PRIDE 2020: Axton and My Glitch

Not a particularly fun fact: Axton from Borderlands 2 was my favourite character before playing the game. He looked and sounded a bunch like me; a generic white dude, with that haircut and the humour of a six-year-old that just learned what sarcasm was. When I did finally play Borderlands 2  years later, I mainly played as Salvador and Maya because every online guide told me Axton’s turret sucked, but I still always thought he was cool because he reminded me of myself.

Actual fun fact: Axton from Borderlands 2 is bisexual. When reviving a character from their downed state during the game there is a small chance he’ll flirt with any of the six other Vault Hunters asking “Wow. Do you work out, or..?”. Later in the (still excellent) Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep DLC he’s a lot more front-facing with his sexuality, claiming he spends his money on “Guns. Women, and sometimes dudes.” Throughout all the DLCs for Borderlands 2 much of the cast become more open about their genders and sexulaities, with characters from Sir Hammerlock to Mr. Torgue revealed to be openly part of the LGBTQI+ community in some way.

Sir Hammerlock and Wainwright Jakobs was one of the few narrative high points of Borderlands 3… Which in all fairness isn’t much of a complement because that game’s writing is TERRIBLE for the most part.

Really shitty fact: this is a mistake, a glitch. During development, each Vault Hunter was planned to have specific reviving voice lines for each character. One of Axton’s lines for reviving Maya, The Siren, was asking her if she worked out. For whatever reason, this feature was cut and instead any revive-dialogue could be said to any character. But Axton’s flirtatious quip remained. 

In the words of the great poets, the Chumbawambas, “I GET KNOCKED DOWN BUT I G--”.

Upon release, the sexuality of this character, who he was, was a mistake. And while you have to praise writer Anthony Burch for doubling down and including more overtly queer and diverse characters after seeing the backlash to this revelation, it still undoubtedly sucks that this man’s identity can be described as a mistake.

Strangely though, I never felt animosity towards this crappy after-the-fact inclusionism in Borderlands 2. At the time I didn’t know why. I continued thinking Axton was a cool character that was underserved by the game, not because of this less than ideal last-minute queerness, but because his skill tree was weak. However, over the last couple of months I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think I figured out why I still liked him so much.

I identify a lot with him. Not because he’s bi like me, but because it’s kind of his glitch.

I didn’t stumble into my bisexuality until pretty late into my teens and even then, extenuating circumstances meant that up until very recently I neither had the mental or physical capacity to really be queer, not to mind embrace it. For the longest time, it was this thing off to the side that never really popped up unless you forced a situation for it to occur. I presented as a standard brown military khakis dude and my sexuality had no gameplay effect, as it were. 

And yet just like Axton, despite my indifference to my own sexuality, I became acutely aware it mattered a lot to others. A teacher telling students they should support the “Vote No” campaign and finding penises markered onto my locker often for wearing a “Vote Yes” badge during the lead up to the Irish Marriage Equality referendum. Along with how “gay”, “queer” and “bent” were used as negative shorthand around my all-boys school made it as clear as hundreds of bemoaning forum posts that people had a problem with me even if they previously hadn’t known about this glitch of mine.

Turns out in Borderlands 3 the only nods to Axton imply he’s become a stripper… So it’s nice to see the new writers aren’t stereotyping bisexuals or anything…

But despite this ostensibly being closeted for much of my teenage years and despite knowing Axton’s bi-ness was mishandled, I still can’t bring myself to view either of these as negative things. In both cases this glitch, this thing that wasn’t meant to be found or seen was - only every now and again but it was seen. And in both cases, it’s only due to the negativity in the community around us that we decided to double down on who we are in later versions of ourselves. Axton is bi, if it took him until the fourth DLC update to embrace that that’s OK. I am also bi, and nowadays I’ll be the first one to make that known.