How (NOT) To Write Madness | Arcane vs Game Of Thrones
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- Опубліковано 5 тра 2024
- #LeagueOfLegends #Jinx #Daenerys
Arcane's and Game of Thrones' climaxes are nearly identical moments for Jinx and Daenerys respectively, but this pivotal scene of "The Bells" failed for Game of Thrones and "What Could Have Been"'s finale worked spectacularly. Why did Dany's madness arc fall short? What goes into a good "burn it all down" moment? Drawing on lessons from Arcane in addition to Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Midnight Express, and other great madness arcs, there are commonalities we see in how these extreme character moments are brought about. Game of Thrones had so many tools to draw on that it failed to properly utilize: the death of Rhaegal and Viserion, the crazed lore of Targaryen history, the mythology of Old Valyria, and obviously the shrinking but still impressive cast of characters surrounding Dany in her final episodes. Using Jinx's arc as a model, we can give the Mother of Dragons the great fiery end she deserves.
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0:00 - The questions
2:20 - What I've been missing w/ Jinx
5:52 - Rule #1
8:25 - Rule #2
9:21 - Rule #3
10:57 - Rule #4
12:08 - Rule #5
13:24 - Hitler (Rule #6)
15:30 - Rule #7
16:39 - Rule #8
17:26.- Rule #9 (Abby's Levels)
20:39 - Rule #10
21:28 - Rediagnosing GoT's problems
27:20 - The Fixes
41:23 - tribute to my teacher - Фільми й анімація
Had to reupload due to a copyright thing! Sorry for the delay! Enjoy the vid!
no worries man! thanks for the amazing vid!
Dude have u studied psychology or at least abt psychosis?? Bc some of these ideas in the video are validated in textbooks and scientific articles to the point it feels like you are well read in these topics
That's annoying. Your videos are definitely fair use. I hope UA-cam eventually does something about that. I've seen a ton of essayists moving a lot of their stuff to Nebula. You would fit right in there.
So you say jinx loves and hates herself yet what about people like kayn who confess hate for love.
The guy deletes comments that don't go along with him. What are you afraid of?
The craziest part about Arcane is that they created all this amazing story for a character that up until that point was just "funny psycho girl we all love"
The writing is no doubt incredible in Arcane. This was probably one of their advantages, having nothing to work with. Or, the writers sure made the most of that. Danny had a story arc they had to mold her around in TV-format. Arcane was literally little but a bunch of characters with no personality from the game, and a few images of what the cities supposedly looks like + a few music trailers from LOL.
In short, they had ALOT of creative freedom, and boy, did they know how to use it.
I never liked that character, and they made it worse with Arcane. Irritating.
@@Lutzifalilia ok
@@Lutzifaliliacan you elaborate?
Jinx was just a Harley Quinn clone when she was added to league years ago. With Arcane she became her own character.
Another thing about jinx is that she seems like she never stopped being a child. She has all the qualities of a child, but with all the hope sucked out. Her imagination, creativity, the way she speaks, and the way she conducts herself. However, they haven't used this to create sympathy, in a "she's still a child underneath all the trauma" kinda way. Instead, they use this to show her madness. She is always surrounded by her imaginary friends, to a point that it haunts her. The weapons she uses can cause extreme destruction, but to her, they're toys. Her brain, in moments of distress, thinks in scratches that look like drawing's she would make when she was younger. She seems like she died at the moment Vi left her with silco, and is now some ghost of her past self. The scary part is not that she's a different person than she was earlier, it's that she's way too similar in all the wrong ways.
Very eloquent way of putting it. I very much agree
I kinda feel like the fact that she is childish makes her scarier as you never know what she is gonna do next.
@@LUGIGGGGGG fr
Your take remind me of The Magicians series. One of the villains in the 4th season is an ancient creature called Monster that has a mind of a child. But it’s so freaking scary bc Monster has no morals, only needs. There’s a scene when he kills a guy who sold him an ice cream without sprinkles and the Monster became upset. So he just cut the guy’s throat.
I think that what’s happening to Jinx when it comes to Caitlyn. She doesn’t received the love of her sister in a way she wants to and projects it to Caitlyn. Who also happened to be an Enforcer, an enemy, that makes Vi an enemy as well.
So the reason she's insane isn't because of change, it's because of stagnation?
jinx's voice acting is also phenomenal. sometimes you can close your eyes, and imagine what's on screen solely from the way lines are delivered.
that's the talent of ella purnell! she's also GREAT as jackie in yellowjackets season 1
Thats league. They really work hard on everytrhing they do
@@Dyrgos except the game itself lmao
@@Anonymous-td9fl real
@@Dyrgos v JB by hi hi hi hi h
I think this is a good way to frame it.
When Jinx blew up the Council, fans went “No Jinx! No!”
But when Danny destroyed Kings Landing, fans went “Why Danny! Why!”
We know why Jinx did what she did, and that’s what makes it more tragic, we can see her pain and desperately want to help her, but as the audience we are helpless.
When Danny destroyed Kings Landing, fans could see that they were trying to paint her as mad, but it didn’t come off as genuine because the trigger moment and buildup wasn’t there.
accurate af
YES! This right here. Like we could understand the reason why Daenerys turned out mad but the pacing felt unnatural. It's like sudden bipolar disorder. But with Jinx, the whole show was pretty much about her psychotic origin.
Yep. All and all it just felt like they sacrificed Dany's character for an unearned plot point. Actually two plot points. The burning down kings landing and a valid reason for Jon to kill her. Because if she'd just attacked the castle to kill Cersei and left the city alone...which would have completely fit her character.....Jon killing her wouldn't have felt like the right call. One of the many ways that 'twist' sucked.
if i were to guess the pacing was to cut on budget
I tell myself it all makes sense because Missandei’s last word was “dracarys” to her dragon (Danny) and she burned it all down because she was “told” too. It’s what I tell myself to fool myself into liking the scene.
I loved how they portrayed Jinx's psychotic break. It never felt like it was a means to an end, but rather Jinx finally letting go of Powder and fully becoming Jinx.
AND it was super sad bc we saw her last try with VI and everything, even after the shimmer
Plus for the most of the show, she always seems like she's on the verge of breaking. Like you must walk on eggshells around her
Arcane is, despite the high quality production, a really cringe show imo. The depiction of madness is more intricate than got, but damn it sucks. I am bored and gotta vent a little bit after seeing how much love this has gotten, so feel free to ignore this rant as it helps no one whatsoever. The setting is as geberic as it gets, the charachters are plainly archetypical and melodramatic to a comical degree. The show has a habit of taking itself as serious as an in depth depiction of mental illness, but it instead comes across as an edgy 15 year's copium-letter to the people who wronged them or smthn. It's not deep, it's not cutting edge in any way other than production and any immature edgy teen whining about mental illness for the wrong reasons on twitter could have written this if they where blessed with a large chunk of creativity. It is annoying, it sucks and it's fan-base have formed a ces-pool, radiating cringe and headache with the half life of around 30 years. If I have to hear imagine dragon their nuts on my face with that mucus song and see yet another cosplay of jinx I shall end it. It was really impressive in some regards but the complete lack of cohesion and consistensy across all attributes of the show is preatty sad tbh. I mean how could anyone have let the directors or whomever it was that took a giant diharrea on that art work, take a giant diharrea on that art-work? Dissapointed, im giving arcane a decent to strong 3 out of 10.
@@theviking2316 @The Viking lmao couldn't you make a comment on your own instead of an answer, hiding this gigantic blob? Just the massive size of text of one paragraph for someone who thinks the show is shitty is a bit much.
You should add a TL;DR at the bottom just saying that you think the show is crap and were just venting. You should post this is reddit maybe, where the middle age sad people post their pointless venting.
@@theviking2316 Bro.... you don't like the show and that's okay. However that doesn't mean the show is bad because you don't like it. The show is based of the lore and world of a VIDEO GAME, so I don't know what you expected tbh. It gets love because its one of the best adaptions of a game to series there is. It stayed true to the lore whilst not being afraid to explore its own story with the characters.
The show isn't trying to be a commentary on mental illness, it's a story about two sisters who ended up going in vastly different directions in life. If anything it would be a more a commentary on how being a villain isn't black and white, no one in the show is 100% right and has their reasons for what they do. That's what made it great
I love the insanity that feels logically sane. You can understand why the character did all those things, it makes sense, it’s even reasonable to an extent. Yet somehow the logic starts to contradict itself and that’s when you realize the true depths of their madness
kid logic is the same way. Something that makes sense when viewed through the lens of a small child but not through the lens of an adult. For example, when i was like 3 or 4 I remember wondering if blood was cherry flavored because it was red.
@@NinjaFlibble dude that’s adorable 😭
idk why u compare kids logic with logic of human who have psychotic episodes during which they can lose logic at all couse of inability to think on abstract-logic level.
@@Wendy_OKoopa and also horrifying.
@@NinjaFlibble When I was a kid, I thought "paying medical care to older people it's useless, they are already close to their end, same goes to children, they are too new, they can be replaced"
I think Jinx saying "Powder fell down a well" was also a parallel to silco being drowned by Vander. Powder falling out of the building and Silco being drowned are both turning points in their lives and and both are associated with a betrayal from an older sibling who was also a role model.
maybe it’s also because she’s following kid logic. she thinks in half baked “random” ideas that don’t connect from the perspective of an adult but they would to a kid. an example of kid logic would be “the sky is blue and the ocean is blue. i like the sky and i like the ocean, therefore blue is the best color.” kids also can’t quite grasp the concept of death, so they think of it as “they went up to heaven and don’t want to come back” instead of “they don’t exist anymore.” i think that line is jinx trying to tell vi that powder doesn’t exist anymore because she’s dead, but because she’s thinking in kid logic, she says that she “fell down a well”.
nice theory
@@wren_. bruh that's not how mental human development works
That, and Silco has been telling her it's the same.
I was betrayed by Vander, I almost drowned, I have to be a different person.
You were betrayed by your sister, and you have to become a different person.
The drowning idea kind of naturally comes from that.
He even tells her to "Drown" It the "Baptism" Scene.
