How ARCANE Writes Women

arcane is a master class in how to write amazing women every one of these characters is just a work of art and storytelling and characterization and it's weird to say but it seems like everyone is happy which is crazy no one ever agrees on stuff like this so what happened how is it all so good so while i as a man definitely hesitate to make a video that's like allow me a male man to tell all you female women how to write the ladies this is about arcane not about me you know if anything this is about me as a writer who is really looking for guidance on this topic not a lot of stories do this this well and as a guy i really want to learn more about how to write great women characters and this show just taught me so much so this video isn't a how-to it's about what i personally learned and these are basically just a bunch of incredible storytelling things that arcane did that i believe deserve to be highlighted and celebrated and encouraged and i love any and all discussion in the comments adding questions and critiquing whatever the more the merrier especially if you're a woman and you have opinions on this kind of thing i'm here to learn so i want to hear your thoughts and by the way let me add one really surprising thing about this whole situation which is that archane does a lot of things that could go really wrong a lot of tropes that are just like minefields for bad writing when it comes to women arcane has a manipulative seductive femme fatale they have a macho action girl who beats up men twice their size they have a manic pixie slash broken girl who is arguably fixed by man they have a beautiful but doesn't realize it outcast girl who gets a naked shower scene and the way our king does it it's great it works it's all these things that we want in our lady characters deep nuance realistic empowering so let's get to the actual characters here i want to go through each character in relation to topic or trope where i think the writing really made them shine and the first of those characters is mel and the first topic is agency agency is the ability of characters to make choices that change the course of events and the exercising of that ability and this is a big one i think this is the main thing we see in failed attempts at writing strong women what we often see is characters who might be physically strong might be skilled might be independently minded but then we see them just being tossed around by the plot or by the decisions of the men in the story never making any actual decisions themselves arcane's women have agency they make a ton of important decisions mel has the final say with the development of hex sex she pushes for hex weapons she pushes for war then changes course and pushes for peace and the whole time she is the pivotal voice on the council leading them in whatever decision they make savika is a henchwomen which seems like a very follower role and remember that she basically makes soco she dethrones vander takes away all his power and makes sukko the new undercity boss spy disobeys evander to sacrifice herself and then when he exercises his agency right back to stop her she uses hers again to go after him and fight for him jinx defines her own identity at the end she sets the whole thing up figures it out on her own and then takes action when she's done but i think mel is the best example of this she starts out with an incredible amount of agency in the form of actual political power she has like a direct one-to-one influence over other council members she's wealthy and proactively seeking to increase her wealth and influence but like i mentioned a lot of women start out in positions like these where they hold positions of power and we're all ready to see them use it and then something happens why or really where do characters like this lose their agency so i think it most often gets lost when the characters get into relationships especially if it's an important charismatic man with strong opinions or a strong role it also can often get lost in developing conflicts and the weaknesses of the character and the other scenario is that it often gets taken away by a competing strong woman mel meets each of these scenarios coming out stronger than she was when she went in she gets into a relationship with jace and by the way even getting into this relationship she has a rare show of agency she sleeps with jace because she wants them that's not something you usually see stars letting women do it's taboo but her cane showcases that decision of hers very openly and confidently but anyway she gets into this relationship and he doesn't take away her agency at all on the contrary she uses the relationship to further her goals and then she confronts her weakness who is a strong woman literally coming to take away her agency and she doesn't let her she grows through that experience and ends up in a situation where she and jace are equally dependent on each other's agency to bring the council to vote for peace jace initiates it but the council violently protests until mel changes their course by exerting her political influence which far supersedes chases so mouth starts with agency and it only increases but i want to zero in here on one characteristic of mills that relates very strongly to her agency really one of her most central characteristics overall and it feels a little weird highlighting this as a central characteristic because normally that's bad writing and or just not true that it matters so much but here it does matter and it's great writing so one of mel's most prominent features is how beautiful she is and making this a major characteristic of a woman is often a recipe not just for shallowness but for passivity that's why we think of it as a bad thing to build a character around but for mel her beauty does the opposite