How (NOT) To Write Madness | Arcane vs Game Of Thrones

people hated this scene and people loved this one and it's the same scene essentially it's a burn it all down moment it's prompted by death and despite other characters trying to stop it despite it coming moments after a long sought after peace had finally been reached it was kind of inevitable in hindsight we should have known just by the character's name and it wasn't just a disaster it was this kind of twisted moment of personal triumph for these characters despite it annihilating the show setting in this really shocking way so why did this scene work and this one fail and i want to narrow the scope of this video quite a bit i don't think we need another video saying mostly the same stuff about the danny scene yeah it failed because they rushed her madness arc we didn't believe the basis of the gigantic personality shift of hers so the whole scene had no lexus stanon felt incredibly unjustified for the character they had like two episodes to set things up that should have taken at least one more season probably two and that's the part i do want to focus on if they did have that extra season to do the progression right what would it look like and we're gonna use our gal jinx to figure that out we're gonna look into not just her arc but the way she speaks some of her mannerisms how her madness is depicted by the animators and we're going to get some help from a couple other buddies as well golly denny billy annie and also some more help from a non-buddy dolphy but manus is our topic today what goes into a good madness arc but goes into a good depiction of madness what foundation is the burn it all down scene built on in an ideal story and a more specific question i kept coming up with this topic is that there seems to be a big difference between mental distress and mental illness on the one hand and madness on the other hand mental illness and distress are these things we see characters going through that we relate to with sympathy or empathy and it's because we know mental distress we've experienced mental illness ourselves or alongside family and friends and we see fiction using these facets of our familiar world madness is not that way at all manus most of us don't know from real life most of us know it from fiction the mad scientist the mad hermit the mad king the axe murder we see madness in stories and it doesn't evoke sympathy or empathy it scares us that stuff isn't resonating because oh man yeah i've been through that we relate to it as a horror archetype it resonates like a werewolf resonates it's just this horrifying thing to see depicted maybe there's some deep-seated fear of becoming that in some way but it's not coming from our own experience so it does seem like these things are different but where's the line between these categories what features bring inner conflict to that next level where we call it by this new name okay so i want to get into methodology here and something interesting we'll see once we explore arcane's methods a bit is that game of thrones was trying really hard to do some of these they didn't work but they really tried okay so i'll be honest here i've been feeling like i've been missing something big when it comes to jinx for a long time like this stuff i've seen people call it jinx's scratching great name for it we see this or i see this and it does feel powerful it feels like a great tool to depict inner chaos but it was hard to say anything more than that just yeah it comes off as very mad very wild very demented felt like i was missing something same with this stuff and the dolls all feels very much madnessy but it felt like there's something more foundational going on here let me give you an example using something she says really thought i buried this place but i should have known better nothing ever stays dead okay so jinx says a lot of weird stuff but it's one thing when it's like throwaway lines and jokes but stuff like nothing ever stays dead that one sounds important and it's like in the most important scene of the entire show and it's not like we have no context here there is a surface level understanding what's going on jinx spent seven years thinking of i was dead and then all of a sudden dead sister is back dead sister is hugging her and then there's a layer that goes a bit deeper here we have milo unlike vi this was a sibling who was dead but for jinx he didn't stay dead by any means i mean we hear her saying this about vi you never left i always hurt you shadows in the streets there's even more left unsaid about the other sibling that was always there and this extends to vaya as well when jinx thought she was as dead as milo but for jinx's tortured brain vi wasn't staying dead either and then there's also like the more literary level that's also lurking here you could call the psychological level the subtext here old trauma old conflicts past events that should be firmly in the past should stay in the past so that you can move on but they persist they come back to haunt you they resurface the past will always have its claws in the presence so we can say all these things but ultimately none of these answers were really satisfying to me which was weird because they're coherent i guess i can't point to something and say that doesn't make sense they make decent sense that's not the problem but sometimes there's bad answers and then sometimes the answers are okay but there's a growing realization that you're asking the wrong question that line we can talk about what it means we can get these ideas but that's not getting to the core of what's going on here it reminds me of this scene in star wars obi-wan tells luke that vader murders his father luke finds out that's not true and he feels kind of betrayed so obi-wan gives him an explanation anakin turned to the dark side and it's like the man he knew died and that is an idea but that's not what luke was asking the question that really opens up this whole situation is why did obi-wan purposely word it in this misleading way and with that question we get this wealth of context obi-wan was charged with protecting luke which meant keeping his identity secret precisely salvatore would never find him and of course he realized rightly that luke had this burning curiosity about his father and he's trying to prevent that from actualizing in any way except learning the ways of the force and obi-wan knew that luke looked up to the jedi knight version of his father and that seemed healthy and obi-wan didn't want to corrupt that or worse see that admiration for his father the jedi turn into his admiration for his father the seth that's a full explanation that's satisfied to me and that has nothing to do with what did his words mean what we really wanted to know the right question was what's causing him to express himself in this abnormal way it's like the doctor in arrested development how's my son he's going to be all right oh oh thank god he's lost his left hand so he's going to be all right you son of a most of the humor from that doesn't come from interpreting what his words mean most of the joke is that there's no reason at all for him to say it like that so that's the real question here as well and it's the question with so much of what jinx says