He thought her story was the same as his from the start, that's why he adopted her instead of killing her. And he's been imposing that on her ever since.
The thing about Jinx is that at the start of the show it's kind of a mystery how she would become the psychopath she eventually becomes. But they show that even as a child she was already mentally unstable, it's just that nobody really knew it, and they illustrate this by showing her instability only when nobody is around to see it. She didn't really change, rather a part of her that was always under the surface slowly grew and expanded until it overtook her.
*Sociopath.
She's a sociopath, not a psychopath. Psychopaths are born that way and have a general lack of empathy for everyone.
That's what I was wondering. In any reaction I saw somebody questioning the exaggerate reaction she had when Vi asked her to stay behind while saving Vander. I found her screams and crying and everything way too exaggerate, but when nobody pointed out I thought maybe it was my perception.
It's true, people are already born with some characteristics and this will be affected by the environment or life in time, we see this in all of the characters. Even Caitlyn who was born in a rich family but always felt "misfit" means that she already is born with some moral characters and a great sense of sympathy in her, that she wants to do more. As Vi tells Caitlyn the memory of her and Powder being children, we see that even that time Vi was a caring person and love giving sister
I don't want to infantilize her pain and instability at that scene but.. isn't it normal? Your entire family goes to sacrifice themselves and may not live and she can do nothing. That's just a reasonable reaction. Besides so many other layers to add guilt, feelings of inferiority, anger, indignancy(?) and helplessness to the already split wound.
I'd have went insane if I were her. Some people can only hold their rationality for so long, and for the already vulnerable? Non-existent.
Jinx is THE BEST depiction of what psychosis is like. She is never sane, but tries to hide it. The writers navigate around her psychosis, and her story follows as a natural consequence of her mental disorder.
Daenerys is whatever mood the writers feel would progress the story.
THIS. I came to the comments to look for someone pointing out this "madness" is basically translated irl to psychosis.
Daenerys in early seasons had a clear character arc and with clearly written characteristics. I always suspected she would go down the road of Wonder Woman, or the Joker, depending on the direction her character took.
However, it was around the 5th season, that everything about this character (and the whole show for that matter) stopped making much sense. And that was because they ran out of source material. (As I’m sure you probably know.)
I don’t think I’ll ever get over the betrayal of what they did to that character. And it has nothing to do with her madness arc, and everything to do with how she was written after the original material ran out.
Close, D and D got bored with Got and wanted to work on Star wars. So the tried to wrap it up as fast as possible.
This I love hot she’s not „Harle Quinn I’m so crazy 🤪🤪😝😝“
“A Netflix animated show based on LoL characters handled and wrote madness better than the HBO live action adaptation of GRRM’s ASOIaF series” is a sentence I never thought I’d say.
But here we are.
tbf it's Riot and if there's one thing Riot does right is telling stories through media. Whether it be animated shorts, music videos or the songs themselves. They've always been very good at it.
Edit: Because ppl are fighting down below its worth mentioning riots success in this area comes from hiring exactly the right people to do the job. They select people very carefully as was the case of everyone chosen in the design, writing and producing of KDA. They did the same for Pentakill. They've done the same here. It's not an either or situation with the animators, they work in conjunction.
Just fyi fortiche animated the show
And the sad thing is that a major responsability for this failure lays on two idiots (D&D) who decided that they have new more important projects to make, so they rejected HBO's proposition of budget for next 2 seasons, and have hasten the entire show.
@@yattaaa641 They didn't write it or fully direct it though. Riot oversaw the show's entire production process.
Netflix has nothing to do with the production of Arcane. Riot hired a french company Fortiche to make it and Netflix was simply chosen as a platform to play it.
Don't give Netflix the credits it doesn't deserve.
Tbh Jinx’s “madness” never left the sympathy & empathy phase for me - I think that’s part of what made her character so brilliant. Like frankly she should be terrifying considering the power she yields & how little control she sometimes has at where that’s directed….but weve seen so much of the process of her gradual decline that it feels understandable & we see her so weak at times so I just feel sympathy
Thank you! I am only part way into this video and completely disagree that Jinx shows the madness he is describing as unsympathetic.I think he maybe just can't relate. Based on her mental illness (probably personality disorder too)and what has happened in her life all of her actions make sense. She is still a teenager in the show and i just see a very sad guilt ridden and haunted child in an environment that enables her, despite her actions. Now this may and probably will change. I do think Jinx can be a bit scary but mostly she is sad.
Would you call Hitler brilliant, if that person would come to life? Sorry but what the fuck.
Also the fact that she maintains a childlike innocence despite murdering dozens, and by the end hundreds, of people. Her lack of development from the childlike Powder is a big part of her character, and since Jinx is this relatively more mature(?) character it's part of the split. Jinx is disassociated from Powder so she can live with her actions and stay in the past where it's more confortable.
But obviously the events of the show cause enough cognitive dissonance for her to embrace the Jinx persona and go fully insane killer mode
I was honestly surprised when Danny did not go completely mad when her dragon babies died. Like, imo, that would have been the best tipping point. I would have gone ballistic if that was me considering what she and her dragons went through lol
Yeah... It's not just what they "went through" but they're her BABIES. Although they biologically aren't, in her mind, they are. She lost her husband, son and brother, they're her last family members, they're more important to her than anybody else.
I think the funniest part of the show is that during that arena fight where the Sons Of The Harpy attack, Dany is holding Missandei's hand, kind of in a "We'll die together" moment, but then enters Drogon. The moment he gets wounded, Dany completely lets go of Missandei and rushes to help him, then she escapes with him without even looking back. She proves that her dragon's safety is the most important to her. Yet, when her other dragon is killed she's just a bit sad, and doesn't even really show it ? But when Missandei dies she loses it all ? That's so backwards it's ridiculous. It would have made more sense to have Missandei die early, Dany be affected and sad but keep going, and it's one of her babies dying (possibly due to her own mistake, even) that shatters her world.
@@Libellulaire it makes all the sense, considering how house of the dragon is solidifyng the true connection the targaryens have with their dragons proved that Dany could have went crazy when the first 2 passed. i say true connection because before i just assumed dragons were like horses where you could train them and they simply listened to targaryens but they proved that its more of a blood bond they share. much more mythical then i originally understood.
Avatar the last Airbender also did madness right, even with a short timeline. Azula had a few scenes to herself where she was obviously losing her sense of self and had many dialogues with her two identities, they also showed a CLEAR diversion from her usual organized meticulous behaviour...(unkempt hair, being afraid of her own staff instead of strategizing to keep them in line).
Your suggestion of having the two dragons die, be the Dam Breaking trigger was a very good one, especially since she viewed the dragons as her children
Azula never seemed to have two personality for me, it seemed more that she simply acted in her best interest, no matter the cost.
she never had friends, only people she could manipulate for her own objectives, keeping those people close and loyal was simply the best for her own interest.
but when she was betrayed during the boiling rock episodes, she couldn't make the sacrifice necessary to keep her friends (or rather, tools) and overestimated her control over them.
this was the tipping point, it was the first time she ever lost, and she couldn't understand why, because unlike her "friends" she didn't had the empathy needed to choose friendship and love over her own interest.
her short lived reign was yet another, tho smaller tipping point. she had no obligation to be reasonable anymore, no one could go against her, but she was afraid of being betrayed once more, she understood that what she was doing seemed wrong to the people around her, but rather than reflect on herself, she doubled down on her obsession with power and respect.
For me the key to portraying madness is to show them slowly starting to lose it until the final break. Too many writers for both books and shows/movies show the character go through traumatic experiences, seemingly unscathed and then just suddenly snap after one last thing. You can't just show the character going through stuff, you need to show how it effects them, otherwise you just have the edgelord variety of Mary Sue.
For Azula they showed this well, they showed how she felt about her mother's resentment and fear of her, they showed her turning to and idolizing her father who praised her for her fighting abilities and rewarded cruelty, we saw how she treated her brother out of spite for being mother's favorite and how that resentment carried on into when they met again in their teens, we saw how the betrayal of her only friends effected her as they turned away from her growing cruelty and malice at the continued failures to stop the Avatar, then the final break when she realized that the only one left in her life, her father, just wanted her as a pawn this whole time. You also see her struggle with being a perfectionist, her disconnect with her Uncle, a supposed great general that was going to be the next Fire Lord turned 'weak' after the death of his son, causing her to view love as weakness... She didn't have a lot of screen time but every ounce of it was building to that break down.
Gollum also works because even though his breaking point was finding the ring and then killing his friend for it, you believe it because the movie already showed you how the ring works in corrupting minds, even showing that those with more darkness in their hearts are corrupted faster (Boromir). Which suggests that Smeagle had a lot of hidden darkness prior to finding the ring. Further emphasized by how Bilbo lasted decades with minimal corruption, Sam was unaffected, Frodo lasted right up until the very end, Boromir was heavily influenced without touching it once, Aragorn and Feromir both overcame it's draw and Isildor (sp?) was taken by it shortly after receiving it.
Tick off another spot on your "Avatar did a trope well" Bingo card.
@@ledocteur7701 it was at the very end that she had two personalities. The badass that didnt care about anyone, and the terrified girl who spoke to her mother in mirrors
@@Ramonerdna I think you can see the scared girl much sooner, in one episode she is trainning and get her hair un do, to replay something like "almost perfect isnt good enough", also every time she speaks to her father or even when she speaks at the beach episode, she is just a fraid of not being love (she thought being perfect and badass granted her the love of her father and her friends), so when her friends turn over her and her father just put her away she just breaks
One thing arcane did right is madness does not equate to failure and personal destruction.
All other examples of madness you show, the character "falls" into madness, but Jinx rises into it, achieves apotheosis through it.
Dany could dream of a great second valaria, kill half of kings landing... and then build it. She could rise in her madness to become the greatest player in the game of thrones. She could build the 400,000 seat stadium, the 2x colossus, all on a strong foundation of ash.
We cheer for Jinx because, at the end of the day, she furthers the plot toward where we instinctually know the world of Arcane is going.
