; at their best having us root for characters that stand harder behind their version of justice and goodness to the point where it’s hard to distinguish their fictional code from our own sense of what’s right, guiding the player through a story of grey morality and constant falls from grace - personal and otherwise. This sense of greyness if heavily muddled through the creation of personal connections and shows of comraderie - Borderlands knows exactly how to show loyalty and affections to tug at the player’s heartstrings just enough so our humanity is project into the characters in the game, letting each player decide who are their heroes.
