Guild Wars 2

I can write a book about why Scarlet (Villain Sue) is a bad character. But in a nutshell:

“She is way too young, and her childhood too peaceful, to be a good villain.”

If you look at good villains in stories, they are usually 30-40 years old. The have had some tough life experiences. (Someone stole the villain’s wife for example, in Fire Emblem.)

The other alternative is a younger (20-25 years old) villain, who had a terrible horrible childhood to make him/her into what he is today.

1) Young
What kind of people can she meet? What kind of pain did she suffer though? What kind of pain did she saw others suffer?

None. Not much. She is too young to experience enough to be a good villain. That’s why she is so shallow.

2) Horrible childhood
Did Scarlet witness her parents getting killed by corrupt nobles? Did Scarlet suffer abuses in a Brothel as a child?

Nope. She was safe and happy in the tree! What kind of tale can he tell the main character to justify her actions? That’s the 2nd reason why she is so shallow.

Conclusion:

Think about it. Here we have a villain who suffered nothing in childhood. And then went on and suffer nothing in adulthood (because she is so young). Not only this, she meet a ton of NICE PEOPLE along the way. She had like a thousand mentors showing her different skills in the world. And the Pale Tree never gave up on her.

The only possible explanation is she is pretty much an “evil baby” possessed by Satan. That’s the only reason why she is evil.

Villain Sue check list:
-suffered nothing in childhood.
-suffered nothing in adulthood.
-surrounded by nice people and mentors show / taught her things.
-cared by a loving mother figure.
-betrayed her mentor.
-look down on everyone. Evil laugh.
-became smarter than everyone else, in an incredibly short amount of time.
-raised an army from nothing, in an incredibly short amount of time.
-invented weapons that defied logic (became legendarily powerful, in an incredibly short amount of time.

Now I will give an example of a good villain. Nagato from the Naruto series is one of my favourite villains. He seems to kill without remorse, but he actually wants world peace more than anything else. His belief is “One cannot know true peace until they know true pain.”

http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Nagato

Now let’s use the Villain Sue test, to show the difference between Nagato and Scarlet.

Villain Sue check list:
-suffered in childhood. (parents killed in front of his eyes.)
-suffered in adulthood. (best friend killed in front of his eyes, by his own hands in a twist of fate.)
-surrounded by a mix of nice people and horrible people, so he gets a view and mix of both.
-cared by a loving fatherly figure and his friends.
-betrayed his mentor for a greater purpose.
-respects everyone, even his enemies. He only kills when he have to, for a greater purpose.
-became “smarter” than everyone else by years of life experience and suffering.
-raised an army after spending years to get supporters to his own point of view.
-became powerful after years of training.

There are about twenty other threads with amateur analysis on Scarlet. Why not just post this in one of them?

…So in order to be a villain you have to suffer? In the same ways there are different personalities there are different senses of morality. Some people are just evil, despite whatever experiences they go through in life. Personally I enjoy Scarlet, she’s chaotic and is one of the few characters that seems to have life to her.

Just because a villain doesn’t fit YOUR personal idea of what a good villain is doesn’t mean they aren’t a good villain. She’s chaotic, a little unpredictable, somewhat playful, and definitely evil. That makes for an interesting and entertaining villain in my book.

Suffering at a young age has nothing to do with making a good villain. Its all about their thought processes and motives. A good villain can start out with an ok childhood, just like a good hero can start with a bad one.

Lets use your “Villain Sue” checklist against a very popular villain… Lord Voldemort.

-Suffered nothing in childhood. He grew up in a orphanage. Not an ideal upbringing, but he suffered very little. If anything, he was the one to make all the other children suffer.

-Suffered nothing in adulthood. He was a well liked member of the community. They also thought he would do well in the ministry, maybe even make Minister.

-Surrounded by nice people and mentors that showed and taught him things. Tom Riddle was charismatic. He was able to charm all the teachers, other then Dumbledore, into basically giving him whatever he wanted.

-Cared for by a loving mother. He had none, but neither did Scarlet. The Pale Tree is there, giving comfort to those who seek it, but she is always at a distance. She rarely interferes into her children’s lives. Something that Scarlet preferred, since she neither liked, loved, or cared for the Pale Tree, and she wanted nothing to do with the being.

-Betrayed his “mentor”. I put mentor in quotes for a reason. Neither Tom Riddle or Scarlet have mentors, since they never trust anyone or view anyone as their betters. They only see them as a means to an end. That end being increasing their power or wealth of knowledge. Anyway, he betrayed Slughorn’s trust after he asked for information on the horcruxes. All for the greater purpose of his path towards of immortality and power.