it's an aid to her agency she uses her beauty to get done what she wants to get done and it's not just a one note batman eyelashes get money type trade no she already manipulates people in all kinds of ways complex ways by appealing to faulty self-image by offering them power by scaring them by bribing them this is a character who can paint a picture and use it to unsettle two different characters in two completely different ways she uses everything at her disposal to send messages foster relationships manipulate people whatever she needs to do to achieve her ends so they took this characteristic which has such potential to erase complexity and take away agency and they use it to add to her complexity and aid her agency and just to talk a bit more how this relates to some of the other characters just like with mel it's very clear that akina is using a character first approach when it comes to attractiveness which is why they end up with hot characters that are also good characters and to contrast when we see a poorly written hot character it's like the starting point is the characteristic they pick a characteristic that's attractive like a boob and now what sort of person shall we craft around this boob and that's obviously destined for shalomos when you start from the other way from the character it leads to much more layered approach to character attractiveness vi is a fighter what type of attractiveness are we going to give her well a character with her skill set wouldn't be voluptuous she'd be toned she'd have confidence swagger she'd have scars we take elements of her starry she's a prisoner so she has tattoos she has a jacket she stole from someone who's trying to mug her jinx you know jinx was an interesting challenge because she was designed in-game to be the psycho sexy type by the way not letting the fanbase know if she's of legal age very efficient meta solution forces otherwise thirsty fans to focus on her personality clever thinking arcane very clever but they also gave her this messiness we see smudges of dirt on her face dark circles under her eyes this is a far cry from the no hair out of a playstore we often see for any character of any level of attractiveness kate is obviously part of this conversation but there's a lot to talk about with her so we'll get back to her at the end but overall beauty makes our games characters deeper and more complex instead of shallower and simpler and if we look at vai who i want to talk about next we see this exact same phenomenon but with strength the major bad writing trope they've with vai is the action girl and action girls aren't bad but it's a trope that i think everyone from pretty much every perspective out there rolls their eyes out hard when it's done poorly i think we all know the story of this trope women in fiction used to be mostly weak dainty fragile things that needed help fighting their battles from the big strong men in the story when we say objectifying this is the most literal form of it where women are really basically objects through their passivity and through only being valuable for their looks so that's more or less where things were and then the pendulum started swinging back the other way we got women who were beautiful but could also fight but sometimes it still seemed like it was just a facade built over the same old objectification and really before we got too many characters who were balanced we were happy with the pendulum started swinging further and further and we got several variations here that it seems like no one likes variation number one is the man plus boobs action girl take a very masculine personality and roll add surface level femininity and congrats to reach your quota for women in your story these characters range from the one of the bros types to women who are toxic to other women to easy access for a romance that doesn't really fit with anyone's personalities they're basically female in name only and the impression i get is that people who want to see strong women characters don't really feel like they're getting women with this variation the defined by my gender action girl is variation number two this character is feminine but her whole personality is basically just not being accepted by men it's her major conflict it's most of her dialogue it's in subtext everywhere and this type of character not only feels one-dimensional but very much still defined by the men in her world it's just an antagonistic relationship but she hasn't escaped that limitation variation number three is the auto overpowered action girl this character is stronger and more skilled than all of the male characters without any training without trying without earning anything that characters usually have to earn in order to get to that level and the main problem that comes up here is you have people just not respecting the character and it's a shallow type of strength usually that these characters have since it took nothing of their inner selves to get it i want to talk about that last one first because they navigated this perfectly they did it right away in vi's first fight scene and it doesn't start here when the fight starts it starts right here giving vai a slow-mo ugly getting socked in the draw shot that's something not every story is willing to do with their action girl that's the first thing they did right but the payoff is actually here in this scene that comes right after the fight because the fight itself isn't what convinces us that via strong it's this moment wait want to see how that ends [Music] vai won this fight but it's not like it was this badass hear me aurora moment no vi got beat up it was pretty even but she won and only then does she pull the just try a line totally different scene if she says this without taking all those ugly punches first now we believe she strongly