Sniper Team 4 said:
I'm going with Handsome Jack. I just cannot wrap my head around his mindset. He is so stuck in his little fantasy world where he thinks that he's the hero that he murders innocent people for laughs, kills the children of people who work for him if they say something wrong, imprisons his own daughter for life and doesn't listen to her at all, and that's just to name a few things. And all this time, he truly believes that he is the good guy, even as he shoots an unarmed person in the face for no reason. I mean, most villains are at least aware that they are evil, or at least hated by the common people, but him? He is so far gone that I can't even fathom what happened to make him that way. How do you do all those things and still fully believe that you are the good guy?
Actually I've talked about this a few times, but Handsome Jack is a representation of the average player character from most RPGs, as seen from the perspective of the average bandit.
You see in Borderlands, you, the player character, are a bandit. Sure, you're a vault hunter, but you're also a bandit just like the rest of the denizens of Pandora. Hell, you can play as a Psycho in the game. The entire game is spent with you looting and killing, and fighting little land wars against various other bandit clans, and that's all you do when you're not fighting Handsome Jack. You're one of the reasons that Pandora is so dangerous. Why are you on Pandora? Because you're a vault hunter and you're all about getting more money and bigger guns. You're not a hero you're there for your own self interest.
The reason Handsome Jack thinks that he's the hero is because he is. He's bringing peace and order to Pandora. He's capturing, studying, and eradicating dangerous wildlife and exterminating the bandit populations that make Pandora dangerous for normal people. He created the city of Opportunity, which allows people a safe haven to live in
for free.
I mean, what are the evil things that Handsome Jack has done?
Destroy the environment? Pandora was already kind of a shit-hole, and while he did pollute a few areas he did so in the name of progress. He created real cities on Pandora, rather than just the shanty towns that were there before.
Murder people? Pretty much everyone he "murdered" were murderous psychotic bandits who attack everyone the moment they see them. He killed the same kind of people that you spend the entire game killing. Did he kill them brutally? Sure, but the average player rather enjoys finding gruesome ways to kill their enemies. I bet you enjoyed shooting people in the face and watching their heads fly off. Of course you did you sick bastard, we all did.
Imprisoned his daughter? You could see it that way, but you can also see it as protecting everyone from a person who has incredible powers that she can't control.
Handsome Jack lives by the idea that the ends justify the means. The reason you see him as evil though is because everything he does is counter to what your player characters are trying to achieve, and because the other characters in the game, who are bandits, tell you that he's evil. The game is about bandits and anarchists fighting against a government which seeks to eradicate them in the name of peace and safety and your character is put on the wrong side.
That's what makes the game so interesting and well written to me. Handsome Jack is written as an evil bastard but at the same time I see everything he does as the actions that an immature player would take when playing an open world RPG while role-playing the hero. It's kind of brilliant.
