Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-35941743-20190724191227/@comment-39854843-20190803193620

73.Anon.52 wrote:

1. She "was" charismatic, and SSS was likely referring to the fact her motivations of her past need fleshing out, which would include her motivations and personality.

2. At this point we don't know why she does things... and that's the problem, fleshing that out could make her much better.

I personally agree that she should just die already if they aren't going to show enough of her history to care, but she still has potential beyond what Adam had around V3. I never found her to be charismatic. To me, charisma is the ability to bend and affect people with your personality, and Cinder is completely incapable of that. She relies on threats and displays of power to bend people to her will. Take Adam, for instance. It wasn't until Cinder beat the living crap out of his men that he was willing to follow her. If she were a charismatic villain, she wouldn't have needed to.

As for her assimilation of Emerald and Mercury, I always hated those scenes because I found them to be forced. Cinder's appeal never struck me, and I never understood why Emerald/Mercury so blithely joined her. My god, if only it were that easy, right? Of course that's just bad writing and forced character decisions, but nevertheless her charm and attractiveness in those scenes were missing. It's as if Miles and Kerry wanted her to be charismatic, but forgot to write her as such.

The problem with fleshing her out and retroactively giving her a personality is that she's too far actualized at this point. She's been in this show for six volumes, and she's been thoroughly sold to us as a one-dimensional psychopath with no capacity for empathy or love. If they start trying to change that, it'll come off as a betrayal of her character and will seem forced. It will do more damage to her character, rather than fix it. The truth is that she's ruined, and can't be mended. They waited too long to flesh her out, and it's just too late to do anything about it.

But, nevertheless, I do think that Miles and Kerry will go the Adam route with her, and I do think she'll die in the near future. They'll give her some backstory, but I don't believe it will be intended to change her as a character. It will just offer some explanation as to why she's so power hungry. But it won't make her a personable character, nor will it justify her monstrous evil. And then she'll die in a poetic and satisfying way, and the show will move on without her. That's what's going to happen, and when it does, I doubt many in the community will complain. It will probably go down as the best narrative decision Miles and Kerry have made since Volume 3.