A Quick Pre-Sequel Rewrite

I’ve already done a rewrite of the climax of the Borderlands Pre-Sequel, but that was a very zoomed out outline of how to make the ending more impactful. During that post, I talked about how the line-by-line writing often fails, so I want to zoom in and do a rewrite of some specific dialogue as an example of exactly what the problem was and how to fix it.

Here’s the situation up to the bit of dialogue we’re looking at: At the start of the Pre-Sequel, you, a band of 1-4 intrepid vault hunters, meet Handsome Jack, your new employer from the Hyperion corporation, on the space station Helios. Unfortunately, it’s under attack from rival corporation Dahl. You escape to the surface of the moon Elpis, but Jack has to stay behind to fire the improvised escape vehicle. He’s trapped on Helios, so you need to get to the moon city Concordia to get the fast travel coordinates for Jack so he can beam down to the city before Dahl’s mercenaries catch him and kill him. Down on the surface of the planet, we discover that Elpis does not have air and get saved from asphyxiation by Janey Springs, a local junk dealer. After the quest that introduces Janey and tutorializes how oxygen works out in the frontier wilderness of the moon, Janey points you at the first bandit clan you’re going to murder in this game, and the curtain rises on our scene, copy/pasted directly from the transcript of the game (although I have removed lines from optional DLC characters, since I only plan on writing for the four characters in the main game in my revision).

SCENE BEGINS

Springs: Deadlift leads a band of scavengers — scavs — who used to raid the old Dahl dig site. Colonel Zarpedon imprisoned them, but they escaped when Dahl’s digging cracked the moon.

• Athena (if present): Zarpedon?
• Wilhelm (if present): Wait, her name’s Zarpedon?
• Nisha (if present): Did you say Zarpedon?
• Claptrap (if present): Zarpedon? Was her dad a kaiju or something?

Springs: Anyway, he’s got the digistruct key for my Zoomy stations. Killing him will get you into Concordia and make my week. Win-win!

(On way to Regolith Range)

• Athena (if present): Why are we killing Deadlift, again?
• Wilhelm (if present): So why’s this Deadlift guy gotta die?
• Nisha (if present): What’s the story on this Deadlift dude? Why ya want him dead?
• Claptrap (if present): My sense of post-murder guilt would be lessened if I knew WHY you want me to kill Deadlift!

Springs: He’s kind of a dick.

• Athena (if present): … Is there anything else, or…
• Wilhelm (if present): Heh, alright.
• Nisha (if present): … That it?
• Claptrap (if present): … Is that all?

Springs: Well, he also stole my Moon Zoomy digistruct key, stranded me out here, and got really rude when I told him I wasn’t into guys. But mainly the being-a-dick thing.

SCENE ENDS

Wow, that joke at the end does not land at all. It’s doing that thing Borderlands does where it tries to make a joke out of how long and overwrought the line is, but, like, this is the opposite of how punchlines work. Punchlines should be fast and snappy. If you get the timing right, by which I mean quick, you can sometimes trick an audience into laughing at a joke before they’ve even fully parsed it, which can help turn a line that is otherwise a dud into something which makes people go “heh.” That’s good enough not to sour the mood for future jokes, especially in the context of a video game where the main point of the dialogue is just to serve as a frame for fighting Deadlift’s bandit clan.

So how can we rewrite this?

As a note on the dialogue format, all of the main character lines marked with “(if present)” are, I believe, selected from randomly if you’re in a multiplayer game. I never tested this, but my assumption in my rewrite is that a maximum of one character from the group will speak a relevant line, and if there’s multiple present, which one gets the line is chosen randomly. A lot of the player character lines set up or pay off the exact same joke four different ways, and while part of this is lazy writing (the player characters express themselves shockingly little in most of their dialogue), part of it is also because we don’t want to record four fully distinct versions of the script, so the exact same NPC dialogue needs to work with any of the four lines.

I’m also assuming that the game can keep track of when two PC lines need to be linked. For example, Athena’s last line in my new script is a direct reference to the fact that she and Deadlift have a common enemy, so it sounds weird if it doesn’t follow her previous line where she brings it up. None of the other characters bring this up, so Athena’s last line is kind of hard to untangle if you don’t have the previous line to set it up. It really shouldn’t be hard at all to give that line a flag that says “only use this line if you randomly selected the previous line from the same character,” though.

SCENE BEGINS

Springs: Deadlift’s got the digistruct key for my Zoomy stations. There’s no way into Concordia without getting it back from him, so go kill him, get the key, and bring it back to me.

(On way to Regolith Range)

• Athena (if present): Are you sure killing this “Deadlift” is necessary? We’re in a hurry.
• Wilhelm (if present): What’s the deal with this Deadlift guy, anyway?
• Nisha (if present): Anything I should know about Deadlift before I kill him?
• Claptrap (if present): For tax purposes, I need to know on behalf of the Hyperion Corporation whether you have a personal grievance with Deadlift or if this is a recreational murder.

