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loveandlegacy · 24 days ago

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nothing ever stays dead: part i

jinx, viktor, death, and rebirth

tumblr is forcing me to break this up into multiple parts because there's a limit to the number of images you can have in a single post 💀. find part ii here. also if you find a zillion typos in these.....no you didn't

anyway.... onward to:

i don't think this is an especially novel take to say that viktor functions as a kind of death-symbol in the story of arcane, but what i do think is neat, and what i haven't seen often discussed is the way that arcane positions jinx and viktor together as parallel symbols of death and rebirth.

i made a kind of joke post about it, and about how i think these parallels seem like they're going to get reinforced in season 2, but i started this essay even before the s2 trailers dropped and i wanted to spend some time trying to be a little more rigorous about where i think these parallels emerge.

to start, it’s interesting to me that jinx and viktor are both native to the undercity but operate separately in piltover and zaun for all of season 1. subsequently, their respective symbolisms run side by side throughout the story only really directly intersect/intertwine (kinda) in ep 5, everybody wants to be my enemy.

in the episode, we get a the montage sequence of pressure points where various characters have to deal with ruptures or fractures in their self-concepts or their planned trajectories. a moment with jinx sets this montage off, setting the stage for the death/rebirth themes.

jinx goes through a figurative rebirth in a pseudo-baptism - which is followed by a fade-to-black and then really abrupt return to reality with the shimmer bubbles. we already know shimmer is a transformative substance and that it will play a part in the much more violent and direct near-death-to-rebirth pipeline for jinx later in the story. it’s an interesting pattern of foreshadowing for jinx all on its own.

but! rather than having her arc proceed alone on that trajectory, the moment braids with viktor’s a few scenes later, in the same montage. where jinx has a ritual moment of death-rebirth, viktor’s character ‘rupture' is his very literal post-brush-with-death awakening.

they are both somewhat consumed by darkness in these moments. jinx literally disappears into it, but viktor also is only half-visible bc of how the light falls on him in this shot in the hospital room. both characters dissolve into a veil of something unknowable to us, the living audience.

in this way, these shots unify them in their nearness to death. our last glimpse of jinx as she disappears under the water is an overhead closeup shot, and then a few scenes later, our first sight of viktor in the hospital bed is also an overhead wide shot, with that camera eventually pulling into a tight closeup of just his face.

viktor’s for-real brush with death changes the trajectory of his life while jinx undergoes her symbolic death and rebirth, and we see them as supine figures sinking down into these roles that are shrouded by darkness.

to drive their matching paths home, as many other people have already pointed out, the cut immediately following viktor's scene and the thing that breaks us out of the montage altogether is a shot of the death and magician cards with jinx's little criss-cross symbol in the hands of the magician.

episode 5 is significant in how closely it positions jinx and viktor to each other. they never interact over the course of the season and we don’t even really have evidence that either one of them knows who the other is. at most, they have access to fragments of each other — jinx has a hexgem, viktor helps dismantle one of jinx’s bombs.

but their matched symbolism actually pops up everywhere.

following enemy - but not following the actual temporal progression of events in-world, which is interesting - more parallels between their stories emerge. viktor's journey with life and death is always a few steps ahead of jinx's, but their paths are tied together through a two specific devices: physical location and bodily transformation.

physical location

maybe the first thing condemning them to this trajectory is the fact that they are the only two characters aside from silco himself who have direct interactions with singed. out of the entire cast, singed is arguably the most visually and narratively underworld-coded character in the entire series. we never see him 'above' ground, and the only time we ever glimpse him in natural sunlight is in his cove, where the shot composition presents the location as a place physically sunken into the earth and also vignetted in heavy shadow, creating a visual border of darkness that breaks the area off from the rest of the world.

just as jinx and viktor were disappearing into shadow in episode 5, singed's crater-world emerges from shadow in our first glimpse of it in episode 6.

his character design also leans pretty heavily on death-imagery. before jinx accidentally burns silco's first shimmer production pipeline to the ground and also fries singed Severely, the silhouette for singed’s face emphasizes the structure of his skull more than any other character's. yeah he's maybe somewhat emaciated, but on a design level he also just has a Death Face (a skull) with very little to soften it.

with singed set up as the steward of some under-other-world, his home functions as the physical location where the boundary between life and death is thinnest.

in the chronological sequence of events — but presented non-chronologically in the story — child-viktor’s first encounter with singed requires him to take a journey that follows the logic of a katabasis through the visual language of the camera.

in episode 6, viktor loses his little boat. to recover it, he has to chase it by first entering a tunnel that leads deeper underground (low camera angle; he's traveling downwards towards us, the audience, but also into the earth). for a moment, the implication is that neither we nor viktor can see his boat. as the scene unfolds, we the viewers then have to pass through darkness (!) before the boat becomes visible again in a place that's distinctly different from the site where viktor fell: a slow-moving stream adorned with preternatural plant life.

