Demotion Deets & PTR
Oct. 21st, 2019 03:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
therushingskyBut Rhys is adorable? How did such a charming young cyborg get demoted?
You know what? Rhys is adorable! But he also possessed Betelgeuse and made him jump off the deck.
Wow what? That's kind of extreme!
I know, I know don't @ me! But this hasn't come from nowhere. Rhys has never been an altruistic warden. His moral compass has always been defined by a combination of ego and personal interests, and a lot of what's kept him on the straight and narrow as a warden has been the fact that a lot of his self esteem is tied up in being good at his job, which eventually was paired with a major emotional attachment to his inmate.
In fact, when Bill briefly broke the Barge, and Rhys decided to go with him - pretty much the only thing that made him a moderating presence and not just a stupid wingman on a weird and wild ride with his new horrible friend - was his conscious commitment to what was best for Hux.
Now however, with Hux graduated, and Rhys just kinda hanging on because he likes the Barge, he's left with the fact that it maybe kinda hasn't been entirely great for him. One thing that he's done massively while he's been on board, is to indulge in friendships, rivalries, and relationships with people who satisfy an urge that he has for... well, power and pissing contests. Even his aspirations to be better and do better than people, are rooted - very literally - in wanting to be better than other people rather than having a strong moral core of his own. A lot of these destructive dynamics come from the toxicity of working for Hyperion - where there was a lot of currency in hostile banter, backstabbing, and cut-throat ladder climbing. I said in his original app that Rhys was an octopus who learned to swim with sharks, but that means there's a lot of stuff that he also never unlearned, because of...
Our old friend, trauma!
This is why Rhys is getting demoted right now and not a few months back when Hux first graduated. Because Betelgeuse - right from their first encounter - was hitting some fuckin' buttons for Rhys.
The thing is, there is already a nickname issuing, wise cracking, vividly threatening dead guy in his pretty recent past. With whom Rhys made some extremely bad decisions and had kind of an intense relationship, involving possession, intangibility, and ended with Rhys condemning him to infinite nothingness.
The thing is, Rhys's kneejerk reaction to meeting Betelgeuse was to low key recognise this dynamic, and to be lured back into a bunch of his own behaviours that had come with it in the past. Partly out of guilt, or insecurity about having gotten rid of his actual idol in such a hauntingly unpleasant way, and partly just because - as mentioned above, he's never actually unlearned the shit that led to this in the first place.
While some of what got Rhys into this situation was the fact that he was emotionally compromised by the moon event, the actual moment where he forced Betelgeuse to jump overboard after him was pure Rhys. He was punishing someone for traumatically hurting him - he was lashing out at the memory of someone who wasn't there - and he also just needed to win.
Path to Redemption
It's actually not super complicated beyond what I've written above!
Rhys needs to do more to unlearn the corporate culture of Hyperion, instead of constantly having it in the back of his mind as a fallback for when he meets someone who it'll be fun to have a weird and damaging rivalry with.
One of Rhys's strengths on the Barge is that he's pretty accepting of other people, no matter how bad they are. This isn't something he should lose, but he needs to be able to tell the difference between being accepting of someone and mutually enabling his absolute worst instincts with them.
This is probably going to be complicated by the fact that he's going to be unbelievably embarrassed and angry at what he sees as an unfair demotion because I'm a cruel player! \o/
You know what? Rhys is adorable! But he also possessed Betelgeuse and made him jump off the deck.
Wow what? That's kind of extreme!
I know, I know don't @ me! But this hasn't come from nowhere. Rhys has never been an altruistic warden. His moral compass has always been defined by a combination of ego and personal interests, and a lot of what's kept him on the straight and narrow as a warden has been the fact that a lot of his self esteem is tied up in being good at his job, which eventually was paired with a major emotional attachment to his inmate.
In fact, when Bill briefly broke the Barge, and Rhys decided to go with him - pretty much the only thing that made him a moderating presence and not just a stupid wingman on a weird and wild ride with his new horrible friend - was his conscious commitment to what was best for Hux.
