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ganondoodle · 3 months ago

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so with echoes of wisdom .. i havent watched any of the trailers beyond the very first one and the thumbnails/screenshots and what others have said about it-

but with the world inside the rift being called "Welt des Nichts" aka "world of nothing/void" in german ('still' in english, for some reason) and demises title in french being "avatar of nothing" ... yeah my anxiety is shooting through the roof again

(hopefully you can be a little more forgiving for me being anxious/weird about it bc demise is my blorbo)

i had similar worries with totk, that werent proven true thankfully, but the darn book is making it all worse again with all those weird lore things the game doesnt even so much as hint at AND potential retcons- im in for a really rough time huh, not just stress in real life (more in tags.. its alot) but now about my specific hyperfixation from two things even (AND artblock still..)

weird as it may sound, i dont want demise to get more lore, partly bc i dont believe theyd do anything with him that i would like (given their track record) but much more importantly- the fact that he has this little lore about him is precisely one of the reasons why i fell in love with him, i tend to like characters that are neglected by the narrative, and his story being both so flat and already done meant i can be very creative with what i come up with for him without necessarily contradicting anything in canon (which is ... or was a big point of how i wrote destiny's story and lore, working with canon in a way that reframes it all without straight up ignoring it ... but i suppose i urgently need to let go of that and accept i spend alot of time working things that will go to waste :( ) AND not having to worry that there will be more stuff with him that would massively change not only what im writing but also potentially how i feel about him since the game he was briefly in was the oldest chronologically and ended with his death- i didnt expect them to mess with anything that far back and thought theyd just go forward and leave the timeline behind and wouldnt mess with it again, given how botw seemed to be a sort of 'fresh start' that seemingly regarded the past as the past that needs to rest and that the timeline was finally no longer a discussion if everythings unified through botw and one thing going forward

but i suppose i was very wrong with that .__.

right now the only thing that motivates me still is the left over determination and spite to work on my zelda comic, since i have never gotten this far and really want to get something done for once, but i cant lie that im feeling like i should pause all work on it too to wait and see waht the book and the new game will do .. either to determine if i still have the will to keep working on it after those things are out (my love for tloz has been taking alot of hits lately ..) or if i have to change stuff (mostly bc of my lore problem trying to not ignore it ..)

#ganondoodles talks #zelda #ganondoodles rants #sorta #suicide attempt mention in the IRL stuff im talking about in the following tags btw #theres some construction stuff on our house going on #and my father is extremely stressed about it #he used to be very explosive- being silent and then exploding out of nowhere .. probably left me with lasting damage yippie-#but now he much more lets it eat at himself bc hes old and feels bad for the past stuff so now it makes him irritated and depressed #my older brother is the most normal cis straight guy you can imagine and incredibly impatient and bossy (you CANNOT talk with him)#(brother doesnt live in our house)#and while hes helping out hes doing it exactly how my father doesnt like and since you cant talk to the guy (explosive +200) it stresses hi #to the point of my father yesterday saying that “it would have been better if i had just died back in the day”#likely referring to the time when he was drafted for the military against his will and tried to kill himself #which i learned only like .. a year ago- theres so little my parents tell me ....#its like my mother telling me- while my father was in hospital for heart surgery- that she not only almost died back when i was a young tee #and only survived bc of some incredibly unebelievable lucky coincidences (medics on a travel being there that knew what she had-#-while our local doctors said welp- nothing we can do lady AND them beign there with a helicopter and emergency transferring her #to antoher bigger hospital while giving her immediate treatment our local one didnt do- AND at the big one just so happened to have-#-an expert on that illness in the facility when she arrived who was able to narrrowly save her life #BUT ALSO while she was recovering and weak and frail as a dust bunny witnessing someone stealing hospital surplies-#not noticing she was in the room at first (which .. the nurses left her in the nurse room while going on break ... which uhm .. yeah cool)#and if my mother hadnt acted in time like she was fully asleep and the lady stealing stuff beign in hurry- she might have killed her #without my mother being able to fight back bc she could barely even talk (the nurses didnt want to believe her when they got back either)#ANYWAY that comment from my father brough me to tears #and my mom is trying out more ... other medication shes not prescribed in hopes of it helping agaisnt her many pains #but i worry it will interact with the other stuff shes on ...#and i worry so much about both of their mental and physical well being #always trying to be the one to calm them down or help with communication bc that is a big problem in this houesehold #but i myself am also a very much not normal and not medicated shut in who has trouble dealing even with my own feelings

