This is a PERFECT Side Character (ft IRL Ekko) | ARCANE (Ekko Analysis)

so remember this what is up with this intro i know for a fact that i was not the only one who went on netflix the weekend actually aired clicked on episode 7 saw this intro and was like did i click on the wrong show it's so jarring the music style is different the the animation style is different we don't see anything like it in the rest of the show it's not even a scene it's not part of the narrative okay but here's the big question glaring question every arcane episode up to the finale has a flashback or a scene from the past as part of its beginning each of those episodes focuses on one character and that character gets their flashback and they change it up a bit in minor ways for episode one it's a prologue technically not a flashback but still a scene about the sister's past episode two doesn't start that way it happens a bit into the episode episode fours is a story about the past and since the episode is about pelt over it's about the city's past not the characters but same theme every character gets a flashback every episode opens by going back in time except for echo the one character whose theme is time manipulation the one character who can literally rewind time his episode is the one that doesn't start by going back in time this intro is not a flashback so he's the one character who gets his own episode but doesn't get his own flashback that's when we choose to break this pattern doesn't that seem kinda weird to you okay so i got some comments on my video last week about marcus and bad characters saying that i'm missing the distinction between side characters and main characters and that comparing marcus to a character like vai a very developed very nuanced character isn't fair when marcus is just a side character side characters the argument goes do not need to be as interesting as nuance as developed as main characters and no i disagree so i'm going to respond by showing you what they did with echo because this is how you write a psych actor holy gosh the writing with this character literally blows my mind to pieces because realize for a moment the amount of time they have they have like five minutes to get you reinvested with this character and the way they use it and the ground work they laid before that so impressive and we gotta start with this because there's this big structural writing thing this character turns on its head and i should probably make a separate video about this at some point this is a character design model i call the hero villain trifecta i don't know if other people call it by other names but the idea is that you'll often see this in stories you got your hero and then you have one villain who is an evil or corrupted version of that hero and then you have a second villain who's the other who is everything our hero is not and you see this model all over mario wario bowser luke vader palpatine harry malfoy voldemort ash gary team rocket neo cypher agent smith photogolum starman or gandalf sarah monsaran professor x magnitude and whatever human they're fighting i could go on and on you see this pattern very often and it's very effective both from the writing side and from the audience side it helps us to see the nuances understand the characters better and one of the reasons it works is that it plays on two natural human fears or aversions we fear what we can become the evil inside of us and we fear the other we fear what's different for better or for worse now you don't see this model used in every story and arcane is one sorry where you don't really see it use at least not in a normal way but you do see the binary part of it used a lot not for hero villain because those lines are so blurred in the show but just as a general character layout two versions of the same basic character you have the piltover prodigy and the zon prodigy the piltover misfit girl and the zom misfit girl you have the piltover veteran scientist and the zon veteran scientist the piltover law enforcement and the undercity law enforcement and there's different ways of setting up the two sides the good and evil undercity leaders the good and evil undercity brawlers the piltover academic the undercity academic the piltover character who's become more zone-like and the zone character who's become more piltovarian piltovan piltovovich okay so now here's the weird thing we don't get any villain who could be characterized as the other in arcane but what we do get is a hero who's the other in the form of echo and this is something that is rare to do and even rarer to do thoroughly and that throne this is what i really want to explore here that's what blows me away because they use everything in this characterization every question that's asked of this character must be answered outside the binary the show explores with the whole rest of the cast i honestly think that's the principle that they had in mind when they were writing echo this is what begins to explain that weird intro listen to what it [Music] i says war on anybody standing in the way of what i dream for zon piltover no neither we declare a war on anyone standing the way what we want because both sides are standing in the way no one wants what we want we're not just psi characters we are the third player in this war and this is why the show seemingly does something so random here why devote a full minute to this music video s thing when we only have five minutes to reintroduce this character it's because the show has to prime us this character is coming at everything you've seen so far from the story from within a different paradigm this is why echo's music style is so different from the rest of music we hear in the show it's why his scenes are the only ones stylized like this this guy is different he breaks the pattern of the society he lives in so that's how he's introduced goes back to the characterization matching the character's personality thing we talked about in the mel episode and let's go through let's go through all the patterns he breaks all the binary elements you can use to characterize the whole rest of the cast that echo has a third answer to which technology shimmer hex sec neither nature time manipulation eventually different paradigm in the under city we're presented with two options fight or make peace echo does neither the fire light's fighting style isn't the direct blunt force of vi it's not the sneaky underhandedness of silk or of jinx violet swarm like flies and then run they don't fight their enemies head-on they scatter they paralyze they favor mobility overall power evasiveness defense we see no other character even talk about defensive tactics in the whole show except echo he mentions it to something that is important to him and you still block with your face and then the big prominent one we see the entire cast sucked into two different vortices they can't escape you have the characters who are stuck in the past vi jinx who are constantly reliving the past trying to get back dead trying to recreate it and then you have characters who can only think of the future progress jason mel obsessing over what hexa can become over what piltover can