#some cheeky lil worldbuilding and lore

[dateamonster]

actually since its on my mind now im gonna give u another big loredump. this is how angelique gets kicked out of angel school.

to start, a little background info. while celestial and angel are terms used interchangeably, celestial refers more to what angels are as a like species and angel is more like. a career? except not really its more like a career if that career were the only career. its like if humankind was split into like kids and accountants, and if you grew to adulthood and didnt become an accountant youre like not even rly recognized as a person. youre some other weird Thing the other normal accountants dont even have a word for. does that make sense? well moving on.

so the main purpose of young celestials' schooling is to guide them into full-fledged angelhood and help them earn their wings. wings show up usually in like late adolescence to young adulthood upon the completion of some kind of significant life event or milestone. think mlp cutie marks except theyre all functionally the same one. you may be sensing a theme.

new babby angels for the most part kinda just pop into existence, but angels can also be born the ya know traditional way, and angels can procreate with non-angels. the result of an angel and mortal union is a naphal or nephel (plural: nephilim). nephilim are actually a good deal more powerful than your standard angel, possibly due to the fact that theyre not limited by the compulsion towards Goodness that angels are generally beholden to. unlike full celestials who only gain access to the full range of their angelic abilities upon maturation, nephilim are able to access their powers from adolescence onward, but also have a much harder time controlling them, and are broadly stigmatized as dangerous, uncivilized, and impure as a result.

despite this, nephilim are welcome (at least in the most surface level way) and in fact strongly encouraged to integrate into angelic society in the event that their celestial heritage makes them unable to blend in with human society. nephel kids who graduate from an angel institution (and earn their wings, something which a lot of kids experience upon graduation anyway) are even granted honorary full angel status and any trace of their former human heritage is completely erased ^_^ yayy

this is a lot of very rambly worldbuilding but i feel like the context is important.

so back in angel school angelique was a pretty popular kid. top of her class, an exemplary angel in the making, you know the drill. one day by chance she catches a classmate stealing the answers for an upcoming test. the classmate in question is a nephel kid named quinn who was raised human for the first thirteen years of their life before their powers started coming in and they were forced to transfer. as you might have guessed, its not been an easy transition for quinn, and distributing these answers to a few less than studious young celestials is meant to serve as payment for their protection from the pretty much constant bullying.

at first ange doesnt care why theyre doing it, its wrong! but.. quinn points out that she doesnt know what its like. shes the star student, the headmistress' daughter for goodness sakes. theyve been dealt a very different hand.

before angelique can think too much on that though, a teacher walks in and the two of them get busted fighting over the answers. in the heat of the moment angelique takes the fall, protecting quinn. because after all theyre right, the punishment she stands to receive is probably going to be much lighter than what quinn stands to face, right? theres no way the headmistress would punish her own daughter too severely, especially once she explains that she was only trying to do what was right, as always!

angelique doesnt get to explain. angelique gets expelled.

[border-spam]

Maw is rlly good but I personally like the idea of Troy having his skag-mouth as a birth defect from Tyreen leeching him in the womb. Makes for more sibling/family drama, which I inhale like a gas-huffer.

I’m here for drama, yesss. Would actually love to see this idea being used! There is so much there for doing juicy shit with the twins, at the end of the day, both of the nasty little shits are abominations from a galactic power standpoint, so why not go wild with the monster aspect, eh?

My own worldbuilding brain is funky though. Part of why I enjoy doing dives into characters and lore so much, is that I love finding ways to make things make sense, and Troy existing at all in Borderlands does not make any.

So something lots of folks mentioned pre-release was that if the twins were going to be conjoined, they would have to be the same sex. It’s just not medically feasible to have xy/xx conjoined twins as they come from the same embryo split in two but not fully. The only option was they could be chimeric but that didn’t really suit what we were seeing either.