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loveandlegacy · 1 month ago

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nothing ever stays dead: part ii

jinx, viktor, death, and rebirth

(note: this is the second part of a singular essay. i had to split it into two because tumblr caps how many images you can have in a post 😭 part i is here.)

bodily transformation

as foreshadowed in the montage in episode 5, shimmer is the medium through which this resurrection is possible. viktor's first katabasis reinforced this foreshadowing when he emerged in singed's cove of water and flowers. the presence of the proto-shimmer at the boundary of arcane's underworld is in keeping with the cuts of shimmer in the montage in enemy. shimmer creeps close to death and plays a role in extracting organisms from the weird space between being alive and being dead.

viktor's life-and-death-and-life-again journey parallels jinx's progression towards transformation in oil and water. while jinx is getting torture-resurrected, viktor's experiments with shimmer and the hexcore (as guided by singed's suggestions about transformation) have already transmuted his body. in these parallel experiences, a new truth crystallize: proximity to death changes you physically.

oil and water is an episode full of omens and images of death, dying, and the dead. we have mel's flashbacks, ambessa's ominous presence in general, jinx's near-death, viktor killing sky, and jayce killing a child in the shimmer factory all presented to us in under 60 minutes. but only viktor and jinx, by virtue of crossing into the underworld, have undergone physical metamorphoses.

a shift in their character designs is consistent with this. for the most part, other characters in the main cast maintain unchanging designs throughout the events of the story unless they change from children to adults. the major exceptions to this are vander, deckard, singed, sevika, and silco. notably, singed and silco both have critical near-death experiences that are reflected in changes to their actual facial features, both with scarring on their faces and damage to an eye.

in contrast, vander and deckard are the only characters who have dramatic changes to their overall physical build and these changes occur before they die.

shimmer is the engine for their metamorphoses and they both die in fairly short order following this. singed and to a lesser degree silco on the other hand survive ordeals that should have killed them and they do so seemingly without any shimmer-based intervention, at least as far as we’re shown. their survival and vander and deckard's deaths create a set of poles for jinx and viktor to exist between.

singed and silco live but are physically changed by their pretty critical brushes with death — notably on their faces. vander and deckard die despite shimmer altering the entirety of their bodies. jinx and viktor survive their death-encounters, but shimmer is part of that survival, and part of what changes them as much as death itself does. specifically, they undergo both full-body physical changes and changes to their faces, but not as dramatically vander and deckard’s bodies change nor as dramatically as silco and singed’s faces change.

jinx's almost-death and resurrection leaves her ashen and changes her facial features by granting her the glowy pink shimmer-eyes.

this is extra prominent in the recent clip from season 2, where she's so pale she looks almost bloodless.

she also gains some change in actual physical ability. shimmer seems to have made her capable of feats of almost superhuman speed and strength.

meanwhile, shimmer and the hexcore give viktor his transhuman hand and leg, which are defs the most obvious transformations at first glance. but death and the hexcore change his face specifically as well. in episode 6, he says that he can feel his body eroding. by episode 9, his condition has deteriorated so severely, and the hexcore has seemingly sapped him of his vitality, that his face is sunken and hollowed out. his design begins to match how singed looked before he was burned: a skull.

in this way, arcane asserts a pattern for viktor. he’s been changed through his doubled journey into the metaphorical underworld, which gave him transhuman body parts. and he's changed again at the end of the season because, it turns out, surviving a near death experience doesn't mean you're actually very far from death.

his illness has him back in its clutches, maybe in part due to the hexcore's "punishment" for him trying to destroy it in the wake of sky's slaughter. the effect is ominous and carries through to his final scene in the council chambers where the death-mask that has become his face is even more emphasized by the light cast from the blood moon.

it's interesting. even though the change in their designs shares some logic with how singed and silco’s designs change (something about their faces looks different), jinx and viktor’s transformations don’t make them completely resemble their respective parental figures. they have no scarring. they don't look like people who survived any kind of life-threatening physical trauma. they look like people who skipped right from 'alive' to 'something else' — not quite undead, but definitely not part of the world of the living in the way they might have been before.