-Looked down on everyone. Need I say anything?

-Became smarter than everyone else, in an incredibly short amount of time. Again, true for neither of them, since they were both born naturally intelligent. Tom Riddle was naturally gifted with both his intelligence and charisma, and Scarlet was born with a deep understanding on the interconnectivity of all things and how they effect one another. Hence, her deep understanding of engineering and the College of Synergetic’s study of the Eternal Alchemy .

-Raised an army from nothing, in an incredibly short amount of time. Lord Voldemort was able to create the Knights of Walpurgis, the precursor of the Death Eaters, from his followers at Hogwarts.

-Invented weapons that defied logic. Numerous dark spells and rituals. Not to mention, the grand total of 7 horcruxes. Something that was mindboggling and never heard of before.

So, by your definition, Lord Voldemort is a horrible character, and JK should be ashamed for writing him.

I’m more of the Kane type of villains (Command and Conquer).

Villain Sue check list:
-suffered nothing in childhood. > Kane has no Childhood
-suffered nothing in adulthood. > Adulthood for more than 5000 years. Faces direct Ion cannon hit and lives. Twice.
-surrounded by nice people and mentors show / taught her things. > Absolutely not.
-cared by a loving mother figure. > He’s more like a father figure to entire humanity.
-betrayed her mentor. > Betrays everyone.
-look down on everyone. Evil laugh. > Absolutely. comes with 5000 years of experience.
-became smarter than everyone else, in an incredibly short amount of time. > Found humanity in clay huts. Taught them everything
-raised an army from nothing, in an incredibly short amount of time. > At least three times.
-invented weapons that defied logic (became legendarily powerful, in an incredibly short amount of time > Stealth tanks, spider cyborgs, liquid bomb to destroy Europe and invite alien assimilators.

And the cherry on the caek: played by the author himself.

Awesome villain. I like Kane. I like Scarlet.

Furthermore, nothing is inherently wrong with a Villain Sue. It’s just one type of villain, just like OP prefer the (imho) bland world peace through world war one man army character (Nagato). Personally, I think Scarlet is just a Joker-type villain.

One can use a lot of literary analysis to say whether or not the Joker from Batman is a good or bad villain, but that doesn’t take away the fact the Joker is the second most popular comic book villain of all time.
http://comics.ign.com/top-100-villains/2.html

Erukk.1408:

Suffering at a young age has nothing to do with making a good villain. Its all about their thought processes and motives. A good villain can start out with an ok childhood, just like a good hero can start with a bad one.

Lets use your “Villain Sue” checklist against a very popular villain… Lord Voldemort.

-Suffered nothing in childhood. He grew up in a orphanage. Not an ideal upbringing, but he suffered very little. If anything, he was the one to make all the other children suffer.

-Suffered nothing in adulthood. He was a well liked member of the community. They also thought he would do well in the ministry, maybe even make Minister.

-Surrounded by nice people and mentors that showed and taught him things. Tom Riddle was charismatic. He was able to charm all the teachers, other then Dumbledore, into basically giving him whatever he wanted.

-Cared for by a loving mother. He had none, but neither did Scarlet. The Pale Tree is there, giving comfort to those who seek it, but she is always at a distance. She rarely interferes into her children’s lives. Something that Scarlet preferred, since she neither liked, loved, or cared for the Pale Tree, and she wanted nothing to do with the being.

-Betrayed his “mentor”. I put mentor in quotes for a reason. Neither Tom Riddle or Scarlet have mentors, since they never trust anyone or view anyone as their betters. They only see them as a means to an end. That end being increasing their power or wealth of knowledge. Anyway, he betrayed Slughorn’s trust after he asked for information on the horcruxes. All for the greater purpose of his path towards of immortality and power.

-Looked down on everyone. Need I say anything?

-Became smarter than everyone else, in an incredibly short amount of time. Again, true for neither of them, since they were both born naturally intelligent. Tom Riddle was naturally gifted with both his intelligence and charisma, and Scarlet was born with a deep understanding on the interconnectivity of all things and how they effect one another. Hence, her deep understanding of engineering and the College of Synergetic’s study of the Eternal Alchemy .

-Raised an army from nothing, in an incredibly short amount of time. Lord Voldemort was able to create the Knights of Walpurgis, the precursor of the Death Eaters, from his followers at Hogwarts.