become and victor as well but also having his death his fate looming over him heimerdinger probably the worst of all living hundreds of years in the future can't see the present at all even singed love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress progress he's making sacrifices for the future for his future discoveries and that in a different sense looking to the future politically silko dreaming of an independent zone and bessa trying to juggle and plan for all these future wars even caitlyn who starts out quite grounded ends up trying to solve these grand problems taking down the whole criminal enterprise prevent war same with vander preventing war this grand scary thing looming in the future and who's left who's helping people now echo past future nope third option present and that i think is the secret this is an echo the rewind isn't him it's this it's coming back to the present we see him in his original cinematic redoing the same fight over and over again don't focus on him going back he is using the pass as a tool to construct the perfect present moment here's the thing about time if you can't make the most out of any given moment you don't deserve a single extra second and if you think about it an echo what is an echo it's not a memory it's the sound of the past coming back to you now and that's why he doesn't get a flashback because echo is about the present he's about the time that is currently passing now and that's the hourglass hourglass is symbolized time but if you think about it hourglasses don't count time in the past they count time going by now same with a stopwatch and let me ask you this what hurts fire lights being trapped in the past we see it twice both times with jinx trapping the girl fire light in the memory of the past and trapping echo into memory of the past and how do the firelights regard the past firelights make peace with it they don't run from it they don't try to recreate it they knowledge what they've lost they acknowledge the death they've experienced and they use it to motivate them to continue to do their work for the present moment helping people now and this is the tree too by the way it's not just nature remember about the air in the undercity victor's dying i think it has something to do with gases in the fisheries where he grew up have you forgotten where we came from air so thick you clogged your throat stuck in your eyes the farlatch refuge literally allows them to survive by providing clean air for them to breathe and what more of a present focus benefit is there than breathing this whole community is built on simply enabling people to breathe clean air i think this is also why the fire lights are so animal like as well it's about the going back to nature thing but it's also kind of what animals are good at animals are great at living in the moment there's the simplicity and peace about that which is exactly what we see with this community so it really is everything about this character the entire characterization every detail is about expressing that third option the different paradigm i mentioned that it's rare to see the hero other archetype because it's easier to make the other something you fear then something you admire it just takes more work but also it is a timing thing most stars just don't have time to fully develop a separate hero but one place you actually do see the hero other archetype a genre that generally has a lot of time to do stuff is shown in anime an anime has this thing they like to do where they code heroes as red and villains as blue and when there's a hero psi character that's different that's other what color do they get coated as green so of course aki knows this opportunity took full advantage worked out perfectly okay now there's one more twist this character which just wraps it all up in a nice bill because you could have had this hero archetype be anyone and it would look a little different but there's a lot of ways to do that third option so why they make it one of the undercity kids the only other surviving member of the understudy kid group actually what's up with that why use echo for this so interesting thing about echo is that everything we've just talked about only applies to post time skip echo what about pre-time skip echo echo as a child is a totally different character this guy just wants to fight actually wait listen to what he says um oh did i kick their asses yeah i wouldn't be here otherwise oh she showed me a couple of moves to practice look echo as a child is almost exactly powder he practically worships vi he wants to be a fighter but just isn't he isn't good at what he admires and for powder the theater making the ultimate mistake that cost her everything vai wanted her to stay put powder wasn't ready she should not have gone with him that night and echo echo didn't go with him that night and i think it's because his trauma started a bit earlier than vine powders if he hadn't already lost his vander to the monsters he would have been in vai wanami mode just like powder and he would have died instead he stayed away during the benjamin murder he was hiding during the rest of it he presumably hid he avoided the fight throughout all of our kmbc characters embracing the state they were in or the mode represented during their childhood trauma powder assumes the identity of the jinx she was that night in episode three vi was ready to give up fighting and turn herself in but because of that night she gets stuck in punch only mode jace's trauma introduced him to the altruistic use of magic and he fixated on that female it was ruthlessness the fox and the wolf and she couldn't escape that paradigm for echo it's avoidance and i hate that that term has a bad connotation it's good avoidance it's escaping it's protecting himself it's walking away or even running away when you should run away when it's the smart thing to do because often it is the smart thing to do that was echo the night of episode three he embraced that philosophy of smart avoidance for a good purpose that's the man he became with some of these characters you see parallels we had kate and anti-kate last week soon we'll be exploring vi and anti-vi ekko isn't that he isn't a foil for powder he's au powder a different timeline powder we see him and we see powder we see that they weren't just childhood friends they were cut from the same cloth same hopes same talents same things holding them back and then they both experience the trauma of losing everyone they love in one night and remember these are both orphans they both already lost everyone and now it's gonna happen again and you know we forget that echo also lost everyone in that one night and when we see all that when we see echo just barely manage to set himself down a different path and thrive because of it we really see what could have been to quote sting and this is something that enriches the tragedy of powder i think that's the purpose of it if only she had stayed away then and if only she comprehended the trauma awaiting her down that path we see the kind of good life she might have carved out for herself now this was something like this maybe who knows that's a good way to drive