GOT should head toward a world where someone win's the 'game of thrones' but her madness prevents that realization rather than resolving it.
well said!! love the direction!
cheering is an odd phrase for jinx. there's a big difference in hoping to see jinx do well and cheering for jinx to slay queen. the emotional conflict she struggled with up to the bridge, most people can empathize with. after the bridge, she's not a admirable or moral character. the madness does not equate to failure is a terrifying prospect, madness doesn't really seem to build foundations for anything. it's generally destructive to both the person and those around the person. if that person is powerful, it has extremely detrimental effects for the everyone else.
and you don't cheer for a character just to see the plot advance, it's a really bizarre way of interpreting something.
@@txmits507 Madness, or to put it into a less evocative language. Neurodivergence is responsible for dragging us out of the muck.
Vincent Van Gogh
Alan Turin
Niccolò Machiavelli
Plato
There are some things that can't be thought of by a sane person, to reach beyond the limits of normal people, you need an abnormal person.
How many normal people does it take to discover electricity? Fire? Fission? Microwaves? Light?
@@txmits507 Naw i get him, i too cheer for Jinx and wanna see what mischievous things she can cook up for season 2 😈. Either you embrace the chaos or you don't, it's just a show, so like the Joker said „Why so serious?"
YES YES YES
One thing concerning Jinx's madness: We see the scratches over top of people's faces in the very first scene where Vi is leading her as Powder across the bridge looking for their parents. She's got her eyes closed and is singing but the scratchy scribbles are still there briefly. So it was there, in a minor capacity, for a very long time.
I noticed that too
Yeah I see her mental condition as having always been there and made worse by this trauma. Like how she breaks down crying in episode 3 because she was left at home during the big fight.
not to get deeply personal in a youtube comment section, but as someone who does experience both auditory and visual hallucinations as a result of ptsd, i just LOVE the way they portray jinx's. i can't explain exactly how, but they nailed it, they conveyed the feeling perfectly. i'm fully convinced that somebody on the writing team has experienced hallucinations, it's just too accurate.
right like, i've heard this so much about jinx: they have to have had not just a psychologist but somebody with hallucinations, both auditory & visual, like it's so interesting
@@hymnbos Speaking on the other side of the coin, my clinician suspects OSDD and I agree with her, waiting for a diagnosis once I FINALLY get on their schedule.-- I only say this for context. The way Jinx quietly tries to dismiss the constant influences and whispers struck me as much the same way that I've tried and failed to quiet the constant nasty presence of the only violent and cruel alter I have. The way she treats the horrible chatter seeping into her stream of consciousness like it's something she's grown to know well, I resonated so strongly with her and her attempts to balance out Powder and Jinx, who she needed to be and who, after everything, the world would LET her be. At least, from her warped perspective after enduring what she did.
The first breakdown scene was incredible. I have (somewhat influenced by the alter I mentioned, nasty violent fucker) had a long history of completely self-implosive, biting your skin open with gnashing teeth and bashing your head against hardwood floors type breakdowns, I am SO GLAD to see they didn't make the breakdown pretty or dramatic in a cinematic way. It was gross, disturbing, scary and intense, and I loved it. In her case it was more rational considering her entire family was at risk and left her alone because she couldn't help, but I did like that they showed her extremes even before Jinx became a solid identity. And once she went by the name Jinx but still held onto a part of Powder, seeing her still followed by that pain as it manifests into something that won't leave her mind, it was cathartic and terrifying to see. I know my experience isn't that common, but it was still incredible to see a character's battle between two selves, one part trying to reign in the destruction and the other one fully willing to blow up their entire life out of a warped self-protection and revenge. I basically wrote an essay here, apologies, I just really liked how Jinx and Powder fought, how she was often searching for enough safety to be Powder until the walls came back up and Jinx kept people far away from the vulnerable center. Pretty incredible that her presentation resonated with so many different people who have struggled with so many different things.
It was felt here too
So to the "straw that breaks the camel's back" statement, I always understood that to be like this: everyone has a limit and there is a breaking point to that limit and we can keep adding little things one after another until the last little thing "the last straw" breaks that limit or pushes someone past their breaking point and it's obvious not that literal like you said, a single straw won't break the camel's back, but a camel with the ability to carry a half ton of straw "can't" carry more than that ton so the straw in excess of that limit breaks the camel
Perfect👍
Yeah i think youre absolutely right, and I think it's a very real phenomenon. My point was that due to how unlikely it SEEMS, it's a difficult route to take if you're going for resonance. We immediately click with "big action --> big response"; "small action --> big response" is realistic but a harder sell.
I think my languege's version is more realistic. It would translate to something like "the drop that caused a goblet to overflow"
@@McJusti yep!
@@schnee1 yeah small action-big response tells a whole different kind of story
Small correction (from my point of view), he said that she (Powder/Jinx) CHOSE to be Jinx at the end. I have seen many people express this.
But in my opinion she didn't choose to be Jinx, but rather after having unintentionally caused the death of yet another father figure, she just stopped resisting and accepted that this is indeed all she is.
To me this was rather a moment of defeat for her, having to accept a stigma that others blamed her off and admitting they were right...
After which she fully committed to that role.
I think you are right. She is also based off of Harley Quinn while better written, and it can be argues Powder/Jinx has histrionionc personilty disorder and no self worth, and this is why she eneds up killing her new family, and this makes her have another trauma, due to an already existing disorder: Budding Histrionic personality disorder (What Amber Heard was also measured as of having). And I also think she did not intend to actually kill Silco, but she emotionally and instictively reacts based on her HPD and her toxic conditioning of violence from the UNdercity and Silco's ill parenting, i.e. vetting her to become a mob boss. So as is often the case for Histrionics they tend to not be able to have longterm relationships since the harm others due to their emotional reactivity. In Arcane they step it up to the point where she literylla kills her relationships. I.e. at the end Jinx, feels like she has nothing to live for and gives up, and becomes a curse and is consumed bu resentfulness.
but that defeat is still a choice. She chooses to stop fighting, chooses to accept the idea that this is what she is. The only one forcing her to become Jinx is herself, being unable to bear the pain of trying anymore when she only ever seems to fail. And in that choice to give up, there is reprieve and empowerment. Even if it's a defeat and even if she herself feels it's a defeat, it's a loss that means she won't have to lose anymore. She could continue to fight. She could run to her sister now that the man trying to pull them apart is dead. She chooses not to.
@@android19willpwn Well, I would also say that Histrionics are not inocent. Same as a sociopath who kills is still a killer. What I am saying is merely that Jinx seem to have leaned into becoming the curse verison of herself. And I have seen histrionics making this choice in their life. And yes these people choose to live in the destructive way Jinx chooses. I have also see codependents chossing to stay in their self-perception of being innocent victims and getting resentful at people who believ in accountability. I think here one of the issues is also that Jinx tells Vi to coose what identity Jinx will have and she chooses to go along with the ill relational patterns of Silco that looks very zero-zum-game based. And she also makes a high conflict situation, where she as a histrionic ends up emotionally reactive adn killing someone. I think this is a prime example why so many people get far away from Histrionics. So I am not defending Jinx. i am discussing what is going on and again why histrionics are considered incapable of close longterm relationships. Most healthy people can see a person like Jinx is toxic.
I think the problem is someone like Jinx never takes the time to sit down and consider anything and to do introspection. And she would never engage in watching videos like thes eones and have these kinds of discussions. So she doesn't even bother to learn to think through something. She simply acts, and again it is typical of Histrionics not look inward.
@@android19willpwn YES. You explain it so well. She takes the path of least resistance and it's a relief to no longer have to struggle. It doesn't mean she likes or even wants it - you can see the bitter resignation in her when she sits in that chair. But she does it because it offers her what she DOES want: An end to the conflict inside of her. Giving in to her madness is the simplest way to achieve that, because fighting against it would be a lifelong commitment and Jinx just doesn't have it in her anymore. It's an awful choice to have to make, but it's still a choice.
I love that line “It’s celebrating trauma, It’s beautiful doom, it’s DOUBLE BUNNY.”
IDGI?
I gotta say, Daenyrys manifesting her insanity through wearing dragon scales and collecting dragon bones and being obsessed with fire is brilliant and terrifying. I also love the new empire idea, it gives Daeny a goal.
I'm Austrian and grew up around elderly people who had often a very hard time coming to terms with the duality of Nazism. For them it was a time of so much euphoria and enthusiasm, the regime was so popular because they provided jobs, cars, travel and all these organizations for every gender and age group to create a cult like feeling of community, many people were doing better than ever before and constantly told they were special. But this paradise was built on creating hell for millions of other people and this was so hard to grasp for my grandparents and their generation that many ended up in denial.
interesting. So older germans saw nazism in a positive light?
And so do you think that your grandparents descended into a kind of 'madness' when this paradise crumbled and afterwards they were held accountable (morally) by the rest of the world? Anyway this is so interesting, thank you for sharing
@@pandore1602 My grandfather on my mother's side was completely in denial about the holocaust and would only talk about all "the great things that Hitler did for Germany", my other grandfather just refused to talk about it at all and most other people would either fit into one or the other category, the people who went crazy were their children, my mother's generation really did most of the work of facing up to the past, some of them turned violent like the RAF terrorists, in the US there was also a counterculture and youth movement but in Germany this had also the aspect of a generation burdened with their parents crimes who felt like they needed to completely reinvent society and remove everything and everyone reminiscent of the past.
@@c.w.8200 I think the generic "German Psyche" is still quite scarred by the deeds of the NSDAP and those who followed them. Not everyone, or even the majority attained "Madness" but more of a refusal to accept what they had done,, either through denial or simply refusing to face them. Later generations have contorted and twisted themselves in exaggerated efforts to "Not be *them"*
That said, we should remember that the monsters those times made are inside us all. Those efforts of the latter generations are simply mirror images of the pathologies of their forefathers.
@@c.w.8200 Thank you for sharing. It's incredibly interesting to hear. I feel the U.S needs to go through some social recognition about all we've done to the Middle East and Africa. As well as what we did to other countries during the civil war.