-Invented weapons that defied logic. Numerous dark spells and rituals. Not to mention, the grand total of 7 horcruxes. Something that was mindboggling and never heard of before.

So, by your definition, Lord Voldemort is a horrible character, and JK should be ashamed for writing him.

The character of Voldemort comes down to four things:

1) Crazy family – He is a descendant of Salazar Slytherin and the Gaunt, both are known for being a bit crazy and obsessed with blood purity. Intermarriage probably had something to do with that.
2) Revenge for his mother – He killed his biological father and grand parents. It also indirectly led to the demise of his mother’s brother, who opposed the relationship.
3) Fear of personal death – It led him to practise the dark arts. Later he tired to kill Harry and ended up killing Harry’s parents, due to a prophecy.
4) Purity of a wizard’s blood – He believes that pure blood wizards are not only superior, but they should be the rulers over other lessor beings.

It is hard to relate him to Scarlet.

1) Scarlet is not from a crazy family.
2) Scarlet have no reason to revenge against anything.
3) Scarlet fears nothing (so far).
4) Scarlet doesn’t have any personal beliefs in the world and society, other than she is the superior Villain Sue (so far).

It is hard to relate him to Scarlet

Yet I still did, using the same categories you used to find Scarlet as a bad character, because they share a lot of characteristics.

The reasons you listed why Voldemort can’t relate to Scarlet is part of his backstory and his motives. Something he didn’t get until later in the book series. Heck, in book one, he was only just a powerful evil wizard that killed Harry’s parents. We didn’t really get to know his history and motives until book four and beyond.

So, I’ll ask you this question: why can’t the same be true for Scarlet? We only just met her. She is a new character. One that we have a far, far, from complete backstory on, and we have absolutely no idea what her true motives are.

How is she any different than any other villain in the beginning? It takes time to fully flesh out a character.

Scarlet is an okay villain.
She seems to exist to cause comic book style mischief and ants to your picnic.
Then you take the attempted kidnapping of the Queen and invasions into account as well as the fact she has multiple factions enlisted as her minions, one has to wonder if she is more than what she appears to be right now. She can’t be completely mad if she is able to convince so many to go all in with her plans.
Even when OP points out Nagato, you don’t know initially that his motivations are selfless, we only know of Scarlet’s madness.
She saw something of her people’s destiny and if this plan of hers turns out to be more than just meddling in our plans, it could make for a good story and viable villain for us all.

Sankofa Jimiyu.1567:

Scarlet is an okay villain.
She seems to exist to cause comic book style mischief and ants to your picnic.
Then you take the attempted kidnapping of the Queen and invasions into account as well as the fact she has multiple factions enlisted as her minions, one has to wonder if she is more than what she appears to be right now. She can’t be completely mad if she is able to convince so many to go all in with her plans.
Even when OP points out Nagato, you don’t know initially that his motivations are selfless, we only know of Scarlet’s madness.
She saw something of her people’s destiny and if this plan of hers turns out to be more than just meddling in our plans, it could make for a good story and viable villain for us all.

On the other hand … some people just want to see the world burn.

Mary Sue, Villain Sue. Terms that people throw around like they are the new hipster word of the season. Most of the people here on the board had probably never heard of the term, and now everyone considers themselves an expert.

Well I disagree, and I loathe such sheepish behaviour. A couple of people here have already brought it up, we need to give Scarlet the time to flesh out as a character because she is far deeper than she lets on.

A specific implication:

Alas, you have defeated me! And thus I have learned the error of my ways. I shall be good and sweet and nice from now on.
Just kidding! But you do have my full attention now. I don’t think you’ll enjoy it.
I keep a list of people that need sharp reminders about how insignificant they really are. And you just jumped to the top of it.

It was a well-earned victory, and you should be proud. You should be happy. *No, I mean it: you should be happy. *
So be happy. Right now. Because shortly, very shortly, your life is going to be nothing but tears. See you soon!

They way she tells you to be happy, not in her jester ways, but very serious and sincere… There is a lot more to her, and we’ll get to know all of that over the course of the following months.

Erukk.1408:

It is hard to relate him to Scarlet

Yet I still did, using the same categories you used to find Scarlet as a bad character, because they share a lot of characteristics.

The reasons you listed why Voldemort can’t relate to Scarlet is part of his backstory and his motives. Something he didn’t get until later in the book series. Heck, in book one, he was only just a powerful evil wizard that killed Harry’s parents. We didn’t really get to know his history and motives until book four and beyond.

