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The Borderlands universe is a post-apocalyptic setting where the apocalypse is capitalism.
Pandora matches a lot of dystopian post-apocalyptic settings imagined for earth because it's a planet that has been despoiled, strip-mined, wracked with climate change, and then largely abandoned with *illions of people still living on it.
But the rest of the universe?
But the rest of the universe?
The gleaming cyberpunk megalopolis on Promethea is no less dystopian. People and the lives they have built are being blasted by an orbital death laser because a rich guy doesn't know how to make friends with his crush if he can't own him.
It's hard to suss out how the economy in Borderlands even functions, given the inconsistency over what elements like functional immortality and replication are actually solidly part of the story universe vs. gameplay mechanics handwaved into the player's story experience.
But judging from the game, FTL transport of ship-sized objects is very close to instantaneous and site-to-site personal teleportation functions across interstellar distances once you have a network connection.
When you look at the ridiculous things that the megarich spend their money on (like giant pleasure yachts with orbital death lasers or engineering a living pony made out of diamonds), it's hard to imagine it wouldn't be a post-scarcity economy if you ended wealth hoarding.
In the places that the megarich and the corporations abandon, we see people banding together to create functional societies, and we also see this undone or undermined by bandit warlords trying to recreate the societal structures of resource hoarding and control.
The setting is defined by giant planet-destroying kaiju sealed away by ancient astronauts with god-like magical technology, but the threat of global or universal destruction always comes from the people trying to exploit these behemoths as an untapped resource.
This thread inspired by a forum thread I read last night that accused BL3 of being "leftist propaganda", by which they mean the playable characters are two women, a man, and a non-binary robot and the climax comes down to a handful of superpowered women and possibly that man.
Leftism is when women, I guess.
