History WMG / Borderlands2

*** Maya: '''Maliwan.''' The elemental damage and aesthetics fit her theme, she's often shoan wielding SMGs and some class mods increase her elemental damage.

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* The number is 2

*** ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT! I'll add an addendum... Ahem. Your goal won't be to DESTROY the mega-corps, but to take out their CEOs (or protect CEOs that are [[BenevolentBoss decent enough]], like [[BruiserWithASoftCenter Mr. Torgue]]), and replace them with more reasonable members of their staff - while denying the [[BuriedTreasure wealth]] and/or [[LostSuperweapon superweapons]] in the other Vaults.

"'The Goliath'". Pretty obvious, you play as a Goliath. Wears a vision obstructing helmet that restricts your HUD, and your action skill is to remove the helmet. With the helmet removed you can only use your fists, and killing enemies increases the amount of time you can spend making face gravy. Killing enemies also allows you to level up into stronger forms, like the regular Goliath enemies. Your skill trees are How R U, Welcome 2 Die, and Why So Much Hurt?! How R U focuses on improving your abilities while rampaging, such as gaining more experience and being able to spend more time rampaging. It's top tier skill is Unlucky Shot, which causes enemy scored head shots on you to knock off your helmet, instantly sending you rampaging even if the skill hasn't cooled off. Welcome 2 Die focuses on More Gun More Shooty Bang Bang More Pain! It includes thing such as Mor Gun Food!, which decreases movement speed while firing but increases magazine capacity. Why So Much Hurt?! skills focuse on keeping you alive, such as Make Face-Gravy, which give you health for headshots or other critical hits, or Shooty Make Power, which increases shield recharge while firing. And all of your skills are in Hulk speak. Your melee weapon is a sledge hammer, and your class mod is your belt buckle.

* Roland goes from [[UncleTomFoolery wise-cracking,]] [[BloodKnight bloodthirsty]] BoisterousBruiser who just loves his turret and the explosions he makes - essentially a black Axton - to a quiet, determined leader.

* It's possible that, due to too much eridium exposure and/or Hyperion capture of the three, the Vault Hunters you see running around (except for Brick, who is Brick) are really Manchurian agents for the Hyperion cause that goes horribly wrong - Roland would have built up an anti-Hyperion resistance to root out and identify all anti-Hyperion rebels and would have died to leave the anti-Hyperion resistance leaderless, Mordecai would have fooled Bloodwing into turning into yet another Eridium experiment, and Lilith would have become a secondary backup for Angel, after leading the player to the core and getting themselves killed. Handsome Jack, however, wasn't counting on the new Vault Hunters being tough sons of bitches.
** It could also be the other way around - the vault hunters in the first game were unwitting Hyperion goons who did Handsome Jack's work, via Angel's commands, and the people you see in the campaign are the real Vault Hunters.
* Or, perhaps, they've just gone through character growth. Roland has grown into his role as a leader, becoming calmer and more responsible. Between games, Mordecai had a bad relationship with Moxxi, who was pretty much an emotional vampire to him and left him a shell of himself. Lilith has had a legend grow up around her, complete with more than one cargo cult in her honor. That can go to someone's head. Brick...is Brick.
[[WMG:The Vault-Hunters seen in the intro movie were in true vault-hunter mode already.]]

The 4 vault hunters seem to be working together in the beginning, and it's unlikely they'd just all hit the same train at the same time. I bet Handsome Jack hired them with the express purpose of "Turning" on them, so they'd never expect him expect they were pawns in his plan. Any character that wasn't used died in the crash, explaining why not everyone makes it through the intro. Gaige was just on the train as a passenger, and Jack thinks her whole Deathtrap deal is good enough, so he decides to use her as well.

* '''Axton''': He took over the surviving Hyperion organization, and is running it like...well, like Axton would. A smirking, cheerful GeneralRipper.

* I hate to shoot this down, but I don't think this will be likely - after all, both sets of Vault Hunters are basically good - [[BlackAndGreyMorality at least, compared to the Bandits and Atlas/Hyperion]] - and fans would probably riot if they turned into the FiveBadBand of the next game. That said, since [[spoiler: Lilith and Brick [[FakeDefector secretly became leaders of Bandit tribes to keep them in check]], it may be possible the New Vault Hunters would do the same thing, using these personas as their cover, and may oppose the new players as an UpToEleven TricksterMentor.]]. Admittedly, if one of them would pull a FaceHeelTurn, it would DEFINITELY be Zer0, literally because he has the least backstory and the most... [[AmbiguouslyEvil "questionable" moral code]].

As a kind of of prophecy, entities with certain traits must be present; whether one has an Eridium Charged Vault Key or not. This is why Jack assembled the second team. And had Angel assemble the first team. In a twisted way, he's right. He WAS the one who set into motion the opening of the first vault.

