Arcane Isn’t Perfect — But Here’s Why It’s Worth Watching

(Spoilers for Season 1 of Arcane!)

Arcane was one of those shows I kept hearing about, from the moment it came out in 2021 to the recent season 2 finale, yet I knew pretty much nothing about it. So I finally decided to indulge in the first season—and it did not disappoint.

Arcane is a story about… well, a lot of things. There are so many working parts to this show, with an expansive world, a ton of side plots, and a ton of characters. Even its genre encompasses a little bit of everything—some drama, some sci-fi, some fantasy, and a whole lot of action.

To begin what I expect may be a long piece, I am going to attempt to set up everything you need to know to understand the opening premise and impact of this show; it’ll be like you watched it yourself. Better, even. Please stick with me! It’ll be so worth it.

If you love Arcane, or if you’re interested in watching it, strap in. If you’ve never heard of it, hear me out and decide for yourself. And if you don’t like it, or don’t care, I’m sorry. Click off this, probably.

Let’s get into it!

What’s important to introduce first is our two main characters, Vi and Powder.

These two sisters live together with their two friends under the supervision of a man named Vander, their adoptive father. Their biological father’s state and identity are unknown, and their biological mother was killed by enforcers when they were young (don’t worry, I’ll get back to explaining enforcers later—think really strong, really mean cops for now).

Vi, Powder, Vander, and all of the other characters we first meet—from the cynical, drug-slinging crime lord Silco, to his powerful (sexy—I mean, what?) right-hand woman Sevika, to little Ekko, a boy who works at a pawn shop with his own adoptive dad—live in the “undercity” of the Arcane universe.

Called Zaun, the undercity is basically a large city-state across the river from the grand, wealthy city of Piltover. There’s a big part of Zaun that is connected to and actually physically under the city of Piltover that some of the characters use tunnels and sewers to travel through, hence actually being under the larger city, but mostly it’s not? (I did look up the geography of this, just to get a clear picture. Whatever—not important.)

It’s essentially most important as a play on words, because Zaun is seen as “under” Piltover due to its filth, lack of wealth, and crime-ridden streets. Citizens of Piltover see the people of the undercity as dirty, dangerous, less than. They heavily police their streets with enforcers, heavily armed and often discriminatory police—the likes of which ended up killing Vi and Powder’s mother when Zaun (the undercity) rebelled against them and the mistreatment they were facing at the hands of the rich and powerful.

This will come as a shocker, I know. But get this—Piltover, being so wealthy and technologically advanced and douchey, is at every waking moment flooding Zaun with their waste, polluting the air and the entire city terribly with toxic fumes, making living conditions for all very unsafe while they thrive under the guise of “progress”—which is lovely.

So that’s the set-up of the world—Piltover, rich and mean and oppressive, and Zaun, angry and scrappy and fed up with the state of their lives.

Vi and Powder are very close, as they’re all they have. Vi is extremely tough and a very capable fighter, known all through the underground. Powder is the creative, intelligent younger sister who lacks the experience and the physical abilities to carry out a lot of their plans. She is an inventor of sorts, and she often tries to create these devices to use against enemies, but they always end up failing.

We see from pretty early on that Powder is known for dropping the ball when Vi, her, and their two friends attempt to rob a house in Piltover in the first episode, and she ends up loosing all their loot. Their friend Mylo is furious at her, cynically deeming her a burden who always screws up.

Vi, though, is much more gracious and understanding towards her sister’s mess ups. She believes Powder wasn’t made for this world they live in, and she wants to create a better world for her sister. She has frustrations with Vander, her adoptive father, about his insistence to not have another uprising against Piltover, but he is adamant in his ways, as his participation in the previous uprising led to the death of Vi’s mother.

All this to say—things go wrong after news gets out about a bunch of scrappy kids robbing a wealthy Piltover house, belonging to the rich (later also plot relevant) Kiramman family, and a demand for the arrest of a culprit results in Vander turning himself in instead of them, in his typically self-sacrificial manner. What a man. Go, Dad.

