Thoughts on Ekko
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I have seldom been more confused at an audience’s response to a show than when I realized how much everyone loves Ekko. Loves: like, Ekko-is-the-real-hero-of-Arcane loves.
I’m almost constantly baffled by audience’s reactions and writer’s choices. I’d say most of this channel consists of me trying to understand why I seem to absorb things so differently to other people. But the audience response to this character brought me to a brand new levels of befuddlement.
I don’t feel like I have a great sense of Ekko’s personality, and that left me with more or less neutral feelings about him. We don’t really see Ekko in many low-stakes situations, certainly not as an adult. We also don’t see him make many big choices: he has opinions and desires, but he doesn’t make things happen. Stuff almost exclusively happens to him.
It’s clear to me that the writers also didn’t have a sense of his personality until late into production. Like, pay attention to the visuals playing over this line: Jayce: “How do you know so much about its design?” Ekko: “Read what I could, deduced what I couldn’t.” It’s entirely off-screen. They never animated him saying this! They were just like: “Oh shit, we forgot to make Ekko a tech genius!” They have him refer to the process of “letting air through” as “facilitating ventilation” in a casual conversation. Ekko: “These are the same utility ducts that carry our water and facilitate our ventilation.” And while that is absolutely a thing I would say, I hope none of you would go on to conclude that I am a tech genius for using dorky words.
Or, maybe they always intended for him to be a genius, but realized well into production that he simply didn’t read that way. No shade to the writers, I’ve made very similar mistakes in my own screenplays. The point is, I’m confused about what exactly is drawing so much of the fanbase to him. He more or less acts like a cog in the story’s machinery: for instance, his most impactful moments for me are when Vi grabs him and pulls him into a hug those two times, and I liked them because they characterized *Vi* really well. He also challenges Jayce when he tries to wriggle out of taking responsibility for poisoning the firelight tree. Ekko: “So, instead of it exploding in your neighborhood, it would blow up in ours.” Jayce: “We’re miles from the main fissures.” Ekko: “These are the same utility ducts that carry our water and facilitate our ventilation. And that would explain it affecting the tree.” Not that that ends up leading anywhere; see my video on Jayce and Viktor for more on that.
Season 2 sees him lifted up and dropped into environments he doesn’t belong in, and he seems to take the most expected course of actions out of the problem. ‘You’re hurting the tree, I want to save the tree; this isn’t my reality, I got to go back to the other reality; I kinda like Jinx now, I’d like her to not die, actually.’
I think I’d argue that the most interesting part about him, the thing that makes him stand out, is the firelights and their tree. He’s far more tied down than any of the other characters: he’s a local, grassroots political leader, and his faction is really the only party I would consider to be revolutionary. Our other heroes have these rapidly shifting alliances. Every other character is fickle and self-motivated. But Ekko just cares about his people, and if someone isn’t aligned with his goals in *this moment*, he just has to treat them as an enemy, no matter what. YouTuber Schnee made a pretty good video exploring the present-ness of Ekko: he doesn’t focus on the affiliations or grudges of the past or high-falutin ideas of the future.
His duty to the present isn’t exactly a flaw, but his belief is challenged a couple of times in season 1. He turns the Hexgem over to topside, because while getting rid of Silco can help the undercity now, he recognizes that forging a better relationship with the council is what’s best for the future. He hesitates before killing Jinx, because the past inevitably ties him to her. The present isn’t a haven from the past or future because conscious beings tie these three seemingly separate territories into a singular experience. Our bodies themselves contest the idea that past, present and future are separate: we know intuitively that they aren’t, no matter how useful the separation might be.
And so, if you weren’t invested in Ekko becoming “The Boy Who Shattered Time” from League of Legends, the fact that he gets thrown so far out of his world that he crosses into another timeline might just seem ridiculous. As it did to me.