* Perhaps he's in hiding for self protection. The Hyperion Corporation is still around, they might try to tie up loose ends.

[[spoiler:Axton's ex-wife Sarah, when all's said and done, was very loyal to Axton, and he was loyal back. She died before the events of the game, and considering what series this is, we can easily assume it wasn't natural causes. Axton somehow managed to rescue her brain intact(or intact enough that it could serve as the turret's [=CPU=]) and installed it in his turret, so he'd have his wife with him forever. When he calls her honey, sweetie, and all those cute names? That's ACTUAL affection. When he says "Have you met the missus?" It's because it IS his missus. This also would make sense as a stealth ShoutOut: dead wife turned into a tool for her still living husband? And his husband's a COMMANDO? [[VideoGame/BionicCommando Where have I seen this before?]]]]

Lilith was still on Pandora when the Eridium sprang up due to the vault's opening, and had 5 years of exposure to find out that she is affected by it. [[spoiler: Angel has been having the stuff forcibly pumped into her for most of her life, giving her more than enough time for it to affect her.]] Maya only just now arrived on Pandora, and simply hasn't been exposed enough yet.

** It's also worth noting that there are recordings of a family, two parents and their child (called 'Tina') in a Hyperion base. The child escapes via a smuggled grenade, the mother is killed, but the father is never accounted for. Said recordings are found in a slag mutation research facility. Connect the dots.

Similar reasoning to the above (he created a distraction for Gaige's escape using explosives, so he must have had some knowledge of them). Maybe, after the entire mess died down, he decided to go to Pandora (or fled, to avoid prosecution for helping Gaige escape). Handsome Jack blew him up like most of the other vault hunters, but he survived and Jack (not wanting another VH rushing around, outside of his control [[spoiler: unlike the original 4/5]]) decided to send him off to be experimented on.

Tina will always react calm and normal when you meet her as Krieg, despite looking and sounding like a psycho who she hates because of their relation to her parents death. This could either be because of the above mentiod theory that he was her father and she somehow feels it, or perhaps he simply was another test subject in the Lab and helped her escape. We know she managed to escape because of a grenade, but if you look at what Hyperion normal throws at you in the game, it sounds rather strange for a little girl to escape just with one grenade. That is unless it was used to blow a hole in Krieg's cell, with him released and butchering the engineers, robots or even soldiers, which would have been enough distraction for her to escape. So in Tina's mind Krieg was written down as "friendly psycho".

* '''The Necromancer''': A mysterious being who looks like a walking mass of old technology and rotted flesh covered [[BadassLongRobe in a black billowing robe]], his special ability is the deployment of a some kind of stationary monster with lots of teeth and the gun turret on its head. Not only will it shoot down enemies but also pick up the dead bodies using multiple long sticky tongues and eat the bodies, regurgitating a special "juice" item only the Necromancer can use while giving off an aura that inflicts severe debuffs to enemies that walk through it. Once consumed, the "juice" give the Necromancer various random status buffs such as increased speed, faster reload, health regeneration, etc. The skills trees involved the performance of the turret, such as firing speed, how many corpses it can eat before getting "full" and its reach; the stat buffs received from the "juice" and the debuffs the monster's aura give off; and the debuffs the Necromancer himself inflicts from guns and melee attacks, including leeching off enemy health.
* '''The Rogue''': A former secret agent who's a combination of Triple X and Creator/SeanConnery's version of Film/JamesBond, his special ability is a grappling hook type device that he can use to latch onto enemies to reel them in for closer kills or even steal items their loot right off of them. The skill tree for the ability allows the grappling hook to inflict more damage, add elemental damage, and higher chance of stealing loot, and the second involve increasing the Rogue's proficiency in various gun types, and the third involve increasing his regular stats as well as increasing money drops and the probability of gaining rare items from fallen enemies and chests.

* A '''Bombzerker''' The first "Zerker" Focused on melee attacks, the second on guns, the third should focus on the ''third'' way of making things not live. BOMBS! LOTSA BOMB! A tree that focuses on never running out of grenades, getting one every time you kill someone, increasing how many grenades you pick up per grenade pickup, and increasing grenade regeneration during bombzerking, as well as upgrades like making all grenades home in, throw up to 3 in a bundle while bombzerking and overall GrenadeSpam, adding elements to the grenade, and being an unkillable bastard. Bombzerk will let him regenerate grenades, throw them faster, and double explosive radius. He's a bit of a [[MagikarpPower Magikarp]] with low grenade count at first, but can flat out level entire boss fights with unending grenade spam. His backstory doesn't exist, there's no reason for him to be a grenade-chucking lunatic, he's just ''born'' pyromaniacal.

