Arcane Thoughts - Blog Posts

WHY ARE PEOPLE ON TWITTER CLAIMING “ZAUNITE” IS A SLUR??

I REPEAT, ITS NOT A SLUR!!

Piltover call them “trenchers” as the derogatory word used toward the people from Zaun! They only call it the Undercity and nothing more. The whole point of Silco’s rise to power in Season One is to get Piltover to recognize the nation as “Zaun” and make it independent. Please arcane fans, watch the damn show, I’m actually baffled!

S2 arcane spoilers!!

Anyone else notice how dim viktors eyes look in the new season like

And it's like this for nearly every other shot

Compared to his eyes in s1

And he's rlly out of character too

And sure that could be the trauma of EVERYTHING that's happened

But I feel like it's more than that

The hexcore is controlling him obviously so maybe we'll see him try to fight against it??

I really hope he does bc I don't think the whole magic arcane Jesus thing is really working for me tbh

OR if he doesn't manage to get free of the hexcore maybe he decides to lean into it by baking himself even more robotic buy powered by hextech or whatever the new equivalent would be

I've also been thinking maybe he'll start upsetting the chem barrens?? But it seems kinda unlikely

I can't do this anymore I miss them all so muchhhhhhh

Complete word vomit but like what if viktor decides that whatever the 'arcane' is too dangerous or comes at too high a cost and starts The Glorious Evolution from there?

Maybe he feels responsible for whatever the weird magic orb thingys are and decides that all of this mess (not just with the hex core but also with zaun and piltover) was due to human error so now he thinks he has to help people by getting rid of their 'flaws' like they're ability to make the kinds of mistakes he made in s1.

We know he already doesn't want the hex core to be around anymore so why would he suddenly become infatuated with it?? Like sure maybe it has an influence over him, but I seriously doubt it would last all season

Plus viktors whole Thing is helping people why would he stick with the hex core and all it's bs if it means either vaporising people or shimmer? Viktor is smart that's like the first thing we know about him I feel like he'd find a way out of the hex core's thrall

Idk I just don't really want to watch hex core bs for like a quarter of next season, I'll still probably like it tho

Do y'all think the early progression of Viktor's sickness could be seen in Jayce's sketches? A bit deeper eyebags, sharper edges on his cheeks, slightly more sunken in expressions, barely even noticeable if you don't know, but visible in hindsight through all these little sketches spread across Jayce's journal, unknowingly documenting the process

spoilers for arcane act 3

guys, we should have know jinx was gonna die

Hear me out

so yk the perfect universe the Ekko is in for ep7??? Weeeeellllll

literally every one he interacts with in that universe is dead

Silco, Vander, Milo, Clager(Idk how to spell his name), even Benso showed up. What do they all have in common?

they dead.

our final clue is when Himerdinger (no way in hell I spelled that right) dies doing science shit right before Ekko leaves. He is the only other person in that universe that isn’t dead in the main one, but arcane writers made sure to clear that up.

I do sometimes post audio edits on my channel that is dedicated to said edits, and we need to talk about this one.

The song itself is a mashup of two songs, Me and My Husband" by Mitski and Change by Deftones. I would just throw any pick of any character there, but I choose Violet. I choose her because that's how I think she feels. In this moment of the story, she witnesses the death of a strong revolutionary, her great acquaintance, the death of jinxters leader, the death of Gert. I think it changes Vi fundamentally. On this point of the story, she is sure she destroyed every single aspect of her sisters existence, she is sure she betrayed her class, she is sure she betrayed everything her dad was standing for, she lost, she gone down, she turned into the dirt under elegant expensively made nails, but jinxters as a movement can not mean nothing to her, as much as season two brushes it away, it is not possible. She failed, she forgot what she used to believe, she broke, she turned off the road she was on her entire life, but there are people who are still standing for their beliefs, they are stronger, they are still there, right?

