extended canon: interviews

[refactor]

from here

One defining trait of Borderlands 2 was its smarmy villain, Handsome Jack. Burch said that the character was very clearly set from the start, but he worked to flesh him out a bit. "He was funny but he was kind of one-dimensional," he said. "So all the dialogue he has after Angel dies, we made that a lot darker and a lot more angry to give him an arc. In earlier drafts of the script, you kill Angel and he's like "joke joke joke," and so we tried to add a vengeful streak into the later part of the game. But he was always kind of a smarmy jerk that you were supposed to like and hate at the same time."

Angel's death scene was one of the darkest parts of a game peppered with dark moments, as it tasked the player with quite literally killing a man's daughter before his eyes. Nailing the tone was the most difficult part. "That scene in particular went through revisions. It was finding the right amount of anger for Jack to have. Recording the dialogue in the first session he was just completely freaking out, and it just seemed weird. That's a completely reasonable response because your daughter just died, but it was pressing this completely different emotional button that made no sense." That climactic scene leads to Jack's shift toward outright vengeance, and a real anger that replaces his dismissive attitude. So that's led some players to ask: is Jack the good guy, and the Vault Hunters the villains?

"In my mind, I thought this guy believes that he has legitimate reasons for enslaving his daughter," said Burch. "He's not this evil piece of shit that knows he's an evil piece of shit. He believes he's the good guy, and thought that by restraining Angel he was using her power to make the world a better place and keeping her safe. And so once you kill Angel, I think in Jack's mind, he's the protagonist in the cop movie where his daughter is killed and he goes on a rampage."

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from here

"the player’s reaction to handsome jack was supposed to mirror jack’s reaction to the player: first they seem harmless, then as time goes by it gets worse, then they end up with complete hatred. for the vault hunters, the downright hatred was supposed to begin with bloodwing’s death, and for jack, it was supposed to begin with angel’s."