#Borderlands Discussion

[rottenzone]

I really tried to analyze the design of "The Timekeeper" but yes…you know who he looks like

[ominus-potato]

I made a tier list based on which SMG4 characters I think would survive Alice in Borderland!

Survives-

Mario: plot armour is the only reason he makes it through this thing. Otherwise, he’d be dead first game.

Meggy: she’s sporty, smart, cunning and good with weapons. She survives.

Saiko: again, strong, smart, good with weapons, good with violence, etc. she clears these games.

Karen: if she’s fighting to see her kids again then absolutely nothing will deter this woman. She will kill and fight whoever she has to in order to live. Karen lives.

Niles: I can see him having a similar approach to these games that Chishiya did in the actual show. Sits back and watches the others and then learns from their experiences. Cunning with every move he makes and being chill throughout the whole thing. Even if he gets injured he’d be good. I reckon he’d easily clear Heart games.

Wren: incredibly good shot and is probably the one to take down the King of Spades. I can see him having a similar role to Aguni in the actual show. His skills with weapons and fighting is what carries him through these games.

Dies during face card games-

Bob: definitely tried to take on the King of Spades alone and died instantly.

Kaizo: probably was a casualty in the final fight against the King of Spades. A lot of these guys are probably going to be killed by him tbh.

Chris: sacrificed himself like Tatta did in the King of Clubs game. He managed to grab 10,000 points for his team but died as a result.

Belle: She lost to the Queen of Spades. She was the person on her team who was unable to switch sides and as things grew dire, her team betrayed her in order to save their own asses.

Desti: Would have survived but she died to protect Meggy. Probably when fighting off the King of Spades.

Lasts a while but dies before face cards-

SMG3: He got a little cocky that he had managed to survive for so long and as a result, his guard dropped and he died in a game that he chose to play before his Visa was even up.

Tari+Clench: managed to survive out of pure luck for many games (mostly thanks to Saiko) but in the end, she was in a similar situation to the Hide and Seek game and died so that Saiko could live. Similar to Chota I reckon.

Melony: doesn’t take the games too seriously and assumes it’s all just a dream. Her relaxed attitude to the games means that she’s lasts a while but unfortunately she’s not invincible.

Shroomy: his survival instincts and weapons knowledge make it so he lasts a long time and has potential to survive all of the games. Unfortunately, he is too trusting and ends up being stabbed in the back by a random player.

Swag: Chris carries him through their previous games but Swag thinks that he’s be better off without him. They fight, Swag joins a game alone to prove he can do just fine without Chris, he dies.

Hal: skills and knowledge carry him far but he eventually also fails. It’s likely he was trying to help other people survive and as a result got killed.

Lasts 2-3 games-

SMG4: Stumbles through his first game, barely surviving and dies in the second. He doesn’t last long in this world.

Axol: dies in his third game trying to protect Melony. Even then, she doesn’t think he’s ACTUALLY dead. She’s a little lonely after his death but just assumes she’ll see him again after the games.

SMG1: short, stubby legs. He gets put in a Spades game and dies.

SMG2: same as SMG1. Neither of them are equipped for Spades games.

SMG0: somehow made it through his first game (Niles probably carried him) but Niles ditched him in the second, realising that he probably wouldn’t survive very long with him around.

Mr Puzzles: barely survived his first game and ended up being killed in his second. Someone probably used him as a sacrifice to save their own ass.

Beeg: SMG4 helped him out in the first game but one Four was dead, he didn’t stand much of a chance alone. His Visa ran out.

I don’t think the rest need explaining. They were either betrayed, ran out of a game, did something stupid or didn’t take it seriously.

Anyway, yeah! Just a fun little cross-fandom thing in case there are any SMG4 fans who also watch Alice in Borderland!

[butchabouttown]

how can you be a lesbian who’s attracted to/fucks all genders? genuine question no hate just doesn’t align with my understanding

hi!! thanks for asking I LOVE this subject and am so happy to talk about it!! This reply might get kind of long so I apologize in advance hehe <3

I assume you're sending this in response to the ask I got the other day asking about if bisexual women can say dyke, to which I said that I am bisexual & also a dyke (woman is debatable). That's the first place I want to start—that bisexuality does not necessarily equal attraction to all genders. It can! And I have no problem with someone who is attracted to all variations of all genders identifying with the lesbian label if that's what makes sense for them. But for me, I am attracted to women, and men, and people who fall outside of that binary—but I am not necessarily attracted to gendered expressions.

Personally, someone's gender identity really doesn't impact whether or not I might be attracted to them. I am specifically attracted to people who's gender expressions align with or reflect my own in some way—so as a butch, as someone who moves through the world as a lesbian, as someone who identified as trans masculine for several years, who has been on T and may go on T again—that is pretty expansive. For me, I am attracted to queer versions of masculinity—in all its shapes & variations. I don't think that experience precludes me from using the lesbian label! There is not one person that sees me move through the world that does not immediately clock me as a butch lesbian. I cannot change that (and nor do I want to). Does the fact that sometimes I fuck & fall in love with men mean that they're wrong? Or that I am for feeling comfortable with that label?

