To all you would-be Borderlands cowboys and cowgirls, I have dibs on Nisha

Shoot the flesh, whip the wounds

“Behind every great man is a great woman.” Screw that, says Nisha. While Handsome Jack is sitting in a climate-controlled bunker, cowering from the awesome might of the Vault Hunters and bandit gangs, Nisha fights her enemies head on in the gritty streets of old west Lynchwood.

When duty called her to moon, she answered with nothing but her bullwhip, arsenal, and wits. While Athena hides behind her shield, Wilhelm turns himself into just another Hyperion machine, and Claptrap continues to beg for us to like him, Nisha goes through hell and back the same as when she entered. So back off everyone, this cowgirl is all mine. Dibs on Nisha.

She has the most badass skills.

Nisha’s skill trees all build towards her basically becoming death incarnate. With a good enough pistol, the One for Each of Ya skill almost makes her a Gunzerker like Salvador, except that she never has to put the second gun away. The Third Degree boosts her melee to near Zer0’s Bloodshed levels of melee carnage. Now pair all this up with with her action skill Showdown, and Nisha will be bullwhipping and auto aiming bodies until they drop like flies.

And for anyone thinking Nisha’s lack of team assisting skills is a negative, be honest with yourself, only the team members desperate to be liked bother with that. Athena can revive three people at once? That’s cute, try reviving yourself when I effortlessly land six shots in your cranium. Also, I hear she sings annoying road songs just to piss people off. Claptrap can buff team stats? Sorry, we still don’t like you Claptrap, nobody likes you. Except Brett, but I’ve seen him wear socks with sandals.

Finally, a cowgirl.

Seriously, why has it taken so long for there to be a cowboy type character in a Borderlands game? The first Borderlands took place almost exclusively in desert plains and arid settings fit for a John Wayne flick. If we can have ninjas in tundras, how did cowgirls in the desert get overlooked? It’s alright though, I’m willing to forgive and I’m sure you all are too, because now, we have cowgirls in space.

Midriff.

That’s right, Nisha is bringing an exposed midriff to a gunfight. Why does this sound familiar? Oh, maybe it’s because one of the most famous gun-toting badasses of videogame history rocks the midriff. The midriff sends a message to Nisha’s enemies: she doesn’t need any armor because they will be dead before they can get a shot off.

Sure, Doom guy did it first, but Nisha one-ups him, because not only is she confidently marching into battle with her vital organs as vulnerable as possible, but she is doing it in the near-vacuum of a moon without atmosphere. That just seems unnecessarily dangerous, but Nisha doesn’t care about that. In fact…

She just doesn’t give a fuck.

Look deep into Nisha’s eyes, and see the cold gaze of a psychopathic gun nut. That is the look of a bona fide badass, and that’s saying something when half the enemies on Pandora fancy that title for themselves. Look, anyone working for Handsome Jack is probably pretty crazy. Nisha though, easily tops the Hyperion crazy charts with her puppy killing ways. When she was running the town of Lynchwood, all of the 200+ laws were punishable by death. Perhaps not the best way to run a town, but you can’t argue that a bullet to the head isn’t a more efficient way to deal with littering than a ticket.

Even in death, as you stand over her corpse, feeling so proud of yourself for turning Lynchwood’s sheriff into another notch on your gun, you don’t realize that Nisha is having the last laugh. Just look at that death pose. You know what kind of corpse falls like that? The kind of corpse that just doesn’t give a fuck.