#she doesn't care for whatever is happening to zaun or piltover. there's no difference for her they're all fleshbags that could hurt her.

[godlygivenanxiety]

look, not to be a hater but the whole ekko/jinx alternate universe situation only proves that jinx was only ever loved entirely and completely by silco, that's kinda the point of how tragic jinx really is as a character,

vi either only sees her little sister out of guilt/sense of duty mixed with a desperate need to come back to something or as consequences to her own actions(taking away agency from jinx in the process);

ekko sees her through the eyes of an idealist which is exactly what he is and that's not bad by itself, but it makes her either A Problem or Someone That Needs Saving, that's what's going on in his head after that AU he transported to. he's comparing jinx to powder and he likes powder much better, so he wants jinx to be powder or to reignite the powder in her - basically, he thinks how vi used to think;

isha is a complicated matter because she did show kindness and affection towards jinx that wasn't equal to anyone else's, it was pure and idolizing, she loved what she knew of jinx.

the people of zaun don't love her, not by a long shot. she became a symbol to some(as we can notice in the reunion by vander's statue) and overall the assumption that she would get involved more after her attack and silco's death is a fair one; that doesn't mean they like her,

sevika maintains a connection to jinx through grief and a sense of helplessness along with familiarity, silco's death affected jinx's psyche but it also affected sevika's dream of zaun, they feel left behind by him;

vander... well, he only got to see powder and warwick quite literally just had the memories,

the ONLY character we see that meets her as powder and stays with her as jinx is silco; yes, he isn't a good guy and he does cause the whole separation, he sharpened her edges to make her into a weapon, he lied to her and manipulated her at times, none of these things exclude the fact he does love her so strongly, with zero conditions.

she fucks up in missions, she does as she pleases around zaun, she kills their people, she stabs him in the eye, has psychotic episodes and breakdowns, she kidnaps him, ties him down, SHOOTS HIM, she doubts him and his love, keeps running after the past when he's done everything to strengthen her and she was, at a point, the only thing keeping him from his dream of an independent zaun - none of these perceived sins and flaws made him wish for anyone other than her, as she is.

all silco wanted was to keep her, while everyone else either wants another version of her or none at all. that's the tragic part, even if she suddenly decided to be good, she would feel like a burden for not being entirely like people want her to be.

[moldybonessmell]

Arcane Season 2 Finale Critique

// SPOILERS ARCANE SEASON 2

Disclaimer: This is a wonderful show with amazing animation, character design, representation and more, and me pointing out flaws does not take away from this amazing project. I do not aim to put down this show or work done into creating it. Many people tell how amazing it is, but it's also interesting to analyse what are the cons.

So now, I'm going to go through all the plot points that made me raise my eyebrow...

Caitlyn just taking this high rank status so easily?? I get there doen't seem to be democracy in Piltover political system with a bunch of simply influential people being at rule. Cait nepo baby let's go ig But I can ignore that just for the sake of plot moving, alright

My biggest pet peev about this season is that we were getting hyped up about Zaun and Piltover civil war and Jinx being the leader but this kinda never properly happened huh???

Cait was teased to be a brutal dictator bla bla but she didn't do much?? Just tried to not let Ambessa take full control over the city and that's pretty much it. This one also endged me for no reason at all

Jinx was foreshadowed to lead a riot but we never really got one. What was all the build up for? She's even in the opening with a flag. Like yeah she brought people to fight Vik's zombies but I don't know, this left me confused.

The main fight was against an intruder aka Ambessa with a subplot of Black Rose revenge that was questionable bc who.. cares? (if you don't know LOL lore) AND against a bunch of overpowered zombies.

Like yeah cool we finally did a full circle but it all feels SO RUSHED

Each of these sub-plots should have been a different season, but creators kinda just cut these up and slappped them together and you can feel it.

I love arcane I think it has amazing animation, and character design, and representation, but bro does the plot for 2nd season dissappoint.

It felt like creators tried real hard to not go too dark (with Cait for example not becoming a full-on dictator) so it just feels like i got edged the entire time (and got edged in the bad sense)

By the way, we still don't know what Ambessa did to cause all this drama with The Black Rose, there's still no answer.