lines like this are we still sisters or like this powder fell down a well we can understand pretty easily what she's saying we can interpret but what kind of person expresses herself this way and what is this way and you can't just say oh she's just saying in a crazy way that's my question crazy wait what does that mean so what i realized all this was getting at was the question i had framed all this with which is what is the difference between mental distress and madness so i think the first big difference is externalizing conflict and i think that term means something else in other contexts but it's the most accurate description i could think of so apologize for the awkwardness and phrasing but anyway so all of us experience conflict part of us wants x part of us wants y but when that happens we don't hallucinate a second self and have a dialogue with it when we miss a loved one we don't literally see them physically unexpectedly throughout our lives and then have to kill them because we're so freaked out the waging speaks it's not about her seeing how she feels it's like statements about reality nothing ever stays dead that is how reality works i should have known better should have known it's like she's learning about the world and that other quote that i had before powder fell down a well again it's not a statement about her feelings her expression makes it like it's the statement of fact it's not no i don't want to be called powder or no i don't identify with that name anymore no powder fell down a well it's like what happened in the world that's how she is expressing her inner feeling about this and this is also what's going on with the scratching mental distress is an internal phenomenon manus takes that internal conflict and creates an outer world from it that the character lives in lord of the rings is excellent at this on so many levels and in a completely different way than arcane does theoden curse with manus isn't just depicted through his behavior in speech it's externalized and when he is cured of madness that's externalized too gollum we talked about this with the dual selves thing which again does do with jinx but his madness is also externalized in his physical appearance just like theoden madness is an outer transformation as well it's a different kind of externalization but similar impact on the audience it's like the inner chaos bleeding out into reality even midnight express where there's no cgi or anything does this powerfully just with how billy looks and i'm guessing unless my audience is familiar with this one it's based on the true story of an american who ascends to 30 years in a turkish prison it's all about how this brutal environment deteriorates him and just from the acting we see such a physical change star wars prequels also do this with anakin not the greatest madness are granted palpatine is a better example i don't know if you would call it mantis here though but arcane's way is so perfect because the scratching is so clearly this overflow from what's inside her head it's reminiscent of her art style even in typical arcane it really is expressing everything about this character her madness isn't just this thing consuming the way she sees the world it's not just something that impacts the way she expresses herself it's shaped her living environment it's in the company she keeps so to speak it's overflown to her style of terrorism which is all about creating these horrifying spaces and situations it fits her style of invention which always has taken the form of a smiling animal she can talk to even since she was powder as if she's making imaginary friends for herself and then obviously in the tea party scene it's not just about her being theatrical and dramatic it's her externalizing this conflict as it appears to her mind the scene is bringing other characters into jinx world okay so now three things about this externalized conflict idea first thing is that it's not necessarily an entire alternate world the characters live in it can be but whatever form it takes it must relate back to identity to how the character sees themselves it's not a single person caught between worlds it's one self that belongs to one world and the other self that belongs to the other world and this will often take the form of two actual separate named characters powder and jinx smeagle and gollum anakin and vader but you can do it more subtly too and i think denithor is a great example of that in one world he's a pathetic king stanton watching his kingdom crumble and in the other world he is meeting his demise heroically like one of the heathen kings of old and that heroic end isn't complete in its tragic glory if it's not the end of his house as well so we get this externalization of him seeing faramir is dead when he's not that is a fitting end for this grand house of gondor which is integral to who denethor is in this mad world of his so here it's not an actual new identity but still very much a world that relates back to identity in terms of how the character defines himself second thing the way they relate to this alternate world is itself a source of conflict and why wouldn't it be of course it is these realities will overlap sometimes but they'll create tons of contradictions on the important stuff and it's a nightmare for these characters trying to reconcile those contradictions it's not that they just sometimes happily move between the real world and the world of their delusions another reference that might be too obscure here but in arsenic and old base there's a character who believes he is teddy roosevelt and he lives a complete and content life as teddy roosevelt there's no tension there's no agony of him trying to choose between these two worlds these two identities nope he's just teddy roosevelt and that's not discrediting this character that's how the character works and works well i'm just saying that is not this madness archetype we're talking about even though there is a mad world here for madness we need a contentious relationship to this externalized delusion world gollum is tortured by this dilemma between his two selves which self to be and there's this give and take sometimes he's more smeagle sometimes he's more gollum and the ring does seem to universally create this exact kind of tension with its own brand of madness the characters fall into its corruption and kind of start to take on different identities and then become aware of and try to distance themselves but it's this continuous battle with jinx we really see that battle she is constantly trying to get the voices to quiet down shut up i need to think she's trying to tear herself away from what they're telling her even in those lines we talked about again it's not just nothing ever stays dead it's the preface i should have known she's not just making an informational statement she's judging herself for being dumb basically i should have known we're seeing her caught in the process of trying to figure out which reality is real and the third feature here also relates to an element within that nothing stays deadline think about what she's saying for a minute nothing stays dead it's wrong but it's not just wrong it's the opposite of true nothing stays alive would be the more accurate version paradox