No More Handsome Jack, Please

I was going to wait to write this until something in the news made it more relevant, but I’m tired of waiting so I’m just going to write it now.  That’s what REAL journalists do: lose patience! 

Anyway...

I used to love Borderlands.  I really did.  I sank many, many hours into the first game, and I still pop it in from time to time with a great deal of nostalgia and affection.  It’s not a perfect game, and objectively the sequel, Borderlands 2, is the superior game in just about every way.  It’s longer, the environments are more varied, there’s more character and humor, the missions and guns are more diverse, leveling up means something and the classes feel more unique.  But I still only play the first game because honestly I like it better than Borderlands 2.  

And why do you suppose that is?  Because of Handsome Jack!



I HATE Handsome Jack. Hate.  Hate with a capital H, A, T and E.  I can’t think of a single character I loathe more in the whole of the gaming world.  I hate him more than Ornstein and Smough, I hate him more than Nathan Drake, I hate him more the freakin’ Blue Shell—and that’s not just something you SAY.  I hate him with a consuming passion and the fact that he’s a main character in the pre-sequel AND Tales from the Borderlands made me completely lose interest in those two projects.

And that hurts me inside.  I love Telltale Games.  I was so excited to see them take on Borderlands.  But now I just cant.  I’m sorry, I just can’t. 

And I’m going to tell you why...

As with most great hatreds, at first I liked Handsome Jack.  I liked him a lot.  I thought he had a certain charm to him, a certain stupid wit—I liked how he bragged and talked down to you.  It was good to have an interesting, proactive villain.  And he was funny, most of all.  Just a generally funny guy.  Some of his dialogue (I still consider “The difference between choking and strangulation” moment to be a paramount of game writing) was laugh-out-loud good. 

But that’s where the problems came in.  The writers of Borderlands 2 knew that.  And I don’t know this for sure, I wasn’t there, but the worst thing that could possibly happen to a character happened to Handsome Jack somewhere in the production of Borderlands 2: his writers became his fans.

I’m not a professional writer yet.  I’m not respected.  But even with the modicum of authority I have, I can tell you all that’s a very, very bad thing to happen.

The world of Borderlands 2 started to wrap around Handsome Jack.  It didn’t matter if it was out of hate or admiration, as you play through the game you find more and more of the world involved with him and his machinations.  Whole cities were built in his image, characters had histories with him where before they were blank slates, people were driven to him—offering their lives to killing him or in service of him--and soon it was as if the whole game revolved around him.  He becomes this omnipresent force in the game that was just completely unavoidable.  He was everywhere, in every audio log, in every new zone, in every backstory, to the point where he became the new main character.

Let’s compare the two games.  In Borderlands, there were four protagonists.  They were all on Pandora looking for the vault—not only because they liked money, but also because they had their own separate agendas.  Brick was looking for his sister.  Lilith was looking for another Sirine.  And so forth.  And the plot was moved by them—they might not have spoken but the plot was driven by their actions and desires.  They were being proactive in their search for the vault, they were the ones who set everything in motion: thus they were the main characters in that game.



In Borderlands 2, the reverse is true.  You arrive looking for the vault initially, sure, but in the opening cut scene that motivation is immediately stripped away by, you guessed it, Handsome Jack.   He tries to kill you and then everything goes downhill from there.  Your goals change to completely reactionary goals—you want to stop Jack from destroying the rebel city, you want to stop him from charging the key, you want to stop him from controlling the Warrior… you’re not the main character anymore, HE is.  Everything in that game is a reaction to HIS actions, rather than him reacting to you, and when you remove agency from the player’s hands they’re just spectators in their own game, watching Jack do his thing and occasionally being prompted to put an end to it.  Heck, it even post-humorously makes the FIRST Borderlands about himself with the twist (spoiler alert) that Angel is his daughter, and he was manipulating the four heroes to doing his bidding the first time around.

And I’m sorry, but for however strong a character he was, for however funny he was, he wasn’t THAT good.  He wasn’t a good enough character to carry two games on his back.  I didn’t care about him that much.  I didn’t like how he superimposed himself into the backstories and motivations of the other character’s I’d grown to like.  And it just… made Pandora seem so SMALL.  If every element of a world can be manipulated by a single man, it doesn’t make the man seem large… it makes the world seem tiny.

Handsome Jack may have ‘failed’ conquering Pandora in the game.  But he certainly succeeded at conquering the franchise.  And he sufficiently twisted it into his image to the point where I just can’t be excited for it anymore.



And maybe that’s on me.  In fact, it probably is, I seem to be the only one who’s especially bothered by it.  I’m not even going to say ya’ll SHOULD be bothered, or that you shouldn’t be excited about the next Borderlands games.  But I’m not.  And I figured I’d share why.

Because really, I’m getting sick of character’s like Handsome Jack.