Also this whole thing with Maddie. Yeah Ambessa is smart and cunning bla bla bla but making "the other woman" love interest evil just for the sake of it is such an outdated and problematic trope. This "conflict" is as old as fandoms on internet - people hate on a person who's supposedly gets in the way of a main couple, when they're not even evil. Like if not for that one line Maddie didn't do anything bad to Cait and even tried to stop her from intruding Zaun. There were no other signs, it's a plot twist for a shock value and that's it. And it's kinda lame. "I told you so" moment like okay whatever you got a ton of post from people justifiyng their hate of Maddie cool ig (I'm not her fan btw I'm just annoyed at this)

Also, CaitVi instead of talking their feelings out and working on the relationship, they just made Vi say "I don't care you had someone else" and that's it. It's so damn lazy. Like yeah, once again, not enough time ig, but I would rather have them talking it out intead of a sex scene you know.

Also, what the fuck was this sex scene?? We have Vi, who's definitely traumatised from spending time in prison and now she gets locked up again, but instead of showing reaction, we only see her crying for Jinx. So, we counting: first, traumatizing place (sexual violence is pretty common in prisons too, so who tf knows what she could have experienced there), second, she's very distraught about Jinx and in a very vulnerable emotional state. And all this makes the worst fucking possible place and time for sex. Like yeah, we could speculate whether it's Vi's fucked up coping mechanism and whatsoever, but the show itself doesn't show anything related to that, and moreover, it seems like it's supposed to be a long awaited sensual scene. I don't know man, I'm just pissed off.

About Vi's writing in this season. I've touched on that in this post, but will say again. I don't like how the show doesn't really elaborate on Vi's trauma, like ever. We got like one full scene with her in fight club and two short reactions from her, but they were about other people. First breakup, then worrying about Jinx, then, finally, we got her reacting to Vander going mad and then Jinx's death. But in comparisons with other main characters (and Vi is supposed to be in the main cast) we got WHOLE ARCS about their trauma and long elaborate scenes with their mental breakdowns. It's not bad to have characters just to push development of other charas, but Vi wasn't positioned like this in the first season. She's a part of the main cast and helps with rebellions, but doesn't get development for herself this season. The just stands up and goes and does what other characters need her to do (Cait hunting Jinx, Jinx searching Vander and the standing up against Ambessa). I'm dissapointed at her being just a sister and just a love interest.

Other parts we don't know about is Vander and Silco conflict and what actually happened that Vander tried to kill him when they were close friends before.

This is it. This is my subjective view of the Arcane finale, I would like to hear your thoughts about it and maybe some details I could overlook.

[drindrak-art]

[OK so I have a ridiculous amount of Arcane AU ideas thought up. So I'm gonna start posting them.]

AU where the Vander v Silco fight/attempted homiecide/messy divorce happens like a week before the bridge incident. Silco isn't even fully healed when he hears of the peaceful bridge protest going horribly wrong, but he rushes off to see if everyone (cough, Vander, cough) was okay.

And on that bridge he stumbles upon two recently orphaned kids about to be shot by an enforcer. He saves these kids by killing the enforcer with like a scalpel or whatever that he stole off Singed. He then notices the two dead people nearby who look like these kids and despite how cold-hearted he tries to be, his heart wrenches at the sight of the eldest kid just completely breaking down (so much like Vander had all those years ago-)

So he takes these two kids back to Singed's lab, his home-base at the moment. As he walks plans form in his mind, and he notes uncomfortably that most of them centre around manipulating the shit out of these kids.

And yeah he'll do it, but like it takes him maybe six months to get irrevocably attached to these two little demon spawn, and most of those plans are thrown right tf out.

Silco at first manipulates them to hate Piltover with a passion, but he ends up caring for them like his daughters. He's not a good man or father, but he tries his best. The three trauma bond and form a codependency on each other.

They love each other, don't get me wrong, but it's toxic. Their entire relationship is hella unhealthy.

Silco projects himself and the Vander he loved on them a lot, leading to them being different from their canon selves.

Well, Powder ends up much the same just with less psychosis as she doesn't accidentally kill her entire family.

Vi however is different, and not in a good way. Silco twists her good heart into pure hatred for the topside and for Vander + his supporters, and exacerbates her battlelust.

So you have Powder, Silco's youngest daughter and demolitions expert, and Vi, Silco's eldest daughter and right hand. Both can and will fuck you up, and if they fail Silco will not. Everyone in Zaun knows them, and knows to stay out of their way.

Anyway TL;DR it's an AU where instead of Vander taking Vi and Powder from the bridge that day, it's Silco.

