Arcane Season 2 hurt Vi and I’m mad about it
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I once had a creative writing course in which my professor recounted a time when a student brought in a short story with a dog. I don’t know what the story was about, but it wasn’t about the dog. At the end of the story, the dog dies for no reason. Upon asking the student why they made such a needlessly cruel decision, they simply said, ‘I realized I could do anything I wanted, so I killed the dog.’ Woof.
I would argue that this storytelling approach is generally bad. There are stories that beat the shit out of their audiences to create a certain experience: the Umbrella Academy achieved its goal of being a bleak and frustrating exercise in pain to brilliant and hideous effect with its conclusion last year. It was a show about miserable people who made each other miserable and had no potential to create anything other than abject agony on a world-wide scale. The characters get kicked in teeth and tormented each other until the very end, and the conclusion was pretty fitting for that reason.
But when a story begins to feel like it’s just torturing one character in a particularly pointed way, one begins to think that the point of the suffering is to make the character change and improve. And so, when a character does receive this treatment, it’s important for us as readers to see where they’re going wrong so that we feel emotionally invested in seeing them turn out right. Unless you’re Kafka, and you want to torture a character as a means to explore the world on a broader scale, but… don’t be Kafka. One is enough.
Vi’s defining motivation is the love she feels for other people. That’s always been her thing. She’s a deeply affectionate person who needs to be anchored by the people she trusts. And throughout Season 2, this motivation comes back to torment her over and over again.
Season 2 grinds Vi beneath its heel to no effect on her life other than making her miserable.
Vi and Jayce obviously mirror each other: they’re both determinators with wide-eyed visions of the future, they’re fiercely loyal and trusting, which also makes them annoyingly easy to manipulate. The difference is that Jayce is the one with power and Vi is the one who has to suffer when Jayce makes thoughtless political moves. The people generating the big, ivory-tower ideas of progress have no regard for the people at the bottom who get crushed by the debris of the changing winds.
You know the most irritating line in Arcane season 1? “The Atlas Gauntlets. The mining colonies in the fissures can work faster and without fatigue.” Without fatigue, you say? Amazing. Can they also work without sustaining chronic health issues that will ravage their respiratory system and kill them by 40?
This line isn’t frustrating because Jayce is being an asshole. He wants to improve the lives of human beings. But he and Viktor clearly feel that the way to get approval for their actual goals is to pump out work that can generate lots and lots of money for owning class.
Season 1 is particularly truthful to me in the way in showed how big conflicts affect individuals. We’re thrown into a world where children need to claw each other apart for scraps. The fact that they are children forces you to keep your eye on the bigger picture: no matter what the Undercity does, they are not equally culpable for the violence between the classes. The conflict starting the whole show begins when some children steal an object — in no city should that lead to a crackdown on an entire class of people.
This imbalance in power and suffering is brought into sharp relief through the relationship between Vi and Powder. As far as I’m concerned, these sister are the show: they have an innate knowledge of the the city because they’re the ones who have to think about how things work in order to survive.
Even the adults of the Undercity aren’t as clear-headed as the children. Vander may have a point when he tells Vi that a revolution needs to be weighed against the cost of the dead. But Vi has a far more fundamental understanding of the city: it is not sustainable. Vander can hold it together with duct tape as long as he wants, but if relatively small incidents like a theft can completely knock it off-balance, it’s not workable. Something’s gotta give, and you don’t want to be taken off-guard when that happens. Acquiescing to coercion from Topside will only work while the demands are tolerable, and the council are too ignorant of the situation on the ground to tailor their demands to fit the situation.
Vi and Powder have to deal with wrath of the enforcers, have to lose everything including each other, because they were born into an impossible situation.
Their love for each other is the main the thing that kept me watching season 1. Child Vi in particular stands out: she is capable of such tenderness and affection for Powder, you really have to assume she wouldn’t resort to violence if people she loved weren’t constantly in need of her strength.
Clip: “I have my fists, and you have these.”
