I Think Gearbox Is Prolly Planning To Make Lilith Into A Future Main Villain

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel BL: TPS Gameplay Discussion (Spoilers!)
#1

Continuing the discussion from Game Theory: Handsome Jack, Monster or Misunderstood?:

It seems likely to me Gearbox is setting up Lilith to be the Villain of BL3 or some other future BL game. It makes sense from every logical standpoint i can think of. Borderlands 2 has changed/added some of the staples of the BL franchise in many people minds. One of those people i am keen to believe is Gearbox themselves. Thinking about it from Gearbox’s point of view i see why Lilith would be likely made into a main villain in a future game. They have said in many interviews that the driving force behind BL2 is Handsome Jack. BL2 story is Villain Driven. The Villain is the focus of the entire story. It seems likely from everything they said that in future BLs main titles they will continue this story focus.

Lilith has shown to have a weakness to Jack. Not your traditional Kryptonite weakness. I mean a mental and emotional weakness. Because of her Extreme Hatred of Jack over Roland’s Death she has trouble remaining Rational in matters that in any way involve him. This was clearly demonstrated at the end of BL:TPS. This weakness is so strong with her that she is clearly willing to do terrible things because of it. Thanks to Eridrim Lilith also has the kind the power or the easy potential to gain the kind of power needed to become a world/possibly system or even galactic endangering threat. She has shown to be many times more powerful then any vault hunter who has come before her when using Eridiam.

On top of that it is a easy (possibly cheap) way to make sure that they can top Handsome Jack as a Villain. As clearly demonstrated countless times in the Gaming Industry before Fallen Heroes make much Better Villains. In this case it would be a former Anti-Hero that you could actually play as and who many believe to be a Hero (Referring to those who don’t realize the only playable Vault Hunter who can even come anywhere near close to that classification is prolly just Roland). This would be a easy way to make sure Gearbox can out do themselves.

Many believe that Gearbox wouldn’t do this because it would be too controversial. These people haven’t been paying attention to the gaming industry in general. The extreme controversy of it would prolly make them more likely TO DO it because the controversy would be a tremendous boon to sales. Here’s a video to save me from having to explain.


This wouldn’t even have a negative effect on the Video Game Violence Myth so it’s even more reason why it would be appealing to Gearbox.

What makes this even more likely to be Gearbox’s intended direction is the Handsome Jack AI from Tales of The Borderlands Which is Canon. This AI is very clearly a digital copy of Handsome Jack and i have no doubt Lilith wouldn’t be absolutely thrilled about it if she heard about it’s existence. I imagine she would be willing to do some pretty darn extreme things to get rid of it if it’s existence ever becomes known to her (Hint, Hint at my beliefs on future Borderlands story events.)

And again Gearbox has confirmed that Handsome Jack will not be Coming back to life. If the Jack AI was to be the Main Villain of BL3 this would pretty much the same thing even if it’s true the real Jack is technically still dead. This just seems unlikely to me on so many different levels.

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Favourite (not "best") TPS main character?
Jack - Why you so crazy?
#2

I disagree. People sure started hating on her after completing TPS (a lilith-hate topic was one of the biggest threads on the old forums), abd if you pay attention to her dialogue in claptastic voyage, it’s pretty clear she’s trying to make up for it

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#3

I hope so.

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#4

She is? Is that on Normal difficulty? I’ve only played it on UVHM and it was just a lot of Tina and Pickle.

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#5

I don’t know but TftB will affect BL3 for sure. And could affect Lilith too.

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#6

Yeah, if lilith found out about holo jack (possibly from the new vault hunters) it would proooobably be a bad day for Rhys.

Nothing like a pissed off siren who wants to char your flesh!

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#7

I wouldn’t blame her if she did destroy that hologram of Jack. I hope Jack doesn’t return at all. He’s had his run, just let him be dead for good.

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#8

I doubt it. Jack came in from left field in BL2, and they’ve been riding his coattails for 3 games now (including TFTBL). I doubt they would make Litlith the main villian just because of a villian that has run has (imo) long overrun course.

And if BL3 doesn’t even take place on Pandora, this will be even less likely.

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#9

In NVHM she does apologize for trying to kill Athena when you complete CV.

