Unfortunately, for every good, or at least decently fleshed out villainess like Sniper Wolf or Sarah Kerrigan you get a hastily/poorly written one like Edea Kramer, Varesh Ossa, or Scarlet.
Careful. we shouldn’t define female villains by their gender whether as a writer or a reader/viewer/player. For every Loki there is a Darth Maul too.
For that matter, for every Bruce Timm Mr. Freeze there is a Joel Schumacher Mr. Freeze.
The challenge doesn’t change much by gender. It’s largely about motivation. Modern villains are, for whatever reason, rarely allowed to be “just nuts” anymore. (Or even mostly just driven nuts, like Scarlet.) Modern audiences tend to demand thoroughly self justified villains. We have come to expect Joseph Campbell villains: heroes of their own stories.
There are a few exceptions – the most recent Joker and Borderlands’s Handsome Jack come to mind. But they have to be at that level of gleeful evil, and even then it’s hard to say why they still resonated. Maybe you just have to be truly terrifying if you aren’t sympathetic.
That’s my theory about the Scarlet complaints. In my opinion she was a visually great character, voiced by one of the finest voice actors performing today, and I actually found her actions exciting to fight back against. She had a twisted kind of logic and villains that execute plans with discipline are the most frightening. But her story didn’t focus much on her motivation, and the parts that did left a lot of questions unanswered that might have made her more sympathetic. I can see how some might find that unsatisfying.