So, I’ll ask you this question: why can’t the same be true for Scarlet? We only just met her. She is a new character. One that we have a far, far, from complete backstory on, and we have absolutely no idea what her true motives are.

How is she any different than any other villain in the beginning? It takes time to fully flesh out a character.

I think the difference was that Voldemort was an established character in the lore even though the reader that experienced the story alongside the titular character doesnt know all that much about him, most others do and react accordingly. Run that test by Scarlet. That one Asura seems to know her as a smart Sylvari and that’s it. She comes out of nowhere as the apparently greatest threat the world faces with a superiority complex you could hide an elder dragon behind.

If there had been allusions to Scarlet in Rata Sum while leveling I would see Scarlet differently. Maybe some NPC dialogue you can overhear that people are worried about that student (or former student depending on timeline), maybe a reference to the death of her mentor… ANYTHING really. But there’s nothing until Mai mentions here name, and even that has zero relation to everything. The clue given by Molten Alliance prisoners do not even sound like Scarlet (obviously they might still mean her or an intermediate contact, but I consider that a post F&F change).

Scarlet is a prime example of the direction Guild Wars 2 is due to go in. It’s a shame, really – there’s a lot of intriguing aspects of the lore that have gone ignored in favour of festivals and gimmicks. Expecting Arena Net to listen to feedback is not going to end well, though. This is the same Arena Net that have gradually lost key employees and betrayed their original target audience since they decided to take the game in a completely different direction to what they promised in their manifesto.

Erukk.1408:

It is hard to relate him to Scarlet

Yet I still did, using the same categories you used to find Scarlet as a bad character, because they share a lot of characteristics.

The reasons you listed why Voldemort can’t relate to Scarlet is part of his backstory and his motives. Something he didn’t get until later in the book series. Heck, in book one, he was only just a powerful evil wizard that killed Harry’s parents. We didn’t really get to know his history and motives until book four and beyond.

So, I’ll ask you this question: why can’t the same be true for Scarlet? We only just met her. She is a new character. One that we have a far, far, from complete backstory on, and we have absolutely no idea what her true motives are.

How is she any different than any other villain in the beginning? It takes time to fully flesh out a character.

She is too young, and have a childhood which we already know 100%, that’s her problem.

Voldemort, although we know nothing about him initially, is much older. That means there is “room” for his back story to grow. Scarlet is what like 5 years old? How much life experience could she have had?

To make matters worst, her “childhood” was spent in the comfort of the Pale Tree so there is zero chance of a story growing there.

I read a poster stated that Scarlet would be 100 times better by simply being Asuran. This is actually true. If Scarlet was an Asuran adult, then she would have had 20+ years of life experience. And there is room for a backstory of an “interesting” childhood. And all these technology stuff fits an Asuran MUCH better.

Sylvari actually is the worst race to develop a backstory, because their childhood have a 100% chance of being comfortable within the Pale Tree. Its only been 24 years since the beginning of the Pale Tree, that means the oldest Sylvari are only 24 years old. And those Firstborns are limited to 12 members.

TBH I don’t care about Scarlet anymore. I personally think the background she was placed in have already limited her to be a very shallow villain. I just want Anet to design their future villains’ background better. You got to give the villain’s story “room to grow”. Give them either life experiences or “interesting” childhood. Scarlet is 5 years old and grow from the comfort of the Pale Tree; No room for the story to grow there.

Childhood and suffering isn’t needed for a good villain. And while Scarlet is indeed a Villain Sue and a shallow character – at least as far as she’s presented – she is not so for the reasons of the OP.

The OP is following a trend many of the new thread makers are following – complaining without giving much detailed thought into it. Or at least that’s what it feels like. Most of the posts are now just outright whining for… what? If you don’t give well detailed, thought out, and most of all convincing posts, then ArenaNet won’t listen and the community will just view you as nothing more but a complainer.

There’s many paths to take to make a good villain. A childhood is not necessary, let alone a suffering one.

In fact, in my opinion, creating a villain who is evil simply because of poor upbringing or he/she/it has suffered is exactly what makes a terrible villain. It makes the villain seem like a spoiled brat in worst case scenarios, and someone who’s just holding a silly grudge in best case scenarios.

