Jinx: How Arcane Wrote Psychosis

thank you to chimera for making this video possible more information at the end of the video the following video will have intense subject matter and scenes dealing with ptsd and schizophrenia if you suffer from any of these conditions please take this video at your own speed and do not push yourself i am not a trained professional i am just an average everyday person who enjoys good writing enjoy the video mental illness is something that has come to the forefront of a lot of people's minds in the past decade especially what was once treated as not even a disease is now recognized for the monster that it really is an illness that can be hard to externally see and diagnose that can have devastating effects on the person suffering from it as well as the people around them when writing a story about somebody that has a form of psychosis or other serious mental disorder you walk a razor thin line on one side you don't want to make light of a devastating oftentimes debilitating illness that can take over somebody's mind and on the other hand you don't want to go so far in your portrayal as to trigger mental breakdowns and any people that are suffering that happen to be watching or reading your story as if to only add to the problems of trying to write a character going through an intense mental suffering it can be extremely hard to show what they are going through visually on a screen it's even harder to authentically convey them and downright impossible if the writer has never experienced that sort of suffering before or at the very least work very closely with people that have suffered or with professionals that have worked with it firsthand well walrus this is an awful dour way to start a video yeah i know but it's important to understand just how much of a writing achievement characters like jinx are side note i will be using both the names of powder and jinx when referring to the character throughout this video as from a writing perspective those two names hold a very significant purpose i will elaborate more at the end of the video while in my opinion soco carries much of the heavy lifting from a story perspective of season one powder's character arc carries almost as much as the weight of powder's actions is really what propels the season from the bridge opening all the way through the brilliant finale after losing both of her parents powder grows up with only vi her sister and vander a distant father figure in her life much like her sister vi powder is forced to grow up quickly to learn to adapt and begin to fend for herself from a very early age and while she's a part of the little family gang of milo and clagger and her sister the only really friend she has is echo milo is constantly putting her down and yelling at her and clagger ellie is just kind of there i think he's more just there for vi powder has a lot of insecurities about being capable and about being enough for people she fears abandonment which makes sense she's already lost family at such a young age that she can't bear the thought of losing anybody else which is exactly what ends up happening not only does she lose just somebody else she loses everybody else her father figure her sister her friends and not only that she loses them directly from her own actions as if that wasn't bad enough from her point of view the only remaining family member she has left not killed in the blast abandons her so who does she have left no one that is until soco adopts her in her completely broken state just just just think about that okay you have a literal child that grew up with no parents no no offense to vander he did everything he could but he was trying mostly to mentor vais sovay could mentor powder and just didn't have enough time to spend with powder so this kid was never given a chance to be a kid really only had one true friend and then attempts to help her family survive and accidentally kills all of them except for one only to have that one abandon her then she gets adopted by a certifiably psychopathic man hell-bent on revolution i mean is it any surprise that jinx was an inevitability in the story now we have a teenager stuck between being a child powder and the persona of a fully functioning adult jinx which another side note we never see powder fully accept the persona of jinx until the end of the story she suffers from intense schizophrenia and hallucinations seeing the faces of people that she's killed which is fairly common for people suffering from ptsd of that nature to add to that she's mentally and emotionally stunted oftentimes acting in the same ways as a small child would do she's been cut off from anybody of the outside world by silko she knows no one and has no one other than silko which makes it awfully convenient for him to be able to manipulate and control her exactly how he wants to now i caught some heat on the soca video for saying that their relationship is toxic and i still stand by what i said this time let me elaborate a little bit more from powder side as well it's important to know that love alone is not enough to make something healthy powder and selco love each other dearly in a close father-daughter relationship silko tried to do what he thought was best for her and give her a new persona and a fresh start you know embracing the pain of your past and being born anew through it the problem is powder is still a child furthermore she is now a teenager that was never allowed to have a childhood and because she's been hidden away from the world by silco she doesn't have a support group she has no friends she has no one she has to endure all of this trauma and pain on her own in pure isolation soco on top of that saw her potential and put a gun in her hands and told her to do as he wished look i love soko as a character just as much as anybody else but the one terrible lie of season 1 is but he didn't make jinx you did and while it's true that vice started jinx by leaving her silko shaped and molded her into the mentally twisted killer that she becomes their relationship is uncomfortably toxic and again love the two characters but do not glorify this relationship all the hallucination scenes are so well done they are shot with a jittery camera constantly darting between unnatural camera angles and shots to put the viewer on edge there are garbled voices scratching through not loud enough to catch what they're actually saying but loud enough to know that they are there but the most interesting and most obvious part of these hallucination scenes is the flashes of the past that are altered in one way or another with graffiti which does make sense as powder wants to erase or at the very least cover up her past a lot of the characterization of the transition from powder to jinx is shown through spray paint and bright colors used in wild erratic strokes as she begins to go deeper and further into the persona of jinx the more we see the spray paint graffiti in her hallucinations a perfect first example of what i'm talking about here is when we open the time skip with a sexy action scene full of color and explosions and great fight choreography for everything to stop and focus in on powder who sees a girl with pink hair and then has a full ptsd mental collapse it's like she's tried to blot out the memories and paint over them but she can't block them out entirely it's almost like her past is fighting back against her trying