Ava (Borderlands 3)

Ava is one of the main supporting characters in Borderlands 3, she's a young girl who lives on the planet of Athenas, where's she's learning and preparing to become a Siren under the apprenticeship of Maya.

Ava is currently the "scrappy" of the Borderlands fanbase, suppressing Davis Pickle as one of the most annoying and most hated characters in the franchise. Some people hoped that a future DLC will make her into a better character, while many others consider her a "creator's pet" and desires to have her killed off as soon as possible.

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR BORDERLANDS 3 BELOW!

Why She Sucks

 * 1) First of all, Ava’s design is not at all appealing, she’s supposed to be a child, but ended up looking more like an adult woman’s head stuck on a child’s body.
 * 2) Ava’s personality is also rather obnoxious, her high pitched voice combined with her angsty, passive-aggressive and overall insufferable tone makes it grating just to hear her speak.
 * 3) She’s best described as a “Scrappy Do”, a character that’s brash, argumentative, naive, and seemingly completely unaware of how her behaviour puts themselves and everyone around them in danger. Resulting in her being a constant danger to others by forcing others like Maya and you, the vault hunter, to try to save her from threats she himself is provoking but wholly unable to deal with herself.
 * 4) * Ava is exactly all of that, she’s bratty, hyperactive, naive, self-centered and reckless. She frequently disobeys the orders of her mentor Maya and often lets her curiosity gets the better of her. Eventually, Ava’s arrogance and poor decision making resulted in her getting captured by the Calypso twins, forcing Maya to sacrifice herself to save Ava. The fact that Ava got Maya, one of the most popular characters of Borderlands 2, killed, pissed off many fans of the franchise.
 * 5) Another annoying aspect of Ava is that she’s incapable of taking responsibility. She tried to blame Maya’s death on Lilith and the vault hunters despite the fact that it’s her own recklessness and disobedience that lead to the circumstances, and somehow the game takes her side.
 * 6) While Tiny Tina, a somewhat similar character from Borderlands 2, can come off as grating to some players. Tina only plays a small part in the main storyline so even the players who dislike her can simply avoid interacting with her after her part was played. Ava is an important part of Borderlands 3’s story, meaning that those who loath her had no choice but to deal with her irritating presence, A LOT.
 * 7) While Claptrap, a character who's just as loud, incompetent and annoying as Ava at times, is also a scrappy. He's more of a woobie, a character whom viewers show sympathy to, because he's condemned by shoddy programming and is stuck as an irritant even though he's trying to help most of the times. And also Claptrap does get what's coming at him sometimes. Ava was also supposed to be a woobie but her persistently obnoxious nature and lack of consequences to her actions made her unsympathetic in whole.
 * 8) Overall, Ava’s character appears to have no purpose but to become Maya’s successor. Having such an annoying character to inherit Maya’s legacy despite being the one who’s partially responsible for her death is like spitting on Maya’s grave. Reddit user ironangel2k3 went on to point out that removing Ava from Borderlands 3’s story loses nothing and may actually make the story better.
 * 9) Near the end of Borderlands 3’s campaign, Lilith hands over her position as the commander of the Crimson Raiders to Ava for no apparent reason, despite the fact that far more experienced people like Tannis or Ellie are around and that Ava caused nothing but trouble for the Raiders and nearly every single decision she made was a mistake. This is what Literature Devil would have described as a “Mary Sue moment”. The fact that Ava’s eventually rewarded for all of her faults only made players resent her even more.

