![]() Making them subjects of video game violence, I imagine, doesn’t help - and I’m yet to find a dwarf in any Borderlands who isn’t designated an enemy. A 2010 study conducted by the University of East Anglia found that 80% of people with dwarfism had received verbal abuse, and that 12% had suffered violence. Peter Dinklage has described jokes about dwarfism as “one of the last bastions of acceptable prejudice”. That lore, however, doesn’t help the real-life dwarfs who live with the consequences of depictions like this. Back before the events of the first Borderlands, miners found a vault key fragment while digging, and its discovery altered the workers - sending many insane and physically mutating others. There’s an in-game explanation for their existence. It’s made clear that dwarfs are considered inherently funny, a spectacle to add to the sense of strangeness on Pandora’s alien surface. Sometimes they’re carried piggyback-style on the shoulders of their larger comrades. Players frequently come into contact with enemies labelled Midgets, who speak in pitched-up screams. Though rarely expressed so explicitly as this, dwarfism is a consistent target for comedy throughout Borderlands 2. “Also, the midget looks like a little human backpack, and that’s funny.” “Ah, what an unlikely symbiotic relationship, two deadly creatures cooperating to survive this harsh environment,” says Hammerlock, cheerily. One of the first is an optional mission to seek out Midge-Mong, a local bandit with dwarfism who rides on the back of a bullymong - a four-armed, ape-like creature from Borderlands lore. He is the series’ comedy Brit and researcher of local phenomena - a role he fulfils by sending you out on expeditions to document and destroy. The last survivor of Liar's Berg, surrounded by frozen wasteland, he’s dressed from head to toe in Victoriana and sports a deeply unconvincing accent. Discounting Claptrap’s metal visage, Sir Hammerlock is the first friendly face you meet in Borderlands 2.
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