to block it out entirely and using that spray paint that she's tried to cover it up with to disfigure people and twist things in such horrific ways as the scene darts from shot to shot we are put more and more and more on edge until she almost robotically and thoughtlessly kills the girl in front of her one key thing when it comes to showing emotions on screen is to show the actors acting the scene in the purest way possible great example of this that i can think of off the top of my head is matthew mcconaughey in interstellar this scene is haunting because he was relating it to things in his own life in animation you can manipulate the character's performances as much as you like problem is most animated films and shows don't really animate the facial muscles enough so the performance comes across as stiff or robotic at times but arcane arcane does not hold any punches allowing its characters to grieve and express intense emotions on screen and i can't be the only one that curled up into an uncomfortable little ball at this scene some may argue that they went too far with these scenes but considering that there are only a few scenes like this i think it skirts that line it may be too intense for some but ultimately it allows us to understand the drastic actions that immediately follow them things only get worse for powder from here on as our hallucinations get worse we begin to see milo and clagger make more and more appearances in the background haunting over her almost like grotesque gargoyles their faces painted and exaggerated with the spray paint of jinx that she so desperately tried to cover their memories with another thing that the writer smartly did was show that she's still stuck in the past even though she desperately wants to blot it out and deny it in her room we see the couch that was in the last drop as well as grotesque caricatures of her deceased friends loudly outwardly saying that the past doesn't bother her and what happened is just in the past but we can clearly see that quite the opposite is true a quick heartbreaking scene i want to mention is when vai finds her after the time skip and calls her pow pow oh she completely cracks reverting fully back to the innocent little girl she once was that is until she sees caitlyn and begins to associate every evil action that she perceives her sister doing as being influenced by kate i'm not saying that if i was doing anything evil but remember powder has extreme paranoia and schizophrenia so she will see and reason things that do not exist in anybody else's reality because it makes sense to her and only her the dinner scene is one of the best scenes ever put to a screen and for purposes of this video let's focus on how the writers chose to show the struggle of powder and jinx the table is set everyone has a seat except there is a place for both powder and jinx telling vai that she can have powder back all she has to do is eliminate the source of evil aka caitlyn when vi can't do it she starts to become more unhinged hearing the voices of milo and clegger louder and louder at the apex of the scene she has to choose between a man who has become her father one who will not forsake her and her only sister as the tension mounts the music climbs her mind begins to unravel itself seeing distorted images of her past all mocking her surrounding her she's not the confident powerful jinx anymore she's a scared small child she's alone always will be alone in an empty void with everyone attacking from all sides and while vi has good intentions in this scene she doesn't understand how to heal her and it's only making things worse the words that vi is saying to her are bringing up faces from her past that were once kind to her but now are twisted and distorted into horrible abominations that demonically laugh at her all covered in spray paint the click of a pistol awakens her and she acts out of instinct and there's two interpretations for this instinct one is a pure primal instinct to fire at the sound of the pistol as if it was firing at you and the other is familial instinct to protect family in danger honestly i think it's a bit of both as it can be interpreted in both ways jinx hearing the click of the pistol fires at the sound of the pistol being fired hitting silko first which then causes the shot to go off mark and misfi when silko draws his last breath we see powder die the light fades from jinx's eyes as she understands that she can never go back she will never be free from her apparent curse she's no longer erratic in her movements but chillingly confident all accented by the voices scratching through once more she now for the first time chooses the mantle of jinx rather than having it be placed upon her riot chose a very difficult to cover topic with jinx in writing her mental illness as a serious thing which i applaud they could have easily done what so many companies do which is to say play up an insane character for laughs and gags it's just ugh i hate that and if we're going to be talking about riot taking this mental illness very seriously there is a distinct moment when powder is ready to die after watching her once only friend bloodily beat her into the ground where she accepts suicide as a way out after her fight with ekko she willingly pulls a pin on a grenade point blank when she cannot move out of the way i think the thing that has made arcane so successful is that it's a fantasy setting with real characters and intense difficult to approach subject matter topics on top of that while the setting is very much so fantasy the characters problems and challenges are extremely relatable and grounded if albeit dialed up to the extreme mental illness is a difficult topic to put on screen or to even write in a book it's so hard to tell your audience what's happening in a real authentic raw believable way but jinx is suffering and we can see it and understand it we as an audience feel it through not only the incredible script writing and outstanding vocal performance from ella purnell but we also see it visually in her movements the scratching voices the jarring jump cuts and i would argue most importantly the spray paint covering her once happy memories with haunting distortions huge thank you to chimera for sponsoring this video as i am actually very happy to work alongside them as they are sustainability company and a fair labor and ethical manufacturing company but what exactly is chimera chimera is an up and coming clothing company that is focused on making the best quality products for market value prices while also being sustainable and fair labor so twenty dollars for a t-shirt fifty dollars for a hoodie just about bang on market value while also being sustainable and fair labor which is impressive they have everything from graphic tees which i think is hilarious because they have a flying whales t-shirt which again is hilarious as well as hoodies joggers jackets shells just go ahead check them out there's a link down description below they have very very nice products and if you put in code walrus that's just w-a-l-r-u-s at checkout you will get 10 off again thank you to chimera for sponsoring this video and if you want to get to know me a little bit better and my personality a little bit better you can click the link down below as well to go to my live streaming channel where i do do live streams here on youtube hope to see you there and until then take care guys you