is the future to highlight here that's what it means for these characters to exist in this intersection between the real world and the mad world this statement in particular just to draw the paradoxical side of it even more jinx's trauma goes back to these deaths in her past the impact of the death for her is that they stay alive that they never died even though their deaths is the cause of her trauma see this mad spiral of crates that's the feeling we should try to capture with these mad characters it's not just the evil of madness it's not just the disconnect of madness but the paradoxical world that forces on its victims he hates and loves the ring because he hates and loves himself and we see this chilling duality over and over with jinx she dredges up the valdiani this traumatic item of her childhood guilt but she puts sparklers around it like it's something to celebrate she can't figure out if she cherishes wise bunny or hates what it represents so she has two she's one on her desk and she nails one to the wall we have both we're living in the contradiction and her burn it all down moment this destructive act is representing this bizarre but powerful mix of doomsday aesthetic with the red sky and the beautiful triumphant shooting star aesthetic with the path of the missile the madness isn't represented as total trauma or total destruction or total hatred it's celebrating trauma it's beautiful doom it's double bunny okay so now where does this all take us what do we do with it so the climax of these arcs when they're tragic is absolute commitment to the mad world accomplished through some extreme act that only makes sense in that world burning it all down is a common way but there are other forms of stakes so because of how extreme these climatic actions need to be the conflict between these two realities has to take the form of reaching a boiling point meaning it's not just a steady agony that keeps popping up oh there it is again no it's building and building and the conflict makes the character try to quell it try to stop it try to tie themselves down to the real world by force that they stay there now and never come back but that repression only makes it worse and it keeps just building and building more and more corrupt stronger and stronger externalizations more and more transformative so that this climax action isn't just a decision it's a damn breaking moment and that's partially what ends up justifying it on our side on the audience side because these actions are typically so extreme that even if there's a reason for it generally it is hard to believe a character is making a conscious decision to do something so insane but if there's years of pressure building up years of repressed emotional energy pushing the character to act over and over and the character refusing each time or never quite letting themselves go 100 then we have that justifying the action as well of course that much pent of energy needs to find release in something that extreme okay now to shift gears a bit let's talk about uh hitler the next element of madness is expressed so perfectly in this book i'll show it here so this author makes documentary so listen to this this happened in 1990. when writing and producing a film about dr joseph goebbels i talked to wilford von oven who has his personal attache and worked closely with the infamous nazi propaganda minister after the formal interview over a cup of tea i asked this intelligent and charming man if you could sum up your experience of the third wreck in just one word what would it be as taravon oven thought for a moment and considered the question i guess his response would make reference to the horrible crimes of the regime crimes he freely admitted had occurred and of the damage that nazism had wreaked upon the world well he finally said if i was asked to sum up my experience of the third wreck in one word that word would be paradise we tend to view human horrors like nazism from how we know it to be in our perspective but from the perpetrator's perspective it can take on an entirely different character we know this movement was like the incarnation of evil itself but that doesn't mean that what was driving it were these cartoonists the evil villains stroking cats talking about creating a world of pain and death and evil no what drives this kind of madness can be hope it can be paradise crazy as it sounds it can be a desire to make the world a better place and yeah completely corrupted completely insane but at its root it's often a blinding positivity at the heart of madness i remember standing there for hours basking in the radiance of the fuhrer but now that just seems like a dream a strange wonderful frightening dream it was not a dream it was a nightmare of our own making and it's time to wake up from it the look in hitler's eyes was not radiance it was madness so back to fiction that aspect of madness the positivity even if it's not something we typically choose to highlight in real life madness that is a very resonant factor in depicting madness and stories these moments for us may be horrifying but for the characters letting that damn finally burst and giving in to the alternate world it's triumph it's destiny it's bliss depicting that distance that disconnect between the positivity within the doer and the actual objective evil or destructiveness through the perspective of the onlookers us included that disconnect is so powerful it really transforms the impact from shocking to horrifying okay so now we have our positivity we also have our build-up of conflict that damn breaking moment we talked about earlier usually has one more major ingredient grief and this in the same vein of what we talked about earlier with justifying that moment making us by that the character would actually do something that extreme that out of reality grief is another way of aiding that justification the character faces an unexpected death of a loved one or an unexpected defeat or failure everything until now the dam could hold and we've gotten a sense of what this dam is capable of holding so whatever breaks it has to be worse it has to be a qualitatively harder blow than anything we've seen up until now with jinx it was seeing history repeat itself killing her family again it was the loss of her most cherished bond which was also one of her final remaining bonds so we need the character's world shattered that's a prompt for action the character needs to fix their world or to get back at the world for what it did to me either way we demand an action whose impact will be as loud as bad as what impacted me negatively and that's where the bliss fits in the triumph the positivity the character is now desperate on a whole nother level to escape from grief or to revive a cherished bond or to balance the scales of how fate treated them or of justice the lure of the positivity within their madness has never been stronger that positivity is what will balance the scales and while we're on the topic of the grief sugar for the dam-breaking moment similar to this is the trigger of the manus arc as a whole like going back much earlier in the character's life or in their arc and this usually does need its own trigger not everyone goes mad so we feel like there should be some event we