And that really isn't a new experience!! I am absolutely not alone in that kind of attraction model, and I am not the only person who gets clocked as a lesbian that is attracted to people who aren't women.

I can think of many significant figures & authors & activists in lesbian history who have really traversed what has been coined the "butch/FTM borderlands" by author C. Jacob Hale in 1998. Identity categories do not have hard borders—there's a liminal space that exists between them, and it's impossible to draw a distinct line between them. Hell—even the poet & lesbian icon Sappho wrote about both same-sex and different-sex relationships.

I think of communist, activist & author Leslie Feinberg & the exploration of being a leftist, working class butch in the 60's & 70s in Stone Butch Blues. That novel in particular, although fictionalized, is very much a reflection of their own life and details relationships with many different kinds of people while being very much rooted in lesbian culture.

I think of Jen Manion's article in Transgender Studies Quarterly titled "Transbutch," (article begins on page 213 of the linked pfd) where they write the following:

‘‘Transbutch’’ signifies a gendered embodiment that is both butch and trans, not tied to any singular definition of butch or trans but rather falling somewhere in between. Transbutch marks a liminal space that embraces both the historical legacies of the category of butch and the more expansive possibilities created by the transgender rights movement for recognition, community, and empowerment."

(italics my own) In other words, transbutch is about that sticky place between two identities. Someone can have ties to both of these identities at once—particularly since they have been so historically tied in terms of community.

And the argument being made by Manion I think really connects to the discussion here - being a lesbian is about more than who you sleep with. It's a political identity, it is a gender in of itself, it's about your community and how you connect to it.

Many of the lesbian icons that the community holds dear trouble the "woman loving woman" definition of the identity. And besides—it's not like lesbian is a finite resource. We have infinite space to welcome all kinds of people, anyone who wants to be in community together. There are so many ways to move through the world and so many ways to come to this identity.

Anyway! I don't know how to end this! I hope it was helpful <3

[brutally-loving]

Fuck this unborders your land

[fatehbaz]

Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria, by Brock Cutler, begins with an account of food poisoning in nineteenth-century French Algeria. A deep rural crisis of drought and famine in the late 1860s had reduced the amount of fuelwood coming into the city of Algiers, leading one baker to use construction debris shipped to the colony from Paris to fire his bread oven in early 1869. The lead paint on that metropolitan rubble, product of Baron Haussmann’s transformation of the French capital, became a toxic element in the bread that sickened settlers in the colony. The author [...] treats this small episode as a microcosm of the divides, the unruly circulations, and the nonhuman actants and processes that characterized the early decades of colonial rule in Algeria, which the French invaded in 1830.

These divisions and circulations include those between metropole and colony, between modern and not modern, between person and environment, between human and nonhuman, and across the colonial frontier with Tunisia. [...]

---

The first [of three major narrative veins in Cutler's study involves] [...] bread [...], the consumption of wheat grown on the Mediterranean plains of Algeria [...]. The toxic bread affair of 1869, however, was a reminder that the distance between metropole and colony was not so great. [...] The second vein examines the production of new ecosystem relations [...]. [T]he violence of decades of uneven conquest and the confiscation, appropriation, and enclosure of land and its reorientation toward regional and international [European] markets between 1830 and 1870 thoroughly destabilized rural Algerian life. This fragility turned lethal in the final years of the 1860s, when a series of environmental crises - locust plagues and drought - caused widespread famine and ultimately the deaths of up to eight hundred thousand Algerians. [...] The emptied land and cheap labor that were outcomes of the environmental crises enabled [France] to complete the capitalist transformation of rural Algeria [...]. Another outcome of the environmental crisis was an increase in the number of rural Algerians migrating to cities, where they were perceived as both a threat to public order and a reservoir of potential labor energy. [...]

[D]ivisionary logics, including the line between city and countryside and the modern gendered subject, were being performed, produced, and reproduced in the context of environmental crisis.

---

[Another] major element [in Cutler's scholarship] [...] is an exploration of the complex politics of policing French Algeria’s eastern border with Tunisia, in the era before French colonial rule began in the latter polity in 1881. [...] [T]his border, officially demarcated in 1846, was only integrated into local ecosystem relations over the course of subsequent decades. Repeated performance of sovereignty through patrols and taxation of pastoral communities that lived and worked in the frontier commons instantiated the border, but the border region remained resistant to the forms of modern statecraft, such as standardization, bureaucratization, and written transactions, that French authorities preferred. [...] [Cutler] draws on intentionally “mundane” examples to show how they were critical to the steady reproduction of a modern imperial border (p. 47). [...] [A specific] episode of transborder [dispute] [...] in 1869 [...] became a referndum within the settler community on the virtues of military rule and a reminder for that [European] community of [supposed] indigenous incompatability with modernity. [...]

[T]he various divisions illuminated by the story - between modern and not, between inside and outside, and between European and Algerian - were performances staged at various times and places, not eternal features of the society or landscape. The repetition of “divisionary logics,” in the author’s telling, were at the heart of French colonial modernity (p. 149). [...]

