#lore text

Timeline

Timestamps that are canonically in the game are written red while headcanon timestamps are written in blue

Date format is solenear.cycle (SSSS.CCC)

SOLENEAR IS A MADE UP TIME UNIT

I made solenear 20 years because 20 years is roughly 1040 weeks which is close to 999 weeks/cycles

This is assuming all RW creatures live WAY longer than normal creatures or just scaled for convinience

Again this is all speculations and headcanons

Solenear 1400 - 1500

[1404] Void Fluid revolution happened in roughly 1400 because Moon said her creators' ancestors were the one who started it. [Vanilla_Subterranean_Teal Pearl]

SOS, LTTM, CW, SRS, and NSH's creation time are purely headcanon

Solenear 1500 - 1600

UI and FP's creation time are purely headcanon

[1525] I assumed that as soon as Pebbles was active, they took a few cycles to make sure Pebbles was operational before moving.

[1539] Because of the shrinking population during Pebbles' time [Vanilla_The Exterior_Ashy Green Pearl], i assumed either the Ancients stopped making iterators all together and/or abandoned unfinished iterators at some point.

[1560] I assume triple affirmative was after mass ascension as a headcanon just to make things easier since there's nothing on this (unless i missed something)

[1583] Sig has made slugcat(s) before since Suns learned from him when creating SM [Broadcast_Sending Information_White]

[1591] SM had delivered a pearl to Pebbles once before the ingame SM campaign [Broadcast_Sturdy Creature_Gray]. I assume this is THE golden pearl. So Suns probably started making SM sometime after the bug maze convo

Solenear 1600 - 1700

[1630] Headcanon scug creation takes 5 - 10 solens and SM was suns' 7th experiment [Broadcast_A Name_White] so SM probably finished at around 30 - 40 solens.

[1654] Moon's broadcast at cycle 110 states that Pebbles started using more water 2 cycles ago so probably at cycle 108 [Vanilla_Sky Islands 4_Pearl]

[1654] I assume that Sig started Hunter's creation when Moon resorted to forced broadcast because then he knew Moon is in really bad conditions

[1656] UI leaking Pebbles' rot happened before SM's 2nd campaign because Suns and Sig were talking about it during that 2nd campaign [Broadcast_Humiliated_Grey]

[1658] Moon's collapse and Artificer campaign overlaps because Moon is inaccessable and her waterfront facility is intact during Arti. But Moon is accessible and her waterfront has decayed during Hunter (thanks Res)

[1668] Hunter taking longer for Sig to make because of decaying equipment [Vanilla_Red stomach_Aquamarine Pearl] and only took a cycle before sending Hunter out (Rushing with examinations and missed the faulty rot genes)

[1668] Gourmand and Hunter campaign happened very close to each other because of what Moon said about her 'last visitor'

Solenear 1700 - 1800

Rivulet campaign timestamp is purely headcanon

[1732] Iirc it started snowing when you take the rarefaction cell from Pebbles

Pebbles' collapse timestamp is purely headcanon

Solenear 1800 - 1900

I assume that other iterators would last twice as long as Pebbles if they don't have the rot so they start collapsing/failing naturally during this time

Solenear 1900 - 2000

Saint campaign timestamp is purely head canon

Cycle

One cycle is one normal week that consists of 7 days

Each day the rain increases in duration and intensity to the point it takes up the entire day or becomes strong enough to kill

So creatures CAN live through rain and make it to the next day until the rain becomes too strong to ignore and be forced to hibernate

Rain resets each cycle

Iirc your rain counter lights up when you're halfway in a cycle. I imagine this is when the rain starts to hurt

In a bid to impose a level of order and certainty on his world, Viktor researched Zaun’s many accidents and came to realize that almost all of them were the result of human error, not mechanical failure. He offered his services to the local businesses, developing inventions that made them far safer working environments. Most turned him away, but one - the Fredersen Chem-forge - took a chance on this earnest young man.

Viktor’s inventions in automation reduced the number of accidents in the forge to zero within a month. Soon, other establishments sought his work and Viktor’s designs became common in Zaun, improving production with every innovation that removed human error from a process. Eventually, at the age of nineteen, he was surprised to be offered a place in Zaun’s prestigious Academy of Techmaturgy. But Viktor’s work had attracted the eye of Professor Stanwick of Piltover, who convinced him to leave Zaun and travel to Piltover’s academy instead. There, he could work in the most advanced laboratories and gain access to all the resources the City of Progress could offer. Thrilled to be singled out, Viktor accepted his offer and took up residence in Piltover, where he refined his craft and sought to perfect his theorems in ways that would benefit everyone.