can point to which sets the character down this path often is an event of the same nature some world shattering trauma death loss defeat but it can also be the introduction of some dark influence a dark person a dark object a dark substance it can be an environment like the prison in midnight express it can be an idea either independent or an interpretation of an event often related to identity she jinxes every job with denithor it seems like the general trigger was boromir's death and then the final trigger was fermir's death in quotes the star wars prequels actually turned it on its head making love the inception point of anakin's madness arc very interesting they don't do a very good job but it's a very interesting idea okay next main ingredient this one is a little hard to articulate i'm gonna borrow a friend's definition here i'm calling this spiritual deterioration and this is my friend abby's definition of spirituality which doesn't really have to do with spirits or god or religion my friend abby is a chaplain at a children's hospital she helps a lot of parents and children facing devastating illnesses and her definition of spirituality is connection and there's five levels of connection she focuses on with the people she works with your connection to your community your connection to your family your connection to yourself connection with your body and connection with something greater whether it's a cause of value a mission god whatever it is and i think these provide an interesting model that encompasses the kind of deterioration we see with madness we feel like relationships with the people around us our societies our families that's what keeps us grounded so we don't find ourselves slipping into these worlds that don't make sense to anyone around us and that's it also goes both ways that this descent into manus also does end up wreaking havoc on relationships and this breeds a characteristic almost universally associated with mad people a paranoia this is what these broken relationships become i'm not connected to any of these people they are against me if you're not with me then you're my enemy oh shudder again i love lord of the rings depiction of this from both ends of the spectrum gollum obviously cashed out from his own society and then actually alone for 500 whatever years and even when he forms relationships his paranoia fights to break them but also denethor isolated in his own way at the top of society i don't think this was in the books but in the movies they expressed it beautifully in the visuals this giant empty throne room and of course his mana stark matches up with his isolation from his family and saruman similar with his ivory tower or ebony tower isolation so this type of deterioration doesn't have to be this icky dirty outcast thing it can take a variety of forms and then we have isolation from the self equally important here which in a lot of ways means that it feels like we don't know the person anymore but it's not just a change of personality shift it's like the person we remember is deteriorating we see the reprieve from the moments of madness the resurfacing moments sometimes we see it depicted almost as if the character had an out-of-body experience and then has like an abrupt return to the self i think this encompasses the disconnection from self from identity but also distance from something greater disconnection from your values your mission your life's devotion but the disconnection from body that's a really interesting category here and the word that might fit better for this concept here is humanity disconnection from humanity or deterioration of your own humanity i talked about this a bit in the golem show that i did the character becomes less human their human characteristics diminish speech becomes limited they start acting like animals eating like animals or they might become more corpse-like and that's another way of expressing this mindlessness vacant affects meaningless behavior emptiness with jinx we obviously have her becoming more and more socially isolated we have her burn it down moment coming after all of her relationships are no more but my favorite depiction of this of the isolation of identity in particular is the stuff they do with the mirror she can't see her reflection she tries to connect to herself by looking in the mirror but that connection is shattered and i think arcane deals a lot with disconnection from your body with everything they do relating to monsters and shimmer changing your nature changing your very substance with jinx we do see this little part of her arc that has to do with her body and with how her madness affects how she values her body and ultimately impacts what her body is we see this lead to this transformation physically for her in the subtleties of how she looks and how she even moves so all these elements i used to see is kind of separate but i think this umbrella term this way of thinking about it as spiritual deterioration fits really well to encompass all of these qualities okay final ingredient here is agency and there's also a feature of fictional madness doesn't seem like a real thing with real madness but the manus arc doesn't feel complete until the characters themselves get to that crucial moment of choice and choose madness and i think this also has to do more with our relationship to the character via the other characters in the story madness arcs are often about trying to bring the person back from the brink of madness there's faith that they can't see reason they can be themselves again and as long as we hold on to that hope that it's something we can save them from we cannot get to a resolution so that hope has to die and it dies with a character showing that they want this when they have the opportunity and the freedom to choose otherwise to choose reality they make the wrong choice and of course with jinx we get that quiet incredible moment of her sitting in the jinx chair no voices telling her to no demons nothing to push her either way and she herself makes that choice to be jinxed and that's when we finally lose all hope okay so that's what i got for madness so let's go back to game of thrones and see what we're dealing with here so what's interesting like i mentioned before is that we do see them trying to do some of these and there were problems that came out extremely half-baked so let's start with that let's expose some of these doughy mushy unbaked globs and danny's half-baked manuscript and half bigness is its own type of problem which is what happened with most of these lack of development lack of time to develop but really what we'll see is a lack of a strong foundation upon which to develop but before we get to there's one here that was just wrong not half-baked or just a bad choice one of the most obvious problems i've seen other people point out here the grief trigger they tried to do this missandei dies and that's supposedly what pushes dany over the edge it's the straw that breaks the camel's back and i think within that very idiom which undoubtedly was thrown about the writer's room to describe this very moment we can see why this failed and all camel farmers watching please correct me on this if i'm wrong but what usually breaks camel's backs is not individual pieces