Channel: Flying Walrus

Views: 643,819

Keywords: how arcane wrote psychosis jinx, arcane, arcane jinx, jinx psychosis, writing jinx, writing, psychosis, jinx and vi, arcane analysis

Id: uMS_GrDtZrg

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 17 2022

Reddit Comments

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[u/CassOfNowhere]

I disagree so much with this video I couldn’t even finish.

First, is a lot more likely that Jinx have BPD with psychotic episodes than schizophrenia. Really, go take a quick research on the condition and you will notice that everyone of Jinx’s actions is a symptom. The mood swings, the incapability of managing emotions, the insecure attachment, the impulsivity….Her relationship with Vi and then Silco makes a lot more sense when you know that people with BPD usually have what it’s called a “Favorite Person”, that is someone to which their whole world will revolve around.

The video mentions how “Silco isolated her” and how he “manipulated her to his own gain” and how “he stopped her from creating a support system”, but I think this is all wrong. Yes, their relationship is toxic, but not in this way.

I don’t think Silco isolated her. She was already propende to isolation due to her own personality. Before ep3 we do get a sense of solitude from Powder, as if her only real friend was Vi, she merely transferred this same relationship to Silco.

I understand. Jinx is young and his daughter, so people tend to assume that a power imbalance is at place. As if Silco is manipulating her every single action without her knowing, but I don’t agree. I think their relationship is a lot more equal than people realize. The toxicity of their relationship comes from their codependency and lack of morality. They are both lonely people by nature, that isolated themselves even more due to trauma and fear of betrayal. They trauma bonded over this pain that they both felt, so they pushed each other even further into isolation to the point each other was the only thing they have. And while we can see how this is a harmful way of living (putting all those emotional responsibility into one person and refusing to form any other kind of relationship), they don’t. That’s where they are also toxic. They see what they have as something special, precious, as the only thing that they need. So they push each other down further and further and don’t even notice how harmful it is because that’s the reality that makes them happy, or at least more comfortable.

People assume Silco is the only one doing the corruption. He found a little girl, taught her to be mean, and stopped her from having any friends so she would be only his. His daughter, his weapon, his everything. But I think it was reciprocate. Like, how do you imagine Jinx would react if Silco adopted another child, or if he genuinely fell in love with someone else? I even think the main reason why she hates Sevika so much is because Silco trusts her.

Anyway, long story short: Jinx has BPD, not schizophrenia. Understanding this is understanding Jinx and her relationship to people, including Silco. He didn’t manipulated her nor isolated her to his own ends. What makes their relationship toxic is their codependency, how they isolate themselves from everyone else because of their trauma. They relationship is a lot more equal than people give credit.

[u/AGayDamnBitch]

Was left very impressed with this show