Scarlet Briar, real name Ceara, is a bad character not because she did not suffer – because she did, actually (the whole “losing all senses for a time and going insane as a result” thing and being exiled from Rata Sum can be viewed as a form of punishment and thus suffering). Rather it’s because nothing in her life has brought her down a peg. On top of this, she is presented in a flat notion in the game – all we see is a crazy person bent on blowing kitten up and not giving a kitten either way. In the short story, we see someone who excels at everything but holds no interest in them; she’s a jack of all trades and despite most jacks of all trades being also a “master of none,” she’s also a “master of all.”

She’s presented with no character flaw. And that is what makes her a poor villain. A poor character in general.

However, this lack of failure does give us something about her – as told in this interview (which in of itself is an issue, because ArenaNet doesn’t give us enough details in the game), we learn that Scarlet has a superiority complex. One can easily realize that this superiority complex is formed by the combination of her carefree-ness (which is utterly annoying to me, but that’s just me) and her never having any real problems to go through. And this is why she has no depth – ArenaNet seems to confuse the notion of “character depth” with “has a background,” but that’s wrong entirely. A character with absolutely no background and never speaks can have a ton of depth to him or her. Depth comes from how one interacts with tough life choices, especially failures… and Scarlet’s interactions simply is “I succeed at everything, and laugh it all off.”

Scarlet Briar’s first real failure is Queen’s Jubilee – and it’s all thanks to us. So her first real character development will start with that in her whole life.

Lord Voldemort – as Erukk brought up – avoids the Villain Sueness and becomes an interesting character because he does have flaws, unlike Scarlet.

CHIPS, you’re confusing “has suffered” with “has flaws.”

CHIPS.6018:

Scarlet is 5 years old and grow from the comfort of the Pale Tree; No room for the story to grow there.

15, roughly, actually.

After eight years of voracious study in the Grove
spent a long winter as his pupil, apprentice, and forge-tender.
Next she spent two years with a gladium named Asagai,
She completed the Dynamics coursework in under a year
When she achieved similar results in a similar time frame [at Statics]
Synergetics took quite a bit longer,
Ceara’s time with the Inquest was brief – up to this point, it’s 100% certain to be prior to the personal story
She wandered for several months before settling in with the Michotl hylek
After months of painstaking preparation, Omadd’s experiment was ready.

8 years in Grove + half a year with Beigarth + 2 years with Asagari + 3 or more years at the colleges/Inquest + “several months” before and after Michotl hylek meeting each, places her with at least 13.5 years, likely close to 14-15 years by the end of the short story.

And you know what? I’m going to go ahead and give my full analysis of the Scarlet Briar character in this thread (though it’ll likely be ignored in the end).

Scarlet Briar is a character presented to us as a poorly developed character under the pretense of “we’ll learn more later” – the sad thing is, regarding Scarlet’s history, it’s all there now. Or just about all there. There’s no room to really develop her background.

The sad thing is, knowing her background alone is what exactly makes her a Villain Sue. And this comes from what a “Sue” character is – someone that has no flaws, or in borderline cases next to no flaws (or the reverse: having nothing but flaws). However, what makes a bad character isn’t so much Sue-dom, as that can be rectified in the storyline (new situations being presented in which the person does have a flaw) though such situations feel like the author trying to rectify a mistake realized only once the audience points it out (what the TowerTalk interview feels like doing). Rather, it is the lack of depth that makes a poor character. And though Anet gave Scarlet backstory, they didn’t give her depth.

As I said in the previous post of mine, background is not the same as character depth. Depth comes from how character interacts with the changes of the world, the most important of such interactions being how one copes with failures or reinforces their beliefs. On top of that, they require redeeming values – especially those who commit crimes (such as villains) – without them they appear like Kratos at the end of the God of War trilogy, a ball of unrelenting hate and fury (to give the series credit, the first game developed Kratos perfectly, but with the change in directors Kratos ended up devolving into just some hack-and-slash figurine).

The problems with Scarlet is that she has had no failures by the time we met her (meaning nothing about failures in her short story). It is literally a situation that we are the cause of her first failure ever, at the Queen’s Jubilee. And her beliefs have only been told to us, barely, through the short story – that she intends to alter the fate that the universe dictated for the characters (PC and otherwise), but we have not been shown any hint at how she intends to reinforce them (which would be tied to her grand master plan).

In other words, Scarlet Briar was set up to be introduced as a blank slate – in the most literal of senses for character development. She’s basically presented to us as a newborn child with background. And doing that only hurts the character since there’s no development made from that background.

You can quite literally take Scarlet from when she was born from the Pale Tree, and Scarlet after she left the sensory deprivation device, and they’d be practically identical. The only difference is that she’s officially insane. She always thought she was better, she always thought she understood how all the systems worked by just looking at things. So there’s no personality difference.