Bonus:

lmao just imagine sevika defects from vander, expecting to do something worthwhile at silco's side, and the first thing the man orders her to do is teach Vi how to fight properly.

so sevika is forced to teach this 14 year old how not to fight like a drunken brawler.

but then powder also wants to join in so now sevika has to show a 9 year old how to punch without breaking her fingers.

all while silco watches.

the unsaid threat of if you hurt them too badly i'll eviscerate you hangs over sevika's head like a guillotine.

[notasupernaturalblog]

The monster you created

I read @fandomite‘s awesome post about why Jinx and her being a villain, so I’m adding my two cents.

The entire time Jinx is walking to the launch point, and as she's firing the torpedo we hear the soft violin and The Monster You Created. It's not a badass song showing us how badass she is for going to kill all those people, it's sad.

Jinx isn’t an evil character, she’s a tragic one.

I’m constantly amazed by Arcane’s soundtrack and choice of music because it fits perfectly with the story, but this final scene is by far my favourite, and the song gives me the shivers every time I watch it!

Looking at Jinx like a terrorist and a villain is a really one-dimensional view of Arcane in general — yes what she did is horrible (but also consider: this is an imaginary story, it's stupid in itself to assign real life moral judgment on fictional characters but I digress), but i thought the show did a pretty good job of showing us all the little things that lead to this point — if even one thing was different we probably wouldn’t be here. The entire final scene was a result of a bunch of dominos that kept falling on one another way back from before the first episode. But that's the entire point: Arcane (at least the first season) is a tragedy! This was all completely avoidable, except it wasn't. Because the circumstances were like they were, and because Piltover's treatment of Zaun was as it was.

Jinx isn’t just a character in Arcane — this final scene isn't just a culmination of all her issues that she's letting out in a destructive blaze after losing everyone she cares about, but also a culmination of the Piltover-Zaun issues that have been brewing for a long time now. Most of the things that led Jinx on this path are directly or indirectly related to Topsiders’ treatment of Zaun: her childhood, Silco's fight with Vander and his death and by extension Vi's anger at her, the entire way she grew up with Silco — Piltover and their easy life while leaving Zaun people to rot are a constant presence in her life.

This was a war waiting to happen. Vander and Grayson have managed to keep some semblance of peace for a while, but after they’re gone you can see it starts crumbling — Silco’s approach is different and isn’t only focused on keeping the peace, and Marcus in Grayson’s place is obviously starting to crack as time goes on.

In all of that you have one inconsequential little girl, who grew up in the Lanes, who had serious inferiority and abandonment issues among everything else...which in itself doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things. But couple that with everything that happened to her, and the way she grew up, living with the world where she lived and living by its rules of only looking out for yourself — there was no way she could’ve grown up “normal”. In this world where everyone only looks out for their own well-being, where could she even get the help she needed?). Silco, as much as he did care about her and helped her, still pushed some of her problems further, albeit not on purpose.

And this inconsequential little girl happens to be very good with explosives and destruction, and she's really intelligent, so she manages to crack hextech on her own. I don’t know if she would do anything on her own with this, i don't know what part of killing the council was her idea and what was Silco's. We don’t know if Jinx at this point in time would do what she did at the end. Maybe. But also maybe not.

But then comes Vi, and then comes Caitlyn, and Jinx feels like Vi doesn’t accept who she is now, like Vi's betrayed her for Topside, and the bridge fight with Ekko happens.

When she wakes up, her eyes are pink and shimmer's changed her. I saw a lot of people saying that the tea party scene was Jinx finally accepting who she is and Vi not understanding but i feel like people forget that this is shortly after whatever Singed did? Jinx with pink eyes doesn’t seem stable. If anything it looks like shimmer only made her more unhinged and also gave her the power, which is never a good combination.

And you see while Vi's convincing her that they could go together that she's wavering. This isn’t planned, everything she does during that tea party is completely unplanned and reactionary to everything around her. Jinx isn’t in control of herself for the majority of this scene. And then Silco dies and that pushes her over the edge.

Who does she blame for her entire life going to hell? For everyone around her dying? Who was indirectly responsible for near everything that went wrong in her life? And Who's out there enjoying their lives and their richness without ever sparing a second thought to Zaun?

Well now they'll know. We'll show them.

Jinx isn't the monster Vi created.

She's the monster Piltover created.