believes she's brave think of that cheesy rocky quote but it ain't about how hard you hit it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward if you want to show the directional girl strong you need to show her getting hit otherwise you did just write another fragile delicate flower just one who can throw a punch and this isn't a gender-based thing action guys need this moment just as much we don't want to see characters exhibit outer strength we want to see outer strength that comes from an inner strength and that's why we believe vi when she's fighting on the bridge even though by physical standards it seems unrealistic we've already bought into her inner strength that's what we respect that's all we care about now vi doesn't fit the other action growth trophy archetypes either but i think we can make use of a better example here to continue this discussion and if you've seen my videos you know that if i'm talking about vi that means i'm about to talk about someone else there's another very strong character where they took the opposite approach and this has to do with the man plus boobs action girl and it's not just action girl for this archetype this is the broader category of man role plus woman gender equals fully developed character that's what we're navigating around here so this pitfall is actually one of the easier ones to circumvent if man plus boobs is your only female character you're in trouble but if you have a range of characters with varying levels of femininity and masculinity then this becomes really interesting if you put in the effort to make it interesting and that's why i want to talk about all three of these characters together cevica grayson and embessa are women in traditionally masculine roles we rarely see hench women or women having clout in the underworld because of physical strength we rarely see women police chiefs and we rarely see women generals and with each of these characters we see similarities like we just talked about with the more feminine characters this is character first design all three of these rules demand muscle mass essentially it's a necessity for the job it's not just an aesthetic thing but also since these are supporting characters the characters they're supporting also factor into their design cevica is the anti-vibe and with her we see a much more brute force oriented brawling style than vi who is smaller and needs to depend more on technique and speed savika is also a supporting character for silko if sokko was a big muscle man we would have a via like henchwoman but he's the small one so he needs to be paired with muscle mass grayson is the counterpart to vander she's there so that we know that despite superficial differences piltover and the lanes do play by similar rules we saw vanda playing enforcer with huck when we see this new character who's big and intimidating with a roughness to her a hardness even in the unique way that she speaks we're like oh i get it this is topside's vander the physical similarities facilitate that and of course ambassador is a fall to mel mel is full of these intangible qualities that she uses to manipulate people with embezza it's her physicality at the forefront mello's softness ambassador's brute force mello's mercy ambassador is violence and again this just wouldn't work as well with a mama mel who has the same build as mel she needs to literally embody that difference also each one of these characters does in their limited screen time demonstrate what could be called a more feminine approach with savika you have her giving sicko advice on parenting a daughter specifically she'll come to you when she's ready and this is daughter advice sons aren't as inclined to do this men typically don't solve interpersonal issues by reconnecting and talking things out succo really needs a woman's wisdom and sevika is there to offer it with grayson we see her letting kate win the shooting competition and again you could see this as a grayson thing not a woman thing but the stereotypical competitive man-ego just doesn't drive with us from both sides a man in grayson's position typically wouldn't do this and a boy in case position typically wouldn't respect this and kate by the way is open to respecting it when she realizes this wasn't her parents meddling in her life the letting her win things she seems fine with once it's clear her family is involved and needless to say women can obviously be competitive this way if you're not first year last that kind of thing but it's interesting you know i've wondered with the scene if grayson sort of realizes that kate doesn't have a parent who really understands her and this purposeful vulnerability leading into a moment of guidance comes off as her playing a very motherly role to someone who probably can't connect much with her own mom and finally ambassador we have this moment because you weakened me i couldn't endure the look in your eyes whenever i made the decisions the necessary decisions to keep us safe again the moment of open vulnerable communication about feelings or a moment of extremely deaf emotional manipulation but still using the context of her role as a mother keeping the family safe it's worth noting with ambassador 2 that she really takes on this warlord role in a very feminine way she is mother bear protecting her cubs she sees conquest as protecting her family so again with the man plus move characters what's the actual problem with us two things number one when there's no personality behind it except generic manly macho manly macho man that shallow that's bad writing here we see all these ways that facilitates these already developed identities and character functions number two when it fills a lady character quota instead of broadening the range of an already very lady cast which arcane obviously has with these