while i will concede that there is very little that bioware could do/have done to make me like him, what would have made scourge endlessly less intolerable in his return, at least for me, is if bioware had managed to find some other mysterious route to show Him Feeling An Emotion outside of ‘being a pissbaby’ and ‘(still) horny on main for the jk’
like. we already know from vanilla he is angery and violent. that has been his characterisation since he showed up in dk’s profic, never mind in vanilla. oh, there’s that one conversation his fans love to quote where he waxes about not being able to remember the colour of his first love’s eyes or someshit but we don’t know anything about this hypothetical love other than the fact they hypothetically existed (and for that matter if they even existed, or if he’s just a 300 year old incel), and at no other stage does he show signs of emotions other than variations on Big Mad
and while it’s not exactly out of character for bioware to refuse to give their characters actual development and growth, it’s still irritating, not least because of the way bioware fandom keeps tripping over themselves to pat bioware on the back for ‘great characters’
but before this becomes a general bioware gripe,
‘so appo what would you have done exactly’ idk man! the kira n scourge debacle is Mandatory story rather than a sidequest so there’s no reason the rest of the cast and the storylines can’t get woven in somehow.
maybe republic side, scourge gets strongarmed into helping distribute supplies to the refugees when general fish and gnost-dural rock up, and he’s grumbling at first about mollycoddling them but overhears how grateful they are or finds a story about how they lost their homeworld a little too #relateable and surprise bitch, you have emotions now remember
maybe there’s an alliance open mic night kira drags him to in the name of ‘if i have to suffer so do you’ and he ends up laughing his ass off at even the most terrible jokes because holy shit things are?? funny??? humour????
it’s a giant cliché but perhaps he just?? goes for a walk one evening after a long day of getting nowhere to clear his head, and [quest justification] kira has Concerns because he’s gone longer than usual, so the player is sent to find him and they stumble over him just. watching the sunset, overwhelmed by the ephemeral beauty of life - not for the first time, no, but it just all still feels so new after three centuries of nothing he can’t help but sit and (for all it shames him to admit this - and that, the player can tell him, later, is the toxicity of sith teachings talking) weep
hell maybe if they are both unromanced, he can be found clumsily trying to flirt with lana banana because, well, she’s a ds sith who left the empire, he’s a ds sith who left the empire, and wow she’s pretty how did i never notice how pretty people are?? [disgusted kira noises]
show him finding?? joy?? and sadness??? and struggling with them??? because for the first time in as long as he can remember he can feel something other than anger and loneliness and what do i even do with all these emotions?????
but instead we just get a Standard Issue Star Wars Pissbaby which is all the worse because unlike anakin and kaleron at least in tfa he’s also being presented as an improvement on when he wasn’t a pissbaby, both because he ‘feels emotions now’ and because he’s romanceable now and nothing quite says hot like an angry pissbaby destroying other people’s belongings in a fit of rage am i right