extended canon: burch's ask.fm

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Am I crazy, or is Handsome Jack the poster boy for "villians who did nothing wrong?" His actions aren't the most savory but Lilith drew first blood, and you can't tell me Pandora doesn't need an enema.

Guys he enslaved his daughter when she was like twelve

guys he did that



Jack imprisoned and tortured his daughter for years to further his company. Jack rewarded Claptrap's help in building a Hyperion empire with a mass genocide. Jack was literally going to murder a planet over classism. He's a megalomaniacal sociopath. How does anyone think he's capable of redemption?

cause he's funny



Do You think that Jack should have had a redemption story in Tales? I tought that he would sacrifice himself in the end but he remained asshole :(

I think Telltale did the right thing. It's tempting to say Jack is a good person deep down, that he's no different than the other characters in the game...except he's fucking awful. He's an abusive monster, and though I love redemption stories (because they tell all of us that, deep down, maybe we're not as awful as we think we are and that we can be better than we are), a story about Jack becoming a good guy would be dishonest. That's not how abusers are, generally, and stories that perpetuate that idea are probably in some way responsible for abuse victims remaining with their abusers. There is some good in everyone, sure, but a little drop of good doesn't forgive an ocean of horrible.



Do you know that people are complaining and accusing writers that Jack was out of character in Tales because he betrayed Rhys even if you had been nice to him for whole game? Or because he didn't end up as 'good' character? How ridiculous is this? These ppl should play in other bl games

I think those people are confusing what they what with what's correct, which is something we all do (including me -- my initial instinct was to give Jack a redemption arc). We can pretend Jack is a decent guy who went wrong, but he enslaved his daughter and strangles people to death just for shits. He is a bad person.

It'd be nice for Jack to become a good person, sure, but what is that then saying? That abusers deserve as much empathy as their victims? That when an abuser says "hey, I can change," you should believe them?




Jack is jacksexual.

I do imagine him jerkin off to pictures of himself




Dear Anthony, why did Lilith punch Jack in the face

cause fuck that asshole




Did anybody in particular inspire the characters you've written?

jack is evil nathan fillion. torgue is introspective randy savage. tiny tina is ash.




apparently the whole fandom is blowing up right now because rhys/jack didn't end up canon... it's like these people don't understand he was just using and abusing him? im actually a little worried these people see jack's behaviors as "affection" like that's a little worrying lol...

Yeah, that's...we never talked about that being an actual thing.

Jack is a bad guy. Yeah, he opens up a little from time to time, but I dunno if he ever REALLY respected Rhys as a person.




the only good thing that came about when you left gearbox is now handsome jack is no longer straight... the bisexuals can have him in their clutches now

man if my leaving caused borderlands to get MORE queer i would be turbopsyched




A bit of unused dialogue in Borderlands 2 was Jack explaining that the reason the Vault Hunters had beaten Wilhelm was because Jack had poisoned him in order to weaken him because he wanted the vault hunters to get the core. Can this still be seen as canon as I heard it was left out accidentally.

I always intended it to be canon, cause otherwise Wilhelm's death doesn't really make sense. Obviously Jack sent him there to die, but I dunno if Wilhelm would knowingly sacrifice himself just to get Angel into Sanctuary.




Headcanon: Jack is only obsessed with the distinction between choking and strangulation because Nisha introduced him to breath-play and would get really annoyed when he mistakenly called it "choking". Thoughts?

Ooh. Like that.




re: fan reaction to Jack's betrayal, I also think we are culturally ADDICTED to the trope of Mean, Sexy, Charismatic Dude Who Can Be Turned Good For That One Special Person (i.e. The Reader). You see it most blatantly in girl fandoms (hellooooo vampire boyfriends), but dudes are just as susceptible

Right. Which is, like -- I get it. I get the desire for that. We all want to believe that we, or our loved ones, can always find some sort of redemption. That's a wonderful, comforting idea.

I don't know how true it is, though. If your father abuses you from birth, and then he feels kind of bad about it later, that doesn't magically make him a good person who deserves your forgiveness.




(part 3) but I actually got two questions. When writing Jack, was his whole backstory already worked out? Was the mark just there for the "ohh" effect, or was the entire story with Lilith already written? Also: does it annoy you getting asked about borderlands all the time? Nonetheless, thank you! Jay

Firstly, thank you so much for the kind words. I'm incredibly sorry that you've had to go through something like that, but I'm happy the game could have helped you in some tiny way.

Secondly, his backstory got worked out steadily as we progressed through the plot and wanted to find a way to make him and Angel more directly relevant to each other. Once we'd done that, we realized Angel needed to be a Siren, and that same logic also led us, conveniently, to finding a (damsel-y) way of getting Lilith offstage in the game's third act.

Thirdly, no, it doesn't annoy me, because I'm basically a narcissist and answering BL questions gives me an opportunity to talk about myself.




Which scenes in the latest ep of Tales from the Borderlands did you write/contribute to? I'm assuming you did the Jack-apedia (really enjoyed that btw) but what else?

Thanks. I wrote for:

- The scene with Rhys and Jack atop the caravan (and the conversation with Athena preceding it)
- A lot of Athena and Fiona's conversations after they separate from Rhys and Sasha
- Various parts of the big fight at the end
- The Jackapedia




Is it intentional that every playable PreSequel character plays into an aspect of Jack's future personality? Tim - Narcissism, Aurelia - Too much money, Wilhelm - An excuse not to get his hands dirty, Nisha - Evil as hell, and the only two characters that could give him good traits left his service?