women on one side of the spectrum mel on the other side and vi somewhere in the middle okay and the last action girl archetype which i honestly don't think we need to talk about that much is the defined by my gender action girl and again this is the character whose story space is very much taken up by not being a man by standing in opposition to men by being held back by men by being the one woman in a man's world and i'm not out to demean this stroke just like any trope this can be done very well or very poorly but doing it poorly is when gender is the character when gender is the arc and there's nothing else no personality no broader theme nothing and obviously arcane doesn't do this the characters are all rich they all have personalities but i want to talk about an element of this with jinx and there's a lot to talk about with jinx but she is the character who comes closest to being defined by a man in her life being submissive to a man depending on a man and of course this relationship with sokko ends up not being that at all arcane does everything right here as usual first and foremost jinx is a kid and silko is her dad and i think people are really bothered by the submissive dependent thing when it's like a love interest or a boss or even an older brother but parents i mean people are dependent on their parents especially teenagers not as much of an issue but let's look at some of the other ways they navigate her this year first it's made very clear that this isn't because she's a girl and he's a man it's a character thing not a gender thing and we know that because we got three episodes of powder having this exact same super dependent relationship with a girl character vi they established dependence without the gender element to define it for us and then when it shifts the circle we get it it's pretty simple the second important thing here is an even more definitely handled version of what we talked about earlier with mel jinx's dependence on the man doesn't take away from her agency and this happens both with jinx and silko and vander and vi actually vander tries to control her white doesn't let him literally at almost any point in the story vi makes six pivotal decisions in act one she listens to vander for only one of these and that doesn't even work out and then the rest she just doesn't listen to him at all and this is similar to jinx and silko work on your gadgetry she goes out and kills a bunch of enforcers silko goes through lengths to keep her out of his plan she figures out what's going on kidnap soko's right-hand woman does the exact thing he's trying to prevent disappears pokes him a bunch of times kidnaps him and then kills him so not exactly the submissive obedient daddy's little girl archetype but this shows us something important the only woman depends on man setup they had was with a girl they knew would break that mold in every way so again character first and since we're on such already the other dynamic here is a male character fixing a female character and a it's not fixing her and b it's not zoko doing it jinx actually tells us this but he didn't make jinx and if we're being honest here it sort of is fixing her probably they make it ambiguous but sickle is almost definitely more correct than vine in the final scene about who she really is and sekou encouraged her and helped her develop her talents and gave her direction like any good dead would and he gave her a lot of love and affirmation along the way that she badly needed but the reason why it's not exactly fixing is because they keep it so morally ambiguous we don't know how we feel about this and what we don't like is a woman's success being directly attributable to the efforts of a man and here we're just not sure if it's success it feels like that in some respects so it feels like corruption and failure in others this is the same reason why we're not bothered by jinx being extremely submissive in her mentality when it comes to silko because the whole thing is painted in such a negative light we don't want her to be sitting in circle's lap and serving his needs and freaking out because she thinks he doesn't like her we see that as corruption as a low point on this character's arc and i think that's why they purposely make it a little weird with a teenage stepdaughter straddling adopted father thing we're seeing jinx's acting to be honest closer to soko than we ever saw her acting with vi we see some skinship between her and vibe and not this level of shy nuzzling ubu hugs or the almost servile docility we see with the eye drop scenes it makes us want to see her back with the valley where she belongs and yeah we're in conflict about it because we do see her flourishing with sukko like she never did with vai but that's the way they avoid the problems here this submissive relationship is a goal for the character and that does bother us it's supposed to bother us and on the topic of submissiveness in general that's usually another big pitfall when it comes to writing women all the men in the story are these adventurous action heroes and the women are all meek and afraid of the action going on and jinx isn't submissive overall but powder certainly is powder's very afraid of the action she's meek she's scared and again just like the suckle thing was mitigated by being a family relationship here it's mitigated by powder being a younger sibling she's not timid because she's a girl vi's also a girl powder's timid because she is young nada milos taunts her about powder being a girl he legitimately could not say that if he wanted to with someone like vi in his life so he picks on her because of her age her weakness all the things she can't do and these are all things that have nothing to do with her gender that she very quickly grows out of anyway okay but of course the 500 pound trope