tucbilo - Tumblr blog

tucbilo · 26 days ago

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Amen

It's horrible too if Jinx lives!!

OK, I guess we're doing this?

People keep coming at me for my post about Jinx dying being terrible writing and promoting suicide by heroics as a valid way out, and the argument is always "Actually, Jinx is alive because XYZ"

So let me makes myself clear : if Jinx lives, it's also terrible writing!!

Because for all intent and purposes, she DOES DIE! Even if she's alive and fucked off in that blimp, she's still dead to everyone who knew and loved her.

WORSE! Vi will go on thinking for the rest of her life that Jinx died because of her, or at the very least that she couldn't save her.

It's not for no reason that Vi has this scene in the cell with Caitlyn, where she says she always choses wrong. In the scene on the crumbling metal beam, Vi choses not to listen to Jinx!

People got in my comments saying I have no humanity for reproving Vi picking "Vander's corpse" over Jinx. But what we see happen is Jinx telling Vi multiple time to get away and how to get to safety, and Vi completely ignoring her to interact with Vander/WW, only for him to wake up, attack her, and force Jinx to risk her life to save Vi.

Vi made a choice, between more time with Vander and listening to Jinx, and the price paid in the end is Jinx dying.

What if she lived and escaped? Vi doesn't know that! Ekko doesn't know that! Or Sevika! Or anyone!

Thought exercise time: close your eyes and imagine a relative disappearing for your life after a lethal accident you're involved in. You never recover a body and never see them again. How do you feel about it? Mmh?

"Oh but Caitlyn sees the schematics that show a side tunnel…"

Firstly, Caitlyn was nowhere near the event, and she can't frame-by-frame the explosion as we do, so you can hardly claim she's looking for Jinx and not, for example, the arcane gem, or Warwick.

Vander/WW was shown to be entirely impervious to the bullets from Jinx's automatic gun. If anyone has a chance of surviving, it'd be him.

But do you know what? If Jinx is in that blimp, and Caitlyn then tells Vi, "From the schematic, I think your sister could have escaped" (ignoring entirely the fact that Jinx should be cut in half by WW's claws wrapped around her waist), then what would happen???

That would send Vi on a wild goose's chase!! How many years would she spend hunting through Zaun trying to find her sister? How many years until she starts resenting Caitlyn for giving her false hope? How many years until she's forced to accept Jinx isn't anywhere, and so must have died back then, and has to see herself as Jinx's killer all over again??

How is this good for Vi?

And Ekko? He pulled her out of suicide what? 5 times? Had some epic bonding with her painting all over each other, doing self-care and hair dyes and fixing a balloon so they could go on a big attack together.

Maybe he thought he could genuinely finally be close to his world's Powder. Silco just taught him the greatest thing he can do is forgive, and the girl he forgives fakes her death and runs away?

They're barely 20 ffs, Jinx would have plenty of time to struggle on the road to recovery, especially with his help. What if Ekko was ready to be there along the way with her? What about him?

How is it good if Jinx is NOT dead but has NOT told him? What difference does it make to him? She's dead for Ekko, and if he learns later on that she faked her death, all he'll know is that HE wasn't worth her staying. He wasn't even worth telling the truth to!!!

It's fucked! It's not healthy!! Jinx could have her ending removing herself from Zaun without having to fake her death.

But hang on, it gets worse!

Because it's straight up not good writing even on the meta level.

Arcane has millions of viewers. Nobody I know IRL thinks Jinx is alive. Plenty of people in my notes agree she's dead. Do you know what millions of people think? That she is dead!!! Because it's the TEXT OF THE SHOW.

Millions of fans will think Jinx was killed off, because they aren't willing to go frame by frame, extrapolating and make-believing their way into thinking she is alive. Most fans are normal people who aren't terminally online, theorycrafting all day long.

Most normal fans have moved on to watch Dune Prophecy or Sweetpea. And if Jinx comes out alive in another show, the "Somehow Palpatine Jinx returned" memes will abound.

Let's go over the common elements brought forth as arguments.

Jinx uses pink and blue in that bomb, and pink is how she gets away "quick".

No? The bomb she attached to Thieram in season 1 was pink and it was all for glitter and harassment. There is no strong canon association of meaning. If you watch frame by frame, there is a pink "light gleam" over the first blue detonation followed by a very large pink blast and ZERO smoke trails or anything indication someone getting away. Jinx uses the same bomb she used to kill herself very effectively earlier in the show, so we have no indication it wouldn't kill her here too.

We can see the inside of her bomb when she kills herself (with the two liquid vials) and it's the same she uses on Vander/WW and herself.