Of course, you could say that seeing time from another perspective, seeing how a different history effects a different present, challenges his belief that the present is the only thing that matters. But… that already happened. Remember? We just talked about it two seconds ago. That was his season 1 arc. One would expect his altered belief-system to affect his choices in season 2 or also be challenged. Instead, he gets thrown into Jayce’s plot.
And here comes the big hottake.
I didn’t enjoy episode 7 of season 2, and the overwhelming fandom support for the episode is another thing that really threw me for a loop. First of all, if I never see another alternate timeline again, it’ll be too soon. This is on-par with the whole show being a side character’s dream. But it’s worse than being cliche. This episode performs a sneaky little ideological slight of hand trick on behalf of the series as a whole.
The true magic of a story is its ability to convince you to take part in belief systems that you would never normally consider. That’s what’s surprising and interesting about them: when a character or a set of actions makes you feel like you’ve actually glimpsed the mind of another person, no matter how alien their ideas might seem. Feeling with them helps you think like them.
And so, it’s really irritating when a story is trying to convince you of something they want you to consider and then just gives up and tells you authoritatively that they are right. Arcane doesn’t try to show you why the hubris of magic is harmful, it just conclusively states that it is harmful by making another universe.
Yeah, apparently Zaun was just on the verge of a Renaissance before hextech got in the way. Piltover was just about to stop exploiting and abusing them when a couple of uppity undercity kids tried to “make their lives better” or whatever by stealing.
Through Ekko, we get a meaningless view of a world crafted around the scintillating observation that if different things had happened in the past, the present… would also be different. Wow.
I think the entire world of episode 7 is a waste of time, but that doesn’t even touch upon what a waste it ends up being on Ekko. So, he gets to see Benzo, he falls for Powder, he sees the safe and thriving world of Zaun, now that Silco has come around from being such a bad guy and all. I would imagine that Ekko feels some temptation to stay, but he never struggles with it. His goal throughout the episode is clear and he spends the whole time achieving it to no effect on the story other then introducing a new gadget (which I was apparently supposed to care about) and the needless death of Heimerdinger.
As he just kind of goes, “no… Don’t, don’t die for me. No. Stop.” I don’t even understand what killed him. AU Powder isn’t affected at all, she’s fine.
What exactly are Ekko’s new believes after facing Jinx in season 1? What is he wrestling with that requires an alternate universe episode to explore? And why is that struggle not born out in any actions?
Ekko gets this brand new storyline that adds nothing to the aspects of his character that we already cared about. It just introduced an entirely new story to conclude and concluded it pretty uneventfully. Episode 7 honestly felt like a waste of time to me, and I don’t think it really did Ekko any justice.
I should say, if you were very invested in the relationship between Ekko and Powder, I could see this episode being more interesting to you than it was to me. Specifically, if this sequence of them fighting as children and then as adults was moving to you, you might have really enjoyed just seeing Ekko’s prejudice against adult-Powder disintegrate. I think I wasn’t as emotionally invested in their dynamic because I’m not a very musical person. And that affected the way I absorbed a lot of the “music video”-like scenes that this show uses to resonate with viewers. Like, I think some people are more likely to find a “music video” sequence to be a perfectly good way of condensing a lot of character development into a smaller segment of time. So, what felt insubstantial to me could very well have felt perfectly justified to you if you really connected to this sequence. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not how my brain works. And unfortunately, this is my video.
All this to say, Ekko is a decent side-character with the potential to become a great main character in some kind of spin off. Of which, my viewers like to remind me, there will be many.
If Arcane ruined ruined Mel’s character, why would I watch a whole show about her?
In comparison to Mel, who was fascinating in season 1, but whose arc was cut contemptibly short in season 2, Ekko seems like his in a place for a journey to actually begin. I’d like to see Ekko’s beliefs fleshed out. How does he stay present, productively focused on action, when he always has a eye on how to craft the perfect moment? Is this the best way to experience time; are there drawbacks? Ekko has heavy regrets and dreams for the future: does controlling time help him or hurt him?
I guess, I don’t love Ekko yet, but I’d like to.
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