Kaitlin Tremblay - Aint No Place for a Hero: Borderlands

Gentlemen of the Shade: My Own Private IdahoGus Van Sants film and the 90s cult of the alternative

Gus Van Sants 1991 indie darling My Own Private Idaho perplexed and provoked, inspiring a new ethos for a new decade: being different was better than being good. Gentlemen of the Shade examines how the film was a coming-of-age for a generation of young people who would embrace the alternative and bring their outsider perspectives to sustainability, technology, gender constructs, and social responsibility.

My Own Private Idaho fragmented and saturated with colour and dirt and a painfully beautiful masculinity also crept into popular media, and its influence can still be traced. R.E.M. Portlandia. Hipsterism. James Franco. Referencing the often-funny and sometimes-tragic cultural touchstones of the past 26 years, Gentlemen of the Shade sets the film as social bellwether for the many outsiders who were looking to join the right, or any, revolution.

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I finished my masters, in English and film, when I was 23. And I was burned out in a way I had never experienced before, after ten months of unrelenting class work; detailing, researching, and writing a major research paper in lieu of a full thesis (because of said class work); teaching multiple classes as a teaching assistant; being the editor on the school newsletter; and starting out as a freelance editor, performing copy edits and substantive edits on various full-length manuscripts.

Like I said, I was burned out.

When I finished my masters, I couldnt look at a book. It sounds silly now, but opening a book and seeing how much there was left to read made me start panicking. I was used to reading for work, and the unread pages represented hours and hours of more work I still had to do. I needed to chill out, and my old reliable habit of disappearing into books and becoming consumed by their stories wasnt working anymore.

This is when, after almost ten years absence, I got back into seriously playing video games.

Video games became a no-strings-attached way for me to enjoy storytelling again, while I let myself rest and recover from the intensive mental workout I had put myself through. Video games didnt offer me mindless entertainment: they offered me a whole new world of stories and storytelling to explore. They satisfied my need to engage with characters, narrative arcs, and imagery that I wasnt able to do with books not yet, anyway. And they forced me to engage in a new way. It wasnt possible to be a passive consumer. Not that reading or watching films are wholly passive (readers and viewers are engaging, working to decode and bind meanings and images constantly). But with video games, I could control my player characters movements and development to become part of the world in a way I couldnt with any other medium.

The first Borderlands (which for clarity, I will refer to as Borderlands 1 from here on out) was my re-entry into major games. Developed by Gearbox Software and released in 2009, Borderlands 1 was a huge success, selling more than 4.5 million copies and receiving high review scores across the board from many major gaming websites. Youre introduced to Pandora, the world in which Borderlands takes place, to the soundtrack of Cage the Elephants Aint No Rest for the Wicked. Pandora is, quite simply, a hellhole overrun by all means of murderous folk (bandits, assassins, and mercenaries), as well as aggressive monsters (my favorite enemies are skags, mutated-looking dogs that screech at you with a full mouth of dripping teeth to reveal a reptilian tongue). Borderlands 1 begins with a group of bandits hitting a skag with their car and then continuing on to their gory glory, or whatever it is bandits do in Pandora (often murder and cannibalism, referred to as pizza parties). This game was going to be sick. (And I mean sick as in disgusting, not in the way that used to be cool and hip but is probably totally not cool and hip now.)

But as No Rest for the Wicked played, I suspected it was going to be more than just a mindless murderous romp like so many other first-person shooter games.

From the very beginning, Borderlands wasnt about fitting neatly into its genre. In a first-person shooter (FPS), all you see is the gun you are holding and the enemies and landscape before you, and your main goal is to shoot as many enemies as possible. But Borderlands became fondly referred to as a role-playing shooter because it assumed many of the same features of traditional role-playing games (RPG). As in an RPG, in Borderlands, as you level up, you can build your characters proficiency in numerous ways, making your version of your character potentially very different from someone elses version of that same character. For a game that really wants you to play with your friends, being able to differentiate your character goes a long way. My favorite character to play is Salvador in