By arguing the issue is that her background is “too perfect” or whatnot is only briefly touching the issue. The issue is that ArenaNet has given us a chance they had to develop her, and did not do so. A secondary issue is that they decided to take a month break from Scarlet – which prevents us from understanding her and seeing her personality fleshed out and her character developed for that much longer.

In short, the real issue behind Scarlet’s character can be dumbed down to two things:

1. Her background gives her no development.
2. The Living Story. ArenaNet’s intention to space things out so long, while giving us breaks from the main storyline, on top of being able to give us so little story content per update (and instead giving us a bunch of grinding or grind-feeling achievements), ends up giving us too little too slowly, thus resulting in us seeing only half a chapter’s worth of a novel (to use their own comparison) every few months. When people read novels (again, to use their own comparison), they don’t read it at a chapter a month – but that’s what they’re giving us. It’s too little too slowly, and that needs to change. If it does, then we may view Scarlet in a better light. If not, people will be leaving GW2 believing the story’s dead.

(making a new post due to character limit reached)

And to expand on the second point at the end of my previous post…

The concept of the Living Story requires a careful balance between time of releasing content and the amount of content given. They almost had it with Flame and Frost – all they needed was more content per update to keep people occupied, and not much at that. But they went and messed it up by giving the same amount of content as the whole of F&F’s four parts in a fourth of the timespan. I don’t think anyone would have liked or remembered Flame and Frost HALF as much (and that’s being generous) if it all took place in the course of January alone.

If, instead, they delivered the amount of content in half the time, with the same amount (roughly – 2-4 months) telling the chapter, I think that while things may feel drawn out in an “overarching plot” sense, the individual chapters would feel better and more importantly there’d be more time to expand on characters and events happening.

In short, while Scarlet’s character does has flaws (/insert bad pun) the bigger issue is more in the Living Story’s development rather than Scarlet’s character herself.

Konig I think we are talking about the same thing. Without suffering, we won’t know how Scarlet would have reacted. And so we won’t know her flaws.

I agree that it just comes down to a lack of depth at the end. Her whole backstory just shows how “flawless” she was in everything.

What really doesn’t sit well with me is EVERYONE she met in the past LIKED her. They all cannot wait to be her mentor and teach her stuff. Seriously? Even Angelina Jolie (awesome mother, great actress, love to donate and volunteer) has enemies and people who don’t like her.

And for someone as “smart” and “show off” as Scarlet, how in the world is NO ONE jealous of her? When she was in Asura land, that whole class should be burning her homework behind her back and picking on her. They should be banging at her door every single night to distract her sleep. etc.

Suffering is not the same as failure. Not even close. And failures isn’t exactly required for depth either, let alone to prevent Sue-dom, which is the complete opposite of what you claimed.

CHIPS.6018:

Konig I think we are talking about the same thing. Without suffering, we won’t know how Scarlet would have reacted. And so we won’t know her flaws.

I agree that it just comes down to a lack of depth at the end. Her whole backstory just shows how “flawless” she was in everything.

What really doesn’t sit well with me is EVERYONE she met in the past LIKED her. They all cannot wait to be her mentor and teach her stuff. Seriously? Even Angelina Jolie (awesome mother, great actress, love to donate and volunteer) has enemies and people who don’t like her.

There’s degrees. People who like her would want to mentor her. People who don’t like her don’t get mentioned for obvious reasons. People don’t usually burn down people they don’t like as you may think. If they ignored Scarlet, as I do with people I don’t like, they wouldn’t be part of the story.

tl;dr there’s a huge difference between not liking someone and hating someone. You don’t seem to grasp that.

And for someone as “smart” and “show off” as Scarlet, how in the world is NO ONE jealous of her? When she was in Asura land, that whole class should be burning her homework behind her back and picking on her. They should be banging at her door every single night to distract her sleep. etc.

No idea what asura land looks like, but in Europe, that behaviour isn’t nearly as common as it is in Hollywood movies.

You don’t like her. Others do. Same goes for Trahearne. No amounts of text is going to change your or my opinion. We can, at best, agree to disagree.

marnick.4305:

CHIPS.6018:

Konig I think we are talking about the same thing. Without suffering, we won’t know how Scarlet would have reacted. And so we won’t know her flaws.

I agree that it just comes down to a lack of depth at the end. Her whole backstory just shows how “flawless” she was in everything.

