Trigger Scent is the equivalent of kryptonite for Laura. And the way it was handled in here is literally the most infuriating thing that could possibly have been done (speaking as an X-23 fan) short of having her just randomly kill someone. It is a highly advanced chemical compound specifically designed to work with her DNA, to produce a very specific behavior. It's also a top-secret compound, because Laura was designed to be a weapon to be used by high-ball bidders, and if everyone knew the secret to controlling her there would have been no market. So very few people should even know it exists, and there's zero feasibility to the idea that anyone could manufacture their own. Even if they could, it would require having access to Laura's genetic map, and it would take years. What Hopeless did here is as stupid as if a writer had one of Superman's joke villains, who previously knew nothing about Krypton (nevermind Kryptonite), and who did not even have the original Kryptonite to study and work from, magically concoct his own fake Kryptonite which was just as effective against Superman.
Seriously: Arcade, who shouldn't have even known about the Weapon X program, definitely shouldn't have known about Trigger Scent. And even if he knew about it, he shouldn't have been able to make it without at the very least having a formula or a sample of the real stuff to work off of.
Could you imagine if someone wrote a Superman story and said, "well, I know that we need Kryptonite here to weaken him, but Krypton is gone, and the fragments are hard to come by, and most normal people don't even know about that stuff…so I'm just going to have this guy make his own Kryptonite (nevermind how he knew to try), and even though he has no model for the chemical composition of that substance to emulate, he'll just fudge it. Oh, he'll also be the first guy to ever try that, and he'll do it super-successfully, even joke about how easy it was to create Superman's only weakness with a high school chemistry kit he ordered on Amazon."
Arcade should absolutely, under no circumstances, have been able to manufacture TS. It has been a highly-prized compound on the black market; people have killed and died to acquire a small vial of it, that's how rare it is. And seeing as X-23 was marketed to the most powerful and wealthy crime bosses in the world, Hopeless is asking us to believe that Arcade managed to "easily" (considering his "two weeks" remark) whip up something which no other evil genius in the world was ever able to.
Honestly, had Arcade just said he "had a source" or "knew someone" or had "friends in low places," I'd have been fine with it. I accept that he could have gotten his hands on some. But making it? That's too convenient.
And it would be bad enough if Hopeless had just done that, but it's the reason for doing it that makes it all the more infuriating: to either make Laura kill, or make the other kids unable to trust her/see her as a threat. The fact that he could not find a canon-respecting way to do that, and had to completely break the rules of her entire character history (seriously, TS is supposed to be her only real weakness, it can't just materialize) in order to make her fit into his story -- that is the infuriating part.
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