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#10

Didn’t even think to play DLC on normal mode. I’ve only played it on UVHM and a tiny bit on TVHM. Regardless Lilith apologizing doesn’t change my point or contradict my theory. It took her how long to apologize and realize she was wrong. Ok that’s nice but Athena would be dead now and no Apology in the world would fix that. How long would it take Lilith to commit some unspeakable, unforgivable and unfix-able with a simple apology act compared to how long it would take her to realize it’s wrong and not do it at all.

Remember It took Lilith this long to realize it was wrong when the threat and danger had obviously been dead and gone for days, possibly weeks. When she learns of the Jack AI it prolly will still exist and i doubt if it took this long for rationality to come back to her when the threat had been eliminated days ago that she will become rational anytime soon before she leaves a trail of bloody and charred corpses behind her ending with Rhys destroyed body (assuming the AI still with him at the time). Remember There’s no guarantee that the trail of Dead Body’s won’t contain countless innocent people. Heck there’s no guaranteeing that we haven’t killed countless innocent people in each of the 3 games. Even tho we gleefully did it, we certainly weren’t ok with it when Jack did it so who’s to say Lilith won’t kill the “Wrong Innocent People this time”

Also if they did go with this approach i would find it very unlikely they wouldn’t pull a Darth Vader with her redeeming herself in the end because only at the very end did she realize the true reality of the terrible things she would have presumably done.

#11

I’ll just copy SpiderTeo’s post about Lilith trying to execute Athena, in case you never saw it.

[quote=SpiderTeo]
@ACNAero, dude, why you got to call me out like that?

Heheh, I do appreciate the nod, though.

You pretty much have it right there. I would add that Athena also hasn’t been doing herself any favors. The more I play TPS, the more I’m starting to dislike Athena. Back in the General Knoxx DLC, Athena appeals to the Vault Hunters with a sense of moral outrage over what Atlas has done, not just to herself but to Pandora as well. In TPS, she completely lacks that moral outrage. In fact, she stays on the job to the very end, for the sake of her professionalism, and also over a little grudge with Lilith because she sided with Moxxi when Moxxi tried to kill Jack (which would have inadvertently killed the TPS Vault Hunters as well).

In the first playthrough, even Mordecai asked why didn’t she just leave Jack’s employ after Elpis was saved. Again, she cites “Charlie Mike” and her new grudge with Ro, Lil, and Mox. Even after everything she has seen, how Jack purposely killed people out of expediency, how Jack began to enjoy and indulge in his new hobby of murder, how Jack has coveted weaponry to further his own ends, how Jack’s lies have been made more and more transparent, Athena would continue working for this guy despite Jack becoming the embodiment of everything she hated about Atlas Corp. It just doesn’t make sense!

And that’s why Lilith wanted to execute Athena. The former Lance assassin traded Atlas for Jack, and all those reasons she made to the original four Vault Hunters were completely ignored when she was working for Jack. At worst, Jack could have made Athena the new Hyperion top wet-work agent, as she was in Atlas. At best, she was just a merc looking for her pay day. In both cases and everywhere inbetween, Athena ignored the plights of others who didn’t deserve to suffer at Jack’s hand. All their friends who had died or suffered loss in the years since then, could still be alive had Athena not ignore her conscience.[/quote]

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So is the next BL going to have more "curvy" women like Athena and Aurelia?
#12

Well in regards to that i don’t see where Lilith and the other Vault Hunters have a lot of room too judge when it comes too doing terrible things to make a quick buck. If Lilith really wants to get all technical with people knowingly doing terrible things without the slightest remorse she should prolly take a moment to ask the Bandit King standing next too her what kind of things he’s been up to over the last few years. If doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize Brick has undoubtedly done far worse things over the last few years then Athena did during the Entire TPS. Sure the atrocity’s might not have been specifically brought up but you only need to look at what we know as fact from BL2 to know that his hands are drenched in Blood both Directly and In-directly. Much of it undoubtedly innocent blood tho the extent will prolly never be clear.