yourself crazy that's the line echo says after vice said she should have been there for him very consistent with what we've said we can't get held back by the past like that and then funnily enough right after he says that he just totally contradicts himself if i just went with you that day maybe none of this would have happened but i think this is also him acknowledging that he suffered from that craziness too he has the same thoughts he's not immune from the trap of the past just because he chose the road of the present it's a hard road for him to walk and he struggles and drives him crazy too that honestly is also part of acknowledging the past admitting its effects grieving healing from it that craziness is also a part of him even if he knows it drives him crazy and by the way this acts as a foreshadowing of how he does eventually get trapped in the past at the end of this episode yeah so just a different level of intentionality it's every detail in this character seriously so that's what you can do with a psy character and yeah i'm not saying every character should be this specifically but something with this level of intentionality and attention to detail yeah i am saying that put this much work into side characters not this much work those four standards i mentioned last week that can make her break a character that marcus utterly failed in interesting nuance well developed echo completely nails all four everything we talked about here is in the interesting and nuanced categories but he's cool as well in the likable category and he has a whole arc too which we didn't even discuss where we see what happens when he doesn't walk away and he does confront and it's a whole arc this one scene and they didn't even need to give him an ark in the first place but they did a whole r for him in two minutes and that's the other part of this this argument that side characters shouldn't have detailed characterization is assuming that characterization is proportional to screen time and audience attention but it's not at all making echo's aesthetic interesting making the fire lights fighting style different and nuanced takes no time it doesn't take away from these scenes with the main characters it adds to them i don't want echo or marcus to be the main focus of arcane on the level of main characters i want each scene to present a character in a way that if i do choose to focus on them if i scratch the surface i'll find a wealth of interesting characterization i'll find a rich human life i scratch the surface of marcus and i find nothing i need to go outside this character for anything interesting echo i scratch the surface of and i find everything i talked about in this video that's what i want for my side characters they don't demand your attention but you sense there's something more there and if you do choose to pay attention there's a payoff there's a lot more there okay i got one more thing to talk about and uh yeah i was on the fence of whether or not to include this but i think you guys are going to find it interesting and that said feel free to skip this click off main part of this video is over see you wednesday for one minute analysis thanks for watching etc so it feels weird to include this in the video but i had the sense watching echo that this character reminds me of someone and when i was doing research for this video i came across a tweet from amanda overton about how echo gathered up a crew by helping other victims suffering under circle's rule and i thought echo was reminding me of a character from something else and then i saw this and i realized no it's someone i know in real life it's this guy i met typhoon he strung a place called mathari this is this is what it looks like and so when when typhoon was nine he ran away from home because his mother was too poor to feed him and he grew up on the streets he'd go uptown every day to beg you know to the richer areas and uh this is you know he was he was young he was nine years old he was really small and the older boys didn't want him in their gang so they every day they just beat him up they took all this money that he got that day from begging and he was totally alone he was an easy target and he lived like this for years and one day when he was 12 or 13 he was so young compared to the other kids in the gangs but the strategy started to form he started to start to understand something he would totally get thrashed by these older kids on a daily basis but he started realizing that he wasn't the only one there were a lot of younger kids like him alone easy targets so he started discreetly following these older gangs around and whenever they jump one of these little kids typhoon would watch it all go down then he'd come around afterwards and tell that kid hey i also got beat up we should stick together so he did this he went to every single kid he could find who got targeted like this gathered this big group and the strategy worked and not only did the group start protecting themselves with just their numbers but you know they were little kids but they were all growing up they were becoming older stronger smarter and typhoon just took advantage completely of the short-sightedness of these older gangs that he understood he understood that lonely kids don't stay lonely if you give them a reason to stick together and typhoon became the leader of one of the most dangerous gangs in all of nairobi and he was just 15 years old and at this point then his story diverged from echoes all he thought about was money at this point in his life he was desperate and that desperation destroyed him typhoon told me in really scary detail what it's like to do violence real terrible violence the worst he can think of to innocent people and feel nothing and this state he was in this this really horrible state it continued past watching all of his friends get killed or arrested past he himself getting arrested even once he was released from prison you know he was still in this mindset and it only changed when he became a father then he started to finally understand empathy and feel it again and now you know by the time i met him he's a completely different person totally reformed kind really great guy he's made a business of helping people understand what it's like to grow up on the streets in a city like nairobi you know snatching phones getting chased crawling through sewer pipes to escape back home to the dump where he lived and i mean i mean literally he lived in the garbage dump for a number of years echo really made me think of typhoon echo's story is dark but he makes something of it and typhoon's starry is is darker but now he's raising a family and he's making something of it too here's me and him i think he kind of looks like echo too like echo and maybe like seven to eight years could definitely cosplay as him but yeah so i mean yeah we think of piltover and zhan is fantasy sci-fi and that's true but under cities do exist and people live like that people you know people have these stories

Channel: schnee

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Id: 9c3s17NvX5M

Length: 17min 10sec (1030 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 13 2022