But before he is taken to the upper city, Silco, a crime lord from Zaun and previous colleague of Vander’s, intercepts the situation and captures him—they have their own pretty intense lore, but I’ll spare you guys. Just know they now hate each other—only they totally don’t.

Upon finding this out, a terrified, furious Vi and her friends set out to save Vander, leaving weak, screw-up Powder behind—much to her hurt and anger. She sneaks along anyway, desperate to help in any way she can.

This decision, Powder running after Vi and their friends to try to help Vander, ends up changing both of their lives forever.

And not in a good way.

Powder does find them, and when she sees Vi in a dangerous situation—albeit one she ends up handling—she panics and ends up using her inventions, which work a little too well.

You see, when Powder and her friends were robbing that wealthy house in Piltover at the start of the very first episode, Powder stole these mysterious, glowing, plot-relevant blue gemstones she found on the desk. She then put them inside her little bomb-like creations, and they became—unbeknownst to her—immensely destructive.

Massive explosions appear on screen, decimating the scene, and all we see is smoke and chaos.

Powder is, of course, delighted—finally, she did it! Finally, her creations worked, and in such a bad situation too; she has saved the day.

Only she hasn’t, not at all.

Because in an extremely disturbing and jarring moment, we see—through Vi’s eyes—that their friends Mylo and Claggor, as well as their father Vander, have been killed, albeit inadvertently, by Powder’s explosions.

Powder has accidentally murdered her entire family, with Vi as the only exception.

I cannot stress how shocking this scene is. It’s an insane, absolutely incredible moment. It’s especially heart-wrenching because they were going to all get away. Mylo had picked the lock on Vander’s constraints, Claggor had found a new exit, and Vi had defeated the terrifying drugged-up creature Silco faced her with. If Powder hadn’t followed them, they’d all still be alive and safe.

When Powder runs up to an absolutely broken Vi, cheering that it worked and she did it, Vi realizes the shocking explosions that killed everyone were not from Silco, but from her own sister. Powder sees Vander’s body and immediately, horrified, realizes what she’s done. Vi’s wrath and pain towards her, and towards the entire situation, is jarringly emotional.

The scene is incredible. I’ll link it down below.

Vi ends up storming away from Powder in anger and despair—only for a moment.

But a moment is all it takes for Silco to find Powder and, seeing her immense destructive potential, choose to take her in and under his wing. We’re led to believe he sees himself in this young girl who has been left and “betrayed” (a dirty cop/enforcer working for Silco drugs and imprisons Vi, rendering her incapable of reuniting with Powder) by her family, just the way her father Vander once betrayed him.

You can argue that he does see himself in her, and I think that he surely wants Powder to believe she’s been betrayed like he was, but the truth is somewhere in the middle, as he’s a pretty skewed guy. I’d argue a bigger part of him is actually just willing to delude himself into thinking they’re similar so he can feel more justified in molding her into his own perfect weapon. But more on Silco later.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the mere setup of Arcane.

After a time skip, we are reintroduced to an undercity almost completely run by Silco—with the help of his new right hand woman (sorry, Sevika), Jinx.

Who is Jinx, you may ask? This is her.

Jinx is Powder—only she’s not, not really.

While Powder is kind and mild-mannered and means well, Jinx is cold and bold and calculating. Whereas Powder messed up and hurt others by mistake, Jinx aims to hurt others, and she succeeds in doing so. Jinx turns her own failures into strengths; she turns destruction into a success, a goal, a lifestyle. Powder was weak; Jinx is strong. Powder is dead, and Jinx is very much alive.

Jinx steals every scene she’s in. She’s turned her inventing hobby into a full-on assassination job, creating high-tech weapons and utilizing an awesome fighting style to take down Silco’s enemies. She’s super physically capable after undergoing experience and training working for Silco, nothing like the weak and meek young girl she once was.

She also has that fascinating unpredictability factor of being off her goddamn rocker, but in a way viewers understand and even sympathize with.

Interestingly, we see even from before the timeskip that Silco clearly does truly care about Jinx, even though he lies to her and is manipulative by nature to everyone in his path. You can definitely argue about the sanctity of love in general, and how much lies and deceit and manipulate can determine how true or kind it truly is or even if that kind of imperfect love is genuine, but Silco without a doubt loves Jinx in his own unique, and genuinely not even super evil, way. He truly loves her as a daughter figure and is much more understanding and sympathetic towards her still-existent screw ups, to many of his underlings’ anger and irritation.