Now however, with Hux graduated, and Rhys just kinda hanging on because he likes the Barge, he's left with the fact that it maybe kinda hasn't been entirely great for him. One thing that he's done massively while he's been on board, is to indulge in friendships, rivalries, and relationships with people who satisfy an urge that he has for... well, power and pissing contests. Even his aspirations to be better and do better than people, are rooted - very literally - in wanting to be better than other people rather than having a strong moral core of his own. A lot of these destructive dynamics come from the toxicity of working for Hyperion - where there was a lot of currency in hostile banter, backstabbing, and cut-throat ladder climbing. I said in his original app that Rhys was an octopus who learned to swim with sharks, but that means there's a lot of stuff that he also never unlearned, because of...
Our old friend, trauma!
This is why Rhys is getting demoted right now and not a few months back when Hux first graduated. Because Betelgeuse - right from their first encounter - was hitting some fuckin' buttons for Rhys.
The thing is, there is already a nickname issuing, wise cracking, vividly threatening dead guy in his pretty recent past. With whom Rhys made some extremely bad decisions and had kind of an intense relationship, involving possession, intangibility, and ended with Rhys condemning him to infinite nothingness.
The thing is, Rhys's kneejerk reaction to meeting Betelgeuse was to low key recognise this dynamic, and to be lured back into a bunch of his own behaviours that had come with it in the past. Partly out of guilt, or insecurity about having gotten rid of his actual idol in such a hauntingly unpleasant way, and partly just because - as mentioned above, he's never actually unlearned the shit that led to this in the first place.
While some of what got Rhys into this situation was the fact that he was emotionally compromised by the moon event, the actual moment where he forced Betelgeuse to jump overboard after him was pure Rhys. He was punishing someone for traumatically hurting him - he was lashing out at the memory of someone who wasn't there - and he also just needed to win.
Path to Redemption
It's actually not super complicated beyond what I've written above!
Rhys needs to do more to unlearn the corporate culture of Hyperion, instead of constantly having it in the back of his mind as a fallback for when he meets someone who it'll be fun to have a weird and damaging rivalry with.
One of Rhys's strengths on the Barge is that he's pretty accepting of other people, no matter how bad they are. This isn't something he should lose, but he needs to be able to tell the difference between being accepting of someone and mutually enabling his absolute worst instincts with them.
This is probably going to be complicated by the fact that he's going to be unbelievably embarrassed and angry at what he sees as an unfair demotion because I'm a cruel player! \o/
Inmate file
Date: 2020-05-30 10:20 pm (UTC)THE WORLD OF BORDERLANDS
Rhys comes from shortly before the year 3000, from a colonial community of mostly humans and robots, who have slowly spread out across a number of planets on the furthest reaches of the galaxy.
There is no government or police force regulating anything about Rhys's world. Just various Megacorporations ravaging planets for resources and leaving behind their crazed slave labour, while controlling their staff with the heady combination of unimaginable wealth, and the constant threat of being vented out an airlock.
One of the colonized planets is Pandora: a hostile desert covered in monstrous creatures that freeze during it's seven year winter only to thaw in the spring. It was strip mined by the corporation Hyperion, before an even more valuable resource was discovered there...
THE VAULTS
Vaults are extremely well hidden cachets of ancient alien technology, ripe for the plundering!
Or, okay, you might not say, ripe. In fact, you might say "difficult to unlock, with ancient and often complicated keys, almost entirely guarded by horrible nightmarish monsters that will rend the world, and filled with technology that actually probably shouldn't be taken out at all."
But when a mega-corporation cracks one open, that corporation usually gets a pretty major boost in making a bunch of horrible and expensive guns.
WOW, SO DID ANYONE GET RICH AND FAMOUS AFTER OPENING A VAULT?
I'm glad you asked.
The answer is Handsome God Damn Jack.
CEO of Hyperion, Jack started out as a lowly and idealistic code monkey, but after unlocking a vault and having a truck load of alien knowledge poured directly into his brain, he pretty quickly rose to power and imposed violent control over the chaos on Pandora, slaughtering 'bandits' (or civilians), other vault hunters who might challenge his control, and just churning out money, toys, guns, casinos, wild late stage capitalism fripperies, until he was very deservingly killed, leaving a legacy of misery and destruction... and a tantalizingly empty throne at the top of Hyperion.