I remember that causing a wave cause holy shit, were we going to get a trans villain and could anyone trust GB to handle that without it being a trainwreck? I’m still happy they used word of god instead cause oof. I don’t want to think of how that could have gone down considering how both these characters ended up being used within the plot anyway. 

That means my smooth, analytically obsessed brain has to come up with other explanations for the absolute fuckery that is the Calypso twins and how the hell they exist in the first place when they couldn’t have formed conjoined, and that’s one of the reasons I couldn’t use this kind of extra fun shit like a natural monster mouth being why it’s so heavily modded. I needed to try and fix Troy so he... made sense to me. 

Bit of a medical dive into the absolute state of this man under the cut:

We end up with two fraternal twins.

Not identical in the slightest and very noticeable about that in their appearance. It’s not just the height difference, Tyreen’s undercut is dark brown, not Troy’s inky black. Their facial shapes vary massively and not just due to hormones, Ty’s eyes have a cheeky lil’ cat eye slope while Troy’s are sadder, leaning downwards at the outside curve. There’s very little to actually make them even look like siblings bar their colouration, but we still have what we know:

They were born conjoined, Troy had to be cut from Tyreen, and that’s likely why he has one arm.

Keep in mind his arm is literally never mentioned once in BL3. Not ONCE. No one ever references the twin’s childhoods bar Troy, so we actually have no idea if the arm loss is even related to being conjoined. 

We just all HC’d that as a fandom with no evidence, not even a hint of information regarding this was provided and I think that’s something we forget about often enough as it’s so widely accepted Troy was born without his right arm. Actually strange to think about that, ain’t it?

But I’m rambling - so, I figured we have two fraternal twins, sharing some kind of horrific all consuming monster entity power between them. One can do fuck all bar embarrass himself and faint, and the other can’t STOP her power functioning to the point she can’t touch anything without consuming it.. so my idiot worldbuilding brain says “Hey. Well, that’s clearly what happened then. They were in the same womb, she started to consume him.” Logic. 

Logic works for me, so it stuck. 

Made sense that it’s how he’s a Siren at all when the entire cosmos has said Sirens are women, he’s one because the power that was consuming him filled his little body enough to see him as itself, so it stopped - leaving the developing twins joined, and half of Troy’s torso lost to Tyreen.

I can’t justify much else to my fact hungry thought processes, the skag mouth wouldn’t work for me because I can’t fit it in, him being a natural Siren doesn’t work for me cause it can’t fit either, but it does open an avenue of logic for my brain to start following down, and that’s why in Leech Lord, Troy is so desperately unwell. 

Growing up barely having survived being consumed in utero is not going to go very well when you’ve no medical assistance living on a shitty little dirthole planet with your dad.

Damaged organs from The Leech feeding as he grew, out of wack hormones ravaging a body that couldn’t really regulate them correctly in puberty leading to massive growth spurts and bone structure issues, no proper nutrition, starving half the time as his size outpaced the amount of food he and Typhon could scavenge, it all comes together into a very delicate health balance. 

We already know Troy is very unwell at times from what we see ingame, it made sense to me, so I ran with this line. 

He’s sick when he doesn’t want to be, he’s weak when it’s an embarrassment to the character role he’s playing. He covers himself in tattoos and aggressive mods to try and combat looking delicate, so he can lie to himself that he’s not pitiful and bolster his fragile ego. The massive, hulking prosthetic is there to MAKE you look at it. A way of proving how unashamed he is of the damage to his right side, and it works. 

The gullible believe, the stupid remain easy to control, and billions see him as a God, rather than the truth - that he’s a very sick, very delicate man.

A lot of what I do with Troy is there to support the underlaying character I’ve tried to write for him in some desperate attempt to try and make the bastard have some logical excuse to exist in the first place. 

If I’d gone down the route of having his Maw be something that wasn’t self inflicted, I would have gone off track with the direction I was taking him in, even though I am WEAK for that kind of monster level shit.. Mmm. 

I remember being asked:

Would troy have gotten the face mod if Seifa hadnt left?