User blog comment:King Flurry51/Mal and Scarlett:analyzis of their values and vices as villains/@comment-24971793-20140821131423

Scott was a sociopath (his bio states that his favorite memory from childhood was the first time he caused an argument between his parents), so he thrives on drama. In All Stars his evilness get's toned down significantly but in ROTI the cruelty interested him more then the money, leading him to sabotage his own team way too often which is a really dumb thing to do. And Heather was a mean girl outside the competition as well, in her videocall from home exclusive clip we can see her parents celebrating that she's gone. When she read Gwen's diary it didn't help her in the competition, it even hindered her. So some of her actions weren't strategic, just evil for the sake of being evil. Even Alejandro made some in-game mistakes because his urge to take revenge was too big.

So I dissagree that the other "villains" where only cruel for the sake of the competition. Mal and Scarlett are definitely different in that they are the first cartoonish supervillains. The other ones where all somewhat based on realistic stereotypes, while Mal and Scarlett are pure cartoon villains. Out for world domination ;)

I agree about Mal, the idea was good but it needed more time to develop. He was simply overhyped and his actions got exaggerated. They made everything he did and said seem like it was something extremely intense while he never did anything intense. Which somewhat turned the whole thing into a joke IMO. And of course they shouldn't have offensively labelled him with a real life mental condition. Scarlett is a lot better, it helped that she wasn't the main antagonist but rather a well developed gimmick. Unlike with Mal, the show itself doesn't overexaggerate her actions. On the contrary it even downplayed them by showing Chris completely disintrested about her actions. So they balanced it well. From a storyperspective (and some people might be getting annoyed with me, repeating this over and over) Scarlett wasn't an antagonist in Pahkitew (besides episode 10). She's a villain but not an antagonist. Antagonists are placed against protagonists, and Marlett was a supervillain in a season without superheroes. She and Max where comic relief sidecharacters/filler. So that allowed them to take more time to slowly develop on their own, they had a lot more freedom then Mal.

I believe that Scarlett could come back as an antagonist in a next season. Mal.... not so much, he had his chance and blew it. With the immense backlash they got from the audience I'll doubt that they'll ever bring Mike back.