Enter Rhys : The Company Man.
Rhys was raised by two colonists, desperately under the thumb of the corporations and struggling to survive. They scraped out a medium to good life working on space stations, and Rhys never set foot on the ruined planet of Pandora, but he saw the pecking order at work. People at the top got to be rich, powerful, they made the world a better place and becoming one of them was the only route out of powerlessness. He knew what he wanted while he was still really, really young, and as a child even made up little business cards to hand out to people.
His parents were probably kind, gentle, supportive people, because Rhys is an extremely sensitive, curious guy. But they were also probably murdered young, for serving coffee that wasn't hot enough, or for not cleaning someone's desk with the right wax, or for just being in the wrong room while some delusional middle manager had a temper tantrum about his workload, and by the time it happened Rhys would have known better than to even be mad about it. Because he's also Hyperion.
TO BE HYPERION...
Hyperion's corporate culture is basically a company full of people desperately trying to live up to the mythological monstrosity of Handsome Jack.
Everyone is a lying, bloodthirsty, murderous asshole, who will backstab you, steal your work, and kill you if that's what it takes to climb past you on their way to the top.
It's not that they're badasses, it's that they're slimy, posturing, politicking bastards. Everything is a pissing contest. Showing weakness is blood in the water, backing down is for wimps. If you have nothing to say, think of a sarcastic line even if it means getting shot, because if you can't, then you're nothing. You're space trash. If you can't get to the top, then you can't change anything, can't do anything. You're just a meaningless cog in the machine, and once people know you're a cog, they'll start treating you like one. You'll get crushed into that shape whether you like it or not.
Rhys didn't like the culture at Hyperion. He consciously, and deliberately faked it, and maintained his hypersensitive, awkward geek undercurrent, but he completely bought into the Handsome Jack worship. Like, styles his hair like him, plasters his office with posters of him, is (in the words of his best friend) creepily obsessed with him. His cybernetics aren't replacements for limbs that he lost in trauma, but are expensive body modifications which he got specifically to give him an edge at his job, and it's implied that before the beginning of the game, he has done terrible, terrible things to secure mining rights, and claw his way up to a major promotion.
And then...
RHYS GETS DEMOTED 1.0
The first thing that happens to Rhys in canon, is that his corporate nemesis becomes his line manager, and demotes him to Senior Vice Janitor.
Rhys immediately steals ten million dollars, and his nemesis's car, and heads down to Pandora to steal the deal that his nemesis is in the process of making, to purchase a vault key.
Then, everything else goes wrong.
The deal turns out to be a con job, the ten million dollars gets stolen, and when Rhys tries to upload stolen Hyperion id credentials into his cybernetics, so that he can call for help, he inadvertantly invites a Holographic Artificial Intelligence of Handsome Jack into his brain.
Yes, the ruthless, psychotic tyrant.
Yes, the one Rhys wants to be.
Rhys makes a lot of really bad decisions from here.
Trust Handsome Jack
Without going too deep into the plot twists of the game, Tales From the Borderlands follows Rhys trying to survive on Pandora, as he's slowly pulled into the hunt for a Vault. He befriends the con artists who tried to rob him on Pandora, but - in this playthrough - he never fully trusts them, and he holds onto his hero worship and his Hyperion ambitions for far too long.
There are a number of times when he's presented with binary choices: Tell his friends about the murderous hologram in his brain, or keep it a secret. Trust his friends to get him out of a scrape? Or trust the murder hologram.
Call the murder hologram an asshole, or attempt to high five it?
This Rhys, at the pivotal moments, still wanted Jack's approval. He let him into his subsystems. He traded away self control for power, and lied to his friends about it.
Which, of course, lead to Rhys...
GETTING EVERYTHING HE'D ALWAYS WANTED
Surviving on Pandora is a long, weird, difficult road. Over the course of the plot, Rhys fights bandits, gets overprotective of tiny robots, steals his former bosses face from a sleeping psycho, infiltrates Hyperion, gets shot at (a lot), and finally makes it to the still empty throne room of Hyperion, to grab the final piece of the vault key, and finally has this conversation:
Things do not pick up from here.