What really doesn’t sit well with me is EVERYONE she met in the past LIKED her. They all cannot wait to be her mentor and teach her stuff. Seriously? Even Angelina Jolie (awesome mother, great actress, love to donate and volunteer) has enemies and people who don’t like her.

There’s degrees. People who like her would want to mentor her. People who don’t like her don’t get mentioned for obvious reasons. People don’t usually burn down people they don’t like as you may think. If they ignored Scarlet, as I do with people I don’t like, they wouldn’t be part of the story.

tl;dr there’s a huge difference between not liking someone and hating someone. You don’t seem to grasp that.

And for someone as “smart” and “show off” as Scarlet, how in the world is NO ONE jealous of her? When she was in Asura land, that whole class should be burning her homework behind her back and picking on her. They should be banging at her door every single night to distract her sleep. etc.

No idea what asura land looks like, but in Europe, that behaviour isn’t nearly as common as it is in Hollywood movies.

You don’t like her. Others do. Same goes for Trahearne. No amounts of text is going to change your or my opinion. We can, at best, agree to disagree.

If we see bullying in real life, why can’t Scarlet be bullied? She is a huge show off and pretty much asking to be bullied. I won’t feel sorry for her because she would have deserved it.

You children have no idea how monsters are made…

you don’t make them with checklists.

You do not need to suffer to be a good villain.

Scarlet possesses an ideology, a way of looking at life from birth. By being a Sylvari, she’s essentially embodying a base mode of traits. She didn’t have suffering in her childhood, but she did have a system apart from what she herself found right. She does not conform to authority, which is more common, and instead rebels, ignoring the teachings of the tree and believing her “might is right” approach to be the proper way of things.

She improves her base capabilities through study in Rata Sum, though the idea of her always being the best in her classes is sketchy at best. Like a true villain, she exhausted her environment of resources, then dumped it, moving on to new plans.

CHIPS.6018:

If we see bullying in real life, why can’t Scarlet be bullied? She is a huge show off and pretty much asking to be bullied. I won’t feel sorry for her because she would have deserved it.

I’ve been bullied back in the day and I’d like to make two statements about that:
1/ You are way out of line. No one ever deserves being bullied. It’s one of the worst things to happen to a kid.

2/ I am so happy I didn’t have to endure the level of bullying you seem so fond of. Europe sure is a bit more civilized than Hollywood movies.

3/ If you see bullying in real life, I strongly suggest helping the bullied kid out. That’s the human thing to do. You’re a human, right?

The OP went on for a very long time to describe a very simple problem:

Scarlet has no apparent motivation or justification for her actions.

That’s a problem because it means she’s pretty boring – players don’t know why she’s doing what she’s doing, just that she is – so she is more like a natural disaster than a villain – a force of nature, not a person – and forces of nature are interesting only in their consequences. So we’ve gone from a boring Sylvari good guy dominating the game (Trahearne), to a boring Sylvari bad guy (Scarlet). I mean, Sylvari are my favourite race, but come on ArenaNet, this is getting predictable.

Supposedly she has some kind of philosophy, but it seems to be pretty inconsistent, and for the level of extreme violence and damage she’s causing, it seems fairly weak and inconsequential, and she acts in a very light-hearted way that really undermines the idea that she’s dedicated to a philosophy.

So there’s no emotional connection with her – you don’t hate her because she believes in evil, because what she believes in is pretty vague and middle-ground (“What turns a man’s heart to neutral?”), but this is inexplicably accompanied by her invading zones and having two giant, ultra-mobile armies to back her up (even though they seem to get little/nothing out of the deal).

Given that the failings are more or less identical to Trahearne, I kind of wonder if ArenaNet’s lead writers need sit down and think about what they’ve done for a while.

EDIT – The reason that “bad things happened to X” works well as a villain motivation is twofold – firstly it’s ultra-rare in real-life for someone to be evil unless they were mistreated severely OR were utterly spoiled/pampered to the point where they are disconnected from humanity as a whole – so it feels “correct”. Second-off, it’s easy to emotionally relate to – all of us have been through bad stuff, and almost all of us have rejected evil as an option for dealing with it – but probably considered it, if not seriously. So you can say “Well something like that happened to me but I didn’t invade a zone with clockwork men because of it!”

What we have here is the “I decided to be evil”, or so it seems, which is vanishingly rare in real life, and not very interesting or easy to relate to.

I will say one thing – it’s better than WoW. In WoW there is only one reason anyone ever turns evil:

MAGIC. Pretty much every single character in WoW who is evil, is evil because magic made him/her evil.