So is Silco a good person? Goodness, no. Is he and his distribution of the drug Shimmer the reason Zaun has a massive drug epidemic and is crippled with addiction? Absolutely. Is he a murderer, a manipulator, and an all around sketchy guy? Without a doubt.

But is he a good dad? Honestly, yeah. Weirdly, he kind of is.

We see Jinx has come to care for Silco as a father figure, too. But we also see Jinx still thinking of Vi—a lot—when she’s alone, grappling with the pain of being abandoned by her sister, often resorting to talking to herself for hours and hours—or talking to people that aren’t there. You know, like the entire family she killed.

All jokes aside, the way the show animates her mind and how she thinks is impeccably harrowing. Her inner demons follow her around, on her shoulders at all times. Her guilt constantly plagues her, even when she struggles to feel it, or to feel any semblance of her past self due to what she has become.

Jinx is great. She’s a solid character—solid, but not perfect. More on Jinx later.

Meanwhile, Vi’s been rotting in prison for seven years, and she’s pissed. All she wants is to get out and find her sister.

And ugh.

Ugh, FINE.

There’s Jayce too.

Ugh.

Jayce.

There. Happy?

Yes, there’s also a young gentleman by the name of Jayce, who is (undeservingly) given this strange sort of main character status—it all falls pretty flat for me, especially in the first few episodes. But I’ll get into him a bit since I do have to.

He’s from Piltover, so he’s a rich boy. He gets a kind of sweet, kind of dumb backstory about this time he almost died with his mom as a kid (doing what, I couldn’t tell you, but they were in the snow in the middle of nowhere so nothing fun). But magic saved their lives that day, so he’s devoted to finding it again and harnessing it for the good of all.

He’s very typical, very righteous, sort of annoying, but also just generally boring and uninteresting—hence why I skipped over him until now. Sorry, bud.

Jayce is important (I guess) because he does important science stuff for the world—remember those glowing blue, destructive, plot relevant gem-like balls Powder found in that rich palace?

I know you do—you guys would never not listen to me.

Well, those super magical, super destructive gemstones belonged to Jayce, who was experimenting with them.

After the gemstones get stolen, our boy Jayce is in big trouble. There are concerns among Piltover’s Council that Zaun might use the power of the magic against them—now, is this kind of a racist assumption that the undercity will be destructive and violent? Potentially. Almost certainly, really. But are they wrong for fearing this? Not necessarily.

Jayce is brought before the Council, who are total jerks to him about experimenting irresponsibly with Hextech and technology greater than humans should mess with. (They’re right.) They’re totally jerks to him and so super mean, and they don’t want him to continue with this dangerous experimentation. (They’re absolutely correct.)

They do kick him out of school though, which unironically is a douchey move. Also a dumb move. Like, yeah, give the scientist more time on his hands to experiment, that’ll show him.

Councilmember Heimerdinger in particular—who’s just a straight up ferret, which I love—is a scientist, and he’s particularly intent on not wanting Hextech to become too powerful in the hands of humans, who were never meant to control it.

What a buzzkill. He just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand the potential of what magic can do for the world! Nothing could possibly go wrong as long as we have good intentions—for now. Jayce, I’m so with you.

(I’m not. Heimerdinger is right. I’d bet my life on it.)

Anyway, none of that matters, because our girl Mel on the Council (Slytherin representation right here) is intrigued by this magic and the kind of capital and progress it can bring to Piltover. So she helps Jayce essentially join the Council instead to help incorporate magic into the city.

Boom. Nothing can go wrong.

Jayce is indeed able to utilize this magic and start to figure out how to control it alongside his partner Victor. He joins the Council, that powerful group of Piltover elites who basically operate like an oligarchy, after his creation Hextech becomes such a success.

Enough about Jayce, though. I’ll die if I keep talking about him.