When Jinx said "nothing ever stays dead", my first idea was she wanted to finally end her struggle on the bridge and was devastated to see it's still there. She pulled the pin of the grenade and left it to fall right beside her. She had this face that read as that was the purpose- to finally end it. Mylo and Claggor are still alive in her head and she wants them to finally die too, but when she's pulled back from her own death and goes through a brand new traumatic transformation, she sees that through all that they're still there. "I should have known, nothing ever stays dead" even if she tries to kill them- and herself- again.
But besides that, I don't even watch GoT and watching you figure out & theorize about a better madness arc for this character was fascinating. I always look forward to your videos , even on topics I know nothing about.
Everything about her mental health is so… realistic. I myself never able to truly forget the people who hurted/affected me or made me question myself. Just like you described, wherever I go, they come with me too. I feel like I won’t be able to erase them ‘till I’m dead. I do not see illusions or hear voices like jinx ofcourse, but I just profoundly have them and their impacts on my memory.
This show is too good. One line can mean 25 things one person and one thing for 25.
The chem barons have abandoned me… now there is no hope
- God of War reference
Doesn't that mean "nothing ever seems to die"?
THIS! We've all seen how accurately Jinx can stick her explosives onto people even in fight scenes when they're charging at here at full speed such as her against the Firelights. Her reflexes for that and for dodging full speed attacks on short notice are impressive. So for her to just roll that explosive at the side as her eyes returned to the same grey color they originally were as Powder in Act 1 wasn't really a murder attempt aimed at Ekko, but more of a suicide attempt. This comment deserves the 2.7K likes it got and I hope it gets more recognition because not only is it a great analysis with strong support but it also describes the same awful suffering Jinx experiences and what's sad is that there are people that feel exactly how she feels and some still want everything to stay dead.
I think the idiom “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” refers to the little things, it’s the small moments that build up over time that drive the characters closer and closer the breaking point
I came looking for this. It's all about the idea that *A* straw won't break a camel's back... until it's literally one straw too many. The entire idea of the idiom isn't about the stupidity of the concept and the recognition that big things do, it's that many small, insignificant things unto themselves can quickly become a burden too great to bear.
@@MrAverien This person is trying to tell people how things should be done in terms of madness, but does not understand something as simple as a popular saying somehow... Taking the dialogue "every time a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin" as a literal thing is just plain dumb. Or saying the root of madness is blood. It is obvious madness runs in the family, and just like in real life, some mental health issues are hereditary. The gods tossing a coin to decide if they will go mad in the future or not, is not a real occurrence, it is just a saying, like the camel one.
I cannot take any criticism of a show from someone that does not understand something as simple as that, and interprets everything literally. Does this person not understand the concept of metaphors or similes?
Yeah, it's a thought experiment. A camel (anyone really) can only carry so much weight, physically. Can a camel carry a single straw without injury? Yes. Can it carry five tons of straw? No, that much weight would crush the camel and break its back.
Therefore, by simple logic, there must be a tipping point. If we add individual straws to the camel's load, there surely must be some tipping point between one straw and five tons. Despite individual straws weighing almost nothing, collectively they add up. So which straw will it be? What is the tipping point where it can't carry any more? Which straw will break the camel's back?
"It's the drop that makes the vase overflow," that's how that idiom is phrased in French, and I think it does a great job at explicitly expressing the meaning. The "container" (a person) has been enduring so much and for so long, but they're full, they've reached their limit, and now even the smallest, most insignificant event/emotion (the drop) could make them lose it (overflow.)
I'm hoping that Jinx's phrase 'Nothing ever stays dead' will also turn into foreshadowing for Powder not staying 'dead'. Jinx definitely chose to be 'Jinx' and believes she has abandoned 'Powder' and all the weakness that she represents to Jinx at the end of S1, but it would be interesting to see that internal conflict renew in a later season and have her realise that Powder *isn't* truly gone.
Okay, I don't want to sound overly critical to the point of sounding angry, but I have to put this idea down. There is no definition of "Powder" (as in there is no trait or set of traits that separate her from Jinx) that could possibly still be alive after episode 9. Ignoring the obvious changes that come with becoming older, Jinx is finally starting to get past her attachment issues, is no longer trying to kill Caitlyn for any reason, and if her "here's to the new us" speech is anything to go by, she accepted sooner than Vi did that things have changed. She did not "choose" to be Jinx, she just accepted that it's who she is now because Silco said she's perfect, and she believes him.
Moreover, she already officially gave up on going back to Vi and Silco is dead, so Jinx and "Powder" have nothing to be in conflict about.
I was surprised you didn’t mention Dracula from Netflix Castlevania. His madness is due to the sorrow of the death of Lisa. In Alucard’s own words “This is nothing but history’s longest suicide note”
Dracula had always hated humans, he found them to be vile and worthless. The death of his wife causes him to act out his vengeance against them, but that is not a good example of a dissent into madness, it's just an example of an immortal man who already hated humanity getting justification to eliminate them. There is no build up, it's just retribution.
Further proof of this is that dracula gave humans exactly one year to "make their peace with God", that isn't something a madman would do, he is fully aware of reality and his intentions and their impact.
@@DennGreenIII I would disagree, yes Dracula hated humans but he didn’t went out of his way to exterminate the race, Dracula fed regularly or it was implied. When he met Lisa some of his hatred for humanity abated he travelled the world as the thing he hated the most. When Lisa died Dracula just wanted all to end.
He even said to Isaac“The suffering doesn’t really matter to me anymore Isaac, only the death” he is tired and just wants it to end, Dracula slowly falls into madness, after his rage left him there was just embers of a man one that let himself slowly go. He isolated and starved himself and he knew what he was doing he would not leave any remaining humans for other vampires to feed on Dracula was killing himself and taking the whole world with him. The moment he realized what he had become is when he was about to kill his own son in his childhood bedroom. If a man struck with such grief that he would kill the world and his own son is not madness I don’t know what is
@@DennGreenIII but yes you are right Dracula started completely lucid and then slowly fell deeper and deeper into insanity he no longer “relished the details”
@@kriegofficergary6921 you are confusing suicidal with being mad. Reality and consequences are lost on madmen. Dracula knew exactly what he was doing, fully aware of the consequences, he just didn't care.
@@DennGreenIII what is madness then? Unless you’re saying the Dracula was depressed, not that he had depression.
That "out of body" experience happens with Jinx too.
When she sees the pink haired Firelight at the Hexgates and she shoots her, there's this involuntary sort of tic she gives. Like she didn't mean to, and her hand automatically reached for her gun and shot her.
I read it almost as the reverse: she had a massive flashback that completely overwhelms her, and she uses the gun to destroy the trigger for her flashback by killing the pink haired firelight and regain control of her body and mind.
I think it's the opposite lol, once she had figured out it wasn't Vi she was more than happy to shoot her.
@@maximeteppe7627 beautifully worded
@@nellie__ absolutely, this video actually made me realize I related to these characters more deeply than I thought. In the moment of crisis, your brain will do anything it believes will relieve the overwhelming pressure that feels like it will literally break you. Or at least you'll get intrusive thoughts/urges to do extreme things, there is still usually *some* level of control. For me, I've always been able to avoid hurting someone else in those moments, but I haven't been able to stop a lot of self damaging actions.
Something I think media should show more often is the dissociation/numbness that frequently follows breakdowns, when you are faced with the reality of what you've done
That pink hair Firelight was her sister Vi who she's hasn't seen in years which is kinda why she shot her
I think Danny's problem is the fact that she shouldn't be mad. Like, during the series they kept telling us that “oh she is gonna be crazy” and it's just cheap. When Cersei got mad I thought they would do an inversion, the mad one is actually not mad and the one who shouldn't be mad, is mad. But no, they just went whit the cliche
Exactly. There just wasn't a good reason for her to even become mad. It was totally unmotivated
thisss it would have been so perfect if cersei turned out to be the true mad queen and not dany
Arcane is just way too well done to the point where you will really really really struggle to fault it in the slightest. The animation is stunning, the different facial expressions portrayed flawlessly. You litrally feel sad during the first 3 minutes of the first episode when you rewatch it for the first time. The writing is just great in every conceivable way. There is a reason it is still holding 100% on rotten tomatoes
as some with PTSD myself, I interpret the "scratching" as a visual representation of the "triggers" of the past that linger and you want to run away from but can't, because many of those triggers exist within your own mind, and are not 100% external. I haven't had psychotic episodes like Jinx has regularly, I don't see/hear things in a literal sense, but I will often have memories sudden intrude into my mind and take over for a moment if I don't fight it every day through methods my therapist helped me with, though anti-anxiety meds help a little as well. To me, the animators are trying to convey the idea of a mental irritant that leads you to return to that moment which is the representation of that trauma. Mine is not an extremely acute PTSD like Jinx's, mines more of a CPTSD from 25 long years of more moderate traumas, but it feels very similar. To me, at least. Jinx feels like a victim of PTSD, but one who doesn't know how to accept help due to how severe it is, and how her world is even less equipped than ours to help victims
I saw it in a similar way. I also have PTSD, the scratching and frustration she shows when the scratching is more severe and "in her face", is something I felt was very similar to how I experience flashbacks. You try to ignore is or push it away but then it just gets stronger and you get more frustrated. Jinx has lived with it for so long and had no sort of help with it, the people around her don't really see her struggles as something they should do anything about. Silco loves the "crazy" side about her and only wants her to keep growing into it, only making her symtoms worse. She hasn't had the help she needs to fight it so it only gets bigger and she gets more desperate and more frustrated every time it shows up. The angry scratching really shows how sudden and aggressive such flashbacks can be, they basically scream in your face while staying invisible to everyone else.
First of all good luck on your mental health journey! I hope you're feeling better today :)
And I agree with what you said. What I noticed because I could relate to it: Jinxes PTSD is so bad and she feels so torn between the two worlds because she sees HERSELF as the abuser if you will. She doesn't see someone from the outside being a monster and destroying everything - she sees HERSELF killing her family as a child and that sets this whole spiraling down into madness lose.
That's my take on it atleast ^^
I don't have PTSD, I think.. but I very heavily relate to the instinct "burning everything down so no one can hurt you anymore" (never acted on it of course, thank god)
For me it can be very "mild" triggers just noises and such that feel like they turn me into a "crazy mentally ill tortured creature"
I suddenly can't think rationally, I hear screaming in my head and everything just gets super overwhelming until I want to scream and burn everything around me down so I never have to hear "it" again. I won't go into details as I think it's rather common to have those noises as riggers ^^".