in the room when it comes to jinx is the manic pixie dream girl and right off the bat dream girl that doesn't really apply i've heard jinx called the manic pixie nightmare girl because germanic pixieness isn't a good thing it's not this thing that the men in the story are transfixed by on the contrary the one character who maybe canonically has a crush on her is only transfixed by the opposite witnessing a moment where she she's not manic pixie at all but just the girl she used to be before all that and that is the key by the way the girl she used to be before all that that's the main way they avoid the traps of the manic pixy trope it's not about jinx it's about powder i think jinx must have been one of the major hurdles for the writing staff here was this iconic character who just was a manic pixie dream girl in her lol incarnation it's one thing to avoid a trope in creating a character but when you're given a character to write who really does embody a trope in a pretty simplistic objectified way and you need to write your way out of that and like every tool you have with characterization is built around this trope that is a tough spot to be in so what do they do well first of all they picked out the one very non-simplistic non-manic pixie thing about her she apparently has this implied relationship with another character another girl character so it's not dream girl related at all and it would appear this relationship digs deep into something something about the character we don't know something in this character's past and that was step two and this is a really creative but very straightforward solution character embodies some trope well that wasn't always the case it could be maybe little girl jinx was also a disaster but maybe she was a totally different person so let's introduce you to this character in a form that's basically not trophy at all powder is not a manic pixie so already by the time we get to jinx we'll see that she's more than just that shallow troll and that leads to step three we make this whole story about how powder became jinx if there's a well told nuance organic story that tells us how he got there then trope or no trope we don't care anymore it's a good story and this is a fundamental in writing any trope the trope itself isn't bad it's bad if it makes your story more simplistic jinx as a manic pixie is only shallow when that's all there is but that's not all there is she's a character with an incredible story so who cares about the trope and by the end of the show no one is thinking about man pixie we're all just blown away by this character that's it that's what the backstory does the build up the nuance and just to highlight some of that nuance let's rewind a bit and talk about the manic pixie trope checklist as a whole here's tv chope's steak she's stunningly attractive energetic high on life full of wacky quirks and idiosyncrasies generally including childlike playfulness often with a touch of wild hair dying so low jinx basically fits all this to a tee but let's look at arcane jinx all that childlike energy that playfulness it has a dark undercurrent this isn't a teenage girl acting young because it makes her cute or attractive this is a severely stunted psyche making tea parties and drawing animals because she has this absolutely horrifying past that left her as a 9 year old and a 16 year old's body and something conspicuously absent from the manic pixie checklist is actual mania with a trope it's an analogy to the high energy thing but with jinx it's literal not mania per se but psychosis hallucination voices in her head making dolls of people she killed and interacting with them like they're real people and appearance-wise the blue hair obviously natural in runeterra so not a problem but i think the tattoos are the real kicker here i made a short about this about how they took these tattoos that had been there on the lol version of this character for years and they infused it with a story meaning this is the blue smoke from the flare that vi gave her this is jinx's longing for her sister even the is the classic tried and true i'm older than a little girl but i'm wearing my hair like a little girl because young a sexy hairstyle again jinx is a little girl mentally and it's not sexy it's sad it's really really sad long overgrown pictures on someone whose psyche has trapped her in childhood for way too long yeah that's not simplistic or objectifying at all anymore that's now a really nuanced touch to character with a developed backstory okay caitlyn i think kate's one of the most important characters to talk about in the whole show because even though it's pretty organic she's a character who does play into her tropes more directly than arcane's other women kate is the heart of the story the moral voice a role which is almost always filled by a woman she consistently shows the most understanding empathy affection out of the whole cash he doesn't particularly like fighting kate's also the one character in the show who gets blatantly objectified by another character hot cupcake i'm getting called pen names like cupcake which he doesn't like for basically no reason are you gonna help me out cupcake stop calling me that my name is caitlin but you're so sweet like a cupcake and by the way the your hot cupcake thing is pretty close to another trope that usually bothers the heck out of people this beautiful along throw like really this girl doesn't know she's pretty also she's a damsel in distress at one point she gets a naked shower scene physically she's not that strong she can't keep up she can't even keep up with this guy even her choice of weapon is arguably the long-range woman trope women are often archers so they can stay at a safe range because we need to protect them so all of these actually fit a single pattern a single brilliant tool arcane uses heavily all except for one of them which is the beautiful all-along thing so let's start with that then i'll get to everything else so this is the theory in this video that i'm the most on the fence about i love other people's opinions on this i do think i'm picking up on something subtle here but tell me what you think the beautiful all along trope necessarily accompanies a world of mediocre looking people where beauty is a major value of all the characters involved it's very important to the character's goals if she's beautiful or not it's very important to other characters goals if the main character is more beautiful than them or beautiful enough to deserve them and they kind of flip the script on this in arcane piltover is a really beautiful society and most top sider characters we can help put some effort into their appearances through fashion through makeup through grooming presumably tidy facial hair and or rest of body hair and kate wants no part of piltover society we know that she's obsessed with the understudy from the very first word she says she hates the whole two-faced nature of upper-class piltover where everything is pristine and lavish on the outside but rotten on the inside so when this undercity girl calls her pretty it's this thing that kate doesn't think about that much because she's done with that culture she's left that world she hates this isn't the character realizing she was beautiful all along when she thought she was mediocre this is a character being reintroduced to this quality of hers in a context that's no longer distasteful to her and in the end it's actually not that important at all and we get hints of that from the fact that this is so just not the usual rendition of the stroke it takes place in a brothel where one love interest is trying to get the other love interest to flirt with one of the brothel people we'd even aside once vice says this kate's looks don't bring her any closer or further from achieving her goals and don't bring anyone else any closer further from achieving their goals it's being used for other reasons it's a character moment it's about exploring the cultural differences in the setting it's a plot device for vi to subtly ditch her police tale and go after cevica it's not some big climactic happily ever after moment for kaitsara so i think that does bring us out of the strobe somewhat okay now what about everything else so all these tropes and stereotypes we see too often with women in fiction like i mentioned arcane navigates all of these in the same way let's start with the heart of the starry thing kate shows all these soft warm traditionally feminine traits like empathy compassion nonviolence and where does she get it from her dad i love that they work this in so efficiently from the start we get that kate's mom wears the pants in the relationship it seems like she's the breadwinner in the family she holds the more traditionally masculine career a politician but then this scene shows us a lot more with the mom doing the gun-toting father catching the daughter with the boyfriend trope with this gay relationship and the mom has the gun and it's already seamlessly set up by having marksmanship clearly being a big thing in the kiriman household it's even in their painting but then mr caitlyn rushes in and has this traditional motherly response the big hug tending to his daughter's wounds while kate and her mom discuss politics these possibly gender traits are shown to be non-gendered kate is the heart of the show the moral compass but not because she's a woman it's because she's caitlin and this is exactly what we see with the objectification thing because i kind of sort of lied earlier and caitlyn's not the only one we see objectified by another character there are actually two more examples of this the first is with the same character incidentally we got a deal pretty boy and by the way the fact that this is the same character shows that this is a lot more about vibing a flirt to get under people's skin than about like some gender thing seeing it happen to a man and a woman also removes the gender element and it's similar to how we see kate giving dough eyes to the broth of woman and some random girl giving does to jace when akeem does something that could possibly be interpreted as making a statement about gender we see that potential statement neutralized by doing a similar scene with the other gender and then we also have the other example here with embezza and howell very little objectification here i'm off to sample the local cuisine same thing going on here who objectives and who gets objectified has nothing to do with gender per se and we can go through just about everything else with this character and we see the same pattern caitlyn is a damsel in distress vander is also damsel in distress he even has a scene where she shows a ton of skin for no reason jace also has the shirtless scene of the forge and they do this with other women as well kate is a long-range character but so is grace and a woman even more masculine than some of arcane's men caitlyn can't keep up in the parkour scene and vi is the parkour master all neutralized by demonstrating clearly that this has nothing to do with gender this neutralization tool goes a lot further by the way with a lot of different characters the last named character i want to talk about is our wonderful miss young fridging is a term used for characters who are basically only introduced so they can die never having done anything really but certainly not anything wrong and these characters are often women and that does fit what happened to skye pretty well not entirely like i explained in my victor video sky does serve a much more important purpose she's the one who's consistently right there beside him valuing him for being