Borderlands 3 Lovecraft DLC eliminates major problems with the author’s work

With the release of the new DLC Guns, Love and Tentacles from Borderlands 3: The Wedding of Wainwright & Hammerlock DLC, I figured this would be the best time to return to Gearbox’s first person shooter. The Borderlands franchise has had a decent track record when it comes to post-launch campaign extensions and it’s been a few months since I’ve played Borderlands 3 so, you know, why not?

However, I was not particularly excited about my time with Guns, Love and Tentacles, largely because the interpretation of HP’s Gearbox The work of Lovecraft incorporates some of the problematic parts of the author’s worldview and does nothing to resolve them.

It’s the DLC’s representation of blacks that annoys me the most, largely because of the narrative style of the Borderlands franchise. Borderlands games traditionally explore concepts or elements of pop culture through sarcasm, satire or playful homage. Gearbox takes something that already exists and adapts it to its irreverent chaos style of Borderlands.

When this process works, it really works. For example, Tiny Tina’s assault on Borderlands 2’s Dragon Keep, which sends you on a table RPG adventure that riffs on Dungeons & Dragons, is a fun DLC, both in terms of theme and gameplay. There is also all the symbolism of Greek mythology which acts as a guideline for the four games, as each mermaid being a beautiful but dangerous woman and the planet Pandora acting as a safe, which all contribute to the most fascinating aspects of the history of Borderlands.

Guns, Love, and Tentacles is a Lovecraft-themed DLC, incorporating aspects of H.P. The stories of Lovecraft and the myth of Cthulhu as a backdrop to the overall narrative. Unfortunately, what makes the DLC more adaptive than interpretive is the way it treats Sir Hammerlock and Wainwright Jakobs, the two characters who are at the center of Guns, Love and Tentacles. The DLC concerns the two characters who marry and face the unfortunate snag of holding the place on a planet ruled by a cult. Cult leader Eleanor considers the couple’s love unclean and weak and therefore Wainwright becomes the unwitting host of her husband’s mind – doomed to slowly turn into his beloved unless you decide to do something to stop the process. As Hammerlock is made a passive spectator for almost the entire DLC (he helps you in your quest to save his fiancé only once), the whole agency belongs to you.

So the story of DLC is that a woman who is essentially anotherworldly witch steals a gay couple from their happy day, questions their relationship, then tries to correct the “flaw” in their love by transforming one of the men into her own husband, in order to create a supposedly purer love. It’s already a little strange and more than a little homophobic, but when you also consider that this DLC is inspired by Lovecraft, it becomes even more problematic.

It all comes down to this: H.P. Lovecraft was racist – and racist at the level of frank white supremacist on this subject. Nor is it a question of separating the artist from his art, because man has integrated his views on people of color in his literary works. Just look at his poem “On the Creation of Negroes,” which states that the gods created man and beast, then created blacks as an inexplicable intermediate creature.

His hateful opinions about people of color extend to his stories which also cover up occult and cosmic horror. For example, “The Horror at Red Hook” refers to Brooklyn, a neighborhood in New York with a citizenship mainly made up of people of color, like “lepers and cancer patients with ill-fated old worlds” and the people who live there. like “hordes of prowlers” that cause a “babel of sound and grime”. The third chapter of “The Call of Cthulhu” refers to the murder of “the strange and evil crew of Kanakas and half-castes” as a “duty”, since the group of people of color and those of mixed race are of “abominable quality”. The Deep Ones in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” are said to be horribly monstrous because they represent the impure offspring of interracial couples.

So now, looking at the story of Guns, Love and Tentacles, you have to take into account the way Gearbox wrote the black characters – in this case, Wainwright and Hammerlock – because it’s also part of Lovecraft fiction. And in this sense, Gearbox is rather spot-on. The two black men are too useless to help themselves and have a love constantly scrutinized and questioned in the majority of the DLC, while the antagonist “purifies” their love by transforming one of them into her white husband and heterosexual. If she just falls in love with Wainwright and marries Wainwright, it would be, in Lovecraft’s eyes, a rude mix of races, then Wainwright must first transform into her husband for love to be authentic. Lots of red flags there, but very Lovecraft.

The problem is that Gearbox doesn’t nothing to fire them.

Now I understand. It’s a Borderlands game. I don’t expect Borderlands 3 to tackle the nuances of every aspect of what makes a Lovecraftian story. But if your game is going to adapt the Lovecraft stories and incorporate the themes and messages of those stories, you should also address their problematic parts. Guns, Love and Tentacles don’t do that. Wainwright and Hammerlock don’t even have a chance to show how much their love is worthy of defeating Eleanor and her husband – you defeat the mean couple while your allies watch helplessly. Guns, Love, and Tentacles is one of the few situations where traditional Borderlands disrespect could have been used to make fun of Lovecraft’s horrific views and solve problems with his work, but the DLC makes no attempt to do so. despite the opportunity.

And, of course, in doing so, Guns, Love and Tentacles takes on the same flaws as Lovecraft’s work. The actual mission structure in Guns, Love and Tentacles is good quality – like the main campaign in Borderlands 3, you have too many boring platform sections and sponge ball boss fights breaking through the pleasurable episodes looting and shooting. But Gearbox’s seemingly deliberate manipulation of Lovecraft’s views in Guns, Love and Tentacles gives the DLC story a terrible aftertaste that ultimately translates into a poor campaign expansion for Borderlands 3.