Borderlands 2 Writer Responds to Tiny Tina Controversy

Borderlands 2 is one of the games that no one expected to be one of the bigger hits of the fall gaming season and turned out to be one of the best-sellers and was beloved by all that played it. That is a good thing. Of course, with popularity and increased-sales also comes the fact that some people out there are going to get offended by some stuff almost no matter what you do and Borderlands 2 is not immune to that. Tiny Tina is a thirteen year-old explosives expert who doesn’t seem to be quite right sometimes and tends to have some mannerisms that some find offensive, go figure.

What are people finding offensive? Use of words that seem typical of a stereotypical African American person like “crunk” and “badonkadonk.” Tiny Tina is of course a caucasian character, but some people are finding this offensive and even racist. Anthony Burch has come out to defend himself in this matter with the basic “I’m not racist” and “don’t you know people who talk like this?” lines of reasoning, which honestly don’t seem that far-fetched. This whole thing is just kind of weird.

http://www.facebook.com/stephen.tibbles.5 Stephen Tibbles

I wrote this earlier in reference to the allegations that Tiny Tina is a racist character:

Time for a fun little rant: to those out there that keep calling Tiny Tina a racist character quit being racist. You assume that her speech is based on a perverse interpretation of American Ebonics, you may be wrong. Noam Chomsky theorized a language developmental stage for people, this has been supported by research and widely accepted. Tina’s developmental stage was spent with her parents and her advanced understanding of language and demolitions shows they were likely good parents. Then her parents died in a violent way, this could inhibit development of theory of mind and emotional understanding, and could also be the trigger for a schizotypal personality disorder. From this point her language was primarily influenced by the undereducated workers turned bandits, who are predominately white. Add to this the violent nature of her surroundings and the actions of the bandits towards her, and her fragmented personality is well explained by her past experiences. In conclusion stop letting you want to be politically correct make you and ignorant racist.

What this character should show us is the effects of society and stress on an intelligent mind. While under the care of her parents Tina gained a great deal of structure and developed a schema for interpreting the world around her. With the violent death of her parents Tina had a partial break from reality. From this point on her development was influenced by the violent world around her.

Racism is not what should be taken away from this story of woe, what should be taken away is the effect that tragedy and a violent world has on the mind of a child. Even somebody as obviously intelligent as Tina can be broken by horrific life events.