Wow. That's neat.

Uh, yeah, totally intentional.





Yes, Tumblr is exploding a little- thank you very much for indulging us with all this extra little canon tidbits. You've seemed to touch all the most recent Vault Hunters- may we get a random Nisha tidbit next?

She has literally never failed to bring her partners to orgasm

Also she was one of the top-ranked Smasher Buds players on her home planet




I'm at least 99% positive Jack is into pegging

Sounds about right, unless you only think that because he's a bad person, cause super cool people are probably into pegging




What do you think of people who try to excuse what Jack did to Angel?

I imagine they're the same kind of people who think Walter White did everything he did for his family.

It's really easy to sympathize with someone you like/find entertaining. Which is interesting, but also pretty dangerous in my opinion.




Despite Jack and Nisha being evil, I can't help but hope that there is a little boy in a cowboy hat with heterchromia being raised by Hyperion Loaders with Nanny AIs named Jack Jr wanting to get revenge on the Vault Hunters for killing his parents before he could because they missed his birthday

That kid would grow up to be a pretty big asshole




does the fan reaction to lilith in BPTS bother you? (namely the "handsome jack did nothing wrong/it's all lilith's fault he became a villain" side)?

No, because that was sort of our goal. I think I went a shade too far in making Lilith unlikable, but the idea was to muddle the morality of how heroic Pandora's heroes actually are.

(You could also argue that Lilith and Moxxi and everyone did the right thing, they just didn't do it hard enough.)




Does Jack have a strangulation kink?

Yeah basically




Who's idea was it for you to voice Jack's body double in BL2, and why did you make the delivery so monotone?

my idea. I wanted the double to be a guy who hated his job and was clearly just phoning it in, and I'm pretty good at sounding like someone unenthusiastic.




Have you seem the newest Game Theory video? It's determining if Handsome Jack is a villain or not.

Yeah, I saw it. Nice to see someone noticing the subtext we tried to put in there.




So I'm watching somebody play BL2 and notice that in some ECHOs Jack keeps calling Blake Jimmy rather than Jeffrey just as Tassiter repeatedly gets Jack's name wrong. Nice detail.

Oh. Uh, yeah, that was intentional.




Given how much Jack liked Nisha in the Pre-Sequel and that their a couple by Bl2, why did Jack react with only being 'slightly pissed'?

Becaaaause I honestly didn't think we'd get a Pre-Sequel where their relationship was more developed. If I'd known then what I knew now, I probably would have made him super angry. And maybe not had her be part of a totally optional side area.




Is it horrible that I want the Jack we killed in BL2 to have been a body double, for Nisha to be retconned back, and to see them living in a freaking turbomansion with a white picket fence and 2.5 Butt Stallions? (Okay maybe not the last bit, but they were the best duo EVER. Pre-Sequel confirmed it)

You know they are like SUPER bad people right




Would Jack and Nisha have an open relationship? Neither of them seems to be the type to enjoy being tied down. Well. Metaphorically speaking. Not literally. We all know they would love the literal version.

Nisha would definitely be down for openness. Dunno about Jack...





do you think jack and nisha cuddle

yes, albeit covered in lots of fluids and leather and stuff when they do




I just wanted to say thanks for that tweet about Jack finding programming/engineering stuff easier than PR/the internet. It's nice to know that he is good at his actual job but just generally a fucking awful meme-loving fuck online.

"generally awful meme-loving fuck" is on my family's coat of arms




Tbh, Jack's relationships with male characters like Rhys and Timothy are so intensely creepy that I really, really, reeeeaally don't want him as the face of bi rep in Borderlands. Especially when there are so many other great bi characters.

Huh, I'd never thought of Timothy that way -- in my head it was always "Jack is so egocentric that he'd be the most attracted to someone who looks like him, because he's the ultimate asshole and wants to objectify himself."





Like, I'm sorry because I know you must be getting tons of conflicting feedback, but I don't want ppl to give you the impression that it is the unanimously decided Right thing to do to make Jack bi. I'm seeing a lot of people who are uncomfortable with the idea already and for good reasons.

Yeah, I mean...

So, here's the thing. I wrote him and, in my head, I thought of him as straight. Through the years I worked on the game and got slowly less and less shitty about my own internalized homophobia, I may have accidentally made him say some stuff that comes across as gay jokes. And that's terrible, and I'm sorry if I did that (I don't remember any specifics, but people say Jack seemingly jokes about hitting on dudes in a potentially homophobic way and I believe them).

So if it's easier to believe that he's bi than that he is a homophobic character or that the universe of the game believes it's okay to make fun of gay people, then I understand that. I also understand not wanting him to be bi because it may not be fully supported in the story, or because having a psychopathic abuser being bisexual isn't exactly a step forward for bi visibility.




I know it wasn't entirely your doing, but I just wanted to thank you and whoever else worked on the scene with Rhys confronting Jack in episode 5. For myself and a lot of other abuse survivors it was just... really empowering to play through that, and it was painful but it made me really happy.

Pierre Shorette is mainly to thank for that. My first pass was WAY too easy on Jack, made him way too remorseful. The Telltale folks were much better at remembering that he's still, inherently, a piece of shit.




I'm another person but I too was disturbed by this prase about Fiona: "She is a woman and she is right, I can't belive this!"

Hm, didn't notice that one.

I mean, Jack's definitely kind of a chauvinist...I personally wouldn't have written that line for him, but this IS a guy who locked his daughter and Lilith up, so he's definitely got baggage about women with power. It doesn't feel spectacularly out of character for him.