of straw usually camelbacks are broken by like i don't know really bad falls down dunes or like cars or sand worms i don't know the whole reason that straw breaks the camel's back is an idiom the whole reason it sounds interesting is because despite it being possible the alternative seems much more realistic to us straws don't actually break camel's backs it's the irony it's how unlikely it would seem and to put that in the terms we discussed earlier the way the dam-breaking moment works is that we get a build-up of challenges and burdens and through those we get a sense of what this dam can hold which denotes an expectation of what it will take to break it and whatever form that takes it has to be world shattering has to be so bad so big that the equally big response it prompts is understandable to us meaning that climax action so it's gonna be so bad that only burning it all down is gonna balance those scales and in game of thrones they had that we saw two dragons die and that would have been a great opportunity and forget how this would fit into the mess of the beyond the wall plot but imagine danny goes to warren king's landing and that's when we see the scorpions for the first time and in horrifying succession they kill viserion and kill rhaegal and it's the first time we see dragons die and we also want to balance the scales of this injustice so danny lays ways to the scorpions and can't stop herself from balancing the scales by destroying king's landing as well killing the children of westeros and retribution for killing her children that would have been better but what did we get we got dead dragons and then we're like oh they killed her dragons and she hasn't gone mad yet that's a pretty strong dam and then missandei is what sets her over the edge terrible sequencing and half it was clearly from failing to juggle these two major plot lines and their climaxes but the other half were just running out of characters which as i mentioned the stranger things death video is exactly what happens when your show's gimmick is killing off characters they walk right into that one okay so that grief trigger that's one thing we're gonna need to fix while we're on the topic of the damn breaking moment we don't get a build up either and this one was a time issue they had moments like this do not become what you have always struggled to defeat we can tell she's suppressing emotion but we didn't get anywhere near a boiling point so we're gonna have to figure out what that looks like also positivity they also tried to do she knows what's good and no one can tell her otherwise she wants to build the society of peace she's gonna free the world from tyrants and there's her paradox as well she wants to free them from tyrants but she's the tyrant oh no it makes no sense why can't she see but let's let's discuss the contradiction spiritual deterioration we do have some of this and by some i mean basically just this he hasn't seen anyone since we returned hasn't left to chambers relationships do get rocky but it doesn't feel like isolation it just feels like normal conflict same time we've seen all series long we see some deterioration of humanity and i'm being like a thousand percent generous here hasn't accepted any food she looks a little worn too but yeah nothing besides that the general trigger the inception point of the whole mana stark they think they gave this to us but i don't think they did it seems like they're trying to say the root cause of the madness is blood which is a big theme in the show so that helps a bit we get a history man targaryens and then this they say every time a targaryen is born the gods toss a coin and the world holds its breath so you're telling me that the root cause of the madness arc is randomness that's not a cause it's a lack of a cause and i get what they're going for here it's suspenseful if we don't know what tips the scales but it's not satisfying to have a vital part of an arc have no cause just like it wouldn't be satisfying to say here's aragorn whether he becomes king is a flip of the coin not his character not his struggles just randomness statistics and lastly they do give us a moment of agency a moment of choice and like i said before they do just the same way arcane does it all the plot reasons to act fall away because we have peace and it's actually slightly stronger here because danny knows for sure that this means peace and doesn't show any signs of not trusting it whereas jinx doesn't know if there's peace or not she's still overcome with her paranoia so the bell's ring game of thrones also uses quiet and stillness to emphasize the lack of other influences on danny's decision just like with jinx and danny chooses madness just like jinx says very similar so this is the part where i'd say they did this part fine it just has no foundation to stand on so it feels because of everything they failed to do beforehand if you imagine them doing everything right and then the scene is the exact same easy to imagine it being a great scene so that's everything they tried to do and it didn't work so we have half-baked versions of these rules and then the parts of what we talked about that they didn't even touch we have these externalized conflicts second identity and conflicting realities and those two really are the most important they are the foundation to build the entire arc on any kind of start attack not like herself by last episode especially but not like herself didn't mean a second identity this is not smeagol reverting to gollum it was not powder reverting to jinx it wasn't even denthor larping being a heathen king of old it was just danny being out of character we badly needed a second identity of some kind but they didn't give us one when she talked about the world she wanted to build that wasn't a world we're really familiar with it should have been part of her externalized conflicts we should have been building a world where this action made perfect sense in its own twisted paradoxical way but in a way where we really could relate to the piece of it the triumph of it having those two worlds having danny be tortured by it constantly as she tries to work through all these plot burdens sometimes she's moving away from reality sometimes she's moving towards it that's what we needed and what we didn't get what they tried to do was that she wanted to be loved but she was feared but that's not an identity and the thing is we had identity she should have been conflicted over we should have seen the clear deterioration underway of her becoming just another mad targaryen and then also feel her longing as danny to become a good queen she should have been tortured by the question of whether she is going to be one of the mad targaryens or one of the sane ones that creates something that can build up something that can break a dam without that we don't have much that we can build up she just wants to be loved because i guess everyone wants to be loved and she wants to be a queen because that's the name of the show and everything that happens the death the war it doesn't build on any of that these events don't push her to want to be loved more or to want to be queen more no it just doesn't relate to the manuscript at all okay so time for the fix and to be clear this