(I don't know why I have these triggers though... And that's exactly the thing that makes me feel torn! (I think that part is different to Jinx) I can be a happy cheerful sorta healthy person, you know, normal, average. But I can also feel tortured by something only in my head and the torture gets worse and worse and worse (even though nothing traumatic is happening! No one is hurting me nothing) But it starts getting out of control all the screaming in my head, my breathing gets shorter and yeah.. you get it. In that moment it can be minutes, hours, I feel kind of like a ticking bomb- like Jinx.
I feel insane, I notice how I wish I could just bang my head against the wall or scream at the top of my lungs or do whatever crazy thing that is SUPER unlike me (I'm cheerful, can't scream at all, am rather scared easily, nervous etc)
And the most crazy part I find most disturbing: I feel so tortured for no reason at all but my brain reacts the same as if I was actually in danger ...
I get the strong urge to (if I had magical powers) just BURN EVERYTHING AROUND ME. Burn the house I am in in that moment, burn especially the people I see as a threat in that moment. That's why I so so heavily relate to Jinx and it's kind of worrying me ngl ^^"""
But hey maybe everyone relates to her. I mean I saw lots of people relating to her and loving her the most so.
Sorry for this long post, this was supposed to be a Jinx analysis but turned kind of to a me telling my worries to a stranger in hopes of them telling me I don't have a mental illness and this all is just normal :,)
Uhm sorry about that
@@uniblack591 that sounds a bit like it could be something, but I don't think you're crazy, for what it's worth. You know what's going on, and try to do your best to manage it. Good job, and good luck
@@benjamincarlson6994 thank you for your words. :) It really made me smile ^^
I agree! I have C-PTSD stemming from trauma that started as a young child, and I've never had any psychotic episodes like Jinx... I got dissociation instead. But I completely agree with what you said here -- a lot of the visual representations of Jinx's trauma really resonated with me. In some scenes I felt like viewers took things too literally, in the sense that not all of those scenes were Jinx hallucinating... instead, some of it was a visual method of showing the audience the flashbacks she's having. That's a hard thing to SHOW with how internal it all is, without being artistic with it.
I think another thing that worked so well for Jinx is that her choosing Powder would be like her choosing naivety and innocence again which we all know is literally impossible so the only "real" option is choosing Jinx, it's just tragic madness the way that final decision comes about.
Especially because Jinx KNOWS that powder was weak and a burden and had no ability or power to do really anything. She can never go back to the little girl that Vi loved because it would be losing the only parts of herself that she likes now. She would go from externalizing her anger, back to internalizing it towards herself, like she did when she was a child
I think GOT writers were desperately trying to make Danny’s descent into madness a major unexpected plot twist, but that meant not preparing for it properly
I think a lot of writers who haven't experienced significant loss multiple times, think that losses kind of accumulate into one bigger and bigger grief, until even the smallest thing finally gives it enough mass to break through that metaphorical dam. But in truth, that dam scales with every moment of grief, but the grief slowly shrinks over time. I recently had a heart to heart with someone who is currently losing their life partner in a very awful way, and they get a lot of compliments for their resilience.
They looked me dead in the eye and told me that what these people don't understand is: "I had to watch my own child die, and bury them all by myself. I survived that, I'll survive this too." That absolutely wrecked me tbh.
I have never considered the idea of a “new Valyria” but that is actually such a great direction for Danny should things sort of play out the way they did in the show
You could also double dip into the dark influence from there by having Dany start building New Valyria from the Ruins of Harrenhal, a place that is both notoriously big and believed to be cursed within the setting of the series.
It would be a bit odd for someone who presents herself as a "breaker of chains" to base her new empire on one that was rooted in slavery and racial/class discrimination.
@@Y0uTubeCommentPoster Good point. Better thing would be for her to start a new 'anti-slavery' empire and try to take down braavos, the iron bank, etc.
I would have loved to see her rebuild Old Valyria into this new place. To revive magic as the dragons were believed to be all dead. She went and revived the dead. Magic and Dragons. That would have been awesome and you would have rooted for her to be able to do it. A place full of peace, prosperity, and magic.
@@Y0uTubeCommentPoster tbf, the beginning idea of valyria was to create a freehold where everyone decided what the country did, however after defeating the ghyscarthi empire and arriving at slavers bay and seeing how profitable slavery was, the valyrians Instead became the biggest slave empire. So it could always be daenerys trying to create what the valyrians orginally intended.
Along with not having enough time to fully develop Dany's character turn I think the writers also fell in love with the amount of praise and attention they got from shocking and unexpected moments earlier in the series. Instead of setting something up through logical paths in the story they instead tried to subvert expectations with the goal of more shock and catching the audience off guard. You can only go to this well so many times before it is no longer impactful and they carried it on all the way through the end of the show when they should have dropped it for a proper build. I don't think the writers wanted us to see Dany's turn coming when in fact seeing it coming is exactly what would have made it believable.
They were lazy, and the real credit was for George, and the twists he gave to the books, but (D&D) got the praise and thought that they could do better without the books, and we saw the results. I'll never forgive what they did not only to Dany but also to Dorne in the show, there was a fantastic setup, and production but no plot, and the interesting characters were transformed into boring at best
@@piperldy so true. The Dorne arc in the last recent books were so good. I was sad they didn't adapt it.
It's a matter of them writing off of an already established story (the books) to writing completely on their own. Combine this with them wanting to end the series earlier so they could capitalize on their fame at the time to get the next lucrative project.
So it led to them trying to create ends to all these different plots that were just mostly unsatisfying. Which is sad, you can see the path that Martin was kind of going with Danny. She basically believed her hype of being this awesome person. She loved her titles because she believed it showed why she deserved the Iron Throne.
The more natural progression from this, would be basically her becoming Robespierre.
,@@jameshobbs9180 Personally, I don't think it was the lack of material; there was plenty with Dance of dragons to adapt, but I do agree that they wanted to cut short the story and move to something else, and that's ok. Still, the most sensitive way would've been to leave the project to someone else, and maybe we would have winds of winter with the actual progress of the story and an adaptation that fits the material with a more believable end for the characters I found that many characters endings were complete nonsense but that's my take🤷♀
@@sasori2425 bingo!
I instantly fell in love with Jinx’s character (not Powder, just Jinx). She is a stereotypical quirky girl character, but there is something different about it. She had a reason to be the quirky psychopath girl, because of the trauma she endured. Like when she used the monkey face as her sign, when it was the same monkey toy that killed her family. It really showed how messed up she became and made me more interested in her character.
You know being as obsessed with this show as I am, I am truly surprised I never realized the monkey symbol was based on the monkey that killed her family. I thought she just liked monkeys or smthn
please don't fall into the trap of romanticising trauma
Imagine having a character development across many seasons, spaning several years, with almost an endless budget and a show with 9 episodes, that were indeed very carefully crafted, with care and love, beats it in such a way, no one dares to question it...
When you add the context that even Jinx herself didn't stay dead - she was essentially monstrously resurrected on Singed's table - it adds a layer of personal pain to the statement.
I really think the only way the “Dany is mad” arc could work is if they spent the entire series with her struggling with her Targaryen blood. Sure, we saw her say “I won’t be the mad king”, but we needed to see her wrestle with “mad king” choices and muscle through the better choice, which should get harder as time progresses. Then the big war for Westeros begins and there needs to be questions as to whether she actually is going to do good (and not just characters saying “I have a bad feeling about her”). Then she makes the bad choice, and it should feel as tragic as Frodo saying “the ring is mine.”
In addition, I feel like the show needed Dany to actually be in Westeros for much longer than she was. She seemed like an alien in that kingdom after being across the sea for so long.
This is exactly what is hapening in the books everytime she takes an extreamly cruel decision she keeps questioning it and wondering if she is turning mad like her father especialy in the last book it's an important aspect to her character that the show just removed of course theire is more that was totaly changed or cut
She said "I won´t be the mad king", because she would be "The Mad Queen". She didn´t lie.
@@kikima258 What extremely cruel decisions are you talking about exactly? She spends the entire fifth book being way too nice to the point where it's a flaw and making compromises in order to create peace. Anytime she questions whether or not she's turning mad is because she is too hard on herself, not because she is actually making a cruel decision.
@@mayaa5016 how about torturing two girls in front of theire father to make him confess? How about crucifying random slavers without trials and calling it justice?how about burning astapur to the ground and ordering the murder of all the freaking 13 years old then flying to the sunset leaving that place to be described as hell on earth?
@@kikima258
"torturing two girls in front of their father to make him confess"
The two women were prime suspects in the crime, you're phrasing it like Daenerys ordered two innocents to be tortured when the narrative never comments on whether or not they are. Torturing for information is extremely normalized in the asoiaf world, even Jon Snow does it more than once in book 5. Do you say Jon Snow is cruel as well? You're holding Daenerys to an impossible standard that you hold no other character to. She is actually the only character in ASOIAF to regret having people tortured and vows to never do it again.
"crucifying random slavers without trials and calling it justice"
They weren't random slavers, they were slavers who voted for the crucifying of the 163 little girls. The issue of "some of the slavers she crucified didn't vote for it" was show only. It was justice.
"how about burning astapor to the ground and ordering the murder of all the freaking 13 years old"
What are you talking about?? She never burned Astapor to the ground and she never killed all of the thirteen year olds. She ordered only masters and soldiers to be killed, those actively fighting against her to keep slavery. She tells them not to harm any child below 12 to avoid the Unsullied killing innocents. Saying “don’t kill anyone under 12″ is not the same thing as saying “kill everyone over 12.″ Daenerys is very distressed over what happens to Astapor after she leaves and she never intended for it to happen. How is that cruel?
31:55 I absolutely love how the "dream city" fix pairs PERFECTLY with the intro animation of buildings popping into place; you can imagine the dream sequence being entirely "toy castles" or at least start that way and crystalize into a more realistic city she walks through. If they'd have done that, it'd have felt like it was part of some master plan the showrunners knew about from the start.
