Borderlands 2 Lead Writer on Inclusivity

Anthony Burch, lead writer of Borderlands 2, has penned a developer blog that tackles the theme of “inclusivity” and how he attempted to inject it in the title. Here’s an excerpt:

Anyway! With those hojillion caveats aside: let’s talk about inclusivity in Borderlands 2. Let’s talk about characters like Ellie.

Ellie specifically bucks against the stereotypes that all female video game characters must conform to mass-market definitions of beauty (not to mention, if I can digress for a moment, the fact that even our more conventionally attractive characters like Lilith and Maya still have infinitely more realistic proportions than most games).

Her look, concepted by Matias Tapia, is considerably more realistic than most female video game NPCs. She exists not as eye candy for some assumed type of (heterosexual, male, 18-27 year old) player, but as a character in and of herself a character who finds herself beautiful, and refuses to be the butt of anyone’s joke. Ever.

This is why when you first meet her, Ellie is squashing a guy in a car crusher and mockingly ignoring his insults as she pulls the lever. She definitely has to deal with insults about her body on a daily basis, but she refuses to give them any credence: she likes the way she looks, and that’s pretty much all that matters (this is basically the theme of the sidequest (Positive Self Image) where a bunch of bandits make hood ornaments of Ellie’s likeness in an attempt to mock her size, but she thinks the ornaments are so awesome that she asks you to kill the bandits and bring them back to her). Anyone who wants to argue with that, in Ellie’s opinion, is just plain wrong. She considers conventional definitions of beauty limiting, and ultimately pointless.

When I see cosplay like this, I feel stupendously happy, and ludicrously proud of the art team who created Ellie (Concept Matias Tapia, Character Model / Texture Kevin Penrod, Rigging Ryan Metcalf, Animation Dia Hadley, Jimmie Jackson, James Houchen, Josh Rearick). I love knowing that Hija found Ellie cool, inspiring, or relatable enough to cosplay as her.

We also have a few gay or bisexual characters in Borderlands 2. Sir Hammerlock is gay you’re given a quest to find some old audio recordings by Hammerlock’s ex-boyfriend and had an entire DLC all to himself. I’m also happy to say that in Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, we confirm that Mister Torgue (an NPC who also had a DLC named after him) and Axton (our playable Commando class) are bisexual.

In a slightly-related story, Axton had some bi-curious dialog in the main game due to a slight hiccup in the writing process. Initially, I wrote a bunch of character-specific reviving dialog so that if you revived Sal while playing as Axton, he might say, (on your feet, soldier,) but if you revived Maya, he’d say, (woah do you, uh, work out?) We didn’t end up actually getting the character-specific code implemented but the lines all stayed, so in the released game you can revive any male character and Axton still has a small chance to hit on him. After we mentioned this in an interview and some people on our forums expressed a bit of disappointment that he wasn’t intentionally bisexual, I put some more overt dialog in Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep to confirm that, actually, yes dude is bisexual.