Viktor worked with Piltover’s best and brightest; including an insufferable genius named Jayce. The two were equally matched in intellect, but where Viktor was methodical, logical and thorough, Jayce was flamboyant and arrogant. The two worked together frequently, but never truly became friends. Often, the two would butt heads over their perceptions of intuition vs logic in the process of invention, but a level of mutual respect developed as each saw the flawed brilliance in the other.

In the midst of his studies in Piltover, a major chem-spill devastated entire districts of Zaun, and Viktor returned home to offer his help in the rescue efforts. By grafting a sophisticated series of cognitive loops upon existing automata-technology, he crafted a custom-built golem, Blitzcrank, to help in the clean-up. Blitzcrank was instrumental in saving scores of lives and appeared to develop a level of sentience beyond anything Viktor had envisioned.

Even with the spill contained, Viktor remained in Zaun to help those afflicted by the released toxins. With the golem’s help, he attempted to use his techmaturgical brilliance to save those whose lives had been blighted by the spill. Their attempt was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing more deaths, and the two parted ways. Though Viktor was distraught at the loss of life in Zaun, the work taught him a great deal about the merging of human anatomy with technology and how mortal anatomy could be enhanced with technology.

When Viktor returned to Piltover, weeks later, it was to find that Professor Stanwick had held a symposium on Blitzcrank and presented Viktor’s researches as his own. Viktor lodged formal complaints with the masters of the college, but his impassioned claim that he had designed Blitzcrank fell on deaf ears. He turned to Jayce to verify his claims, but his fellow student refused to speak up, further widening the rift between them, and the matter was decided in Professor Stanwick’s favor.

Bitter, but resigned, Viktor returned to his studies, knowing that his ultimate goal of making people’s lives better and enhancing humanity was more important than one stolen project and a bruised ego. He continued to excel, finding ever new ways to eliminate human error and weakness from his work, a facet of his researches that came to dominate his thinking. He saw human involvement in any part of a process as a grossly inefficient aberration - a view that put him at odds with a great many of his fellow students and professors, who saw the very things Viktor sought to remove as the source of human ingenuity and creativity.

This came to a head during a reluctant collaboration with Jayce to improve the diving suits used to keep Piltover’s docks clear of underwater debris and lingering chemical waste. Viktor and Jayce’s enhanced suits allowed the wearer to go deeper, remain underwater for longer, and lift heavier weights. But many wearers claimed they saw phantom corpse lights in the depths or suffered from chem-induced hallucinations. When divers experienced such symptoms, they panicked and often got themselves or their fellow divers killed. Viktor saw the problem was not technical, but with the wearer’s nerves unraveling in the inky depths. He devised a chem-shunt helm that allowed an operator on the surface to bypass the wearer’s fear response and, effectively, control the diver. A heated discussion between Viktor and Jayce on free will and mental enslavement turned bitter - almost violent - and the two vowed never to work together again.

Jayce reported the incident to the college masters, and Viktor was censured for violating basic human dignity - though, in his eyes, his work would have saved many lives. He was expelled from the college, and retreated to his old laboratory in Zaun, disgusted by the narrow-minded perceptions of Piltover’s inhabitants. Alone in the depths, Viktor sank into a deep depression, enduring a traumatic period of introspection for many weeks. He wrestled with the ethical dilemma he now faced, finding that, once again, human emotion and weakness had stood in his way. He had been trying to help, to enhance people beyond their natural capabilities to avoid error and save lives. Revelation came when he realized that he too had succumbed to such emotions, allowing his naive belief that good intentions could overcome ingrained prejudice to blind him to human failings. Viktor knew he could not expect others to follow where he did not go first, so, in secret, he operated on himself to remove those parts of his flesh and psyche that relied upon or were inhibited by emotion.