Yes!! I love this idea
I think the main problem is that Daenerys was not mad in the first place, and was actually quite mentally stable.
They just re-wrote the characters in the last two seasons to reach the garbage "controversial" bad ending they wanted.
Mentally stable and mentally healthy are two different things though. Mania/madness is not a condition, it's a symptom derived from something else. Dany and her incestuous family have a whole arsenal worth of mental disorders inherent in their bloodline which is where the bouts of madness stem from if things get bad enough for it to trigger.
I always thought the straw that broke the camels back was more about how little things add up. In isolation the final straw may not be the worse thing to happen to the person. But at that point the load was at full capacity, so that a straw was enough to make it break.
yeah thats what he says but he also says its also used as irony
Jinx being compared to Vader is way more in line with her character than Harley Quinn or Azula. They even have their own similar identity crises.
If anyone ever *properly* showed Harley's descent it would look much the same I suspect. not quite Azula, but Harley yea.
You can't ignore the sexualization of the girl-woman in both Jinx and Harley. It seems a very relevant comparison to me. Also, Vader is a vilain lucid enough to work for somebody more powerful in order to achieve his goal, while Jinx's and Harley's are just chaos.
@@bergamotemcdonald7672 what does female sexualization have to do with this? that seems more like a problem with the viewers to me. Also, Jinx's is not just chaos, it has a point. That was kind of one of the reasons it was compared to harley, because harley just seems to do it just because, whereas with jinx, it's personal and hits home for a lot of people.
The issue here is that Vader thought that everyone was keeping him down, his transformation is based in arrogance and paranoia. Azula was raised to be strong and ruthless. I think Harley felt repressed. None of that applies to Jinx / Powder.
Powder was a failure who ended up getting her entire family killed and she was just too mentally weak to deal with it so she went insane.
@@thedarklrd6714 « with the viewers » 🤓
as someone with a similar but more realistic background to jinx, i was blown away by how accurate the portrayal of psychosis or "madness" was. the shapes, the overlays - can really be seen. they became a prominent part of my life and i remember some of my first hallucinations more vividly than i remember big stepping stones in life. jinx shows a rich inner world, which is my theory for why soooo many people who were nothing like her tried to emulate her, in order to try and suggest the wealth of their inner world. Repressed emotions can even lead to hallucinations, and after long term hallucinations, the "people" and images become like possessions.
Powder's facial expressions felt so accurated along all the serie. It was heartbreaking how real it was and the evolution of her mind break.
"make her have a baby, than burn it. that would be the worst and most perfect" it is sentences like these that make me love the writers of the world
(edit: omg thank you all for the likes!)
And then there's the editing at 39:10 which makes it look like the dragon is breathing fire into the baby's face, which I think is hilarious.
something about her trying to prove the babies bloodline and being immune to fire like her, but it isn't, perhaps her calling dragonfire upon herself when she is surrounded by enemies whilst holding the baby, thinking the baby is immune as well
@@belof449 this
The baby only inhering 1/2 the fire resistance Danny has leading to it not burning but instead just melting into a human meatball in her arms is the most f-ed version I could come up with.
@@endlesstrash4718 brilliant!!!
In awe of how you pump out good quality videos so quickly
thx!!
@@schnee1 do you work full time on the videos?
@@schnee1 Have you done a video on the "leaked script" from season 8 that had Jon and Danny have a child, but they both died, and Tyrion was left as hand of the king to raise their child as the new ruler?
Jinx's madness made sense. You could see and feel her break as she realized she is the one who killed all her friends, and even before she broke, there was plenty of foreshadowing that showed her attachment issues.
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Khaleesi on the other hand... came out of nowhere. I get the showrunners tried to have a few things happen to lead up to her "downfall". But they had spent 7 seasons developing a kind, caring, defend the innocent type character. And then all of a sudden she just changes... because... subversion I guess? There was never a point where I felt Khaleesi break... They didn't even seem to make an attempt to show anything like that. Her first sign of breaking is literally when she's sitting on top of her dragon about to wipe everyone out.
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I don't understand how that level of terrible writing ever was allowed on screen.
That is the thing you seem to not realize.
Insanity does not need a motivator or a push point. That would make it sanity, where sanity snaps under a massive weight/chain of events.
True insanity is something akin to a spree killer.
One day, a perfectly normal plane pilot, with family and a will to live, goes “huh, why don’t I just kill myself and everyone else on this plane”…… and they do. It happened IRL.
0 things or tells that they would snap.
There is no real logic to it or reasoning…. It is ABSOLUTELY impossible to relate.
But in some people, doing something on impulse feels… natural. Eerily natural. Akin to intrusive thought winning out of nowhere, and person jumps from the hill.
THAT is true insanity. It cannot be reasoned with, or predicted. It does not follow any sense whatsoever. It just…. Happens.
What you describe is not insanity - it is just sanity unable to keep up with pressure, turning villainous.
You never had to deal with true insanity…. And pray that you won’t ever deal with such.
To me, Khaleesis’s insanity is a depiction of “true insanity”. Just snapping for no reason whatsoever, randomly.
People seem to rationalize life too much, whereas in actuality life is just… random. Chaotic. Unfair.
@@kingol4801whether what you describe is actually “true insanity” or not doesn’t really matter, because even if it is it makes for an extremely poor narrative device.
@@kingol4801 I see where you are coming from, and I partly agree. But I disagree with your idea that someone cannot be driven to madness/insanity.
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I think your final statement sums up my reasoning well, people tend to rationalize life. And sometimes a very serious event is what forces you to abruptly realize that life is really just random, chaotic, and unfair. And upon that realization, you might abandon all rationality/sanity.
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Khaleesi's insanity was just poor writing. Even George R Martin said there was supposed to be a lot more foreshadowing for her break.
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In short, insanity is not really one or the other. It is just a break from sanity, whether it is a natural break, or one caused by external sources, doesn't really matter. The only thing required for "insanity" to fit it's definition is a deviation from sanity and rational thought.
I think it was when she lost so many of her followers in the long night. The people who kept her grounded were gone. The people praised Snow for riding a dragon when she had been doing it all along. She nearly lost her dream of being ruler for the sake of ungrateful people. The falsehood was that she wasn't really altruistic but wanted willing followers to help her cause
Jynx’s breakdown scene as a kid will never cease to give me chills. It is horrifying to watch
I’d say that Jinx’s triggers started even before the explosions but because she had those connections you were talking about, it was contained. It was during that first intro in the bridge where they find their parents dead and Vander takes them in. You can hear her singing to herself as a way of selfcomfort as she covers her eyes and clings to Vi. It was probably Vi who told her to do this so Powder doesn’t see or hear the devastation and the cries, but in a way, this is an introduction to how she started developing certain coping mechanisms. Covering her eyes and ears to reality. When she stops and sees her parents, it is Vi that crumbles down expressing her grief and just letting it out. In the meantime, Powder is obviously in pain and scared too but she holds it in and hugs Vi tight once more, both as an attempt to comfort her and establishing her as Powder’s grip on herself, making sure neither her or Vi ‘disappear’ like the people in the bridge and her parents. I understand that nobody grieves the same way but to me that’s when the repression started. I don’t think she ever got the opportunity to properly address that trauma. Even in those years where she had Vi, Vander and the boys, it’s not clear they ever talked about those events, eventhough they continued to live that “quiet” oppression due to Vander’s agreement with Grayson.
We can see another glimpse of this mental distress when they ask her to stay behind as they go and rescue Vander. It always seemed odd to me how erratic her crying was in the scene she’s alone on her bed. Surely, anyone would feel crushingly impotent if you knew your loved ones were putting themselves at risk to rescue your other loved one and you had to stay behind. But what caught my attention was how self-destructive she was being, just completely out of herself. A hatred that was directed to herself and what she identified in herself as broken, fragile and useless ((often ‘confirmed’ by those around her like Mylo.. which is why, aside from the guilt for what happened, I think that Mylo was the main hallucination she had whenever she was being self-critical or letting her insecurities over being abandoned/replaced take over)) as opposed to Vi’s strength, leadership and determination. She only pulled herself together once she realized she might be of help, and we all know how that turned out.
Also, just a little margin note because I already lost my train of thought, love the parallel between that shot where Powder glances up from Silco’s hug and the shot in the intro where Vi glances up from Vander’s hug.
If you pay attention she hums that same song walking on the bridge towards vi cait and Ekko. I wonder if she was singing the song in order to not think about her parents, OR to maintain her cold irrational mindset so she could carry out her violent plan without feeling anything.
Having read the books (which, at present, end at the point where Dany has to flee the coliseum on Drogon's back) there was a potential building seed for Dany's madness. Namely, she only ever Wins when she goes wild.
She gets dragons when she burns the witch to death. She breaks her deal with the slavemasters and gets an army of free unsullied. She spends her entire time in Mereen trying to be nice and just and solve things kindly but runs into problem after problem. It's not working. It's a possible arc for book Dany where she grapples with the fact that becoming what she is feared to become - the mad, ruthless dragon - is the only way for her to get what she wants.
We actually already have her madness moment as she wanders the Jade Sea with Drogon in the chapter after her escape. She gets food poisoning, starts having fever dreams, etc. and eventually resolves that peace has failed and going forward she will conquer through "fire and blood".
@@gatsynogim She was dehydrated, starving, had just suffered a misscarriage, and damaged from exposure when she was hallucinating. That's not a permanent state of being for her. The peace in Meereen was unjust and her freedmen were paying the price for it, it needs to be ended and Dany needs to follow through with the slave revolution by burning inner city of Volantis. That won't make her "mad", in the world of ASOIAF you can't end oppression by asking nicely. Her heart is still with the innocents and the downtrodden, her fury is reserved for those deserving of it.
@@princessshei9171 the point of that chapter is that her fury isn't reserved for those who deserve anymore, otherwise there would have been no change to the status quo, rendering the entire Meereenese Knot pointless
@@gatsynogim That doesn't render the Meereenese Knot pointless, her entire arc is learning when to use soft power and when to use hard power. She used too much soft power in Meereen and in turn the masters walked all over her and her freedmen. She is angry for her people, before Drogon shows up at the pit she is angry that the masters are calling her Myhsa because she only views the freedmen as her children. A few bad nights on the Dothraki Sea are not going to reverse her character development over 5 books.
I thought it was when she starts thinking about fire never harming dragons even though she still had that burn on her hand.
I think that you missed a very fun part at the end of Jinx's arc: the last thing said to her is from a dead person "we will show them all"
now its half a reference back to the meeting (a bookend in the series) but also very on point: "nothing ever stays dead"
I've never even watched a single bit of Game of Thrones, and when you got to the description of Old Valyria, I knew exactly where it was going and i got *chills* at how good that could have been.
Also, your explanation of making these huge projects as signs of an unstable leader overblowing their own importance helped me realize how common that is, and how I've felt that exact thing in other works even if i couldn't verbalize it
I disagree with you here.
I don't think Jinx shot the tower with Fishbone (her 'burn it all down') simply because she was insane and unpredictable, she's not that a simplistic a character. In my view she fired her mega-weapon out of grief.
Destroying the council was what SILCO wanted and she did it in honour of HIM. She didn't care about the council, she owed them nothing (but they gave her and the people she cared about a life of misery), Silco had her plan & build Fishbones from quite early in the series and she fired it because as far as she knew that's what he wanted even if he wasn't around to see it.
-at no point did we see that Silco explain his agreement with Jayce to Jinx (she had no idea about the peace deal), but more importantly for her the final moments of the final episode was a moment of clarity for Jinx. After she killed Silco there was no madness, no stress, no being pulled apart by the people around her; she was just finally HER.
No Vander, no Milo, No Clagger, no Silco, no Powder and she's beaten Vi and Cait (and probably thought Echo was dead too), after her entire life there was finally peace in that there was only Jinx which was made clear by her sitting in the Jinx chair. From then on there was no jagged lines of madness, her voice was clear and strong, only clarity of purpose.
The rocket was a thank you of sorts, a goodbye to her foster-father by giving him his dying wish. Madness didn't fire the rocket, Silcos death did; It was HIS dream.
If she had just lashed out in rage & insanity she would have lashed out at her personal world, she would have attacked the undercity with a series of bombs but a single long range attack was HIS view, shooting a far away enemy being the council was HIS idea and his mindset.
Jinx didn't attack the council out of any retaliation tipped over the edge. She was finally free and it was a parting gift to the one that gave her that strength; the monstrous Silco. Silco was 'the monster that you created' and in his final act freed her by telling her she was perfect.
if anything comparing Daenerys to Silco would be better
Really well said.
I disagree.
Based on all the facial expression animations they did on her during the final 1-2 minutes of her tea-party, I'd say the reason she fires the weapon has nothing to do with Silco.
Her entire conflict is the question of her identity, which is only in a state of ambiguity due to Vi's reappearance. I think the purpose of shooting the shark-thingy is to finally burn all the bridges to her past self, so that she's no longer tempted by Vi. That way she actually sustains an inner peace and equilibrium. I wonder whether the showrunners will go in that direction for season 2, whereby, if I'm correct, she should no longer suffer from the hallucinations that plagued her all this time.
I also disagree with Schnee about her having agency and making a conscious choice. It appears much more likely that she recognizes that there is no option for her to go back. In her world, she's doomed and the only thing left is to seal the deal. She appears extremely reluctant to take that seat and how she almost literally has to drag herself up to that ledge. I don't think she's particularly happy about being Jinx, she just has no choice!
Also from a more pragmatic angle, after Silco's death her position would be very precarious. Starting the war and having possession of the only weapon that can balance the stakes may be the only guarantee for survival.
@@phileas007 "the reason she fires has nothing to do with silco" ??? Bruh. Do you not remember her hearing silco in her head saying "we will show them, we will show them all"???
@@phileas007 I agree. It's even explained in the song. "I had to kill the part of me that saw, I needed you more". The only thing left in her that was powder was her hope that Vi could "love her like she used to". So she did something that not even Vi could forgive. A final nail in powders coffin. "Here's to the new us". Not "here's to Silco"
The tragic thing is, the foundations for Dany's madness were there, you can see it as early as the end of season 1. The woman she orders to heal Khal Drogo takes her unborn child from her, and only restores Drogo to be a husk of his former self. Dany's response is to tie the woman to Drogo's pyre and burn her alive. Even this early, the duality in her starts building. She wants to be a good queen, but when someone wrongs her, it seems to be almost a reflex for Dany to burn them alive, just like her father did before her. The death penalty is common in Game of Thrones, but even by those standards, burning someone alive is a cruel and unusual way to do it. The problem is, the writers seemed more intent on making her likeable than tragic, which is where Arcane went right. So for the next six seasons, they focus on making Dany likeable, even through all the horrible things that she does. It's how they wrote themselves into a corner. Season 8 was a failure of writing, Dany being the most obvious example, but it was a slow descent into failure that was years in the making.
Conversely, every time Jinx does something horrible, Arcane pulls no punches to remind us that the things she did were horrible. The enforcers she kills in episode 4 are a good example. The enforcers are corrupt as a system, but the worst we ever see those guys do is that they are jerks to Caitlyn. Because ten seconds later, they don't hesitate to run into a burning building because they think there is a little girl trapped inside. We see their funeral, and Marcus reminds us that they had families. The creators never wrote Jinx to be likeable, they wrote her to be a tragic but inevitable product of her world.
people chose to like Dani, people often take sides and they took Danis side even thought she was mad and evil from the get go. In season 2, if you watch it again, the clearly give you hints that Dani will burn down Kings Landing.
Yes, the final episode of Game of Thrones would've landed better, if Daenerys only targeted the red keep, with her dragon, only for the following scene to be about King's Landing outraged over the loss of their family and friends, who were hiding inside the keep as the show does set up. It would create that conflict that Daenerys wants to be good, but ultimately can't without doing evil to reach her goals.
It could have been a good lesson for the viewers as well, who would probably argue about what's right and wrong, given such a move would be just like the Red Wedding, where they choose to sacrifice the few to end the war early, regardless of how horrible it may have been.
It could ultimately have driven home the point, that Westoros has a new ruler, and yet their future is still as uncertain as it has ever been, as lords will soon probably rise to rid their realm of the Targaryan who gives the death penalty by fire once again. But maybe I just say that because I like bittersweet endings.
Reading the first book I knew after that scene that Dany was going to be the mad queen. I've always seen the targaryen coin flip, the madness, as a result of power. A bloodline that believes they are entitled to greatness and power and they materialized this curse of them ultimately doing some horrible things if they don't feel like they have that power or they feel like they need to maintain it. Everything she does she believes is justified because she feels like she is owed by birth the iron throne. She talks about breaking a wheel when in reality she is trying to reinstate the cycle of power purely being a birthright.
Then we have Jon as the other side of this coin, we see him as a leader who believes he's owed absolutely nothing as a bastard with no birthrights.
The show did a horrible job by yeah making her too likable and trying to tell the story like everything she does is objectively good in the narrative
@Eddard Tyrsson I think the biggest problem here is that Dany actions in the grand scheme of things can be downright comparable to other characters doing certain evil things. But Dany is labeled mad for it, while people twist themselves into a corner to defend these other characters and their equally heinous deeds.
For example, Arya.
I'm just gonna use the instance of her revenge against the Freys. So, Arya essentially wiped out the entire male line of House Frey as retaliation for the Red Wedding and the murder of her mother, brother, and sister in-law. Hoorah! We all wanted some kind of poetic justice to come back and bite House Frey in its ass.
Problem is, while we're celebrating that victory on House Starks behalf, we're ignoring everything Arya did to exact her revenge.
In the time before Arya reached Walder Frey, she found his two elder sons, killed them, then she butchered them up into tiny pieces and took the time to bake them into a pie. She then took this pie to their father, and fed it to him. She proceeded to cut his throat and watched as he slowly bled out and smiled as she watched him die.
To be clear, that is type of sociopathacy we'd expect in characters like Ramsay Bolton. We watched Arya do that and yet by the show standards, Arya is still allowed to stay an altruistic and sane character after how sadistically she killed off the Freys.
Why is Dany more mad than Arya in season 2 for standing outside the gates of Qarth and issuing desperate empty threats after her Khalasaar was dying for weeks?
@Eddard Tyrsson the woman even explains to Danny that what is life when all that you are gets taken away. Her place of worship gone, destroyed by the Dothraki which Dany leads alongside Drogo. People she had healed and cared for murdered by the Dothraki. She was raped 3 times by the Dothraki before dany “saved” her
To the woman she got revenge upon those who had wronged her. And dany burnt her alive for it because she refused to accept that her actions as a saviour were meaningless, because of the fact that her demand of the Dothraki to buy a fleet to sail across the seas is what lead them to the village where the woman lived so they could take slaves to sell to buy that fleet.
That woman didn’t betray dany she owned dany nothing, it was explained in words this isn’t an interpretation of the events this is all clearly explained in conversation after dany learns of drogos coma like state.
If you somehow come to the conclusion that dany was betrayed by this you fell into the same trap that most people have with dany where you ignored the flaws and writing of the character because of the softer way she is presented for the most part so when her cruel, evil whatever you want to call it side is shown it’s brushed off as the people deserved in, right up until the time comes when the people she was cruel and evil towards didn’t deserve it then all of a sudden cries of “the writers fucked up, they ruined her character” come out from fans who never looked past the surface level display of the character
Huge huge props to you for specific sympathy *or* empathy. As a low empathy person I almost never see people recognizing the distinction and it genuinely means so much
I really love one interpretation of Jinx's scratching. The scratching and the delusions are the conflict between Jinx and Powder, them fighting over what they are doing. And this gives two ideas for the final scene, with no scratching there is no conflict between Jinx and Powder, so either Powder is "dead" and we are seeing Jinx prevail as the one true identity, or we are seeing them agree, Jinx and Powder on the same side, both committed to this choice this action.
Not only did GoT barely set it up by comparison, but in Arcane Jinx's mental instability is subtly hinted at even when she was younger before the tragedy (second tragedy really).
