Having played TPS recently I'm actually pretty shocked Lilith wasn't some like, twist antagonist or something in BL3. She went against the better judgement of of Brick and Mordecai and ordered for Athena's execution only to be stopped by a deus ex machina. Not to mention the several times where Athena tells Lilith that she sees the exact same thing in her as she saw in Jack before he "became" Handsome Jack.
Sure would beat the shit out of having to see this mary sue bitch show up in every future borderlands game until this franchise crashes and burns.
Edit: typo'd
I think it's funny to me how people can still look at Jack as the bad guy and Lilith as the good guy after TPS. I've argued with people online and the biggest argument they come up with is that Jack killed his daughter. No, YOU and Roland killed his daughter without a second thought, Jack merely kept her in captivity out of fear because he saw firsthand what she did to her own mother.
In TPS you find out that Jack got fucked over by his spiteful ex moxie and Lilith, who turned on Jack because he killed a handful of scientists because the sake of the planet was at stake, but they turn around and basically create a black hole and kill countless Hyperion workers on the ship who were just working or hiding from Dahl soldiers. Borderlands 2 was the story of a man trying to bring order to a planet full of enraged psychopaths, and gets stopped by a bunch of idiots.
If you change handsome Jack to the white man, Pandora to Southside Chicago, and the vault hunters to antifa, that's the way I look at Borderlands 2 lol.
TPS only hammers home the fact that Jack was right, he was the hero, he was doing the best he could even though he was over his head, and despite being human and flawed like the rest of us he was genuinely trying to make things better.
Pre-Sequel was farmed out to 2K Australia, the same team that did Bioshock 2, and it is not canon. It won't be acknowledged in Gearbox games.
It's one of my favorite games not only because the story is so fantastic, but because that world actually FEELS like my world. By that I mean a world that has a bunch of American accents with random Australian ones thrown in lol.
Personal bias aside, I honestly feel that the reason it will never be acknowledged by gearbox is because no matter how the sales numbers were, the fan reaction to the plot was a gut punch to Randy Pitchford.
And he even knows deep down in his heart of hearts that TPS was a better written story with his own characters then he could ever write, and didn't have to rely on gay 12 year old boy cringe shit to be good. It was the best written gearbox game and gearbox didn't even write it.
And that's why Randy, out of childish spite, decided to say it wasn't canon and to do stupid shit like kill Aurelia in 3 for no reason other than "Fuck you for writing a better borderlands game".