I’m not trying to clickbait here, but it is hard not to do that with a topic like this, so sorry, because this is not what you are expecting.

So, Borderlands 4 had a big new trailer at the Game Awards or something. I don’t really care about the event. Of course, a number of different content creators have picked the trailer apart in number of ways, sometimes multiple times, because they riff off of each other. They look at everything trying to look for details to stretch that video a little more.

And part of me enjoys this. I like the franchise quite a bit, as my readers have probably noticed. Except that I don’t really care about the lore details. Why would you? The franchise is not about that. It’s about irreverent action and that’s what I’m looking for, not books and books worth of complicated lore that is just going to be forgotten anyhow.

At the same time, there is one big glaring thing none of them commented on. It’s right there. There is a mention of a new planet called Kairos and none of the videos comment on this in any way. They acknowledge the name of the planet, but for some reason they don’t realize that’s kind of important.

I mean, we start of at Pandora, where both BL 1 and 2 happen. Pandora, in Greek mythology, is the first mortal woman to whom all the gods gave gifts in the form of various abilities. Of course, she is also the woman, who opened the jar that held all the evils in the world, which feels apt to Pandora. Except that hope remains in the jar, which brings us to…

In Pre-Sequel, we are on Elpis, Pandora’s moon. Elpis is also the name of the Greek god of hope. See what they did there?

In BL 3 we again start from Pandora, but move to a number of different planets, first of them being Promethea, named after Prometheus, who, against the will of the Olympian gods, brought humanity technology and knowledge, which then lead to civilization, which Promethea represents.

From there we move to Athenas, a reference to Athena, the god of wisdom and warfare, a planet full of monks, who are actually pacifists, so maybe not the best named of the planets.

Then we have Eden-6 (you know, the paradise) and Nekratafayo (which is pretty close to ‘cemetery’ in Greek), as well as the DLC planets Xylourgos (‘carpenter’ in Greek) and Gehenna (both a valley outside of Jerusalem and a word for ‘Hell’).

So, should we not assume Kairos also means something. As it does. From Wikipedia’s introduction:

Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning ‘the right or critical moment’. In modern Greek, kairos also means ‘weather’ or ‘time’.

It is one of two words that the ancient Greeks had for ‘time’; the other being chronos. Whereas the latter refers to chronological or sequential time, kairos signifies a good or proper time for action. In this sense, while chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.

If you are interested in the lore, might this not be important when the villain is named Timekeeper? Yet, the name is just mentioned off-handedly by these people supposedly trying to understand the trailer. They just happen to be so much more interested in mining for content than crafting interesting content.

Sure, there is a time pressure, because they need to get their videos out before everyone has already forgotten about it, but this just seems very obvious.