I kid, he’s not that bad. It’s not Jayce’s fault he doesn’t hold a candle to Jinx or Vi. But genuinely, the Jayce parts and the science parts that aren’t just Victor-based are my least favorite aspect of the show. They’re very cliché, and Jayce is a character I have seen an innumerable amount of times. So it’s just a bit boring and predictable.

Personally, I found his science partner Victor to be more interesting, because Victor has two things. One of his things is that he’s dying of a terrible illness, and he—spoiler alert—ends up becoming one with the Arcane/magic and not only healing himself but… bypassing his own humanity, possibly? Potentially? He’s at least 70% cyborg by the end of this season. It’s sick.

His other thing is that he definitely wants to bone Jayce. Which is less sick.

There’s also a wild scene that I have to mention for shits and giggles—Jayce and Mel end up sleeping together, and we see Mel wake up alone in bed the next morning before getting a hard cut to Jayce at Victor’s bedside instead. It’s hilarious. To be fair, he did pass out, so Jayce was worried about him and rightfully so, since he’s so ill. But it’s still a great moment.

Maybe if the show commits more to the homoerotic vibes of their relationship, Victor will rub off a bit more on Jayce (oh god, no pun intended) and make him less of an abominable character. I choose to be optimistic.

Speaking of queer representation, Vi and Caitlyn—let’s get into it.

For a time, the only thing I was aware of about Arcane (besides that it’s “that show with the girl with blue hair”) was that there is a somewhat controversial lesbian couple in it. I’m not sure exactly why some people disliked the two together. I figured it was either going to be toxic in some inexcusable way, or just bad and boring with no chemistry. Immediately, I was intrigued, and I put my critical cap on before delving into this show.

Fellow haters of bad romance, I’m both surprised and pleased to report back that in my opinion: it’s good. The relationship between Vi and Caitlyn is good.

Caitlyn Kiramman is introduced as a friend of Jayce’s. She’s an enforcer for Piltover, but since her mother is on the Council, she is often seen as the rich girl who doesn’t and shouldn’t get any serious, dangerous work. But when one of Jinx’s attacks on Piltover land strikes her intrigue, she can’t turn down the opportunity to investigate; she wants to find the perpetrator and bring her to justice, as well as be seen for more than just her family name. You know, one of those.

So she goes to Vi, once (and still) an esteemed fighter in the undercity, and frees her from prison to help her investigate the crimes occurring in the city and get to the root of a lot of their problems—Silco. Vi, in the hope of finding Powder along the way, joins Caitlyn on her search.

Usually I am all up on the hate train of a poor romance, especially when it’s poor queer representation, but I genuinely feel like this isn’t the case here. Maybe this is more of a season two issue, or maybe people just don’t like Caitlyn, which I guess is fair—she is a living, breathing trope, and she’s a little pompous at times, sure, but she does have a charm to her as well, and her sense of justice makes her interesting and intriguing.

I’m always all too ready to complain about a bad or mediocre relationship, but not this time. Especially for only having nine episodes to establish romantic tension, the ship is good, the ship has sailed, and I’m shipping it. I am on the ship, even if I have to be on it alone.

So far, I’m not really getting the hate? I don’t know why some people explicitly dislike this relationship so much. I think Vi and Cait are a very solid ship. They’re both good characters (especially Vi, she’s very well written), they compliment each other well with moments of humor, heart, and emotional nuance, and I think their scenes together range anywhere from decent/passable to very good.

Come on, guys. Vi has been through so much. Just let her have the hot cop.

Make no mistake, though: the romance aspect of the show here definitely isn’t perfect. Vi and Cait’s dynamic is an intriguing one, but there is this evident sense of inequality between them, as Caitlyn is from Piltover’s wealthy Kiramman clan in Piltover while Vi is from the slums of the undercity—which is a little cliché, but not necessarily bad or super toxic. But it could totally go there.

I think they learn a lot from each other, especially Caitlyn learning about Vi’s trauma and her life experiences being born without such privileges. Cait uses her privilege to help Vi as much as she can. She isn’t perfect, as she certainly has her own personal beliefs and misconceptions about Zaun coming from where she has in society, but I think spending time with Vi has changed her for the better.

