#gearbox try not to ruin tales characters challenge: impossible

[comma-tose]

I wish Sasha had gotten better treatment from Debt or Alive. I spoke a bit about it in a previous post but she is just not developed at all and I have a LOT of problems with how the book portrays her. Which is a shame because I really loved her in Tales, she was a really great character. There ARE positives to her in the book but this is purely me talking about what I don't like about how she's portrayed here, so while there are good points I won't be speaking about them here.

(if you liked this book that's completely valid! These are just my personal opinions on somethings I didn't like in the book)

Spoiler warning for Debt or Alive obviously.

To put it into perspective, Sasha in Tales was someone out of her element like the rest of the group, she wasn't great with tech (although not completely clueless), she loved guns, she wanted to get off of Pandora, she cared about Fiona's safety, and she canonically liked Rhys. She had moments where she was pessimistic and occasionally didn't acknowledge Fiona's feelings (about the situation with Felix) but overall she was VERY close with Fiona and cared about her, wanting them both to be safe and okay. She was great and I love her.

Now... In Debt or Alive unfortunately that is not the case. That's not to say that she doesn't care at all about Fiona or Rhys, but the way the book portrays her is very strange. It tends to either give her very negative traits without ever acknowledging them as bad, or it treats her as a plot device that magically provides the way for the story to progress, either just handing her wins without earning them or giving her abilities that she shouldn't have, often at the expense of minimising what makes other characters special.

To be more specific let me start with the ability to hack that the book gives her. Now in Tales she showed no knowledge of it, quite the opposite actually, and the book randomly says that Rhys has taught her a "ton of stuff" about hacking, although when this happened it's not quite clear considering the book makes it clear that they leave Pandora fairly quickly after getting out of the vault... So I guess she just got the skill in a few weeks???

The first thing she hacks, which is also the first mention of her having any ability to hack ever, is the debt cuffs. The cuffs that billionaires have funded being made, the cuffs that they would have poured so much money into to make sure that no one ever got away without paying their debts. She just hacks into it and dismantles it. It's not a perfect job because the cuff does explode afterwards but she is able to remove it in time, You'd think if it was that easy you'd have a legion of people doing back-alley deals to remove them and the majority of the planet wouldn't be wearing them. So clearly this is something difficult to do, especially with the amount of money the billionaires of Eden 5 would have poured into it.

The other thing she hacks is a sec-bot. One of Countless Holloway's robotic security guards. In the middle of combat Sasha just leaps onto its back and just hacks into it, changing its allegiances almost instantly and rewiring it to be on their side now.

Now bear in mind we have seen robots change allegiance before in tales from the borderlands when Rhys takes control of the drones.

But in that case not only had Rhys been a programmer for YEARS, he still had to have help from Jack's AI to take control of them. So if Rhys with years of experience needs help to take control of robots, then in no way should Sasha be able to randomly take control of them from what could only be at MOST a few weeks of practice.

Now not quite hacking but along the lines of machinery the other thing Sasha does is repair Deathtrap. There is no explanation given as to how she does this. Deathtrap is barely functional at the time and has absolutely no vision, no ocular beam, no hover function, barely functioning audio sensors, and no digistruct claws. That's the list of damages explicitly given in the book.

Bearing in mind that this is a robot built by a literal genius, one who was essentially a technological prodigy, a robot so impressive that the Holloway estate ripped off the plans for it to built a robot army to keep the entire planet of Eden 5 in check. And Sasha just fixes it, the only time before this that Sasha had shown ANY kind of mechanical skills was when she was fixing the caravan during the intro song to Episode 3 of tales from the borderlands and even then she was being walked through the repairs by Scooter.

Sasha should not be just given abilities that are randomly as good, if not better than other characters whose whole thing was being REALLY good at that in particular. Gaige was a mechanical genius that's how she built Deathtrap after years of learning. Rhys was a good programmer who still needed help to perform complicated hacks. It doesn't make sense for someone with basically no experience to suddenly be even half as good as them at it. It also diminishes Sasha as a character because they don't give her something SHE IS uniquely good at. It essentially turns her into a ripoff version of those two ability wise, and she deserves far better than that.