She takes Gert's hand, she looks her in the eyes as her face gets distorted by pain beyond human endurance. Woman's eyes slowly glaze as Gert gets in the dark. Before Violet can even process what had happened, she gets drugged away by strangers hands. The blue fire of revolution that remained for Vi in Gert's dreadlocks, in blue makeup on her eyes, in the ardour of her soul, this fire had gone out. Gert's corpses are getting drugged now and thrown somewhere with the rest of the corpses. She is no more a friend, she is no more a leader, she is no more a hope, she is now just a dead criminal. That's what they're going to write about her in books on the rich people's behave. a criminal. Vi was sure the place she was at changed her forever, heavily, but Vi is still Vi right?

Violet is dead. The rest of Vi died in that fight, holding Gert's hand. Time passed, years changed, but on the darkest nights, the only thing Vi was able to think about was this look that she saw in Gert's eyes, filled with tears, eyes with blue makeup on them, eyes over which hung blue dreadlocks. blue.

do y'all think shes trying to be alike her sister

"i wish i was just as strong as vi, i need to.. i need to do something that she did, i need to look threatening i need... to ✨️✨️cut my hair✨️✨️"

SOMEBODY REBLOGGED MY teenage silco vander and felicia FANART AND YOU KNOW HOW DID THEY TAG IT??

GIRL

...it's an official AU!name now

@burlbread ily

(Arcane season 2 spoilers)

(Seriously massive spoilers)

(scroll past because the title will spoiler you already)

I can prove Jinx is alive

with a lot of knowledge and deductions

This is based off of a few other theories which I will link respectively.

This theory begins with another theory: Powder made it to our universe.

In the scene where all of these papers fly up, a head with her hairstyle is visible and... in animation, no accidents happen. (Excluding the possibility the animators are sadistic fucks) This means that Powder traveled through universes. So far, so good.

Now, it's very likely she used the machine which Ekko and Heimerdinger rip left behind for this since she helped build it yadayadayada. We can't know for certain the way this machine works, but I would suggest that it works in the same way the Arcane travel that brought these three there in the first place worked since... when Ekko gets back, it all slots into place and he's back in his body. More on this later.

One characteristic of this way of interdimensional travel is that you can't travel to a dimension where you are dead, the explanation for why Jayce doesn't come with the others to the 'happy end' dimension (or the Arcane has its own will and brought him where he landed because of it but that's boring) because in this one, Vi died, the council prohibited the hextech experiments completely so Viktor didn't come to him and... well. (I unfortunately didn't find where I read that his death is why he isn't in this dimension, but I did somewhere).

This means that in order to travel into a dimension, you need to be alive in this very dimension. NOW if Powder traveled to our dimension, that means that Jinx must have been alive at the time of her travel and since we saw Jinx sacrifice herself for Vi when she was very much herself, this means she must've survived the fall so Powder could travel there and take over her body. Also, we see Powder in the end scene and since she'd take over Jinx' body when she travels dimensions, Jinx' body must've been alive at the end of the story.

Now. What does this mean for Jinx? Where is she?

She is alive, that much is clear now, but where is her psyche if her body is controlled by Powder?

There are two options really, and it boils down to how inter dimensional travel works.

Option 1: when you travel to a different dimension, you take over your other selves' body and they just kinda get knocked out. This would mean that while Ekko was in the other universe, parallel!Ekko was just kind of nowhere. This doesn't make that much sense to me since it would mean there's a forward and backward direction for travelling.

Forward means you stack a soul on top of another one, backward means that the soul gets sent back. It's kind of possible, but a bit dull and rough around the edges. Also, this would mean the machine Ekko and Heimerdinger built is specifically designed to bring them BACK which means Powder couldn't have used it to travel forth so... it's a bit scuffed.

