Guild Wars 2

Unlike a lot of people, I actually liked Scarlet as a villain. She was smart (though a lot of that was short story-based), she was cunning (didn’t see her until the halfway mark of the season), and she was hilarious (serious +1 to Tara Strong, as if I didn’t like her like crazy already).

What bugs the stuffing out of me is that we, the heroes, went about things in the most direct manner possible. People can be annoyed at how Scarlet evaded our clutches every time, what she wanted already in hand, but when all we ever did was go Big Kitten Heroes (I guess that makes us all Charr) against whatever we saw, it’s trivially easy to plan around that.

Her contingency planning only needed to cover one potential problem: “How do I keep the heroes occupied long enough to get what I need and then leave?” The simplest and easiest answer was to shove bodies at the problem, as illustrated by the Molten Alliance, the Aetherblades, the Twisted Watchworks, and the Toxic Alliance. And we, the ever so heroic heroes, charged right on in the front door each and every time.

This “slay evil first, ask questions later” attitude was defined by Braham’s arrogant “It doesn’t matter now. You’re done” to Scarlet’s pointed “you don’t want to know why?” I bet that ANet’s writers were just trying to avoid a monologue cliche, but it just stuck out to me like crazy because I, the player, the hero, wanted to know. Some big buffoon of a heroic norn (no offense Braham) decided for me that I didn’t care.

The only people questioning motives at any point were Marjory, Kasmeer (and maybe Vorpp), and they didn’t do that until late in the story. As soon as Scarlet came onto the scene in the Jubilee, the behind-the-scenes approach to everything should have been clear. What did we do? Avert the immediate crisis, and then wait for the next one as if she wasn’t still a problem, even while her twisted watchwork minions raged across Tyria through portals.

Ultimately it feels like the story was out of our hands, that the “emergency response hero” approach we were implied to have by the options available to us merely set us up to be the biggest fall guys in Tyrian history, beating out the Chosen (both White Mantle- and Khilbron-duped). At the end of the day, we failed to stop Scarlet from doing exactly what she set out to do. Or maybe, as this other thread put it, we stopped her at the exact moment where we’re the villains instead of the heroes.

I agree with pretty everything here. Also, not sure why we couldn’t just knock her out and interrogate her on our own terms.

If her reason was really good enough, she’d have already stated it instead of egging us on to wonder about it. Besides, given that she has a knack for teleporting away and using voice commands in her monologing, it was better to just end her right there than giving her another chance to get away.

Admittedly though, the ending really did leave more questions than answers. What was the point of gathering all those armies if she was just going to drill a hole in the ground to force some energy elsewhere to wake up a dragon?

Nilkemia.8507:

Admittedly though, the ending really did leave more questions than answers. What was the point of gathering all those armies if she was just going to drill a hole in the ground to force some energy elsewhere to wake up a dragon?

She was supposedly using them to gain things she needed to pull this off, but all she really needed in the end was the aetherblades for an army and the dredge sonic/drilling tech. And it’s arguable that with her ridiculous amount of gathered knowledge, she should have been able to develop that on her own. The toxic miasma helped with clearing out LA, but the majority of the damage was done by the aetherblade airships.

Maybe she intended to kill the dragon, and needed the other armies to do so. The powerful toxic miasma and ship-mounted lasers seem to be overkill for taking LA, but might be needed for killing a dragon.

The Marionette was also not very well suited for fighting ground troops, and its chains would have made it difficult to use in LA. But it could have done well in combat against a single large opponent, like a dragon.

So no one breaks in and blows up the drill before Mordremoth’s awakening of course!