Mel the Queen
New video essay out about Arcane!
You’re an Athenian philosopher. Your school sits in the temple of Apollo, the Sun god whose virtues you interpret as pertaining to truth, reason, clarity, sobriety, logic. And so you write endless words on the subject of empiricism: you dedicate your life to dragging that knowledge which dwells in the shadows into the light.
Until one day, when you find yourself spellbound at the theater. You’re watching a tragic play. Not just any tragic play. A tragedy that exemplifies everything drama ought to be.
Your teacher believed in “the forms:” a nebulous idea about the way things work at their core. The ethereal pillars of reality of which we can only see the shadows. As far as your concerned, that’s a bunch of pious nonsense.
And yet, here you sit, so magnetically transfixed by this play, that you begin questioning your fundamental relationship to reality. If there are no perfect forms out there, how is it that this piece of art seems to strike some kind of truth beyond knowledge a human could ever hope to understand? For a moment, you feel the unease of a solar eclipse.
So, you go home and try to make sense of it. You pick up your pen and attempt to do the impossible: you’re going to prove that stories, fundamentally a bunch of lies, are actually the conveyance of truth.
Your name is Aristotle, and you’re writing Poetics, the oldest surviving treatise on theater.
And the play that changed your life… is Oedipus Rex.
Known primarily nowadays as the mother fucker play. Yep. That’s the play whose narrative Aristotle believed is the quintessence of the human experience. And Dr. Freud thought so too.
So Aristotle is a shivering mess, curled up in the corner under a pillow fort he created to feel safe as the mind-bending reality that “I don’t know everything” started to sink in, and here’s what he comes up with:
He identifies two sections of stories that work together to create a unified impression in the theater: a complication and an unraveling. (Or denouement, if you’re insecure about the relevance of your English degree in the modern employment hellscape we call life.) Between the two, there is a peripeteia, or reversal of fortune. As in the case of Oedipus Rex, this peripeteia causes a self-revelation about one’s own “hubris.” The act of hubris invites Nemesis: retribution for hubris. Oedipus realizes that in fleeing his destiny, he ran straight into it. He can only heal Thebes of the plague by leaving the throne and wondering in the wilderness. That’s not to say he understands destiny, but he’s come to understand that he is subject to the irrepressible whims of destiny.
Essentially, in my mind, Aristotle determines that good drama is a delicate tango between the known and the unknown. If too little is known, we can’t feel catharsis along with the characters. If too much is known, the untruths of the fictional world weigh down the character with meaningless slop.
Jayce’s last words to Mel are… difficult to swallow.
Yes, Mel is a very active agent in her own life. She’s by far the smartest person in her surroundings and part of her genius is her ability to understand and manipulate people: both as individuals and as groups.
But it’s hard to argue that Mel isn’t an object of fate for most of season 2. I feel that there are so many facts surrounding Mel, that truth effectively gets lost.
Even if you were just interested in more Mel content, which I absolutely am, there is an entire show’s worth of story involving Mel’s involvement with the Black Rose that you could easily mine for a solo spin off. And I’m not saying that as a League of Legends player: I’m not one. I’m saying it as someone who really wanted to follow Mel’s arc, but could not tie all those thin threads of story together while processing other stories.
Mel’s season 2 journey is one long string of facts that convey little truth, which is strange, because in season 1, she was the best character.
If we consider all of season 1 to be a complication, and the second as an unravelling, Mel is the one winding the cord. She introduces herself as a climber, “the richest person in Piltover, yet the poorest Medarda.” If Arcane is indeed a story about hubris, Mel is the one inviting Nemesis. Her first substantial act in the show is goading Jayce into revealing what his studies were really about. Jayce was willing to keep his mouth shut, but Mel wants to know how to put Piltover on the map. She pulls the information out into the open, and then waits for her moment to strike.
Mel spends much of season 1 walking a thin line between desperately wanting her family back, while sticking to her principles: being the fox, not the wolf. She wants to make Piltover a glowing metropolis her family can approve of, but she also needs to prevent every conflict from escalating to violence. Both of these motivations contribute to her main goal: to make Piltover strong. But how do you make a city built on such a fundamentally weak structure work? Half the city is essentially subordinate to the other: how do you keep them there? Do you placate them? Liberate them? Or do you build a really big bomb to scare the shit out of them? This is her struggle to deal with, and she’s floundering. Her mother showing up, quickly getting her claws into Jayce, and ramping up hextech weaponry doesn’t just threaten her turf, it threatens her non-violent way of doing statecraft.
And she realizes she’s made a misstep: yes, Jayce is a good investment, but he’s also a volatile element. He has this ever-present sense of urgency for whatever problem is happening right now, and if she can’t control all the forces in his life, she can’t control him.
In the years between season 1’s first and second act, it seems that Mel has become the main political fixture in Jayce’s life: he’s her project and her key to “putting Piltover on the map,” and she loses control of him. This is what eventually leads to Jinx getting the hexgem, hence the peripetia of the season 1 finale.
In a show about politics, Mel was only one with any kind of political savvy. But she’s not a shark with an indiscriminate lust for power: she has compelling reasons for everything she does. Season 1 Mel is complicated, profound, fascinating, flawed but well meaning.
In season 2, she’s put in an ethereal box. For, like… a while.
Like what you see? Check out the full video here!