Option 2: Symmetrical travel. When you travel to another universe, the soul from that universe possesses YOUR body in turn. This means that the way forward and the way backward is exactly the same, the minds get switched and the direction doesn't matter. This would more easily allow Powder to use the machine to travel forward into another universe since it's the same procedure as travelling backwards. A way to prove this would be to check if Ekko's or Heimerdinger's body have been active in OUR universe while they were there. Actually, now that I think about it, this would mean there IS still an alive Heimerdinger in our universe. This theory makes more sense to me, though, again, that would mean there's someone controlling your body in your universe while you're controlling theirs.

Now, this means that, option 1: Jinx would just be KO while Powder has control of her body BUT option 2 would be: Jinx is in the 'happy end' universe while Powder is in ours which is also just a lot more interesting.

Maybe I'll check if I can find proof for option 2, but this is it in the meantime. BUT anyway, Jinx is alive! And this also means Ekko COULD still get his happy end (I made this theory for him, poor boy deserves a happy end), with Jinx or with Powder.

Why Season 2 Of Arcane Felt A Little Off

Let me preface this by saying I adore this show, and I loved this season. I laughed, I cried, and I had a good time watching it. The art direction and animation is a masterpiece. This is probably my favorite show, but I think it's good to critique the things you love and this entire season I felt like I was waiting for something.

For a show titled Arcane, season one had remarkably little to do with the arcane. Yes, there was Hextech and magic, but the show was centered on this class divide between Piltover and Zaun and all the conflicts that stem from this. The very first scene of the show is enforcers killing citizens on the bridge, with Powder and Vi finding their dead parents' bodies. Zilco's reasoning for doing anything he did was because he believed he was helping Zaun, including raising Jinx the way he did. Vi was so passionate about her city and the injustice facing it. Caitlyn witnessing this injustice is what causes her to question the systems she is a part of. Viktor and Jayce (but especially Viktor) created technology with the intention of wanting to improve life for the undercity. Ekko is a revolutionary doing so much to give his people a community and a chance to live their lives. My point is literally every single character is connected by this conflict between the cities.

Now let's take a look at the second season. Where is this part of the story that was so essential to the first season? There's a brief revolutionary beat with Jinx and her followers but once they escape from prison, the show moves on from this and never touches it again. We see Caitlyn's descent into corrupt madness, becoming everything she and Vi wanted to stop. Eventually she realizes how wrong she was but do we see her make any reparations to Zaun specifically for the damage she caused? She gassed the city, poisoning the air even further (with gas that has been confirmed to make people sick in the long run), harming hundreds of innocent people. And Vi, a character so vehemently against enforcers in the first season, goes along with this for how long? Days? Weeks? And only stops when she can visually see the impact of Caitlyn's madness as she almost kills a child in front of her. These characters are flawed and I love that, but we see them get their happy ending without ever truly addressing or helping with what they did to Zaun.

Ekko sees an alternate universe of everything his city could be, everything they all wanted so badly in the first season. Equality, safety, education, food security, and more. He says he is thankful for the reminder and I fully believe he will go forth with this vision in mind, but do we ever see it? And that right there is the problem. We don't know what happens to Zaun in the end, we don't know if things get better. All we see is Sevika on the council but we don't know if that will fix anything since people have stood up for the undercity in council before and it did nothing.

I want to see Ekko rally his people and repair the damage caused by the war. I want to see Vi open up the last drop and make it what it was always meant to be, a place of community. I want to see schools open in the undercity in honor of Viktor and Jayce. I want to see the two cities heal from the damage done to each other. Fuck it, I just want literally any closure on this plotline! Just tack on a 2 minute montage of what happened to this city after the war and I'd feel a little better. But instead this part of the story was completely sidelined throughout the season and ignored entirely in the finale. I'm not someone that thinks every story needs to have a moral, but this show was trying to tell us something! The first season was screaming from the rooftops to beware of privilege, beware systemic oppression, to fight inequality, and I find it really sad that there was no conclusion for that.

I do wish there had been three seasons to give it a smoother transition form politics to magic but it is what it is. Nothing is perfect. This season gave me so much including the best depiction of soulmates I've ever seen in my life so you win some you lose some ig.