Springs: Deadlift leads a band of scavs — scavengers — who used to raid the old Dahl dig site. Colonel Zarpedon imprisoned them, but they escaped when Dahl’s digging cracked the moon.

• Athena (if present): Deadlift is enemies with Dahl? Are you sure we need to kill him?
• Wilhelm (if present): Zarpedon?
• Nisha (if present): Wait, is she really called Zarpedon? You’re not making fun of her, that’s her actual name?
• Claptrap (if present): Zarpedon? Was her dad a kaiju?

Springs: Deadlift declared a blood feud against me when I told him I wasn’t into guys. He won’t be letting go of the digistruct key without a fight, but I’m the only one out here who knows how to install it. You kill the local nuisance, and I’ll hook you up with a free Zoomy to get to Concordia. That’s fair, right?

• Athena (if present): [sigh] Jack’s stuck on Helios with the Lost Legion, I don’t have time to play diplomat. Moving to engage the bandits.
• Wilhelm (if present): Works for me.
• Nisha (if present): I get to kill the local sex pest and get a free car? I’m not seeing any downsides to this.
• Claptrap (if present): Of course! Killing organic lifeforms is my primary function!

SCENE ENDS

The main problem solved here is that the original belabors the joke that the premise of Deadlift’s feud with Janey is kind of paper thin but we’re going to murder him on Janey’s behalf anyway because it’s a shooter game, while this one drops the reason for the feud into dialogue and rolls right past it without extending it into three lines one of which is a run-on sentence (I am in the middle of a run-on sentence which now has a parenthetical so I certainly can’t talk in terms of brevity, but I’m also not trying to land a joke right now).

Now ideally I’d find a way to do the original joke idea but make it work, i.e. set up expectations that the conflict with Deadlift is something worthy of lethal gun violence and then spin it into a joke that nah, he’s just kind of an asshole. The problem is, getting into gun battles over day-to-day dick moves is such a well-worn tradition in Borderlands that there’s not really any way to wring a punchline out of it. You can’t subvert the expectation of gun violence being reserved for severe enmity because no one is expecting that to begin with. Borderlands 1 handled the over-the-top violence of the world this way when Scooter talks about burying Lucky alive so casually that you’re not sure if it’s just friendly banter or a real threat, and then it actually comes back around as a punchline in one of the DLCs when he mentions that he has now indeed buried Lucky alive: “Don’t act all surprised, I told you I was gonna do it.” I don’t have any particular ideas for how to take Janey’s line about Deadlift declaring an actual literal blood feud on her because she set some boundaries and use that as a punchline later on, but using it as patter rather than a punchline means it contributes to the comedic tone rather than deflating that tone with something that was obviously supposed to be a laugh line and it flopped (more literally, a “make that audience go ‘heh’ line,” but a flop is a far cry even from that).

The player characters also express themselves considerably more in this version. Claptrap has three lines and uses them to tell three different dumb jokes that might make the player go “heh,” but if they flop, well, he’s supposed to be a nuisance character so that works. He’s also written to be more enthusiastic about the murders, which both better fits how he was written as the Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Claptrap in Borderlands 1 (and is not inconsistent with his character in Borderlands 2, he just lost his combat abilities somehow and became significantly more cowardly) and is just generally more fun. Nisha expresses her vindictive bloodlust and hunger for signs of wealth and status symbols. Willhelm’s just here to fund his addiction to cybernetics, so his muted, functional responses are pretty similar to the original script, but now they stand out from other characters who show more investment in the situation.

And the conversation with Athena now sounds almost completely different from both the original script and other characters’ conversations in the same script, even though she’s responding to and prompting the same lines from Janey as everyone else. Athena expresses a bit of discomfort with getting involved in personal feuds between people who are, so far as she can tell, just rival scavs bickering over the same territory and petty grievances arising from that. We can tell right off the bat from Janey’s character design that this isn’t the case, but Athena is the straight woman who bothers to actually dig a little deeper and get at least some token confirmation that Deadlift is in the wrong here (even if she does just take Janey’s word for it that Deadlift dickery is unprovoked – we don’t really want to drag this out into a whole investigation sub-plot, just let Athena express that she prefers to keep her violence surgical and discriminate).

Also, I rewrote one of Janey’s scavengers/scavs line, whereas in the original she calls them scavengers first and then explains that scavs is the shortened slang version used locally, in this version she uses the slang version on auto-pilot, catches herself, and then explains what it means. This is an absolutely puny thing but I was really proud of how much difference it makes to Janey’s character just by reversing the placement of two words in the script so I wrote a whole paragraph bragging about it. Likewise probably no one will notice that Athena is slow to adopt the term “scavs” over “bandits” because she’s stubborn and tends not to change course on things until long after she should have, but I thought it was clever, dammit.