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May. 30th, 2020 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
therushingskyTHE 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 Mega Corporations 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
Okay so from here I'm going to be slotting in convenient youtube videos. Tales of the Borderlands is basically the length of a tv miniseries and solid plot, so I'm just going to focus on toxic relationships and bad ideas that would come up in an inmate file.
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 boss's disembodied face from a sleeping psycho, infiltrates Hyperion, gets shot at (a lot), and finally makes it back up to the space station he started on, Helios.
There, in the empty throne room of Hyperion, he grabs the final piece of the vault key that all of this has been leading too, and has this conversation:
Things do not pick up from here. (Please skip to 3:45 to see Rhys try and talk his way out of having a robot exoskeleton inserted into his body so that Handsome Jack can ride him around like a horrible meat puppet.)
A key difference between the playthrough above and the one my Rhys comes from: Since my Rhys solidly sided with Jack until the above moment, when he falls down that shaft, he's been abandonned by the people who would have waited for him.
So he's alone, stranded, and stuck on a space station with a murderous AI with a personal grudge against him. In an act of great decision making, total lack of impulse control and sheer Hyperion ruthlessness, Rhys sabotages the space station's power core, bringing it crashing down out of the sky.
The fact that he was able to do this and still show up as a warden really reinforced the power of Rhys's idea that any action undertaken to survive can be justified. It's true that this may have been the only way for him to survive, but only because he made excruciatingly bad decisions to get to this point, and even then, it probably wasn't justified.
(If you need to skip one of these this one is five minutes of just a space station falling apart and it's beautiful but I don't blame you.)
As Rhys manages to score one of the last escape pods off the escape station, he can see behind him at least one person who didn't make it off in time, rubble from the collapsing station destroys transports of people escaping, and pods fall apart and crash into each other upon re-entry.
Anyone who survives that? Has a space station land on top of them.
And in the ruins, Rhys finds Jack, one last time.
And, after all this, all the pain and difficulty and betrayal, what did Rhys do?
OPEN VAULT. BECOME CEO. LEARN NOTHING.
Okay, it's not fair to say that he learned nothing. He left the situation determined to take a different path to Handsome Jack, and to build something different on Pandora. He grew more on the Barge, giving up his deal (which was just for cool alien tech that he could sell) to help his inmate.
But as loyal and focused as he was on his inmate, he never worried about whether he needed to change. He still gravitated towards wealth and power, and befriended or seduced characters he saw as having it. He never worried about actual bigger moral problems, but saw himself as someone with a job and who wanted to be good at it.
More than this, he identified the barge as an immoral system that he believed was imprisoning people who didn't deserve it, but he stuck around anyway, because he liked the work. Just like he did on Hyperion.
Annnnd if you just love to read there are more words about his demotion here.