I am deeply interested to see what is done with Caitlyn’s character in the second season. She still very much teters on the sidelines of knowing what is right and wrong, what is just and what is corruption. Will she concede to the misconceptions she has of Zaun due to Jinx’s deranged actions, or will she still be able to maintain a sense of peace, justice, and understanding through the tragedy of what Jinx may have done to Piltover (we’ll get there)? And will she one day hold her own city accountable for its own corruption and injustices? I truly don’t know.

Anyway—Cait and Vi, on their search for information about potentially taking down Silco, who’s causing a lot of pain and problems in Zaun, eventually come across Jinx.

It’s a great scene, because we get this flashback of younger Vi giving Powder a smokescreen-like device and saying that whenever she needs her, use it and she’ll be there. Jinx, who still has it, finally uses it after so long, and it’s a gorgeously heart-wrenching moment with her wearing this solemn, broken expression, and as all her dead family and friends cling to her back as she holds it.

This is one of my favorite scenes in the show so far. No matter how much has changed, and no matter how much she’s changed, Jinx cannot let go of Vi. She cannot let go of Powder. She cannot let go of the past that has formed her, even though it causes her so much pain and guilt. She still has hope and love within her. She still wants to reach out to her sister despite it all, to the beacon of strength and protection and hope Vi once provided. She wants to experience and deserve that love the way she used to, more than anything.

And yet, her past still drags her down, even while she fights for a moment of hope and love and belief in the future, as her regrets and mistakes literally physically clings to her as she holds up the flare in the form of the people she killed. Despite killing so many since then, and on purpose, it is these accidental deaths that still haunt her the most. It is these deaths she cannot let go of or forgive herself for. She cannot even focus on her own reality due to the weight of her shame; she became Jinx because Powder, in her eyes, was never far off from it.

This scene shows Jinx’s intertwined hope and self-resentment so powerfully, and the way they battle, and are always battling, in her mind. God, it’s a great moment.

It seems like Vi is not going to show up—but she does, and the sisters see each other for the first time in seven years. Vi recognizes her immediately as her younger sister Powder and gives her a big old hug.

I think the most striking thing to Vi during the reunion is how deeply Jinx doubts her. She even asks Vi, are you real?, to which Vi responds that yes, of course she’s real. But Jinx, after years of only seeing and remembering Vi in her own mind, and believing she was abandoned, struggles to grapple with the reality of the sister in front of her. Heartbreakingly, she is unable to trust anything she sees, including Vi. She turns defensive, turning on Vi for working with an enforcer, saying Powder is dead and exists no longer.

This is a painful moment, because we see Vi come to the realization that this girl is nothing like the sister she once knew. She is cutthroat and mentally unwell, jumpy and distrustful, wracked with hallucinations and violent tendencies, jaded and deeply traumatized from her own experiences and decisions. When the Firelights (please don’t make me explain who they are) attack Jinx in the middle of the reunion and Jinx begins shooting and them and acting viciously, Vi sees the darkness that has blossomed in her sister, and she is struck with fear for the first time that she may have lost the sister she knew for good.

Let’s throw it back to 3,000 words ago—remember when I said there were some people we first meet in the undercity, like the very important little boy named Ekko who worked in a pawn shop with his own adoptive dad?

Of course you remember.

Well, Ekko is the leader of a group called the Firelights now. They’re mildly significant, and they do cool stuff such as: attack Jinx for being a menace. Try to take down several of Silco’s drug operations. Attack Jinx. Work on the community they’ve built to help rehabilitate Shimmer addicts in this big, awesome tree. Did I mention they also attack Jinx a lot? Because they do.

Ekko and Jinx have a cool fight a little later on in the series, and you can just tell the fans of the video game were crapping themselves in excitement with the way this show shows off its weapons. It would be corny if it wasn’t so funny and wholesome to think about fans freaking out over it.

Jinx ends up on the brink of death after attempting to suicide bomb them both—because she’s crazy—and she ends up being saved by the scientist Silco brings her to, who injects her with the drug Shimmer to keep her alive. Shimmer makes her even crazier and more unhinged, in both fighting style and mentality.

Before this is millions of pages long, I’m going to try to wrap up the summary of the season.