When the surgery was done, almost no trace of the young man who had traveled to Piltover remained. He had supplanted the majority of his anatomy with mechanical augmentations, but his personality had also changed. His idealistic hope to better society was refined into an obsession with what he called the Glorious Evolution. Viktor now saw himself as the pioneer of Valoran's future - an idealized dream where man would renounce flesh in favor of superior hextech augmentations. This would free humanity from fatal errors and suffering, though Viktor knew it was a task that would not be completed easily or quickly.

He threw himself into this great work with a vengeance. He used technological augmentations to help rebuild Zaunites injured in accidents, perfected breathing mechanisms, and worked tirelessly to reduce human inefficiency by decoupling physicality from emotion. His work saved hundreds of lives, yet seeking Viktor’s help could be dangerous, as his solutions often brought unexpected consequences.

But if you were desperate, Viktor was the man you went to.

Some in Zaun, hearing fragments of his philosophy and seeing the successes of his work, saw him as a messianic figure. Viktor couldn’t care less for them, viewing their quasi-religious cult as an aberration; yet another reason to eliminate emotional foibles and the belief in that which could not be empirically proven.

After a toxic event in the Sump saw hundreds of men and women in the Factorywood transformed into rabid psychotics, Viktor was forced to use a powerful soporific to sedate the victims and bring them back to his labs to try and undo the damage. The toxins had begun to eat away portions of their brains, but Viktor was able to slow the degenerative process by opening up their craniums and employing machinery to slowly filter their bloodstreams of poison. The technology available to him wasn’t up to the task, and Viktor knew many people were going to die unless he found a way to greatly enhance his purgative machinery.

As he fought to save these people, he detected a surge in hextech energy from Piltover and saw immediately that this could give him the power he needed. He followed the powerful energy surge to its source.

Jayce’s lab.

Viktor demanded Jayce hand over the source of this power, a pulsing crystal from the Shuriman desert. But his former colleague refused, leaving Viktor no option but to take it by force. He returned to Zaun and hooked the strange crystal to his machinery, readying a steam golem host for each afflicted person in case their body gave out under the stress of the procedure. Empowered by the new crystal, Viktor’s machines went to work and, gradually, the damage from the toxins began to reverse. His work would save these people - in a manner of speaking - and had Viktor retained more than a fragment of his humanity, he might have celebrated. As it was, the barest hint of a smile was all he allowed himself.

Before the process could complete, a vengeful Jayce burst in and started smashing the laboratory with an energized hammer. Knowing an arrogant fool like Jayce would never listen to reason, Viktor ordered the automatons to kill Jayce. The battle was ferocious, and only ended when Jayce shattered the crystal Viktor had taken, bringing the entire warehouse down in an avalanche of steel and stone, thus ending the existence of those Viktor was trying to save. And for this, Jayce returned to Piltover, feted as a hero.

Viktor escaped the destruction of the laboratory, and returned to his mission of bettering humanity by ridding it of its destructive emotional impulses. In Viktor’s mind, Jayce’s impetuous attack only proved the truth of his cause and strengthened his desire to unburden humanity of the failings of flesh. Viktor did send chem-augmented thugs to raid Jayce’s laboratory not long afterward. This was - Viktor told himself - not for revenge, but to learn if there were any more shards of the Shuriman crystal he could use for the advancement of mankind. The raid was unsuccessful, however, and Viktor thought no more of Jayce.

Before we go on: I’m a graphic designer. Not an ethics professor or anything. So if you’d like to contribute with academic theory and so on, go ahead!