Handsome Jack, in one of his notes to a group of assassins, said that only six Siren can exist in the universe at a time, and that he knows three personally. Counting Lilith and Maya, it's entirely possible that the third one he knows or one of his three unknowns could show up.

** Adding to the above, when Jack says he knows three, he of course means Lilith, Maya and Angel, but this recording was made after Steele's death, so even if she was a Siren and he knew it, he wouldn't say "I know four" in this instance anyway. The original WMG gets the three he knows wrong, but Jack's line is not evidence against Steele being a Siren.

* To elaborate: Zer0 is clearly after the Vault, but seems to go about it subliminally: he makes the line refering to the Vault before anyone else in the bar mentions it - and when it is mentioned by the panicking bartender, Zer0 seems to take the news like he's hearing it for the first time. Either as a [[RidiculouslyHumanRobot robot]], [[HumanAlien or as an alien]] ([[TakeAThirdOption perhaps]] [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot both?]]), it seems he's [[ManchurianAgent "programmed"]] to find the Vault, [[WouldBeRudeToSayGenocide "complete the challenge"]] there, and go after any other "challenge" between him and the Vault: on [[DeathWorld Pandora]], [[EverythingTryingToKillYou there are certainly plenty of "challenges" to go around]]. I think the Eridians were hoping, between the body piles of [[StupidEvil Bandits]], Creatures and [[MegaCorp Hyperion employees]], Zer0 would legitimately mop up the chaotic elements of the planet, and restore Pandora to a greater degree of peace.

Why? It was a direct challenge to his skills and he couldn't resist. Also he is the Vault Hunter fighting in the arena during the trailer.

[[WMG:Handsome Jack is..]]

* Actually an Eridian HalfHumanHybrid who took over Pandora for a foothold for the Eridians to gain power in the galaxy and take over the world. Oh, and there's definitely more. (Trollface) See, it occurs to me: Why does anyone want Pandora? My friend postulated that people want it because it's a free license to be as sociopathic as you want, though I'm not sure I believe that-Pandora would probably have way more offworlders with better toys if that was true. And the 'why control Pandora?' question goes double now that Roland, Mordecai, Lilith, and Brick opened the vault. See, Vault Hunting and the support of Vault Hunting seems to be a prosperous industry on Pandora, with Zed giving an air that 'oh, I've done this dozens of times' and mentioning giving the 'vault is a myth you'll get yourself killed lecture' very early. You even hear audio diaries from a Vault Hunter or three, and the fact that people refer to them as 'Vault hunters' implies that this is happens more often than not. Now that it's public knowledge that our favorite sociopathic {{Kleptomaniac Hero}}es opened it, why come? What value does it hold? Who's gonna buy your guns? So, in short, Pandora is useless. Then I thought about how Mr. Blake is made to resemble the UncannyValley appearance of the [[VideoGame/HalfLife G-Man]] (Okay, maybe not, but you can't deny the G-Man inspired him.) the WMG below that Hyperion is run by Eridians, their incredibly advanced tech that they do deceptively little with, and the question of how, if Atlas made its fortune on elemental tech and (allegedly) being the best, Hyperion actually has the best tech. So I came up with an even more fanwanky explanation than my previous idea of Pandora being a giant firearm testing site-Handsome Jack is an Eridian-human hybrid who took over Pandora for a foothold for the Eridians to gain power in the galaxy and take over the universe, and the Eridians will be the BigBad of the rest of the series. Besides, if the Eridians being Abusive Precursors does not make sense to you, remember: this is ''Borderlands'', people.

** Somewhat jossed: Innuendobot is the preacher for an impending Hodunk/Zaford goliath wedding in the new Headhunter DLC.

* New-Us are not canon, so that wouldn't work. He could always come back as a zombie, a raid boss (raid bosses are confirmed to be resurrected whenever someone challenges them again) or "Roland-Trap", though.

* Moredcai goes from loud-yet-vaguely-professional, to a depressed Truxian slob.[[note]]I'm aware this is due to a change in voice actors.[[/note]]

Tina's gangster speak is similar to Roland's from the first game (albeit greatly exaggerated), and it's suggested in Dragon Keep that she speaks that way because she thinks it's cool (she makes Roland speak the same way, and Lilith quickly points out that Roland doesn't speak that way). Perhaps when she first met Roland, he was still cocky and fun-loving, and because she eventually started talking like him due to how much she adored him. As Roland matured and became more serious like in the second game, Tina kept talking that way.

Tina's gangster speak is similar to Roland's from the first game, and it's suggested in Dragon Keep that she speaks that way because she thinks it's cool (she makes Roland speak the same way, and Lilith quickly points out that Roland doesn't speak that way). Perhaps when she first met Roland, he was still cocky and fun-loving, and because she eventually started talking like him due to how much she adored him. As Roland matured and became more serious like in the second game, Tina kept talking that way.