Basically, a very deranged Jinx kidnaps both her sister and Caitlyn and hosts a messed up little tea party in which she tries to convince Vi to kill Cait so they can be together again like old times and so Vi can have Powder back.

Yeah, that is really weird, isn’t it? I’ll get into it shortly, because I have thoughts.

Jayce goes to Silco and attempts to broker a peace agreement, asking him to give up Jinx, who has attacked Piltover. In exchange, he can have his dream, his ideal land of Zaun, free from Piltover’s thumb. Silco thinks about it, but soon decides he cannot and would not be able to betray his daughter.

Victor—remember Victor?—has been using the Hexcore (please don’t ask—it’s science, but it’s actually magic) to heal his broken body piece by piece, but it ends badly when it takes someone he loves (his assistant Skye) as a sacrifice. He tries to destroy it, which doesn’t go well.

He’s also part cyborg now—did I mention that?

Just nod and move on.

Arcane stans, please don’t be mad at me, but as Jinx is the main character of the show, I do have some critiques.

Make no mistake—I think Jinx is a good character. She is wildly entertaining to watch, and you never know quite what to expect from her. Her fighting style is also immensely awesome. I love how she grows and develops her weapon usage into something truly terrifying and dangerously destructive; the style perfectly fits her personality and suits her deteriorating mental state. But like any character, she’s got some issues and inconsistencies.

Firstly—and this is a little nitpicky, but it must be said—tragic, mentally ill characters, especially tragic, mentally ill female characters, don’t always have to be depicted as so goddamn crazy.

After the timeskip, with Jinx working for Silco, she develops some trauma-driven behaviors and symptoms reminiscent of two separate mental disorders. One is what I’d pretty confidently call an evident case of PTSD. For an anime-adjacent show, Arcane deals with PTSD pretty well, and definitely interestingly. The scenes and artistic designs of Jinx’s flashbacks of her friends and family, all gone because of her, are so uniquely and unnervingly done, and we really feel Jinx’s guilt and pain through them. They’re emotionally effective and stylistically great.

However, Jinx also experiences some symptoms of DID. And with DID in a piece of media—sadly, like always, there’s going to be problems.

This particular case of dissociative identity disorder is extremely simplified, as our main gal’s personality has two sides. There’s this constant tug between Jinx, the detached, cold, murderous person she has become to survive, and Powder, her previous self—the version of herself that was loved, that had family, had friends, but lost it all due to her own self-destruction and shortcomings. These are two totally fine, totally valid parts of her, and I get why her inner turmoil is so intense. Jinx wants so badly to be rid of Powder, because truly, she wishes so badly for the opposite: to be rid of Jinx, to be rid of all the things that make her self-resenting and a failure, and to be loved—as so many humans desire.

However, the way this is constantly shoved down the viewers’ throats is so melodramatic and contrived. It’s totally sensationalized. Jinx’s two personalities and when they arise/conflict with each other at random moments are so clearly plot driven rather than emotionally driven. Her DID is just used as a narrative device, existing to evoke feelings instead of say something intelligent about her character, and it’s a device that is hammered down a little too hard on the audience. You don’t have to treat your audience like fools, banging them over the head with themes and symbols and messaging. A lot of the time, they will get it.

I understand Jinx’s gradual loss of sanity, and I don’t absolutely despise the way her DID symptoms are dealt with. But sometimes, it’s a little much. We understand the dichotomy between Jinx and Powder; it doesn’t have to be explicitly brought up and shoved in our faces in the way that it is. Even with her PTSD, which is overall quite good and well depicted, it can easily feel like some of her constant flashbacks are being played for edgy reasons rather than for actual emotional development.

That being said—for the sake of entertainment alone, it totally works. If we say screw the realism, screw the actual impact and effects of a disability like this, it absolutely works. It’s not the worst thing in the world, all things considered. (And the scene where she chooses to sit in the Jinx seat in that last episode is awesome.)