The one definition we’re gonna work with is: of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong;   Now, let’s start with something imoral, wrong. Something that’s a pilar for our present society, a reference of evil and a reference many Borderlands-centric dicussions use to talk about its characters: Murder. Why murder? Well, Borderlands is a pretty violent game, with murder all around, done both by villains and heroes. So how come there are villains and heroes? Well. My starting argument is: Murder doesn’t matter. Lifes don’t inherently have value like that. In our society, we have set rules that tell us the value of human life. Religion; don’t kill another cause they’re made by god(s). Laws; don’t kill another cause we’re all valuable members of our society etc This things - exclusing problems with a captalistic worldview and we’ll get back to that - tell us that human life has value on it’s own and therefore should not be terminated. But in the borderverse, there’s no religion as far as we know, and although certain details imply there might be a justice system in some planets, what’s just in Pandora, a planet that doesn’t even seem to have an overarching organized society, and actually seem to thrive in small settlements, towns and clans?   The highter powers we ever got over Pandora were the megacorps. Atlas, Dahl, Hyperion... Pandora was always under the all seeing eye of something other than a god. And this corps - see here’s where we get back to our own mostly captalistic society - see human life as expensable. There’s no value in a life with no purpose, and the purpose has to be contributing to society’s machine in some way. And even so, many of these lifes can be replaced, making them all the more easy to ignore.  This brings us to a galaxy, or universe, or whatever Pandora is floating on, filled with “human” planets. As far as we know, all the megacorps are run and worked by humans. As far as we know, there are way too many humans.  Enough for a corporation to try to mine a planer and leave the miners behind when the operation goes wrong.  Enough for a man to experiment on people in search for more power and profit.  And enough for Vault Hunters to run around laughing as they vanquish human obstacles in their pursuits.  What’s the point in all this? Too many humans make almost any work easy to substitute, at least to the higher power’s - the megacorps - eyes. Pandora specially, having basically all of it’s colonization history being of explored people and corporation wars, never got to have a socio-cultural environment that never allowed for the intrinsic valuing of human life.  Not only that, but Pandora is a dump planet. A literal border at the edge of civilization, where many people go when they have nowhere else to, or when they have to hide and so one. It’s hard to believe there will be day when no one will be moving to Pandora and adding to their numbers.  All these factors take away from the possibility of seeing human life as valueable and improper to harm. Murder doesn’t matter because human life doesn’t matter. At least, not how we see it. I mean, if it doesn’t matter, why are the Vault Hunters and the Crimson Raiders trying to save Pandora and (most) of its people? Because they’ve assigned their own value to these lifes. Just as Jack can pin everybody down as bandits to moon shot erase cities out of the map, the vaulties and raiders can see the people as potential for the planet to get better, as human interaction and connection. - we’re not here to discuss the whys and hows of human value that deeply; but if you’d like to see me touch deeper on this let me know (tho I think it’s an ok summary). What murder and human life not mattering means is that they’re not could standarts to withhold to our heroes and villains of Borderlands (so far. BL3 has the potential to make this so much more complicated...). But then, what is the standart in a godless, moraless land where murder is... “Eh”?  It’s personal. Morality in Pandora is completely personal. Borrowing much from its aesthetic and feel from the western genre, Borderlands also borrows from its themes, specifically those of a personal code of honor. There’s only frontier justice at the border lands.  When we as espectators - and players - see a code, we internalize the person that holds it has their own morals and limits. The sheer having of principles already raises one moraly over others; it’s the act of setting a limit for yourself not matter the urges.   With that in mind, what are common values in the personal codes we see around Pandora and the borderverse, and how do they define who we fight and who we support?  Here are my takes:  Empathy - the hability of needing no reason to understand the struggle of another person and wanting to help and ease the struggle  Loyalty - following those you’re allied too to the very end, staying true to your word, risking yourself for others  Truth - even if your truth is yes, I like punching people in the face, we seem to align more with those who admit even to their worse sides  Bravery - to stand for others and strive for something better  What’s interesting here is that if we look at Jack, for example, he pretends to uphold most of his values - trading empathy with Love - through an ends justify the means mentality, but ultimately betrays every single one of these values while maintaining them for the people around them, creating an egoistic divide between his reality and that of others. It’s pretty neat! That’s how we see him as a villain - he’s saying all the things he’s not actually doing! (Though, he might think he is! Wether he’s crazier than he looks, extremely manipulative and abusive, or a mix of both, is left for our own headcanons and interpretations!) Finally, my last point is cruelty. Two points I’m gonna explore here are:  Jack scooping out a man’s eyes with a spoon in front of his kids, and;  Brick severed from the Raiders for extreme cruelty.  Why is Brick here not seeing as much of a monster as Jack is - even if he comes to the point of letting us just kill slabs because they’re dumb?  Because what matters most in Pandora is not human life, but how this life is lived. Those that make life worse by all means, for personal gain or no reason at all, are bad.  And those that try to make life better, for personal reasons or not, are good.  With, of course, layers to that. As the westerns had their heroes build codes to face agaisnt the deliberate and abstract laws of their lands; Borderlands let’s us debate how solid personal codes actually are and urges us to think about what we’re condoning - and who are the true heroes.  (there might be none!)

IN CONCLUSION/TL;DR: