How Does TRAUMA Affect IMMORTAL Characters? (HEIMERDINGER Analysis) | ARCANE

okay so my question is does heimerdinger have ptsd so i asked dr schnee about this scene it's groundbreaking what's most exciting is that it reacts to biological matters you must destroy it what i've seen nations destroyed by a single seed and it looked exactly like this something's different you've changed what did you do what do you mean professor it's that thing it must be destroyed wait no i won't let you jace this is a violation of the ethos i will have it destroyed one way or another and by the way i would absolutely love to hear dr dao's take on this topic as well but anyway my dad watched the scene with me and he broke out the dsm-5 and showed me this first of all just the definition of trauma we get in the ptsd section is exposure to actual or threatened death serious injury or sexual violence in one or more of the following ways and we see number one or two either directly experiencing the event himself or witnessing as it happened to others that seems to be what happened okay now criterion b this is where it gets interesting number three is dissociative reactions or flashbacks and it points out the most extreme expression is a complete loss of awareness of present surroundings now if you look at heimerdinger in the scene it seems like he's having one of these dissociative reactions he zones jace out completely he's just gone for a couple seconds and back to dsm we see number four is intense distress at exposure to external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event you know this is what we call getting triggered and that's definitely what's happening here he's encountering something that resembles the thing that caused his trauma and only resembles it i mean you're just looking kind of at its scale it's it's superficial features i've seen nations destroyed by a single seed and it looked exactly like this and we see this complete change in his mood and criterion d actually mentions that it says that the trauma changes how the subject thinks and their mood and association with the elements of the trauma so we see his mood completely changed we see the intense distress more intense probably than any reaction we've seen from heimerdinger until now he gets aggressive he gets accusatory he's making threats about destroying victor's work and also in criterion d had mentioned how the trauma changes how the subject thinks about their trauma persistent exaggerated beliefs about others about the world about the cause of the traumatic event and that's also what we see here i mean the views he expresses here but also in other places are sort of extreme you know from the start we hear arcane equals bad simple as that science should never put people's lives in danger even if it can save lives this is a pretty extreme way of thinking especially given what's going on here on the human level this person he cares about trying to save his own life and just to mention the other thing that was relevant here which we don't see in this particular scene criterium c is avoidance behavior lifestyle changes to which stimuli associated with the traumatic event you know and that we definitely see with heimerdinger so does heimerdinger have ptsd no there's like a ton more here that you need in order to make the diagnosis and we just don't see it i think this is a really important discussion to have about how mental illness is used in fiction and i don't think there's anything wrong with us by the way i think it's just important to point out this is a fictional world and these are fictional characters and it's easy to get carried away here when we see signs of things that we recognize we may see a familiar element of some condition depicted very vividly and very realistically but the goal isn't necessarily to depict a full expression of what that mental illness looks like the goal is the starring i had the same discussion with my dad about jinx i want to know if jinx was a psychopath and he went through the diagnostic criteria and some of it was very clear and then other stuff she just didn't have it all and that's the story they wanted to tell with that character jinx has signs of a lot of different things borderline personality disorder schizophrenia ptsd the story they were trying to tell with her involved these really realistic depictions of individual symptoms of many different conditions and their aim wasn't to depict an overall picture of this condition or that condition you know they're not trying to tell a story about schizophrenia or about antisocial personality disorder they're trying to tell a story about jinx and that's why i think with these diagnostic discussions about characters it rarely matches up to the actual diagnostic criteria we just shouldn't expect it to and by the way this is something i really do respect in georgia does approach that she's not treating fiction like a psychology textbook but focusing on all the lessons these pieces of art are trying to convey to us about these psychology related topics and i think that is where the real value lies but anyway this was dr cheney's take on heimerdinger we see all these well-depicted characteristics with him they're trying to tell a story here about trauma but what is that story and the interesting thing about heimerdinger is that this is one of two stories being told two parallel stories take a look at the scene tell me what you notice you don't understand what's at stake but how can you that's a burden that only i here carry time i've seen this power in the wrong hands it corrupts consumes lays waste to civilizations that cannot happen here my boy it must not this is like the opposite of the hex core scene he's being firm but it doesn't come off as reactive he's in a leadership position acting like a leader he's making known this important history that the council and the people need to hear to deliberate on this and he does get emotional but it feels genuine it feels appropriate it's a sorrowful show of emotion for what was actually a tragic historical event this scene is showing us a wise old man giving sage advice and in this scene the other one is showing us a scared victim of trauma having a violent reaction to a trigger and that's the central question of heimerdinger the two narratives arcane is telling us that it wants us to be in conflict about is this guy old and wise or is he just old and arcane loves these twin narratives in their arcs being able to view characters as heroes or villains good parents or bad parents but with heimerdinger they take it a giant step further and this chiefly has to do with this really interesting concept they explore here of how trauma affects an immortal character so to back up a bit in general how do you write immortality i mentioned this in my friday short this is something we're told about heimerdinger we're not shown him actually living forever and the reason is that you can't really show immortality that way it's impossible unless you want your story to span thousands of years so we need to resort to other methods and a good starting point when figuring out how to write immortality is death let's talk about that death what it do how does death impact forget starry stories actual stories how does it change the stories of our lives so death does several important things it creates urgency it defines what danger is it makes us cherish the present moment it connects us with the rest of nature you know all living things deteriorate and die we feel that bond death gives us direction this is how i want to spend my finite years and probably most importantly death provides limitation and that last one is the most interesting to me and i could go through all these one by one i'm sure you're noticing some of these applying to heimerdinger already lack of urgency not living in the present skewed definition of danger but those are pretty straightforward i'll circle back to those a bit later but lack of limitation that's the really juicy one that's the one that's going to unlock heimerdinger for us what we often see with immortality is a character who is wise beyond mortal limits and this often but not always correlates to powerful beyond mortal limits as well and that's the broader phenomenon i'm talking about here over development but my favorite immortal characters are ones whose strengths and flaws are over developed characters who have never had that natural limit of death to stop their advancement both in their best qualities and especially in their worst qualities and i have to mention the master of doing this anne rice i don't know how much my audience has read her so i won't go that much into it but her vampire characters all have this over ripeness so then we get to see qualities like hatred fear arrogance passion just grow into something else something far beyond their natural limits because nothing ever stopped them and i think that's what we're seeing with heimerdinger and trauma an over-developed relationship to trauma when we interact with people who experience trauma in their own lives most of the time usually it's not like centuries after the trauma happened most of the time it's like years after decades after and we see it at a stage where it's still sometimes a daily struggle we see people shaping their lives in certain ways to minimize practical impact of the trauma focusing on moving forward making healthy boundaries or we see the intense process of healing from the trauma through therapy or through some kind of practical constructive work to help others pay it forward heal through their healing that kind of thing with older people who have had trauma in their youth we see it at a different stage think like holocaust survivors veterans for some it's just that they've now completely built a life away from their trauma it's a compartmentalized piece of them that's locked behind all these barriers they won't speak of it their life now has nothing to do with it and for the most part it doesn't impact them for others they've let it slowly trickle back into their life but in a healthy grieving sort of way and that lets them reestablish this less reactive and more thoughtful or philosophical or practical relationship to their past whether it's about a political orientation or a living life appreciating life or sometimes we see that these people have incorporated into their lives in a much fuller way they become advocates for change speak about their experiences maybe they even set up foundations so what do we see with heimerdinger heimerdinger built a city and you can see this in a couple of ways you can look at this as him being even more than an advocate being more than an activist he did something so constructive and paid it forward so much that we've had generations of people who haven't had to experience the trauma he has at all it's a whole civilization built away from that he's leveraged his pain to constructive ends to literally make a part of the world that is now a better place or you could see this as heimerdinger building a civilization an entire world around himself basically that would be empty of magic empty of what scares him empty of triggers for his drama and while i do think it's both i think it's notable that his life is like this cocoon of happy stimuli what we get is almost this childlike existence he has his little pet and his shows and his counsel where he gets to make pompa speeches and play politics the way he talks about science is almost like a fun game to him you reminded me of myself a scientist ready to forge a new vector of experimentation if that sounds like weird phrasing to you it's because you're used to hearing people talk about using science to change the world to help people heimerdinger is excited by new vectors of experimentation just the process not even the results it's completely divorced from any altruistic application heimerdinger someone who feels threatened by things not working the way they're supposed to will you please stop hovering he has this kind of fantasy wonderland approach to politics it's like his speeches are magic words that will change everything and even his relationship with his own city his own utopia he created he's very sheltered from the real problems that plagued that world this is a very scared old man and now it's time to talk about dog metaphors so we mostly see the puppy thing mirroring harmoninger's mood when he's all happy and peppy so is the pearl when he's angry so is the pearl but what's more interesting is when there's a disconnect at the progress day speech heimerdinger is clapping first and then he's all stern dead but what is the dog doing the dog is hiding from jace the dog's afraid of the tech in the hex core scene heimerdinger is kind of paralyzed here but again his dog is afraid in the demonstration scene the pearl starts off all happy and bubbly just like heim and then afterwards when heimerdinger is vocally saying it's brilliant and just needs time but yes it's all good just a few kinks again look at the dog it's running away to the pearl this technology was a personal threat and let's talk a bit more about the scene because raquin is so brilliant with these small little touches the scene starts out from jason victor's point of view but that's misdirection because there's a shift to seeing the effect of the technology as heimerdinger is actually evaluating it from his hyper-vigilant hyper-risk-averse perspective with the boulder it's almost like we're inside of the boulder as it's being crushed and then the laser just shoots directly at heimerdinger and then immediately goes after the dog metaphor heimerdinger sees this tech as not just dangerous in some abstract sense in his mind he relates the danger to himself and that's what generates concern for him he's experiencing this demonstration in a highly personal way and this last point was my dad's theory look at the way he reacted to all this but give it a decade of careful research and it will be ready we assume he's being legit here in like a scientific sense even if his quantities are skewed because his yordle and he doesn't get how mortals relate to time but this can also easily be interpreted as avoidance behavior he's putting it off he doesn't want to deal with it doesn't want to think about it it's a good theory but let's balance things out here moving on from trauma also often involves a reintegration of the traumatic experience's meaning into a philosophy of life or some kind of ideology and heimerdinger has to large extent reintegrate his experiences into a coherent philosophy valuing science and safety but like we said we see signs of that being overdeveloped as well it's too safe it's too risk-averse we sense this desperation in his sense of safety it doesn't match up with real safety people are suffering people he knows and can help and he doesn't want to help him out of fear so we get this interesting thing where it's almost like his trauma has caused him to circle all the way back to now causing trauma again his idea of safety which i'm sure at some point was very healthy and rational and level-headed has developed into this thing that's not this thing that is unsafe that's harmful to people he comes off as someone who thinks he's gotten over his trauma completely and is now totally rational and not reactive at all when thinking back to it but we see from the beliefs themselves how a shaman has distorted them he believes things always get out of control he is more reverse to potential unsafety than people dying right now in front of him and that's a perfect use of immortality as a character trait because we don't know if he's worked past it or not how many hundreds of years is enough to be clear-headed on this topic and if you look at the other rules the other common conventions for writing mortality they took every single one that applies to heimerdinger and used it to bolster this uncertainty the central question of the character is heimerdinger wise or just scared and we can actually even keep score here for example otherness so we have death we have decay deterioration these are intrinsic facets of the physical world so if you have something that doesn't die there needs to be a connection to something other something that doesn't decay and die usually this equals fantastical paranormal otherworldly should we get vampires ghosts aliens things that play by different rules not the actual rules of our own world something mystical mysterious unknown you can also have a character connect to nature itself things in nature die but nature itself doesn't or even connected to time itself so usually this is to give a character a mystical or supernatural or divine wisdom now without getting too much into lore heimerdinger does follow this rule by being a yordle the type of otherness they invested in him made him a different species from us with different needs time moves differently where he's from so they're not using the otherness to enhance his wisdom but to make us question it because he's too different from us so does he really understand human problems so that's the point for being just scared on the other hand despite their otherness immortal characters are often granted some connection to the mortal world and this is for practical purposes without survival there's not much to connect you to society but we need you to be connected so we can tell a story about you so we need something like vampire sucking blood a manufactured need or we could have an externally people in the mortal world need you and seek you out or a duty of some kind and this is probably most common and mortal characters have some sort of protective or facilitative role for society and that's what we get for heimerdinger he is in a civil servant role so of course his concerns are pure and altruistic of course this isn't just some neurosis some complex of his so plus one for wise in a similar vein mortal characters are typically old you know they've had time to figure things out they're usually pretty good at life stuff they're often loaded and there's often something that they're like amazing at and you can see this rule in the absence of the opposite we usually don't see incompetent immortals financially struggling immortals and worlds who are still trying to find themselves so we get this super well put together successful character who is good at stuff this person knows how the world works just look at them so plus one for wise another feature of immortality is that their memory is history this invests their personal anecdotal experiences with this authority that most people just don't have i was there i was there 3 000 years ago i was there the day the strength of men failed and we naturally just value first-hand knowledge over secondhand knowledge so we automatically think oh wow if you're old enough that you're remembering this thing i relate to as history that must make you a more authoritative source than this history book for example that's a burden that only i here carry time in that scene we feel his authoritativeness wow it's a living piece of history talking to us so that's another point for wise but then again look at the source this is an issue of safety and this person can't die how is an immortal supposed to understand a topic like that how can they understand the worth of a life if it's something they never had to worry about losing so plus one for just scared and also mortality puts us mortals in a lot of adapt or die situations which doesn't necessarily happen with immortals they can easily get too set in their ways because what's going to stop them you know or they figure out what works and they just keep at it so when we as a society are faced with change that may be exactly the time not to trust an immortal because there's a good chance that they'll be adapting slower than we mortals will so plus one for just scared or maybe they're used to adaptation because they've had to adapt so much throughout history tilt over itself is an adaptation if you think about it so plus one for wise okay now there's one more thing arcane does to really taint our feelings towards immortality and heimerdinger by extension and this is not some rule about immortality it's something very unique to arcane and even though the basis for this is really recognizable how they use that basis to color our feelings about immortality is so subtle so what i'm talking about is the singed parallel these two characters are very straightforward foils you got tall and gaunt and bald versus short and stocky and furry and singed also just tells us he's a foil that's why i parted ways with high medinger so they're foils in a lot of ways for a lot of reasons one of which we covered in the victorvid these two characters are also both thematically tied to immortality one of them wants it the other has it and set the heart of everything for these characters heimerdinger experienced death early in life and his life span allowed him to learn and do everything he did and accomplished so much build this whole city singe also experienced death earlier in life and caused him to turn his back on everything he could have on this whole city and all these potential accomplishments all for the sake of the lifespan and from that point of divergence we just see the two completely opposite lives these two individuals led heimerdinger is this well-respected well put together celebrity in this clean pristine wealthy world he created surrounded by wondrous inventions and ambition and hope singe is this hermit whose science destroyed the undercity who lives in squalor causing pain to things around him speaking of these like forbidden packs with nature itself taking life and twisting and corrupting it and if it wasn't for this contrast we'd feel very neutral towards heimerdinger's immortality but we see the sacrifice it takes for singh to get there we see how it twists his morals and the suffering it causes and honestly it makes immortality and arcane's world feel kind of uncomfortable especially when we see that both of these characters are really cold towards people's pain and suffering and that's the other angle here we see sims giving everything up for this thing heimerdinger just has naturally we see victor's life cut short and hibernator's well-meaning but kind of callous response and heimerdinger's immortality feels kind of just undeserved unearned he didn't work for what either of these characters would cherish beyond anything the full goes a long way for a lot of reasons maybe we'll talk about this connection more at some point but this used exploring immortality from these contrasting angles having the same quality juxtaposed in pristine form and in very ugly distasteful form it makes it hard to develop an opinion in one context without subconsciously incorporating our feelings from the other context it's very subtle beautifully executed it's all towards the central theme this dilemma we've been talking about with creating doubt and discomfort around this mentor figure what's so different about how arcane does this to a narrative versus like the one with jinx that i made a video about or success parenthood or vander or mel is that this dilemma isn't just an audience side dilemma it is heimerdinger's arc he sees himself as the wise mentor in the beginning of the season and by the end he comes to understand just how ignorant he was and we don't know where he stands on the question of hex second arcane in his past but he was confronted with the same question about himself that confronted us am i really that wise or do i have more to learn and his conclusion was admirable it was humble and signified a real change and that's the final rule about immortality that arcane does an amazing job exploring and this has to do with the final steps of his arc about joining echo immortal characters becoming more like mortals as a common arc for stars involving immortality we like seeing that bottom we like seeing them connect with mortals with the experience of being mortal and this arc is just beginning for heimerdinger so who knows where they're going with this but what we've seen so far is the important part as far as season one's arc because characters like this don't just change with that rule about otherness and separation from the physical world and because of the memories history thing immortal characters often take on a much broader role than just a character this has to do with how everything about them resists change their initial adaptation to their environment is often set and they've reached this point of complete symbiosis with how the world works and what that does is that makes them play both the part of a character and a feature of the setting like a living talking expression of the world itself with heimerdinger i mentioned this in the marcus video he's piltover personified along with marcus he embodies the ivory tower blindness of topsider society and when you have a character playing this double role when a character is the setting in some sense change or death is a sign of something way more momentous than it is for a normal character a character like this dying means something that's going wrong with this world it can symbolize a grave mistake or that the world is in danger and a character like this changing means that the world is changing heimerdinger's arc is the only arc in arcane that ends with a feeling of hope i mean i guess echoes too but i think this is much more of a moment for heimerdinger and that's the change they chose to highlight through this unchanging character hope is reintroduced into what is really a hopeless society a society that has a lot wrong with it but that's a really interesting resolution to this whole story we see people dying or about to die we see society collapse and now this downtrodden immortal character who we don't feel that bad for despite his failure represents that maybe some things in this world should collapse should be deposed should change even if it's a rough transition even if it's scary despite all the problems of piltor runs on it's hard not to feel the loss here with all this destruction and death we're seeing but heimerdinger scene here is telling us that there's also freedom and hope and endings like this as devastating as they are so we hit 30k this week which is crazy gigantic thank you to all of you i have something really exciting coming there's been a topic that i wanted to make a really comprehensive video about that i've neglected because to do a really good job i'd really need more than one week to make the video and i think it's time i'm making something much more thorough than i have in the past and it's about a topic i am so excited about one of the greatest things about the show it's gonna take two weeks so expect it next next sunday and subscribe so you don't miss it and you know it's been a really crazy grind making these and now because of the channel growth i feel comfortable taking more time to make content i think will be like a real level up from what i've been doing because i'm confident all you guys will really appreciate it so i'm i'm excited about that and i'm really thankful for that and i'll plug my own stuff in a second but if you're interested in immortality i cannot recommend anne rice enough she is the master of all of this the whole more characters representing the setting thing she does that with eras like a character embodying the ancient world or the french revolutionary period or the roman empire it's insane she's the best at it hands down but yeah anyway check out my comic minor champion superhero parody very goofy very silly but also more dramatic than has any right to be new chapter up today huge thanks to my patrons support me on there to have one-on-one discussions with me about arcane new videos every wednesday friday and sunday thanks for watching

Channel: schnee

Views: 1,319,687

Keywords:

Id: 9bRLp66r628

Length: 20min 59sec (1259 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 13 2022