---

[T]horough reading of the French colonial archive, from official sources as well as memoirs, newspapers, and periodicals [...], [t]he first two narrative threads, on bread and disaster, demonstrate the significance of moments of crisis [...] in actually changing the course of history [...] [and] longer-term [...] ecological transformations. The other thread, however, examines how the mundane performance of modern sovereign power and its divisionary logics, over time, made real or even naturalized the new imperial frontier between Algeria and Tunisia. Both [...] society-wide crises or the steady performance of the mundane logics of power [...].

---

All text above by: Jackson Perry. "Review of Cutler, Brock. Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria". H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. April 2024. Published online at: h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=59842. [Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[r47b0y]

Are y’all fucking with the art style change it’s not like crazy crazy off of 3 but it looks like it’s closer to the movie borderlands style(if you can call it that). But the jump is wild from this to the original games art style

[wainwrightjakobshammerlock]

unironically i think wainwright becoming a class traitor would be a great storyline + conclusion to his arc. being thrust into a role he never wanted but seemed prestigious only to find out it's all rotten to the fucking core. realizing he literally cannot spend his money on investments, charities, even fun things for himself, fast enough. reading a shitload of theory just because hey it's books . breaking the cycle of generational trauma by setting fire to the entire carriage

[rockaberryx]

Borderlands fans (including me) watching the games priotisting shitty outdated lol random humour over the interesting lore more and more and now getting a shitty movie adaptation

[explodingsilver]

I'm reading The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (cosmic horror novel that was an influence on Lovecraft) right now, and it reminds me a lot of Minecraft, of all things. Two guys go on a fishing trip and find a chasm containing the ruins of a house that's been abandoned for who knows how long, and in this house is an account of a recluse having to defend the home with the help of his dog from pig-men who try to break in at night. Also this passage:

Still, when I looked more intently, I was unable to say that it was really mist; for it appeared to blend with the plain, giving it a peculiar unrealness, and conveying to the senses the idea of unsubstantiality.

This sounds like how the game looks when you set render distance to tiny.

[sforzesco]

I'm really curious about the process that goes on behind your art! Especially because you give so much importance to themes and it's like *chef's kiss*. It's always so well thought out and I find your references to all the snippets and readings really fascinating and very inspiring. How the heck do you organise your thoughts so well while reading ?

honestly organizing my thoughts. it takes. a while. to do it lmao

usually what happens is something like: I'll be reading a book on crassus, and the author refers to crassus as the leading domestic politician in rome while pompey was the leading military general. and this will set off bells in my head that go 'oh, roman household dynamics,' because the phrasing reminded me of a text describing the role of wives of roman politicians when their husbands were away (which I first came across in a text discussing octavia's role in her marriage with antony)

and while I'm doing all of this, I usually have a journal or sticky notes or literally any kind of scrap paper with me where I make short notes on what's interesting/what's connecting in my head/what would make an interesting subject to draw, no matter how unrelated it is, and then I'll look over everything once I've exhausted the train of thought like. man! this is borderline incomprehensible! let's make a comic about it.

then when I've done all that, I'll spend two or three days cutting down all the excess material and attempting to figure out the most direct way to convey what's going on in a scene so that someone unfamiliar with any of it might be able to follow along on vibes alone. sometimes it takes a week. sometimes I get stuck on something and I have to make a note to revisit it in a few months!

[kingofdoma]

okay, i either need validation or proper rejection

so, if you don't remember the original plot to the first borderlands game, it's here

[sleepymjntyy]

I’m looking back on my aib blog (this current one) and i am embarrassed to say that i giggled a bit.

[jess-emurphy]

The Alice in Borderland TV show did unrepairable damage because in the manga it was explicitly stated that three people will die in the Seven of Hearts.

And now every time I bring that game up, someone always tells me how they could have survived. No! Silence!

[somerandomg33k]

Surprise, I am streaming on a weekday. Kind of made no real plans and just decide to stream what I am want. So Borderlands 2 because I need to increase my aiming and shooting skills if I am to be "cracked" at Fortnite. (!13+) Surprise SRG stream. Just Borderlands 2 and chatting, & maybe intense discussions :P | !fundraising for !comrades |  !retweet | !AMA

[iheartbanda]

WHY is it always so fun to look at your posts

This actually made me smile omg :) IM GLAD YOU ENJOY READING MY SHORT RANTS. I’ll probably become more active soon with posts i’ve just been very busy keeping up with school But ya whoever said this just know I luv you <3

[thatonetvheadapple]

I kinda sorta don't like Lilith but i think its not for solid reasons. Especially in Pre when she almost kills athena and in Tales when she sends Mordecai and Brick to retrieve her, it was a mistake to do so and she expresses as much in the bl2 dlc but apart of me still believes Lilith wont ever be a good leader, but she's pretty decent in bl3! Some people die but some people died when roland was leading as well. Plus she has more than made up for her mistakes in losing her friends and powers, so I don't know why I don't sorta like her :/