victor and not for any external achievements which is how victor always values himself guys looking at the person not the invention victor reaches for the technology sky reaches for him and it's because she's so inspired by him so she's not there to be fridge but she does die without really having done anything but with arcane's neutralization rule we should see this happening to a male character elsewhere and we do with benzo so fridging sure but not gendered and just go through a few more of these single parenthood is mostly a thing we see in fiction with women single moms but like half the dads and our king are single fathers there's another common trope with action girls that people don't like but a tough girl is tough because she grew up with brothers and they taught her to fight and with why the opposite is clearly implied echo isn't her brother but we do get this scene she showed me a couple of moves to practice via's the fighter via is the oldest kid in the group if anything they probably attribute their skills to growing up with a big sister and i think the relationships fit into this also seeing the relationship dynamics through a lesbian pairing removes some of the gendered focus from the heterosexual relationship as well arcane isn't trying to tell us something about men or women through these relationships it's just romance it's just the characters and overall we just see this with the world and how it's set up everyone in all kinds of rules politicians are both men and women scientists are both men and women fighters obviously and on a deeper level you have a character like vai who has traditionally feminine character goals and concerns she's a protector she cares about her relationships and she pursues those goals with traditionally masculine methods and traditionally masculine style and then you have mel who has a crooked greedy politician is very much in a traditional man's role but she pursues her masculine goals with all this graceful femininity and with both of these this isn't like via showing how women fight or melt showing how women do politics it's just vibing vi and melbourne mill the landscape the show is crafted puts the whole focus on the characters instead of this one superficial element of them and this is a very conscious decision on the part of the writers here's a quote from amanda overton she's talking about more than just gender here but listen we talked frequently in the writer's room of arcane about representation for us the beauty of rontera is that it's a fantasy world it is much more diverse than our world in so many ways and it never made sense that there be any stigmatization against who you love in a place like that we spent a lot of time imagining what that world free from stigmatization would look like and how we would express it for example would there even be a word for gay when vice caitlyn whom she prefers the attitude there was our way of alluding to that lack of stigmatization it's a completely normal thing to ask and not make assumptions about people's preferences based on some perceived norms this is also the reason known commented on vi's body type if there's no perceived norm for masculine or feminine expression i would even think to make some comparative or contrasting statement i think this has a lot to do with the pretty much universally positive response to all of cane's women it's how they handle things on the micro level but also on the macro level with this overall approach amanda is talking about and while we're on the topic of these macro decisions i want to point out a few more big picture moves they made first of all it's very powerful to have women protagonists taking the lead in a show like this in general i think people were really happy to see that but also it's a video game adaptation and you can just hear the voice of like the out of touch no nothing tv exec barging in and going no no video games are for boys you'll alienate your demographic if you have the girlies stealing the show but thankfully that didn't happen we got this whole cast of strong women with nuanced motivations and complex arcs leading the story forward second arcane empowers women but not at the expense of men and i think this is a trend that annoys both men and women and part of this relates to one of those action girl tropes we already talked about but if every time a woman wins it has to be paired with a man losing every time a woman uses agency it has to be triumphantly taken from a man every time a woman takes the spotlight we get this pointed shoving of the man out of the way you wind up in exactly the same place you're trying to escape with the women's whole world being defined by men just through this antagonistic relationship third women can express the emotion without it coming off as weak or hysterical and i think it's worth talking about both extremes of the stroke expression of emotions is either almost mocked by being played for weakness and fragility or it's taboo and then on the one hand we get these undignified creatures of hysteria and on the other hand we get these stoic unemotional robots who are strong because they're so void of emotionality and neither come off as very human both are pretty degrading unlikable superficial and uninteresting but arcane women all display a dynamic emotional range that's both dignified and empathetic and those emotions come at times of vulnerability and empowerment they're paired with characters exercising agency and characters feeling deprived of it and it's never played for a narrative of oh look at so-and-so overreacting again or this is why so-and-so will never succeed okay and the last overarching thing i want to highlight is arcane's willingness to explore the relationships of women and i am referring to vine kate here but i'm referring to a lot more than that