I think it's really peculiar to me that when discussing Artificer as a character, people always dictate their analysis based on the most violent possible route, or with violence as the default. I think it's fine to base character analysis around Arti's usurpation of the scavenger chieftain and the violence necessary to get to that point, it's definitely really interesting, but people usually, actively preclude the ascension ending and its implications from discussion, whether they realize it or not.
"Artificer wouldn't do that, they're too violent, they're too hateful, they would never let go of their grudge with the scavengers" Consider that the narrative of the game supports Artificer having varying relationships with violence, karma, and even the scavenger population. The ascension ending is once that necessitates letting go of the ultimate goal of killing the scavenger Chieftain; you can't have both because killing the chieftain locks you out of ascending, and vice versa. The way the scavengers are programmed, they will always be violent towards you regardless of your own actions, even if you have maximum reputation with them.
One of the most interesting aspects of Artificer's campaign in the first place is that you're forced into violence, no matter how hard you to avoid it. It doesn't matter if you try to play peacefully, you are forced to defend yourself. From a narrative standpoint, that to me represents a cycle of violence that Artificer can't break regardless of whether or not they care to continue it. It is possible to interpret Artificer's campaign such that the threat they pose to the Scavengers has far outsized their actual desire to continue violence on the scavengers, so all they can do is defend themself, which in turn galvanizes the scavengers further. It's a cycle! It ties thematically to Rain World's theme of cycles! And how do you escape the cycle except by understanding it and leaving it behind? Represented of course by the journey of collecting karma. Even more, there are implications made by the fact that ascension is actually impossible because of the state of Artificer's karma, or the fact that you need a dead scavenger to fool the guardians (which you don't need to kill a scavenger to get). All this is interesting nuance and implications that get lost if we assume that Artificer can only ever want violence.
I'm bringing this up because I always see discourse around how characters would act and interact, and Artificer discussion specifically gets this really bugged out disjoint where people will say, "Well this interaction doesn't make sense because Artificer would canonically do x and I headcanon that another character would do y," simultaneously restricting Artificer to only one reading of one part of the campaign while allowing headcanons to define whichever other character is in the discussion. To me, it's a really annoying form of cherrypicking. If you're discussing headcanons, that's fine, and textual analysis also must involve some degree of interpretation, but you can't say "X character wouldn't get along with Artificer because I imagine that they like Scavengers and it makes no sense that Artificer would tolerate being around them" while Hunter, Rivulet, and Spearmaster all start with negative Scavenger reputation and
Artificer has that entire other ending that I've been talking about, the one that has to do with trying to leave behind the cycle of violence. Half the analysis is ignoring half of Artificer's text, and the other half is making stuff up that's literally counter to the text and mechanics of the game. Let's at least acknowledge when we're playing with dolls instead of trying to make a halfway appeal to canonicity.
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