Now then, personality wise... I wish I didn't have negative things to say here, really I do. This isn't to say that EVERY interaction or scene with her is bad, but the ones that are just really stand out.

To start with, Sasha gets mad at Fiona trying to restrict what she does which is completely reasonable for Sasha to be mad about, BUT then in response to being mad at Fiona she goes and does something insanely stupid. Something that doesn't just endanger her but also risks Fiona's life and it's not even done for good reason.

She frees Gaige.

Gaige who had EVERY reason to hold a grudge against her and Fiona and to go hunt them down and murder them, who also reiterated her hatred for Sasha and Fiona. Oh and she shows her the shard that can bring people back from the dead. So not only does she free someone who has every reason to go murder her and her sister, but she also just dangles the cure to death in front of a vault hunter who could just kill her and take it.

She also frees her knowing that she murdered Countess Holloway's daughter. Now we as the audience know that that was an accident, we know that Gaige didn't mean to and that Marcie had been awful to her for years, but Sasha does not. She saw the video of Marcie being killed and all she knows is that Deathtrap killed Marcie, and yet she still frees her. Because she's bored and mad at Fiona.

They could've had her find out the real circumstances behind Marcie's death and then impulsively go free Gaige, but no, she is just bored and angry at Fiona so she goes and frees Gaige so that she can go vault hunting with her.

This being insanely stupid is never addressed. Nor is the idiocy of Sasha literally KILLING HERSELF to prove that the crystal works to Gaige. Just a note, this is also all done after Gaige reiterates her hatred for Sasha and Fiona, and Sasha never tries to get Gaige to agree to y'know not hunt her sister down.

Couple of quick problems here as well regarding Sasha's personality in the book.

-When Fiona starts to free people from the debt cuffs she literally just stands there in bewilderment and says "what are you doing???" And only after Fiona starts freeing more does she join in

- throughout the book Sasha refuses to commit to Rhys, refusing to make the relationship serious, and doesn't say anything more than "I need more time" despite noting how upset it's making Rhys. It takes Fiona calling her out (which also mentions that she has a habit of just ghosting her boyfriends???), for her to actually make a decision. And even then SHE doesn't tell Rhys that she's decided to move the relationship forward and it's Fiona who has to tell him.

-Sasha also says nothing when Fiona is literally compared to Handsome Jack. Like she's literally standing next to them, replies to something Fiona says but she says NOTHING when Fiona is compared to Jack. Doesn't even reassure her that it's not true. (Tales Sasha would've thrown hands with the guy who said that, there is NO way she would let that slide).

Now for my final point, because god knows I've been yapping for a while, Sasha is just HANDED accomplishments and the most glaring example of this is when she goes vault hunting with Gaige, which is literally a weekend trip.

First Gaige just knows where a vault is, then, after she goes there with Gaige, there are NO guardians defending the vault because they were all somehow killed by a few bandits.

When they get through the bandits they get to the entry to the vault. Now what do you need to open a vault??? If you said a vault key then... INCORRECT! It turns out that they just don't even need one because the name of the monster IS the key... Somehow. But regardless they open the vault.

And how do they kill this vault monster you ask? How does Sasha finally, in her own words, be even and equal with Fiona? Well they shove a grenade in the monster's eye and it dies. Then they just go home.

This book does not let Sasha earn anything, which is a shame because her character in Tales was great and had a LOT of potential. But here she doesn't grow as a person, and for some reason has developed some really bad traits after Tales with no explanation, and doesn't bother to give her her own thing that made her unique, instead settling on just giving her other peoples. She would essentially be at the exact same point in her character, if not better, if this book just didn't exist at all, because it just loops back around to her and Fiona broke and vault hunting again.

Sasha deserved SO much better.