Borderlands lore and takedown

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 SPOILERS
#1

So what exactly is Scourge beef against VH and what was he trying to achieve on Minos?
Among the usual taunts he has a few interesting lines:

I put them in an order that makes more sense

“The Overseer was wrong about you”
"You are a mockery of our *kind * (??not sure of the last part of this sentence)
“You are a pretender”
“You cannot contain what is loose”
“The Destroyer Cage must be rebuilt”
"I’ve done what the Watcher could not (?? not sure of the last part of this sentence)

From the bit from the dialogue in the trials and those bits I infer that the remnants of Guardians want the VH to take their role of containing the Destroyer and Scourge is not happy about it. Maybe he tried to rebuilt the Destroyer prison (this confirms that the ■■■■ pulled out by Tyreen has long lasting consequences as the Destroyer cannot be killed just contained) by a method akin to how it was originally built by sacrificing the life of numerous beings, in that case the Minos inhabitants (Tanis confirms at the end that they are nowhere to be found they literally disappeared)

Maybe all of this give hints for BL4 and a conflict between Guardians and VH about how to deal with Destroyer threat if they gather humans to sacrifice to build the Destroyer a new prison.

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#2

We’re in the spoiler section of the forum - no need to obscure the text. (Also makes it tricky to quote). :+1:

Are the Guardians (Scourge aside) capable of this level of thought? I was under the impression that they were largely, eh, ‘autonomous’, though I’d love to be mistaken here. I picture them (at least the ones without specific instructions for guarding a Vault or the like) like ants without a queen when they have no standing orders.

I love the idea though… like Scourge had a go at containing the Destroyer, botched it, and chewed Minos Prime up in the process (and he’s a little miffed at us for our role(s) in releasing the Destroyer in the first place.

Paraphrased in non-Eridian rhetoric (if I understand your post correctly), “Great, Overseer was wrong about you and now the Destroyer is out: way to go, jerk. I wasted a whole planet trying to re-contain it, that didn’t work, and now you’re sniffing around here? #vaulthunterssuck #containthedestroyer #RIPMinosPrime”.

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#3

Well hang on though - the Destroyer is killed with Tyreen (presumably) and Lilith has (at least presently) contained/closed the Great Vault on Pandora. Right?

So why would Scourge be angry at the VHs?

P.S. - I STILL don’t understand how Jack had the eye of the Destroyer on Elpis, but yet the Destroyer somehow still exists in BL3? Is this just a retcon? If not, if someone can explain this to me (with an explanation that makes sense) that would just be greeeeeeat.

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#4

From my understanding the Destroyer can’t be killed or at least not this easily, it’s a being akin to the cosmic horrors of Lovecraft or Galactus in the Marvel comic, it’s like a god and literally eats stars , that’s why the Eridians sacrificed their entire population with the help of Nyriad just to imprison him. Since Tyreen trifled with the vault the prison is not that secure anymore, VH and Lilith contained the Destroyer once again, but that look like a band aid on a festering wound.

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#5

Well the guy who talks to you for the Eridians proving grounds mission is capable of thoughts, there was the guy in TPS too

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#6

@olivier_shady I did catch that part of it, but Jack LITERALLY has the physical Eye on Elpis in TPS. I guess it just respawns a new body every time the Vault is opened or something? I guess this makes some sense but it feels kind of bootstrapped.

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#7

I honestly don’t remember this part very well, but I guess that whatever physical manifestation it had while not being completely free is not his real form just a tiny part of it.

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#8

That sounds about right from what I remember of the in-game dialogue and the eridian tablets.

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#9

The Destroyer is a planet size being. The thing you fight in Borderlands 1 is merely a manifastion of it, a physical form so it can “enter this realm”, Angel tells you this on your way through Eridian Promontory.

As for Bl3 I believe that once again it’s more like it chooses Tyreen as a host rather than that small creature beeing the Destroyer itselfs.

Also I think because Lilith still has to get “rid” of Elpis we can consider that the Destroyer is still alive and we once again just banished its new form.

BTW wasn’t there some hints from enemy chatter that the dimension from Phasewalk/Phaselock is actually the same dimension the Destroyer is from/in?

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#10

As far as Jack getting the Eye… yeah the lore is all over the place and inconsistent. :slight_smile:

In BL1, the original cutscene when you kill the Destroyer just fades to white, and when the game resumes, there’s no trace of the Destroyer. It’s not 100% clear what happened to it, but I’d always assumed it just vaporized or something.

