Guild Wars 2

Scarlet started her life as a cookie-cutter, annoying and one-dimensional Mary Sue that popped out of nowhere and served as nothing but a random Saturday morning villain. I hated her all through Clockwork Chaos up until the Tower of Nightmares.

However, Origins of Madness and the Lion’s Arch arc changed my mind completely. I am not sure what happened… was it her voice, that changed from obnoxious to downright threatening, or perhaps her schemes and plans which became more nuanced? Either way, she kinda grew on me. By the time I fought her one last timeand witnessed Mordremoth's awakening, I loved her.

Oh, and speaking ofMordremoth: his influence actually explained Scarlet's initial Mary Suedom, which is a good thing.

Make no mistake: Scarlet is still not without flaws. Her lieutenants deserved more spotlight, and we needed to see more of them. Seriously, most of them didn’t even get names! We also needed to know why exactly did Scarlet’s alliances join her, unlessMordremoth gave her mind control or something, of course. Still, Scarlet is, as of now, one of the best villains in GW2.

Good job, Arena Net.

Post expanded/updated.

Not sure if I should remove the spoiler tags and put them in the thread title.

I completely agree with you, I wanted to her kill up till I read the journal in origins of madness and pieced together that she was mordremoth’s puppet
It was kinda sad when had to kill her but I did it for the good of Tyria

Opposite over here. I read all the material, followed the releases and couldn’t shake the feeling that this villain just didn’t hold water.

She’s SOOOO smart, and SOOOO persuasive, and SOOOO dangerous, and and and… here’s a dragon.

Seriously, she basically made play things of some of the pillars of Asura culture. Did we learn anything about the eternal alchemy because of this? No, really it was just sort of a totem to show us she’s really smart. Ignore the fact that doing that cheapens the implied complexity of the concept of the eternal alchemy and makes all those Asuran “geniuses” who can only handle one school look pretty dumb.

And you can find plenty of threads on Google about how people are scratching their heads over some of these alliances and why it makes sense for them to follow Scarlet. You won’t be able to read them because the majority get a permalink error when connecting to this site…

And she’s so dangerous not because we’ve seen some subtle and careful build up of power and influence, but because she has more industrial capacity at her whim than all the heroic nations of Tyria combined. Maybe more than the entire planet combined if you consider how fast she turns around these schemes. Massive structures, massive weapons, seemingly endless armies. She pooped out a giant flying drill for Lyssa’s sake! How, where, when? Nope, just is. She dangerous for real.

To top it all off, when the whole thing comes down to an instanced showdown, we find out she meant just about jack because the whole thing was all about waking another dragon. Now we have a full set! One being in less than mint condition…

I have no problems with waking up Mordremoth, or as I think of him, Veggie Tail. I know he’s been there for awhile and all signs pointed to a sixth elder dragon. Cool, awesome, serve him up. But now that dragon has to have his own “Raising Orr” moment to flex his giant vine covered wings and show us how dangerous he is.

Scarlet was meaningless, to be frank, poorly written. I got the same feeling from the Living Story season that I get from blockbuster movies that have an army of script doctors. Too many rewrites, not enough consistent narrative. An obvious lack of vision.

Here’s hoping the production will be a bit tighter next time around and the characters less of a stretch. For now I just hope we focus on Mordremoth and never talk about this Scarlet thing again.

She is still extremely generic. I had hoped she would be one of the good guys and resist the “darkness” (M.), but she turned out to be exactly what we had expected her to be.
Also, she build portals into her unreachable evil lair. Smart people don’t build portals into their evil lair.

Clark Skinner.4902:

Opposite over here. I read all the material, followed the releases and couldn’t shake the feeling that this villain just didn’t hold water.
[…]
For now I just hope we focus on Mordremoth and never talk about this Scarlet thing again.

I’m with you here. We’re getting a lot of “She’s the best villian”, as if it’s forgotten that she’s really the -only- villian thus far that hasn’t been a one-shot appearance. They spent so much time developing her as this really dangerous, powerful, super-intelligent entity, and then the majority of her plans don’t even connect to or make sense with the ending. She proved she could annihilate a zone with her giant death laser but fails to use it on LA. She proved she could create noxious hallucinogenic fumes so dangerous that the hallucinations would spring to life and kill hundreds – still, failed to use on LA.

It seems like everything prior to LA was just a show-off of how great Scarlet is supposed to be, then they decided to toss it all, kill her in a lack-luster showdown, and hope we forgot that everything that happened to date was supposed to mean something.

I still feel like we’re lacking any form of adequate explanation as to why she needed to form those specific alliances – an update or so ago there was a big point made of telling us how each of the alliances were somehow elementally attuned, but I suppose that plot element was forgotten as well.

So pretty much, Scarlet causes a lot of trouble for no reason than to show how cool and dangerous she can be. Then she drill one hole in outside of one city (which she did pretty much unchallenged with a massive super-weapon she imaginated out of nowhere), and lets herself die to a bunch of average people (who didn’t even have a good plan mind, other than “Walk in and kill her”) despite the Tremendous amount of resources, technology, and sheer manpower she has spent so much time proving she has.

We shouldn’t have stood a chance, if Scarlet was played properly. One mega-laser fire into LA to kill everyone, dump some nightmare toxin to keep everyone who enters from getting anywhere, and drill the hole in peace. Instead she uses weaker versions of all of her technology, fights us as if there’s a point to it, and then practically lets herself die.

Yeah, best villain ever for sure. Let’s hope the next LW enemy isn’t so devious and dangerous as to take the throne from here… ::rolls eyes::

Clark Skinner.4902:

She’s SOOOO smart, and SOOOO persuasive, and SOOOO dangerous, and and and… here’s a dragon.

This pretty much sums it up for me as well. It just got worse and worse with every patch. I’m so irked by the way the character was written that I can’t even play the game anymore without lashing out at every little thing that annoys me, be it overflow popup or failed dynamic event…everything just bugs me now.

I think the audacity by ArenaNet, claiming it to be a story on the level of Game of Thrones, telling us we’d be eating our words during the final patch, added to that even more. I’m not an idiot, I do not like being talked down to as if I am, and I’ll decide for myself if I think a story is epic or not.