And so, while we judge season 1 Jayce by his ability or lack of ability to do good, the sisters aren’t really bound by simplistic notions of good or bad to me. I mainly care about how they interact with each other. I care about Jayce seeing through Ambessa’s motives, not believing everything Mel tells him, taking Viktor’s side when he’s clearly the only one with his head screwed on straight. I want Jayce to stop hurting my Undercity babies. But for the sisters, I want to see them reunite, I want to see Powder trust Vi again. Neither are responsible for the conflict nor do they have any power over it: their goals throughout season 1 are to find each other: it’s not good vs. evil, it’s the complexity of loving a person after harm has been done.
This is the most compelling relationship of season 1 because it’s untethered from the moralizing, Topside half of the story. As I’ve probably made clear over my past few videos on this show, the idea that magic or any natural force can be inherently bad is just boring as shit. It’s a bad choice, regardless of whether or not it’s canon to League of Legends: don’t argue with me!
In Jayce’s story, the arcane is bad, because he’s involved in a baby-brained struggle between good and evil. But with Vi and Powder, the arcane becomes a bit more interesting.
Marginalized characters can use the arcane to disrupt the usual order of society. While Topsiders have the institutional power, the resources, and guns to stabilize things in their favor, magic can be stolen and used as a catalyst: it destabilizes things.
Jinx’s personal torment and pain at the hands of an unjust system is a direct result of the council’s horrible behavior. When she lashes out against it, she shows that she has the power to bring the masters of the world to absolute devastation. Her horrific display of violence on her tormentors mesmerizes the people of Zaun, and this act alone is enough to spark a somewhat organized rebellion. The arcane equalizes things; it offers a channel of influence to those who can’t compete against the rich in any other way. Money is stifling form of power that keeps things static, but the arcane is fluid and mercurial.
Magic in our world is also connected to political liberation. The mysterious powers that defy understanding create a kind of parity where brute strength can only enforce hierarchy. Whatever forces the women in the forest are playing with are unknown and terrifying: something to be feared and respected. Why do you think there are so many lesbian witches running around?
In that way, it makes perfect sense that Vi and Powder’s relationship would cause world-ending conflicts in season 2. These sisters bounce off each other in ever more erratic ways throughout season 1, desperately trying to make their relationship work again after so much has changed, and the arcane keeps finding ways to destabilize them. Jinx has to fuck around with Hexgem and Vi can’t stop herself from stealing an Atlas Gauntlet and beating the shit out of people. They collide like two protons in the season 1 finale, and much of season 2 takes place in the nuclear fall out from this event. They are a microcosm of the dualities of power Piltover operates on: the stabilizing class hierarchy and the destabilizing magic and technology that resists the hierarchy has wreaks chaos on a person’s ability to protect their loved ones. Jinx’s shame and fear is this volatile element that keeps combusting against Vi’s steadfast devotion to her sister. Vi’s an immovable, unchangeable force fighting against the erratic fission of Jinx’s personality.
Great stuff. The violence consequence of Vi and Powder’s relationship, bombing the council, is the product of a lot of specificity and nuance. More importantly, it was driven by the sisters desire to become a family again. This personal, intimate moment with large-scale ramifications is handle with such delicacy, that even the darkness of this scene can’t choke out the sincerity of this relationship.
In season 2, the driving force seems to be a desire to put Vi’s pure heart threw a meatgrinder.
Season 2 takes the intimate sister conflict and manages to boil it down to the much less engaging moral conflict up topside. So many parts of Vi and Jinx’s relationship in season 2 feels like a banal fight between good guys and bad guys. Yes, Vi is terrified by Jinx at this point, she became so afraid of her during their little tea party last season that she genuinely believed Jinx was about to serve Caitlyn’s decapitated head on a silver platter. It’s not such a stretch to see Vi as coming to believe that Powder is dead and Jinx is a soulless husk of her that can never do good again.
But the most disappointing part of this change to me is that it doesn’t even allow the sisters to drive their own stories: Vi in particular has her beliefs crunched down to fit neatly in Caitlyn’s corner of the of political schism between the enforcers and council. Instead of Caitlyn needing to work with Vi’s suffering to contribute to her side of the story, Vi becomes a goon in Caitlyn’s authoritarian terror squad. Vi gets to be an action figure being banged against her own sister for the better half of the season, more a pawn in her abusive partner’s quest for vengeance than a person in her own right. And Caitlyn’s quest is no where near as interesting as Vi’s, so why I’m being asked to set Vi’s motivations aside for Caitlyn’s is anyone’s guess.
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