as well sister relationships father-daughter relationships mother daughter even a bit of a mother-son older sister younger brother even middle brother youngest sister there's actually not a single father-son relationship in the show unless you count vanders one line each to my lone clagger it's not like it's a good thing to exclude father-son relationships but it just shows that what they're choosing to focus on is what story they want to tell they're not just looking to comment storytelling conventions to set up their relationships because if we're talking common storytelling conventions so many stories showcase exactly one type of relationship involving women a heterosexual relationship between a man and a woman and that's it and there's so much more to women's experiences than just that one type of relationship and arcane saw they had an opportunity to explore those relationships with all the women in its cast and they did and they didn't do it to the exclusion of male relationships we still got brother relationships with vander and silko jason victor but it's clear the priority here what was meant to stand out was sisters father daughter love between women arcane made those the centerpieces and by the way lots more to talk about with a vine kate relationship there's so much to explore there i did make a video on it in the past but yeah all the discussion around it probably deserves its own video okay so to sum up here are the fundamentals i learned the most important is agency that's kind of the key behind all of these characters without agency none of this works and with it you don't just get the kind of strong women we all want to see you also get a more dynamic story second don't be afraid to show your characters get hurt feel weak be scared be ugly fail that's the only road to enabling your characters to stand back up grow strong be brave be beautiful and triumph third we have character first let a character's personality and story determine the characterization physically aesthetically how masculine or feminine the character is and that those choices deepen the character make them more complex and nuance not just fill in empty spaces like a checklist next transform bad tropes into good characterization by making them organic show a complex story behind them make the details nuanced and integrated into character most bad tropes are bad because they're superficial and don't fit if you make them organic and use the trope's details to explore more aspects of the character a it will no longer matter where it's a trope and b it probably won't resemble the trope much at that point anyway 5. relationships can be a tool for empowerment don't simplify love by painting it as a weakness holding the character back make it a vehicle to help the character grow 6. neutralization neutralize stereotypes tropes traits scenes characteristics by applying them to men and women this removes the focus on gender and replaces it with a focus on character and then the final four the overarching ones seven fantasy worlds can represent an opportunity to show a world without gendered stereotypes and stigmas and this can shape a landscape more enabling for strong women eight be careful about empowering women at the expense of men nine expressing emotions should not be equated with weakness and hysteria ten women have all kinds of relationships that stories can explore family and romantic not just the simple boy meets girl okay so that's what i got up to until now much more to learn please leave comments this video is just the beginning of the discussion i want to hear all your perspectives on this especially from women who like the show i'll be in the comments more so than usual in my videos i'm still here to learn and i know this video only covered a small portion of everything there is to talk about here arcane recently won a ton of annie's which is really exciting as a fan but even more exciting for me personally because when christian lincoln and alex z were giving a speech they were standing in front of a wall of fan art and i saw an image from one of my videos so that means the arcane people some of them maybe one of them knows who i am watches my content and i just want to say to whoever that individual is in arcanes or riot's offices thank you from the bottom of my heart for the show it gives me so much enjoyment and enrichment it's taught me so much and anything i can do to further the success of the show let me know and i love to help in any way i can please reach out so i'm taking the two weeks to make this video i actually came up with another really good two week idea so i think i'm gonna keep to that schedule for a bit try it out might go back after a while we'll see but for now i'll see you for another long video like this in two sundays on another really exciting topic subscribe in the meantime bunch of one minute analyses going on between now and then consider supporting me on patreon if you like the content that short from last sunday about mel and jace was a patron request love chatting with people on there about the show thank you a ton for the support means a lot new videos every wednesday friday and sunday thanks for watching

Channel: schnee

Views: 1,161,999

Keywords:

Id: hML-FGHGEN4

Length: 32min 45sec (1965 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 27 2022

Reddit Comments

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[u/Smart-Soup-2156]

I love this video it really tells you what arcane did right in the plot and character writing it’s just amazing on how accurate that man got it

[u/[deleted]]

This show is a fucking great example of female characters done right

[u/patmax17]

i'm late to the party and watched this video today, but it's so on point, in hits a lot of nails exactly on the head on why this show's characters are so good