I feel like the villains weren’t awful (yes the rest of the writing was awful) but gearbox didn’t really commit to the bit hard enough. At the start of the game they were clearly being set up as vapid streamer culture twins but it never really escalated beyond that, instead of ticktock villains we just got villains who happen to use ticktock. It was like if upon reaching the city in BL2 Handsome Jack just continued being a corrupt CEO with a penchant for robots and didn’t spiral all the way into megolomania.
Good idea bad execution, if it had escalated to raiding a warehouse full of people strapped into vr goggle to up their view numbers and destroying a crowdfunded giant laser to carve their faces on the moon then they could have made for really good villains. Instead we got stale memes, also the final boss fight was somehow worse than BL1.
