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I've been spending quite a bit of time on the wiki reading everything there is to read about Scarlet. Obvious spoilers for LWS1 below.
TL;DR: The lore says Scarlet was trying to rebel against Modremoth, nothing she ever does backs this up. Was she just badly written? Did Anet forget? Am I missing something?
As I understand it, Scarlet was a Sylvari that defied her fate at every turn, she severed her connection to the Pale Tree, refused to even hear about her Wylde Hunt etc. She goes out into the world and learns a bunch of things from every Tyrian race, eventually goes into Omadd's machine, learns that Modremoth was the real puppetmaster this entire time, and then...?
It's strange. On one hand every in-game account of what happened to her from that point on seems to imply she just went insane, or was corrupted instantly and started working to wake Mordremoth from the get-go. Why else would you make the molten alliance, whose purpose was to make material strong enough to drill into Ley Lines?
But on the other hand, there's multiple accounts of her clearly stating she wants to screw over both Modremoth and the Pale Tree. Here are excerpts from "What Scarlet Saw", a short story available on the wiki. This is being said pretty much immediately after she stepped out of Omadd's machine:
"My people don’t have to take what we’re given, or be what we were “born to be.” No people do. We can change the rules…well, I can. And I’m going to.”
And:
“I’ve learned so much,” Scarlet continued. “Now I have to put that knowledge to use. An insurmountable challenge is rising, and my people have been called to meet it. We are compelled by our creator to do so.
“But I reject that call. I reject the notion that that I must choose the Dream or be lost to Nightmare. The forces that push us this way or that can be redirected. They can be set against one another to the detriment of both, and now I know how.”
She seems to have had a plan, at some point, to do something about Modremoth and the Pale Tree controlling the Sylvaris. Yet there is zero evidence of that in-game (as far as I can tell). I've seen people mention a message from her to Caithe, saying that some day, Tyria will need her or something. But every time a character runs a diagnosis on Scarlet, it's to say "She looked into Omadd's machine, and instantly became insane, and that's the end of the story".
So... What? Was she just horribly written? I can understand and appreciate that as time went on, Modremoth had more and more influence on her and eventually took over her mind, that's cool. But where is the evidence that she ever worked towards anything except waking up Modremoth?
Again I've seen people draw a lot of conjecture from her actions, like "she acted as a vilain as a last resort to unite Tyria against Modremoth, to prepare them", which would be fine if, again, there was any trace at all that this is what she was trying to do.
This is slightly off-topic but I'm starting to see a pattern with Anet writing mortal vilains (as opposed to immortal). Dragons don't need much justification for their actions because they're "forces of nature" and "they've all gone mad with the void" or whatever, but human characters MUST have vilainous motivation, or else you're just fighting some comic book cartoonesque apathetic regular joe that just felt like being an ultimate vilain for a week. What exactly was Scarlet's vilainous motivation? The game shies away from outright telling you. Same thing for Ankka, mind you. There's this obsession with keeping every action vague and up to interpretation, which to me translates to an unwillingness to commit to a narrative or an agenda for a given character.
Not that I'm a writer by any stretch, but wouldn't it have been cool if Scarlet could have been an ally? Imagine finding out towards the end of the season that she's doing what she's doing to fight a greater evil, you get context as to which alliance was for what, and you even extend a hand, offering to help her, to try to understand her, and she seems receptive until she gets another round of Modremoth talking directly to her, making her fully snap, turning her into the Scarlet we know in LWS1. There she could take what she has already built with her alliances and use it to wake Modremoth up instead.
The depths of Scarlet's madness, and her struggle against Modremoth would have been a lot more impactful if we, as players, had actually been there to experience it firsthand. Like a before/after comparison. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
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