In the remaster, the cutscene is different and it’s explicitly shown retreating back through the Vault gate when it’s defeated, eye and all heh.

But at any rate, in Claptastic Voyage, Hyperion guys are clearly harvesting the Eye from the Destroyer’s corpse, though this could be some kind of assumption on Claptrap’s part as we’re just going through his memories and they’re obviously quite fractured and corrupted.

But then again, Professor Nakayama somehow obtained DNA samples of the Destroyer’s physical form and grew a little clone.

:man_shrugging:

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#11

Tbh, I took it more as the original cutscene just being inaccurate, be it from lack of proper forethought, or just Gearbox making a budget cut. They possibly didn’t want to animate this weird tentacle… thing dying, so they just splashed on a white light and called it good, which also meant they could just despawn it without being jarring. Worked well with the presequel, too, in that case.

As for the Remaster version, I guess they thought showing it go back into the Vault would have avoided the plot hole of “But wait, didn’t we already kill this thing?”

I personally think it caused more plot holes this way, since they did a fine job in BL3 explaining how it wasn’t dead.

But regarding the point of the thread- I find this really interesting. I actually just got around to trying the Trials yesterday, and what the Overseer had to say was fascinating, especially since it was the 2nd Guardian we’ve met with any sort of sapience. Now we have Scourge, who doesn’t share the same sentiments as the Overseer.

What makes these guardians different, I wonder?

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#12

Just picked up the eridian tablet in Floodmoor Basin and had a “Hmmmm” moment.

(Emphasis added) :thinking:

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#13

Well, to quibble they’re harvesting it from the Destroyer captured body, not necessarily corpse. Heck the Eye is still alive and active when removed from the body, so the bod may have life (or pseudo-life) left in it.

#14

The heart still beats…

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#15

I thought the eye was like a weapon (as opposed to, like, a native part of the Destroyer’s body)? I swear I heard/read it described like that in TPS. To the point, it’s not necessarily that weird that it could otherwise live outside of the context of the Destroyer (especially once Jack figured out how to… feed it.)

#16

Jack calls it a weapon, yes.

#17

A sharks tooth, a rhino’s horn, an elephants tusk, a cobras fang, could all be described as weapons while still being a living part of the animal that generated them.

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#18

To @VaultHunter101 s point…

The vault monster of Xylorgos is clearly dead. Yet it’s heart still lives. So it isn’t unheard of for a part of a vault monster to live on without it’s body.

#19

The rhetoric made me think that this manifestation of the Destroyer was… created? Where Tyreen said, “yo, let’s hook up; I’ll nurse off your energy, and you can use my body for a physical manifestation in this dimension, and we’ll go wreck some ■■■■” for this intrusion of the Destroyer, the Eridians said previously, “well, here’s enough body to give him a foundation, let’s add this cool eye laser and some fat tentacles and make a sick cycloptopus; that should keep people from getting in here”.

The eye/weapon was part of its body, but was an artificial addition (as presumably its entire body was, if we’re to believe that the actual Destroyer is some other-dimentional being that needs these various physical manifestations to get into this dimension (one being Tyreen’s offer of her own body, and the other being a biological weapon the Eridians made from scratch, attached to the Destroyer, and stuffed into the vault as a trap card).

Which makes me think the issue the Eridians had with the initial discovery of the vault was more that the secret is out and more humans will be sniffing around for more vaults, opening things up, and causing a mess than that the Destroyer could get free if that one vault was opened. Like why risk its entire imprisonment behind one of these vaults when you can just graft a shiv onto that inmate’s arm and leave his arm poking through the back of the safe so if someone breaks in, he’ll shank 'em, but he can’t actually get out if the safe is opened.

When they opened the vault and “killed” the Destroyer, they just cut the shiv off his arm. He went back into his dimension, free from vault duty but still pissed in general, the Vault Hunters were like, “well this was a bust: see ya”, and Jack was like, “cool shiv - I bet I could learn to use that. Also: more vaults pls.”

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#20

The Eye is just a tiny piece of a planet sized creature. Judging from the Lovecraftian nature of the Destroyer, I’m positive it has a LOT more eyes, tentacles and whatnot to spare.

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