video is about mana specifically i'm interested in developing solutions to just that aspect i'd be lying to myself if i thought i could fix the finale as a whole or the show as a whole like with all the plot lines and everything too much not smart enough happy to let someone else make that video so here i'm just gonna throw out like 10 or 12 ideas for fixing danny's madness arc on its own and then i'm gonna call tonight so before we discuss identities or anything like that it starts with a trigger she needs a crossing of the threshold moment like deagle's murder like boromir's death billy's imprisonment powder killing her family something that traumatizes her isolates her and gives her story space to dream up mad worlds and mad identities let me just shoot out about six possibilities here that will mostly accomplish the same thing we'll discuss the differences number one one of dany's dragons is killed while she's on it and we get the trauma of the first dragon death along with severe injury to dany from the fall two she kills the ice king and his dragon with hers but his final attack freezes her so severely with some dark night kingy magical ice that it's his curse lingering on that ends up torturing her like frodo's weathertop injury not only do we have night king magic corrupting her but the abomination that is a fire and blood targaryen being frozen three similar effectives too she's captured and tortured by the night king for a prolonged period of time four she is tricked into killing one of her own dragons very powder-like trauma of being haunted by those worst cinderers maybe her own dragons turn on her as a result of this and she has to be increasingly cruel to them to get them in line and that itself drives her madness even further five she finds out about john's lineage embraces him as a family member her only one left family is the strongest one ever and then for political reasons he betrays her and she's left truly alone or nearly alone this time six she and john fall in love get together and despite being told she can never have children she miraculously conceives again and then either miscarries again or whatever is growing her is even more of an abomination than last time and her madness increases as this evil air that should not be gross inside of her okay so again all of these provide trauma that can build and also they provide a practical reason for dendi to become isolated she becomes isolated because she needs to heal from her battle wounds or because she's pregnant or because she's recovering from her miscarriage or she becomes isolated in captivity or she becomes isolated and prolonged grief after her first dragon dies or she's betrayed and actually is isolated by her allies and during this period of isolation we get the chance for her to start externally manifesting her conflicts and that's positive because there's another shortcoming here that had so much potential the topic is historical inspiration so i've seen how people point out in this scene we get a very on the nose visual parallel to the nazi rallies in nuremberg and i love drawing on history for creative stuff but there's a way to do it if you just have danny do rallies and have flags and make her unsullied wear dragon armbands and goosestep and say hile danny it comes off as lazy it's like i don't want to think up interesting villain stuff let's just copy and paste from the most obvious villain in history laziness to the degree that is that noticeable is distracting and it breaks immersion that's the biggest problem but a subtler problem here is that there's nothing inherently evil about these things it's not like goose stepping or holding big rallies is actually an expression of just how evil this movement was so you're borrowing the wrong stuff it's just trying to create the superimposed association to evil from our own world and it's a shame because they're elements they could have drawn on from hitler and his movement that absolutely expressed exactly the kind of evil identity they were building for dany let me give you two perfect examples if you'll permit me to dip into history but again the colosseum in rome held about 50 000 people pretty crazy if you think about the world population back then cut to modern times biggest stadium in the us is the michigan stadium holds a hundred and seven thousand people twice the colosseum over a hundred thousand people in one place and then current biggest stadium in the world india with a nerd pneumonia stadium capacity of 132 000 crazy number okay so if you go to nuremberg today you can see the foundations of the grand stadium commissioned by adolf hitler according to hitler's plans the deutsche stadium's capacity was are you ready for it over 400 000 people that's eight coliseums this was the stadium he saw serving his world nazi empire near the stadium is the nazi parade grounds it's about 2 miles long wide as a 10 lane highway and it's made not of asphalt like a normal road not of cement it's made of granite it's made out of a stone that would last thousands of years because in hitler's delusional dreams of his eternal right nazis would be marching upon it in their glorious parades for thousands of years and these delusional dreams of hitler's were externalized physically into the city of nuremberg the stuff is still there you can walk on the granite nazi road you can see the construction site of the stadium along with shells of other delusionally enormous building projects in various states of construction and deconstruction like the zeppelin fields and the grand congress hall that's so big they don't even know what to do with it nowadays you can go to germany today and reach out and touch hitler's madness so danny want to create a world empire very similar to this instead of telling us these characteristics of danny's mad delusional dream world lack of wars lack of certain political realities to abstract i can't picture that show us her world show us plans for the capital of her empire with like a castle of 10 000 rooms viserion and regular dead have her planned colossi of them that will dwarf the titan of braavos this is the type of thing that can very easily and vividly externalize itself we see her dreaming of this as she's in captivity being tortured in fever dreams while recovering from her injuries we see her waking up in dreams of her grand city walking through the streets feeling the grandeur becoming more and more driven to convey it to her most loyal followers bring it into reality we see her ordering craftsmen to create city models that cover her entire throne room we see her actually begin to build the foundations let's say there's a westerosi city that declares for her and she orders the entire city demolished a clear room for her grand imperial palace and we get these scenic shots of city length foundations for a single building and maybe later we learned that she had the people all killed because she'll have no westerosi selling her heavenly royal city so all this feeds really well into one track that they already had in place half baked but it was there this tyrant to end all tyrant's thing and this would be making concrete her vision of her queendom this version of what she wants to build that we can see her attachment to that vision anything