Oh crap, another important plot fact about this moment—Jinx kills yet another adoptive family member by shooting Silco dead to protect Vi during her little tea party when she thinks Vi might be in danger from him. She thought he would give her up to Piltover, but he promised her in his dying words that he never would have. In mourning and regret, after she stands from having killed yet another father figure, she walks past the seat entitled Powder and sits in the seat entitled Jinx, cementing her fate and her decision on who she will be.

Yes, she built a whole set and scene just to have a dramatic moment before she kidnapped Vi and Cait—don’t worry about it.

Secondly, and this is just more of a pet peeve I have with some of the online Arcane community thus far—Jinx is not a hero. She’s not even close.

I understand the heart-wrenching reality of Jinx’s lostness, of her delusions fueled by her own deep self-resentment and self-destructive tendencies. I understand that Jinx has trauma—arguably even the most trauma in the entire show, only tying with her sister. I understand Jinx, and I think she’s a phenomenal character.

But it doesn’t excuse her basically being… a terrorist? Because she is a straight up terrorist. I find it surprising that no one talks about that more? No matter what mental state you are in, if you choose to do something detrimental, your mistakes are never simply erased or forgiven by the rest of your world. Jinx has killed so many people, and not just “bad” people, or people who stood in her way. Boatloads of innocents have died at her hands, not just from Piltover, but from the undercity too. She has immensely violent tendencies. She also worked for Silco, who utilized her poor mental state for his own gain—keeping drugs on the streets, keeping a steady flow of income coming in, and having Jinx as his own personal weapon of mass destruction.

Her mistakes and actions don’t make her totally unsympathetic; they don’t even make her a bad person, because who’s to decide that? There’s a lot of moral nuance in Arcane, and it’s one of the things I like most about it. There are so many levels of powers at play, so many layers of manipulation behind the scenes of every individual, that nothing can ever be simple or set in stone, and I think that’s a major theme of the show.

But the babying of Jinx that I have seen online, both before and after watching it, is pretty wild. I feel that there’s no denying, especially at the season’s conclusion, that Jinx is not just a damaged young girl who was failed by her circumstances; she is also an antagonist. She is reckless with nothing to lose. She doesn’t hesitate to murder when emotions run high. She actively makes bad and cruel choices, and she hurts the people who love her over and over again.

Jinx lives this way in order to keep living with herself, to protect herself, to survive, to be strong. But she is not this helpless victim any more than she is an inexcusable villain; she is simultaneously neither and both of those things, and that’s what makes her so fascinating.

Finally—and this may get me the most heat—the writing surrounding Jinx’s obsession with Vi is a little weird.

To be clear, this isn’t that kind of anime. I do believe that there is absolutely nothing inappropriate Jinx feels towards her own sister in the show.

But there is this kind of open, suspiciously purposeful implication in certain moments… that seem to subtly want to hint that Jinx might feel something inappropriate towards her own sister in the show.

Even though I think we all know she does not.

Please—let me explain.

Vi was this sort of perfect role model for Jinx when they were younger, and to be the picture of perfection in someone else’s eyes will always lead to ruin. To see her perfect version of Vi crack and shatter in real time had to be a lot for Jinx to deal with; I get that. I also get that Jinx feels possessive of her sister—which is fair, as she is probably the only person alive who actually cares for her in a (somewhat) healthy way.

I completely understand Jinx’s complicated feelings towards her sister, especially with her mental state as poor as it is. Jinx was very emotionally reliant on Vi even after years without ever seeing her, viewing her as her savior, her salvation, and always thinking of her, talking to her when she wasn't there—even defining herself by Vi’s own words that were used against her by calling herself Jinx. She is completely and utterly fixated on her sister, so desperate to be loved, so desperate to be saved from herself. It’s a beautifully tragic relationship.

Obviously, there is a clear attachment problem going on, and that’s totally fine writing-wise; it makes sense. But the way it’s depicted at some parts in the show feels… kind of weird? Especially concerning, in particular, how jealous Jinx is of Caitlyn. Because Caitlyn is “replacing” her, oh no—only Caitlyn is Vi’s love interest, and Jinx is Vi’s sister.

Why, we must wonder, would Jinx want to be the Caitlyn in Vi’s life, even remotely? Rather, why would the writers want Jinx to want to be the Caitlyn?