Hopefully we don’t see too much of that in GW2, but I am still kind of afraid, given Scarlet’s apparent desire to “burn the world” that we will find she is merely an agent for the Destroyers and has been “made evil” by them.

Scarlet didn’t like the system that the sylvari had to go through;

((in the short story, it’s said she saw the life of a sylvari, and she rejected it—
Part of the story here for those who are lazy:
Disappointment soured Ceara’s fascination. Was this it, then? Were the lives of all sylvari so easily encapsulated? Birth, travel, experience, death, all played out under the dictates and philosophies of the godlike entity that created them?
She refused to accept that. Everything she had learned said that no system, no matter how complex, can perpetuate itself indefinitely. Those that did not evolve inevitably failed.))

Sooo something in her head snapped and she decided to go wreak havoc.. since being born a sylvari forced into a lifestyle like that wasn’t enough for her.

….-coughs- That’s how I view her motives, anyways. x_x;;

Without the Pale Tree, the Sylvari will literally go extinct. Unless Scarlet somehow turn into a new Pale Tree herself, there is no solution.

Wait a minute. Twilight Arbor has a Nightmare Tree. Oh I get it now…

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Nightmare_Tree

Dwayna a Lyssa sound like Mary Sues to me. Anet should get rid of them.

Eurhetemec.9052:

The OP went on for a very long time to describe a very simple problem:

Scarlet has no apparent motivation or justification for her actions.

That’s a problem because it means she’s pretty boring – players don’t know why she’s doing what she’s doing, just that she is – so she is more like a natural disaster than a villain – a force of nature, not a person – and forces of nature are interesting only in their consequences. So we’ve gone from a boring Sylvari good guy dominating the game (Trahearne), to a boring Sylvari bad guy (Scarlet). I mean, Sylvari are my favourite race, but come on ArenaNet, this is getting predictable.

Supposedly she has some kind of philosophy, but it seems to be pretty inconsistent, and for the level of extreme violence and damage she’s causing, it seems fairly weak and inconsequential, and she acts in a very light-hearted way that really undermines the idea that she’s dedicated to a philosophy.

So there’s no emotional connection with her – you don’t hate her because she believes in evil, because what she believes in is pretty vague and middle-ground (“What turns a man’s heart to neutral?”), but this is inexplicably accompanied by her invading zones and having two giant, ultra-mobile armies to back her up (even though they seem to get little/nothing out of the deal).

Given that the failings are more or less identical to Trahearne, I kind of wonder if ArenaNet’s lead writers need sit down and think about what they’ve done for a while.

EDIT – The reason that “bad things happened to X” works well as a villain motivation is twofold – firstly it’s ultra-rare in real-life for someone to be evil unless they were mistreated severely OR were utterly spoiled/pampered to the point where they are disconnected from humanity as a whole – so it feels “correct”. Second-off, it’s easy to emotionally relate to – all of us have been through bad stuff, and almost all of us have rejected evil as an option for dealing with it – but probably considered it, if not seriously. So you can say “Well something like that happened to me but I didn’t invade a zone with clockwork men because of it!”

What we have here is the “I decided to be evil”, or so it seems, which is vanishingly rare in real life, and not very interesting or easy to relate to.

I will say one thing – it’s better than WoW. In WoW there is only one reason anyone ever turns evil:

MAGIC. Pretty much every single character in WoW who is evil, is evil because magic made him/her evil.

Hopefully we don’t see too much of that in GW2, but I am still kind of afraid, given Scarlet’s apparent desire to “burn the world” that we will find she is merely an agent for the Destroyers and has been “made evil” by them.

There’s some good analysis here. Scarlet is definitely lacking a clear motivation for her actions.

This “she doesn’t have any flaws” argument is frustrating to read because flaws don’t magically make a character well-written or not. It’s very literary criticism 101, and it’s completely irrelevant. This is especially true when villains are first introduced in genre’s such as this. They are made to be very powerful and often nearly unstoppable in order to press their threat to the heroes.

Scarlet’s flaw, however, is plainly obvious. It’s arrogance. She underestimates her opponents and is so far “gone” that she can’t understand them. It’s a common trope for this type of villain and not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, for a video game villain, Scarlet, so far, is a novelty that many here don’t seem appreciate.

I believe there remains a lot of potential in Scarlet. In the meantime, she’s an entertaining and flamboyant villain. So if even if the plot doesn’t make much sense, you can still enjoy the ride.