and all this for the wayward little boat to lead viktor directly to singed and his underground other-world, teeming as it is with the raw materials used to manufacture shimmer.

in mythology, a katabasis is the journey a hero takes into the underworld. the word is greek in origin but the process is not unique to greek myth and, depending on the story, the hero undertakes the journey for any number of reasons. regardless of the origin of any given katabasis myth, the notable point is that the process of going to the world of the dead usually changes the hero in some way that isn't possible by any means other than putting themselves in proximity to death.

in viktor's case, the most comparable myths are odysseus, who travels to the border of the underworld to receive knowledge and prophetic warnings from the dead, and odin, who kills himself as a ritual sacrifice and, in his 9 days of death, receives prophetic visions and various supernatural abilities that he manifests once he returns to the living world.

viktor isn't an epic hero in the same way as odin or odysseus, but his journey through darkness — which episode 5 established as a kind of occluding veil between the living and the dead — follows the logic of a katabasis. following his boat takes him to a specific location: singed's underworld. there, he unhappily gains knowledge about shimmer and its nearly necromantic properties that, at that point in the story, only singed seems to be aware of.

on a literal level, viktor stands close to death through rio, whose life singed is trying to save. but he's close to death on a symbolic level in singed's domain, whose visual presentation situates it as both underground and also somewhat detached from the rest of the undercity.

singed's home is even circumscribed by water! a parallel to greek myth in which water plays a crucial role in underworld's geography; the souls of the dead and the epic heroes who travel deeper into the underworld must cross the river styx — ferried there by charon just as viktor's little clockwork boat ferried him to singed's doorstep.

so viktor's childhood descent exposes him to knowledge that he can't fully grasp.

at least not until much later in life when he makes his second katabasis in which he claims to understand the knowledge singed provided to his younger self and also gains new insight into both shimmer and the nature of the hexcore that, according to the broader story, no one but singed can provide.

in between these two descents, jinx is born (figuratively, as jinx; maybe literally also as powder) and undergoes her baptism at silco's hands.

baptism isn't the same thing as katabasis, but some denominations in christianity position it as a necessary step in the process of rebirth for believers, allowing them to shed the polluted self of their past (sinful) life and be born anew, incorporated into the spirit of christ. like greek katabasis in particular, baptism allows the believer to be reborn and therefore changed without necessarily requiring a physical death first. in symbolic parallel to the greek underworld, baptism requires a 'passage' through water for the rebirth and transformation to take place.

the baptism in arcane obviously has nothing to do with christianity or religious impulses, but it does shroud jinx in a specific kind of death-aura in the same way that viktor's twinned descents do for him. silco even sets this symbolism up for us when he tells jinx directly that she has to 'let powder die' after he describes how he was born anew after vander attempted to kill him.

as mentioned earlier, even though the unfolding narrative initially shows us viktor's first katabasis after we’ve seen jinx's baptism, he undertakes his journey long before jinx is baptized in the in-world chronology. his actual almost-death chronologically happens after his first katabasis. following this logic, the story makes a point: a symbolic proximity to death precedes and preordains a literal one.

viktor makes his first descent as a child. then, as an adult, his illness leaves him coughing up blood in his lab and shatters his life with a terminal prognosis. after his figurative brush with death, he receives an actual death sentence. jinx's story follows a similar pattern. her baptism provides her with the symbolic death-and-rebirth cycle, but three episodes later, in oil and water (ep 8), we find that her confrontation with ekko has left her close to actual physical death — and brings her into singed’s domain aka the specific physical location where life and death bleed most into each other.

in this specific place, jinx who is otherwise a very physically dynamic character, is sapped of all strength. she’s semi-lucid on a vivisection an examination table. the camera positions her like a person entombed. when we see her face, she's presented in a close up and on her back horizontally in the frame, like we, the audience, are laying next to her. parallel to her, we’re in a position of equal (minimal) power.

but when we see what jinx sees, it is always from below. the avatars of vi and powder stand above her, positioned at first outside of this underworld delirium and in an electric-red world. the implicit land of the living is not only above jinx and out of her reach, but also too garish, loud, and terrifying for someone whose vitality is slipping away.

caitlyn/singed also loom over jinx, with the camera sitting low, looking up at them.

obviously this is in part because jinx is tied to a table, but the framing tells us more than that. the living stand somewhere above the dying. the living possess a kind of energy that the dying lack; they can move while the dead can only watch.

jinx is helpless, stuck in the location that the story has synonymized with the underworld, becoming both a corpse and something like a ghost, while the living are able to glide through and interact with the world effortlessly.

but this near-death isn't permanent. as silco says: she won't die, doctor. she can’t. and it's true. jinx’s baptism was her katabasis — a symbolic promise of what eventually unfolds in singed’s gloomy underworld. when she almost dies for real, his treatment rebirths her, painfully and dramatically, and transforms her. (<- onward to part ii)

#viktor #jinx #arcane #analysis #lol i'm always like. this'll be fast and then i write the longest stupid thing in the world #rips to me but thank you if you read it

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