We get several moments of Jinx being haunted by Caitlyn’s face, to the point where she goes out of her way to kidnap and terrorize Cait in front of her sister—who she also kidnaps, because she’s crazy. It’s a very entertaining episode with great moments, but like my first grievance with Jinx, she’s a little too off her rocker at times during it. The Jinx vs. Powder conflict is shoved upon the audience especially hard in this episode, too.

Anyway—it’s important to give Jinx some grace. But it’s also important to see how weird this is for Vi. I can’t help but feel that if Jinx’s character was male, a brother, that this scene and these moments would be construed in a really weird way. Really, it’s no different here. Even though we as the audience know that Jinx does not want her sister romantically, the obsession she has with her, but especially with Cait in particular, almost hints that it could be a possibility, even though it’s not and should not be. It almost feels like the writers are playing with incestuous ideas here at certain moments, and I don’t know if I like that.

It becomes evident that in a way, Jinx wants to own Vi. She spends so much time talking to Vi in her own head that she feels she knows her, that they have this unbreakable bond. But every time a show does this with a “crazy” (usually female) character, making them even “platonically” fixated on someone, I always raise an eyebrow at the intentionality of it. That’s all this critique is—a raised eyebrow at the writing choice to make Jinx so utterly jealous of Caitlyn, and so fixated on not only their emotional connection, but Cait’s explicitly romantic connection with Vi.

Jinx’s emotionally charged possessiveness of Vi in those moments was super uncomfortable, but uncomfortable doesn’t always have to mean bad. Unfortunately, uncomfortable did kind of mean bad in these moments because they felt so questionable and out of place.

I think this discomfort could have been either intentionally further developed and utilized by diving into more of Jinx’s dark psyche surrounding actually having those inclinations towards her sister, which not many shows would have the audacity to do, or it could have been written completely differently—even throwing in another loved one Vi has that Jinx grows deeply resentful and jealous of would have helped, by showing it’s a toxic pattern of behavior.

I also think just the way in which Jinx was written to be spiteful towards Cait changing would have made it a lot better. It would have been so much better if Jinx did not give a single crap about Cait when dealing with or even disposing of her, feeling that she was incapable of coming between her and Vi; we’d get to see a colder and more deranged side of her. I wanted more spite, less jealousy.

Again—I understand where the obsession for Vi comes from and acknowledge it is completely sisterly/platonic, but my eyebrows are still raised. And also again, I think either taking it to the uncomfortable extreme (the show delving into Jinx’s warped emotional feelings more explicitly instead of letting them linger and having people assume what they could mean—the show actually did this quite well with Jinx and Silco, who were also oddly physically close at times in a way you wouldn’t think a father/daughter would be, but it’s made evident by the writing that the connection is in no way romantic or sexual) or making Jinx out to act a little less like a jealous ex-girlfriend of her own sister—only, I must stress, in a couple of very specific, very noticeable moments—would have been way better.

Okay, my Jinx complaints are done.

The show ends in an amazing, jarring moment where, mid-Council voting for peace in the underground, Jinx sends a Jayce gemstone-powered rocket launcher into the sky and right at the tower. She could have killed everyone in/around that area or no one at all; we will see in the next season. But we saw how much damage those gemstones did the first time she used them, and it was not good.

All in all, season one of Arcane is super solid. The visuals and animation are next-level, the worldbuilding is impeccably detailed, and most of the characters are super solid. I think Jinx and Vi, the two main characters, are especially well written. Their dynamic is both fascinating and disturbing, and I look forward to delving into season two to see what comes next for them.

There are a few aspects about the show that I don’t love, like its pacing in moments, its general edginess that sometimes crosses the line into melodrama, and some of the dialogue being kind of clunky at best and downright cringe-worthy at worst. But what I like and appreciate about the show far outweighs my minor grievances with it. Cliché as some of its aspects are, Arcane is not afraid to take risks. The show is a gorgeous, blinding interception of rage and hope, guilt and freedom, family and enemies. I definitely recommend it—my personal score would be a 8/10, maybe an 8.5 in its best moments.

To anyone who actually read or even skimmed this, I love you, and you’re crazy.

Thank you so very much for reading!