>>150208227
>"the Collector is just a sad little kid who wants friends"
I feel like the biggest missed opportunity here wasn't his motivation. Him being lonely is fine.
The mistake was not delving into just how damaged the kid would be after he was treated so badly, and thus how unstable his behavior would be to reflect that.
Collector got betrayed by basically every family he ever had. His kin lied to him and used him to help them commit genocide against his friends. The Titan Trappers went against everything he believed in. Papa Titan imprisoned him despite being innocent. Belos stabbed him in the back and twisted the knife after centuries of supposed friendship.
The kid would have extreme trust + abandonment issues, severe paranoia, nightmares, claustrophobia, etc
A child coping with a history of abuse and neglect by drowning themself in an escapist fantasy of games/distractions/make-believe would have been a really dark and complicated antagonist.
Instead, they used his background as an alien combined with his lack of understanding on how mortals work as the crux of his villainous behavior.