Besides, even if she used some part of the explosion to get away, WW's claws are around her like this:

She'd be bisected in half.

So some people say that means that Warwick is also alive and let her go! But no. That's make-believe. That's fanon, 100%. The TEXT of the show is that Vander is burnt away (we see the final image of himself burning up) and he has just attacked Vi, trying to kill her. We have no indication he'd want to spare Jinx here.

HOWEVER, he's literally bullet proof, so if there's anything we can conclude is that he's likely to be the one to have made it into a shaft and to safety.

Speaking of shafts: the next argument is that Caitlyn is looking at the tower's schematics to hint that she suspects Jinx lives.

Maybe, but you are reading a character's mind. We see her look at schematics while holding the monkey bomb head, yes, but you don't know what she's thinking, and if the show runners don't make it explicit, then Cait's thoughts about an explosion she hasn't even witnessed aren't worth much. She could think Warwick lived. OR she could think, despite not witnessing the fight, that Jinx lived. But she doesn't KNOW, she doesn't tell us, and so you are INVENTING the thoughts of a character to mean what you want it to mean.

This would be a lot more meaningful if it were Vi investigating this.

There's a blimp going away, it has blue smoke, and then it ends with a Jinx glitch.

No. There is a blimp going away, slowly, without any blue smoke. It's also THE EXACT SAME ONE that opens Season 1 act 1.

Instead of coming towards Piltover, it now is leaving over the sea. This can be fully interpreted as a sign that the hextech era is over. Blimps have to travel the old fashioned way again. It's also going away from Piltover/Zaun, symbolizing future stories taking place there.

Finally, the glitch is 3 frames long and spells "the End". IDK why the fact that it's a little Jinxy means anything to anyone. The end of credits for season 1 was Jinxy as well, and it could simply be about keeping the same visual identity and not a sign of Jinx being alive???

If I wanted to play subtext games, I could say "Wow Jinx writing "the end" would be appropriate if she were dead" and reverse the argument.

Finally, and the thing in most poor taste, IMO.

Jinx kills herself several times in the opening of the episode, and a sad emo song plays over it, with sad fucked up lyrics. Then Ekko comes and pulls her from this…

Only for that EXACT same song to be played while she and Vander/WW fall. They are both crying. Vi is crying and screaming while these lyrics are playing!!

If I could just lay my head down and rest. If there was nothing to fight or protect. Maybe then I could finally be free. Maybe death is like falling asleep. This world is a wasteland where nothing can grow. I used to have strength but I ran out of hope. I know it's my fault that I'm here all alone. This world is a wasteland. Please let me go. Go, go, go. Please let me go.

This is literally singing about suicide. When you say "Maybe death is like falling asleep" over the animation of a character pulling the pin, you are not dealing in subtext or metaphor of any kind.

One of the earlier shots literally has her framed in broken glass among shards that are WARWICK'S MAW. It's like a hint of her death being killed by him, furthering the parallel.

And I think it is in very bad taste to have suicide apologia music playing over characters screaming and bawling (Vi)

while others cry (Jinx and WW)

and a bomb goes off (with no hint of survival),

only for some of y'all to come around acting like Cait glowering at a blueprint and a recuring blimp all means Jinx is alive...

It would be grief porn on the part of the writers. It would mean slamming us in our feelings in a brutal way, in an ugly way, while playing a suicide song, only to turn around and say "Syke! didn't you get that Cait is suspicious about Jinx so it totally means it was all a fakeout?"

I don't want a fake-out at this point!! Why would I?? It's legit worse! Because then it means they couldn't spare 5min of animation time to have her rescued by Ekko and being on the mend with him. Even if she has a scene where she tells him "I need to leave. I can't stay in this city), at least it wouldn't be a cruel joke on the fans and the characters.

This entire ending means that either Jinx was better off dying taking out the mad monster made out of her dad with her (making her the ultimate dad killer, yay), or Jinx was better off removing herself from the equation SO THOROUGHLY that MOST fans believe it, everyone in world believe it, and the show offers no concrete textual clue for it.

It means Jinx didn't deserve/or wasn't able to get better. And so she has to die or do the exact-same-as-dying but kind of more fucked up somehow.

---

ULTIMATELY the message to impressionable viewers who struggle a lot with mental health and identified a lot with Jinx, are being told with soft sad music that yeah maybe dying is like going to sleep and your family should let you go, go, go, and that "leaving everything and everyone behind" is about the same.

It's fucked, and it saddens me that people are so focused on the "she lived" narrative that they miss out the fact that a hint she may be alive doesn't change the messaging.