she does because of it becomes more believable because we see her building it so that fits that but there's also another half fake track they had which also had tons of potential which was the targaryen angle we already have this very vivid fully functional version of literally everything i'm talking about in this video both the rules and some of the possibilities we just suggested they had that with mad king aries with him the madness had already begun but we get the story of him being captured and during torturous months in captivity and thus began his mad fixation on cruel punishments most specifically burning people alive he develops this fascination with wildfire and he starts raving all these fire dragon related things and that is the other path to take dany general targaryen dragon fire theme things the burning people alive thing even if it is the same as her dad i think that path would work just fine first it's people who deserve it for not bending the knee or for betraying her and then becomes a crazed obsession on its own she starts demanding to see people of less and less guilt so to speak being burned she sees herself as purifying westeros something extreme like that and watching these burnings are these intensely satisfying experiences for her i think that much alone would do so much for the ark or going back to the isolation scenarios from before maybe in grief for her dragon she wants images of dragons bones of dragons dragon scales constantly around her close to her to ease her grief maybe she starts dressing in dragon scales maybe even the actual scares of her own dead dragon we get some good deterioration of humanity going maybe as she's recovering from her night king's cursed icy injuries she demands enormous fiery braziers brought into her room next to her bed making her room impossibly hot maybe she starts referring to herself instead of as mother of dragons as the dragon mother and suddenly we're starting to be reminded of her mad brother now you've woken the dragon we hear her using that phrase and we're like or if that's too cheesy too on the nose or whatever a less intense option that's equally tied to lore as she's recovering from her injuries or her failure or betrayal she turns to her ancestors for wisdom she becomes obsessed with targaryen history and all these historical facts of the mad kings and the targaryens which she thought would horrify her she's entranced by it she begins to idolize figures like her own father the determination to be that ruthless maintaining order she relates to that as her own plans crumble she sees that as heroic and we see her withdraw from her actual relationships and devoting more and more to this bond with her dead father who she feels like she's bonding with in this irrational way by letting his mailways guide her maybe we even go the jinx route and have her make a life-size idol of him she demands her subjects bend the knee too especially those connected with robert's rebellion undo their betrayal by swearing to their true king and if you want to take it a step further you could have her exhume her father's remains do like a fully fledged lenin or just a bone of his or ashes of him becomes this precious object or she erects a shrine of some kind and obviously you can take it further in the classic way you can have her start to hear her father's voice in her head thinking he's guiding her personally okay and now with all of this maybe we have enough to start combining some parts of this together up the epicness levels a bit across the narrow sea we have valyria the ancient capital of a super powerful empire full of all kinds of lost magic and technology completely destroyed by some natural disasters seemingly pompei-like and targaryens are the blood of all valyria so combine dany being obsessed with her ancestors and dany having fever dreams of her grand capital city and what do we get we have dany dreaming of rebuilding the old empire of her bloodline she doesn't just want to win the iron throne she wants to level all of king's landing and establish new valyria in its place a kingdom so powerful it hawkens back to the strength of ancient empires of legend and we get this growing fantasy for her literally wiping out all memory of westeros to see the royalty and its people from history so she can have this dream empire of hers and you go further with the voices here hearing the voices of her ancestors you could ever hear hundreds of voices thousands the ghosts of old valyria and treating her to rebuild okay now this is all the mad world mad identity part of things but remember it's the conflict that really makes these madness arcs work i love the idea of this three prong setup cersei is getting more and more evil which is how things do play out in the show as it is but for her it's not madness it's her becoming crueler more ruthless more corrupt then we have dany's following which is actually becoming more and more good we see this trickling towards her of all the individual characters who are pretty moral pretty wise good leaders noble knights little characters admirable characters cool characters and then we have danny herself who all the previously mentioned goodies are behind she is what unites them they want to put her on the throne but the closer and closer they get to victory the matter their queen becomes i'm using jinx's role in arcane as the basis here too we have the good guys the bad guys but it all comes down to this one character and whether or not she chooses sanity or madness and there's this real effort by her side to keep her sane there's this confusion and disagreement about whether to stay loyal to her and there's this tragic realization on dany's own part that she is going mad or at least a realization of the possibility that she's mad uncertainty about this vision of hers or this identity of hers and we see this determination of hers to be a good queen a leader worthy of followers like jon snow or jorah or tyrion she wants their validation but she also feels burned by it frustrated by their inability to see her vision inability to understand her behavior her grief her pain inability to understand her admiration for targaryen ancestors and we see this waver between frustration and outright resentment maybe we even get fury at sometimes this is what she starts to see as betrayal her followers not understanding her and with the paradox theme we have her fearing all these various forms of madness but also running towards the manus when she craves its sense of empowerment or if it's this identity she's taking on this dragon self it inspires her and scares her in these visions of new valyria for her she's caught between its grandness and also visions of another doom if we do the pregnant thing maybe she fears what's inside of her but also loves it maybe she grows paranoid a bit jealous of it okay so what about the final trigger the grief trigger what shatters danny's world and breaks her damn so i still do think that far and away the best option would be to kill dragons best of the best would be if we first see dragons killed here regal and viserion both get killed by the scorpions danny goes nuts on drogon but even if we have one or two of them dead before this i think coming to king's landing on drogon and then