For those who need me to clarify what i mean, think about how he runs things among his own Bandits. His managing style is so “loose” that he constantly has to kill his own men simply because there often too stupid to recognize him. He doesn’t even make sure they take the time to recognize that your a ally so that they don’t try to kill you every time you stop by. Your apparently there most important ally but they still try to kill you. Heck, if you want to get technical the BL2 Brick introduction mission alone was prolly far more Barbaric then everything Jack did in TPS combined. You didn’t realize it because it was all played off some like a big funny joke but if you think about the actual events of that mission Brick has you slaughter dozens and dozens of his men including his “best men”. This is all why they try to kill you because Brick ordered them too as a “intuition”. And then after your intuition, after there is no longer any need to kill anyone a Non-hostile Non-threatening Slap Bandit comes out after you just murdered all of his friends and instead of trying to take revenge on you or crying like a little baby about it he instead deals with the murder of countless of his friends and comrades by sarcastically clapping for you and applauding you. And if you murder this non-threatening and non-violent slap in front of Brick he’ll laugh and commend you for your act of cold-blooded murder of his own man by saying “you really are a true slab”

Btw remember even this Bandit King who commits acts of Barbarism with the same casualness that we have when we eat breakfast every morning felt that killing Athena was too Barbaric too do. If that’s not a clear sign that Lilith was definitely 100% in the wrong for ordering her to be killed afterwards then i have no idea what is.

#13

Take it up with @SpiderTeo if you want to argue, he’s the one who looks deeply into this stuff.

#14

You know there is something wrong with the universe when brick takes the moral high ground.

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#15

Wouldn’t say i’m looking to argue as much as i am posting my theory for other reasons that i wouldn’t really call arguing. 1. just to get it out there 2. too figure out if someone can think of something that actually debunks it. Not attempts to debunk it but fully, convincing and almost undeniably debunks it or at the very least find a significant flaw with it which i still haven’t seen yet. 3. This is every thing i’ve figured out by myself while either thinking about it while also doing other tasks that don’t require as much thought at work or playing a game or whatever or while lying in bed trying to get to sleep but in the process realizing various things (I’ve had so many countless revelations while trying to get too sleep in my life ranging from fictional lore to religion to politics to past mistakes to past things that happened but i didn’t realize the meaning of at the time to. I’ve even figured out the answers to age old questions that have been answered all along without anyone realizing it like why VERY Bad Things MUST happen to everyone including very good people and so on and so forth. I can’t get anymore detailed on this without violating forum rules but this is completely off topic anyways). Anyways i figured this all out myself but by throwing this theory out there maybe it can be further evolved by the people who also read it. Or if it was fatally flawed to begin with then i will be more then likely to find out sooner if i put it out there.

#16

Like I said, SpiderTeo’s your man. He might be able to at the very least make a counter point. I’m sure I’d just come up with some cop-out reason :sweat_smile:

Also, I’m watching Saints Row 2 cutscenes, and the PC is a total psychopath. Why do our PCs need to be good guys? Why can’t we have fun being brutal assh*les? Nothing to do directly with this conversation, just a question for BL in general.

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#17

Ya i love saints row and ya in saints row 2, Boss (the Main Character) is a monster who appears no morally better then the 3 main-ish Antagonists. And the Final 4th Antagonist looks like a saint compared to those 3 as well as the main character. Heck to be honest the 4th antagonist was one of the most morally upright people in the entire game. The only character who i can think of off hand who was more morally upright then him was matt who you tortured by burning his hand to a crisp and eventually killed by bashing his face in with a brick.

However i guess there was prolly a little bit of a backlash too it since he’s toned down a lot for the next 2 games and in saints row 4 they even reference a few times that he was a hardcore psychopath during saints row 2.

#18

There was. People were complaining that they couldn’t emotionally “connect” with their character (softies). But that’s were the fun is: being a psychopathic gang leader that you would never be in real life. Why can’t we, in Borderlands, be a psychopathic Vault Hunter with no morals? Kinda like the first BL, you were just a mercenary with absolutely zero regard for anyone, anything, or any morals; pay me. I guess Wilhelm was that way too, before we killed him… But still, I would like that in future BL3: a psychopath playable-character with absolutely no morals and doesn’t pretend to be a good guy, just revels in his/her brutality. Because we haven’t truly had a character like that yet.

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#19

I don’t think controversy has anything to do with it.

Though if you want to drive the point home, look at Blizzard. Pretty much every single game they make is built on that trope. SOILERS AHEAD IF YOU PLAN ON PLAYING ANY BLIZZARD GAMES
Look at Starcraft and Kerrigan. Warcraft 3 and Arthas. Diablo and the character you play as or so I’m told (I haven’t actually played Diablo).

Also, add in Lilith’s dialogue while fighting EOS. I can’t hear well over all the gunfire but she says something to the effect of her being a villain. What?

As to the way, it’s probably easier to use existing characters than introduce and expound on new ones. Most of us are at least a little bit invested in the current ones.

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#20

I hope not. I really don’t want to kill my favorite female Vault Hunter in BL3.

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