so….what does all this add up to?

ig i would say that using both characters as avatars, arcane posits something specific about people who cross back and forth between life and death: once you do it, you lose access to life in its completeness. and it seems like this will carry through to season 2.

assuming he survives the bombing (call that two for two in terms of symbolic journeys to the underworld that match literal near-death experiences), viktor is set to become the machine herald. in the lore and by his own admission, he's chasing something outside the boundaries of life as we know it.

he might survive his second passage through near-death, but the double-death and double-resurrection will cement his position in the story as something not-quite alive, or at least not alive the way other people are alive. sky is dead, he’s been changed by the hexcore. he can’t go back to how things were before all this happened even if he wanted to. instead he’s set to become the figurehead of a cult that revolves entirely around shedding the limits of the flesh and all this adds up to several transformations too many. the life he lived in season 1 is just that — life. he’s beyond that now.

and since viktor's life and death and life cycles precede and in some ways predict jinx's, i'm excited to see how her story will take shape against his in season 2. she has less lore for us to rely on, but viktor's doubled resurrections suggest that jinx will have to have a second near-death experience and that her survival will peel her even further away from any attachments she had in life.

it’s hard to make serious predictions based on trailer content alone, especially when we have the precedent that the trailers for arcane are intentionally designed to be misleading, but the presence of multiple revolutionary murals, coupled with the blue-haired inx-es, does at least to me imply that jinx’s eventual hagiography is on the horizon — and this isn’t necessarily a good thing.

despite what she seems to symbolize to the undercity, i actually sincerely doubt that jinx will have any kind of redemption arc in season 2, and i further doubt that her potential saintlike status will permit her to form new personal relationships or to fully heal old wounds with the people she loved once.

after all, there’s a big difference between people loving jinx the symbol and people loving jinx the person, and i think that her status as a symbol confirms that there is no space in the world of the living for jinx the person. she can be one or the other, but not both — especially if, like viktor, she has a second brush with death ie the mechanism by which even living people can be split off from life.

so where does this leave her?

probably not reconciling with vi, unfortunately. the way the trailer is edited, it would seem like jinx and vi eventually repair their relationship enough to join forces against a presumed noxian invasion, but i don’t think it’ll really go down that way.

i think this shot is a misdirect for a lot of reasons, but to keep from writing out into a tangent, i'll highlight the main thing: jinx's scribbles. historically, these scratchy hallucinations appear at their most intense when jinx is in a state of duress.

it's kind of a thin thread to hang on, but their presence in this shot — where jinx has also changed (and presumably cut) her hair — leads me to believe that this moment is a difficult one for her, not an instance of triumph.

it seems more likely to me that at this point in the story, jinx has transformed somehow and no matter how she moves through the world she, like viktor, can't restore any aspect of the life she had before her resurrection(s) because that life belonged to a living girl.

jinx post-near-death-experience (possibly post-two-near-death-experiences) isn’t a congregant of life anymore. she’s something else.

her reconciliation with her sister will either never really come, or won’t be fully realized — by no fault of either of them. that's the tragedy of ghosts right? everything from the past is always there, and always just out of reach.

in their final confrontation in season 1, jinx tells vi that nothing ever stays dead. looking at the evidence laid out here about viktor and jinx herself, this is obviously true, but it’s not a complete statement of how death and resurrection work in arcane.

things may come back from the dead, but death changes a person. jinx can’t un-die even if she also didn’t stay dead. she can’t reconcile with her sister because she’s an avatar of something beyond life, and she won’t be able to participate fully in the new world that her followers are fighting to build.

she may help fight off the noxians, but the future doesn’t belong to her or to viktor, even if they helped unleash the kind of upheaval that would usher in a new era for piltover and zaun.

only the living have the gift of a future.

#can you believe i made myself stop #extreme restraint in that i didn't even MENTION warwick or how jayce and ekko are set up as the obverse avatars of life/futurity #to jinx and viktor #anyway thanks again if you read this #or sorry if you do? idk we're all here to have fun #jinx #viktor #analysis #arcane

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