With the release of Guns, Love, and Tentacles: The Union of Wainwright & Hammerlock, the 2nd story-focused DLC to get Borderlands 3, I figured that today would be the ideal time to jump straight back into Gearbox’s latest entry in its first-man loot shooter franchise, seeing as I had not found an opportunity to do so since composing GameSpot’s Borderlands 3 inspection . The franchise has generally had a decent track record in regards to post-launch effort expansions after all so I figured,”Why not?”
However, I was not especially enthused by my time with Guns, Love, and Tentacles, largely since Gearbox’s interpretation of H.P. Lovecraft’s work comprises some of the problematic parts of the writer’s worldview and does nothing to tackle them.
It’s the DLC’s portrayal of black people that irks me the most, largely due to the Borderlands franchise’s style of storytelling. Borderlands games traditionally investigate concepts or parts of pop culture through lively homage, or sarcasm, satire. Gearbox takes something that currently exists and adapts it to match its style of Borderlands mayhem.
If this process works, it really works. By way of instance, Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Maintain out of Borderlands two , which directs you to a tabletop RPG adventure that riffs on Dungeons & Dragons, is a fun DLC, both in terms of theme and gameplay. There is also the whole Greek mythology symbolism that acts as a throughline for all four matches, like every Siren being a beautiful but dangerous woman along with the planet Pandora behaving as a vault, all which leads to the more fascinating areas of Borderlands’ lore.
Guns, Love, and Tentacles is a Lovecraft-themed DLC, comprising particular aspects of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories and the Cthulhu Mythos as the background to the overall story. What makes the DLC feel more adaptive than interpretive is in how it treats Sir Hammerlock and Wainwright Jakobs, both characters who are in the middle of Guns, Love, and Tentacles. The DLC is all about the two characters for the snag of holding the place on a world and getting married. The cult’s leader so Wainwright becomes the reluctant host of her husband’s soul and deems the couple’s love to become helpless and impure doomed to gradually transform into her beloved unless you opt to do something to block the procedure. As Hammerlock is left handed a passive bystander for pretty much the entire DLC (he helps you on your quest to save his fiance on just 1 occasion), all of the bureau falls into you.
So the story of the DLC is that a woman who’s essentially an otherworldly witch robs a gay couple of their joyful day, questions their relationship, and then tries to resolve the”flaw” of the love by transforming one of the guys into her own husband, so as to create a more pure love. That’s already a little odd and more than just a little homophobic, but it becomes much more debatable if you consider this DLC is Lovecraft-inspired.
It all boils down to this: H.P. Lovecraft was racist as well as also an outspoken white supremacist-level racist during that. This isn’t a situation where we need to separate the artist , as the man featured his views on people of colour into his literary works. Just look at his poem”On the Production of Niggers,” which claims that the gods created man and monster and then generated black folks as some unexplainable in-between creature.
His remarks regarding people of colour extend to his tales which cover both the occult and cosmic horror as well. For example,”The Horror at Red Hook” describes Brooklyn, a New York City borough with a citizenship mainly composed of coloured individuals, as”leporous and cancerous with wicked dragged from older worlds” and the people who reside there since”hordes of prowlers” who elicit a”babel of sound and filth.” The next chapter of”The Call of Cthulhu” refers to the murder of the”queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes” as a”responsibility,” seeing as the group of people of color and those of mixed race are of”good-quality.” The Deep Ones at”The Shadow over Innsmouth” are all intended to be monstrously horrifying because they represent the impure offspring of interracial couples.
Since that’s a part of Lovecraft fiction also so taking a look at the storyline of Guns, Love, and Tentacles, you have to take into account how Gearbox has composed the characters — in this instance, Wainwright and Hammerlock. And in this sense, Gearbox is. The two black men are too worthless to help themselves and have a love that’s constantly scrutinized and contested throughout a vast majority of the DLC, while the antagonist is”purifying” their love by transforming one of them into her white, heterosexual spouse. If she falls in love with and marries Wainwright, that could be, in Lovecraft’s eyes, a intermixing of the races, so Wainwright must change into her husband first in order for its love to be real. Lots of flags , but very Lovecraft.