drogon getting shot and wounded badly and then in panic and fury and desperation and grief dany lays ways to king's landing on a dying drogon i think that also works we and danny both think drogon is dying and this determination that we have to win before we lose drogon that's what makes her turn him loose completely not caring who or what she destroys and then after the battle he could have him survive and now we have a dany who is empowered by the experience of unleashing hell like that and then from there would be the same progression as the current finale danny wants more power wants to burn everyone jon has to kill her and if it's not dead dragons that send her over the edge next best option would be everyone betraying her which is also something they tried to do but we could do it so much more strongly if we do have this progression of her getting madder as her good people following gets closer to victory we have them reach a breaking point with her they turn on her and bend the knee to john the other targaryen daenerys escapes on drogon and now unfettered by all these weak advisors she does what she's been dreaming of doing up until now and we burn if we do the grand city thing and she's already started building anything that could also be the dam breaker she's building a city danny destroys it and danny has to destroy king's landing in retaliation she's building a colossus it gets toppled she's building statues of targaryen ancestors for people to bow to they get destroyed dany retaliates with her own worst destruction that all works i think if we do the option of her being pregnant i think miscarriage are having the baby be born and then someone kills it totally reasonable damn breaker for her even more horrifying have danny kill it and her madness have her burn it that would be the worst and most perfect and probably the most straightforward option considering we have two more seasons make a character log my sunday actually become a super close confidant for her and then die we have time for that now it could work and you can do it with a lot of characters have tyrion become her most trusted advisor the one who stands by her the one who keeps her sane and we kill him jorah keeps being ultimate sip number one he stands by here and we kill him grey worm you could probably theoretically do jon snow i think needs to stay alive but lots of options lots of relationships to work with go all in on one of them and then kill that person totally valid damn breaker okay that's it i think i'm done agency moment is fine keep the bells it works and again i'm not trying to fix the rest of what's wrong with season eight none of this has to do with fixing for example the decision to make bran king which i thought was by far the dumbest moment of the finale and so much of what i'm proposing totally isn't really game of thrones style even the world war ii stuff that's not what the series tends to do george martin is bound to do some fascinating type of madness drawn from medieval history and also by the way it is hard to do madness in a show that has had eight seasons of no madness at that point the audience is used to characters acting somewhat rationally they're not used to outrageous behavior they're not used to delusions they're not used to voices they're used to smarts and cleverness and ruthless pragmatism and all that political drama stuff with madness there's this risk that if it's too much even by a little bit it's totally cheesy and not believable and stupid breaks immersion and if it's not enough even by a little bit it's out of character and it's random and it's not believable and stupid and breaks immersion very little wiggle room to work with here so if your criticism of anything i'm suggesting is that it's going too far i hear that totally valid but that's not the point of the video this is about learning more about madness and using game of thrones as raw material for an exercise and i highly recommend this type of exercise to any writers out here listening to this find a story that does something really well induced methods and rules try your best to apply those methods and rules to story that fails to do that same thing and that will usually involve new interesting angles of diagnosing the problems now that you're coming out with the new stuff you've learned and then you can adapt all these lessons think of a bunch of new ways of going and see how they play out how will things actually turn out in game of thrones i'm absolutely sure george martin will have a fantastic madness arc full of new tidbits to learn new methods new rules etc i guess we'll see in the next 40 to 50 years so we hit a hundred thousand subscribers which is unbelievable i started making arcane videos in mid-november of last year so it's just over eight months i think this has been so insane i've always liked thinking about the stuff of my own but i never imagined this kind of response it's really humbling and i'm really grateful thanks to everyone who watches subscribed or not subscribed i'm just happy to stop by to watch and share the ideas and participate in the discussion thanks to the patrons as always and as the last note here if you'll indulge me a bit i'd like to dedicate this video in the event of reaching 100k to one of my main teachers who passed away just a couple months ago he really laid the foundations for me with analysis in general i talked about this in the q a did for 50k but i have a background in a much different kind of analysis and i bring a lot of that with me in analyzing fiction and that started with this teacher with ryan moskowitz he taught me the importance of contradictions he taught me to stop desperately searching for an answer and just appreciate the question even though what he taught was mostly philosophy and ethics everything was a subject of analysis for him there was a time when he would give students rise from school and he would put on the radio and push them to analyze the song lyrics and one summer he did short story analysis randomly it was not his field but that summer really opened up fictional analysis for me in a different way from before and i still use a lot of the same features of his definition style with these videos i am grateful that i had the opportunity to share with him a couple months before he died that i had started this channel and i was passing on his ideas and methods to tens of thousands of people so yeah people here like to compliment me on how i analyze things but i can't take credit i had great teachers and i owe the credit to them anyway thanks robin moskowitz zecharia sadiq raka you

Channel: schnee

Views: 1,252,455

Keywords:

Id: pymojkDct2A

Length: 42min 36sec (2556 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 07 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/AutoModerator]

We have updated all episode theories in Automod. You can request a specific episode (!Ep01,!Ep02,...!Ep10) or all of them at once (!SendAll). These are theories that have held up past Episode 01 and are curated from message boards, Discord, and Reddit posts.
If you see fan theories that aren't covered here, but are accurate, feel free to forward them via Modmail.

---

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/stann1s_the_mannis]

Arcane = good