And it saddens me knowing that if Viktor's arc ended with him being validated in feeling like his human body was "broken" and "inferior" and that his disability made him lesser as a human, people would have pitchforks and torches out.

Jinx's mental illness and struggles in interacting with the world were her disability, and she got fucking killed or wiped off the city incognito for it.

P.S: If you're warming up to post hate in comments or tags because you don't like my take and don't know how to politely disagree, please save us both time and block me. I'm open to polite discourse but the next person questioning my humanity over fandom wank will be nuked from orbit with prejudice.

#arcane #arcane jinx #arcane 2

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tucbilo · 29 days ago

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Hey I cannot disagree more lmao (and agree more with @space-blue)

It is evident that Jinx is tormented by her inner thoughts, so the focus truly is not on what others think about her in the first place (and frankly I don't think @space-blue was inferring that Jinx is tormented by other people's judgement either). More so, suicide is NEVER an option and should not be presented as such. All of Ekko's words "no matter what happened in the past, it is never too late to build something new" were a FANTASTIC counter to the hallucinatory Silco bs of "end the cycle by killing yourself". And the fact that Ekko's words got disregarded quite like that, is extremely ditasteful.

Everyone has capacity to change even if they do not believe it. It takes time to build up that mindset. And it will be easier to fall back on old habits but THERE ARE ALWAYS OTHER OPTIONS. And Vi can free her own shit lmao Jinx owes her nothing and again, even if in the moment she feels she is "freeing her" it is not like this mindset cannot be shifted with time. Which is LITERALLY WHAT EKKO TRIES TO COMMUNICATE.

Anyway, Jinx death is completely unnecessary as it is not heroic, redemptuous or anything like that; it almost felt like just shock value and even kinda makes it acceptable for people to give up "but it is heroic so it is better amirite"

So just to nail it down: IT NEVER IS.

A true off my chest bit about Jinx

It's a little critical of the show, but not hate posting. Just my feelings regarding the handling of Jinx.

I just feel like Jinx's death shows the writers hand in a bad way.

To me act 1 sucks because it felt the most rushed and like it needed to pad and set some things in motions, and most importantly they needed to delay Jinx's suicidality.

By all accounts Jinx should have broken after Silco's death. She should have buried him in the Pilt, walked home, set the place on fire and killed herself.

Instead she needs to be delayed, and she needs to have a reason to be in Stillwater with a lot of Zaunites, so that Singed can do his hiring bid demo with Warwick and score a new employer in Embessa.

It's convoluted, but basically Jinx needs two things :

temporary sanity

a reason to completely blow up later on

And they do both via Isha, the worst character in the whole show as far as I'm concerned.

She's introduced in a bad music video that does a weird job of introducing "sane Jinx". Then she seems to immediately be part of the team, and her attachment to Jinx, with zero set up, made it super out of left field.

It was blatant that she was being set up as a mini Powder to calm Jinx down, and when she blows herself up it's not gratifying if you know she's just a crank/lever being used to flip Jinx into dark and depressed mode.

IMO this could have been handled better (and I'd change a lot of the Zaun situation in Act 1 alongside), but then could have still led to Jinx being "saved" by Ekko.

Instead, I feel like the writers, maybe pressed for time, maybe unwilling to keep the "loose canon" as she was in the new state of the world, chose to kill her off.

Her death is Vi's fault, and I can't help but feel it's manufactured.

I feel like the writers broke Jinx an extra time just to tilt her over the edge and have that emotional scene with Ekko, but then couldn't see how to "excuse her".

Like what she's done is too fucked up, too dark (even if Cait served the city to Noxus on a silver platter, gased zaun, and faced no consequences lol) and she can't be made to move on from the horrors of it all.

It feels like they didn't have the time or will to break the cycle for Jinx. But it feels bad. It feels like it was an "attempt at redemption" death.

WW was an arcane creature by then and they all fucked off with Viktor and Jayce. They could have chosen to keep him innactive. They could have had Vi going with Ekko and relying on him.

The one person who can truly believe in the good in her, because he's literally experienced it in another version of herself. The one guy who could tell her again and again that it's not HER, it's the way the world made things, and that this can change.

I don't see why shy away from that, even implied, especially after Ekko managed to pull her from the brink.

It feels like Jinx is a "too far gone" rabid dog better put down than left loose in their setting.

And I don't really vibe with that. I thought true redemption would be her living. Leading. Her and Ekko could work to better Zaun while Sevika safeguards their interests in the Council.

And Vi could have still cried over WW's body.

#jinx #how they massacred my baby #arcane #powder #vi #fuck vi

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