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#video – @wainwrightjakobshammerlock on Tumblr
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COME CLOSER AND I'LL WHUP YA WITH LEAD!

@wainwrightjakobshammerlock / wainwrightjakobshammerlock.tumblr.com

I'LL EMBLAZON MY FAMILY CREST ON YOUR CRAVEN ASS!
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empyreansentinel asked:

NOOO!! keep going! i would like 2 hear it

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Okay so.

The subaltern is defined as the person who is colonized, and thus placed in a submissive position. For Pandora that should be its native population only, but...

Under the framework of Orientalism that Said describes, Bandits share a BUNCH of traits with the subaltern orientalized. They are:

  • the Other, the Evil, the Beyond. This one is self explanatory. Bandits are barbaric, savage, so on so forth.
  • massively homogenized - all the bandit clans look more or less the same, even in 3 when you're taken to different planets (this is only sort of remedied in the dlc but dlc bandits have different group names so ???) they only really differ by skin color and accessories and those things are unrelated to their possible clan affiliation
  • never allowed to speak for themselves, i.e. everything about bandits is filtered through non-bandits. You do meet bandits and they do "speak" by themselves, but you are unable to meet them on equal footing. Krieg and Nisha are the closest, but Krieg is explicitly "not like the others" (noble savage trope anyone?) and Nisha is just straight up evil with zero nuance anyways. And then there's Vaughn which is a non-bandit who "went native" and therefore speaks for the bandit not with it.

The one feature that does not fit is the... seemingly very arbitrary nature of being a bandit? Ellie, Zane and Moxxi despite being born to "bandits" are never actually called bandits. Krieg is a type of bandit, on paper, but he doesn't get called a bandit. Both Brick and Vaughn become bandits ("go native"), but only the latter is ever called a bandit - also in the former case, the bandit thing pretty much goes away at some point (Brick tells you straight up not to be worried about killing his own people, what the fuck dude), and in the latter it's treated like an (admittedly kinda funny) joke. Also, as, I said above Vaughn is literally a "nativized" colonizer WHOSE ENTIRE CLAN IS DEAD AT THE START OF THE GAME (BOTH IN FIGHT FOR SANCTUARY AND IN BL3), so he is quite literally speaking for the bandit for there is no bandit alive to speak for themselves.

Then there's Tyreen's line about how bandits are "human wreckage left behind by the Corporate Wars"... like okay that is clearly a disenfranchised group. These people need help and you are mowing them down in droves! It doesn't help bandit clans have a disproportionately large amount of xenohuman or mutant members, like holy shit please learn to be nicer! (But I already ranted on how Borderlands assumes human nature to be Not Nice, contrary to its critique of capitalism so w/e)

...I know that this is a video game that needs a subhuman enemy for the player to mow down. But the bandit isn't just subhuman, it's an orientalized depiction of what I can only describe as a massive galaxy-spanning criminal subculture.

Btw this is the video essay I mentioned in the tags but you cropped the mention of it out. This is the video that made me read Orientalism:

Anyways Patricia Tannis may be the world's first banditist and I am unsure if that's good or not.

#fourth wall mail slot#borderlands#mohavegecko#video#jakobs manor metas
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