We must remember that the Act one doesn't just end with Powder killing her family and losing Vi, but began with her losing her parents, seem them dead right in front of her. Even in act 1 as a little girl Powder has moments showing she isn't perfectly well and even the scratches and screen effects shown later in the show when Jinx is having an episode is shown in act 1 with Powder. It's just upon first viewing the audience doesn't know it's in association with her in particular. It's at first played off as just stylization on it's own.
So even before Jinx fully goes mad, she was foreshadowed having issues as the young and innocent Powder, but as Powder she seemed not too far gone yet and like with the right upbringing she could rebound and become more happy and stable.
The solution that I like the most would actually ditch the madness arch and would make Circi much more evil. She would fly in and Circi would be standing on the top of the castle. Dani would fly in and light her on fire but she would have set up wildfire inside the castle and strategically throughout the city. Dani was trying to just kill Circi but Circi out maneuvered her. Everyone believes that Dani went mad and destroyed the city and Jon has to choose whether to betray her or side with her.
*Cersei :)
Interesting solution as well.
A lot of people assume that this is gonna happen in the books. I guess we will see. Honestly Dany is such a complex character. I could see either option. She stays a good person? Awesome. She becomes a mad queen? As long as it's well written, awesome.
That is trash
Didn't Emilia Clarke state that when they were filming her burning down King's Landing she wasn't told what was ACTUALLY going on and that wildfire set it off? I swear I read and heard about this in the many GoT videos talking about season 8's disappointments...
@@zombieluka be honest, I don't know. Maybe I'm just remembering something I heard somewhere and thinking it's my idea.
There's one solid difference between the two (and it may have made the set up easier for Arcane), Jinx has already been going down that road for some time when we meet this version of her. This allowed the producers to sidestep the 'descent' aspect. Game of Thrones never takes its eyes off of Daenerys for very long, so they'd have tp put more effort into hers. Unfortunately, they didn't do that and we got a lazy, nonsensical end to her character arch.
Jinx's scratching is reality vs the story her brain creates to stop herself from shutting down.
Pinpointing Caitlyn as the villan leaves room to keep idealising Vi despite none of the characters being completely good or evil. Jinx needs that thing to hold onto to stop herself from losing it all together. It's her way of coping which simotaniously drives her insane
So about jinx's scratching. I can't speak for everyone, but when I saw them I immediately recognized the feeling. It's hard to explain, but that's what tramatic thoughts/memories "feel" like during a manic episode. It's jarring, like a shock to your brain, scattered and forceful. The dinner table scene where Vi is trying to make her remember in episode 9 was a perfect example. I think someone with experience designed those visuals.
Same here. I tried to draw on paper the feeling myself and couldn’t quite get it, so when I saw it on the screen, it just clicked. It finally was like the thing I had been feeling and failed to express even myself, perfectly portrayed on a screen with a character that is scarily relatable. What a stellar way to portray PTSD/C:PTSD and how it can seep into every day life like that.
I think Tokyo Ghoul has a good depiction of this in the manga with Kaneki's centipede form. The deeper he starts to embrace his new roots as a ghoul, the more he starts to rely on and weaponize his trauma, it causes him to fly off the hinge and completely lose himself. The new form that breeds from it is a visual actualization of that descent into madness. His kagune takes the form of a centipede, something he remembers vividly from his time being tortured by Jason.
I think one of the better written and crafted "Descent into Madness" arks for a character I've ever seen is the story of Arthas Menethil from warcraft. That is believable, raw and outright masterful.
I think rule number 7 is actually realistic and applicable irl. The mad character wants to get back at whatever/whomever, yes but I also think that the large dramatic responsive act is also to help themselves regain a feeling of control. Our characters in these situations feel like they are not in control of the things that are around them, so they do these big acts to show themselves that they can still do things, they can still control something. That's what I think at least
As someone who has experience with dissociative identity disorder and schitzophrenia like situations Jinx is the absolute best depiction on screen that I've ever seen of what it feels like to be out of control of your own mind. The overlay of scritchiness onto reality is EXACTLY what it feels like. Not necessarily what it looks like or sounds like, because that is different for each person, but this is what it FEELS like. Also my wife had really intense panic attacks while she was experiencing post-partum depression, and when I showed her the part in the music video (shown here around 9:23) where powder is banging her head while the shadows of her head are going crazy, her eyes got huge and she said, "That's exactly what it feels like. I've never felt more understood."
I agree as someone who experiences psychosis. Jinx is probably the best representation of losing control of your mind. I just would like to see one with out the evil aspect.
@Zach Hogan I don't think either side was the good guys or the bad guys which was a really good portrayal of how grey reality is by the people who made arcane. I should have used the word dangerous instead of evil to describe Jinx.
@Zach Hogan It's pretty easy to see a person like her as morally bad, even if you don't view Piltover as the ultimate goodness. She's not a hero and you aren't supposed to see her as one regardless of what Piltover did to that city. Another thing I just realised was that she was bargaining for Caitlyn to die so that Vi gets the "old powder back", and you do not put your own sibling into a situation like that.
@@machinaowl910 Well, she is psychotic and has attachment issues and Vi continuously chose Cait over Jinx. It is understandable that she would make such kind of ultimatum. I really hate how Vi basically chose to assist Cait when she clearly could go and try to help Jinx. I mean that scene at the bridge made me disappointed in her. Cait had a burn, painful but in no way lethal or dangerous to life, while Jinx was on the verge of mental breakdown and Vi looks in the eyes of Jinx and just helps Cait to get away.
@@edenic_hare3616 I don't think that was what happening at all? Vi's understanding was that Jinx was out there somewhere in the underground and she was going to aimlessly look for her after Cait and Ecco got out of the city safely/didn't need a guide anymore. It wasn't like she actively chose between them she just heard gunshots and got understandably worried/went to help.
The part at the end where Jinx asks Vi "Get rid of her please" Vi looks at Cait, but I think she was really referring to herself as Jinx and she knew she couldn't stop that side of her so that was Powder's last ditch effort to be "saved".
Dany being held in captivity would be an interesting parallel to her father. I am pretty sure the madness trigger for him in the books was being held captive in duskendale and Tywin refusing to parley and sieging the city instead.
There are two Targaryens. They could have gone further and had two parallel madness arcs, one for Dany and the other (more subtle) for Jon, then have them reach their breaking point at about the same time and have one choose madness and the other choose sanity. Jon even has a great moment to start his descent into madness (getting betrayed and murdered will do that to you).
Jon in the show comes back pretty much completely unchanged after his resurrection. The books have the possibility of making his experience dying and coming back to life change him on a fundamental level, like Beric Dondarrion or LSH from the books, which could start him down that path of going mad.
That of course assumes that your idea will play out, but if it was added to the show, the resurrection could have become a bigger part of it. And the idea of him coming to the brink and choosing sanity when the root cause is him literally dying would make it more powerful.
@@Niveden1 I think you'd need to have started the madness arcs seasons ago for them to make sense and not seem really rushed. Also, you could totally have Snow being the one to choose madness :) Either way though, it would make him more interesting.
@@AliasAerius Exactly, the problems with Game of Thrones extend back throughout the last few seasons, and a lot would need to be changed to make ideas like this work. I agree that it would make Jon more interesting. Both him and Tyrion seem to have been made more boring in the interests of making them more morally pure characters, whereas in the books and in the earlier seasons of the show they struggled a lot more.
A literal “burn it all down” arc would make sense for jon. I could see him burning the northerners who refused to retreat from the marching whitewalkers to keep them from joining the night king’s army
Daenerys would NEVER idolize her father, ever. It goes against everything she's in the books, and the series directors did a great job at fucking up with her book arcs and didn't translate half of what she IS or what she endured. Benioff and Weiss (especially Benioff) never got what her character is from the get-go. They thought her to be this stoic woman who never shows emotions, didn't allow the actress to show the full extents of the character's warmth, and profited off her only to discard her like a pile of shit. The family member she admires is RHAEGAR, her brother, not Aerys II.
That's the one thing that pissed me off about Dany in the show. In the books Dany said that she wanted to break the wheel. And to not be like her father. Honestly it would have been great if she had subverted everyone's assumptions of her and not gone mad like everyone thought she would. She could've been a female Rhaegar. Why make her say all that stuff in the show, if you were going to make her go mad?. Maybe they showed her going mad in a subtle way and I missed it?. Seemed out of the blue to me.
@@henriettereines6273 In the books there are hints Daenerys might not be completely sound of mind, her (possible) downfall that more tragic because she has been one the more positive characters until now. In the show, Daenerys' story arc is mediocre not because she descends into madness (that's ok and as I said earlier, even hinted in the books) but its execution (IMHO, of course).
Plus the whole white savior thing they did with her in the show felt very weird
@@bunnycommando2201 Hard agree with this.
By end of the latest book, Dany is hearing voices, talking to herself, Eurone has the Dragon Horn, and Victarion is coming for her while very likely introducing her to the Fire God and make her really believe that she's meant to be this firely savior.
The book is setting things up for Dany to possibly become more brutal sooner or later.
It's sad because Dany is doing her best to be a good person but the story is setting up to the high potential of more tragedy.
The show rushed through it all.
But hey, after GoT ran out of written material (cos George R.R. Martin never bothered to finnish the series and now it's unlikely that he ever will) the show took a sharp plunge. Nobody can know what he had planned but immediately when the written material ran out and they switched to some other people to just "fill in" for the rest of it it went to shit. All the character arcs that were beatifully built thrown away, everybody's dialogue becoming simplistic etc. This is why first 4 seasons are brilliant and then... not so. I haven't read all the books but this is just so visible in the quality of the series.
In the books they are building towards Dany’s change. She keeps making decicions where she chooses cruelty. In the beginning it is people who are Evil, corrupt and clearly enemies. But she moves to people she suspects, she begins to develop paranoia about the three betrayals.
If the books are ever finished, we will see How it was supposed to happen. But most likely, Unfortunately, that will never happen.
I think that a madness arc for Dany should have been implied a lot earlier in the series if they wanted to go that route from the beginning. Her whole character in the first 4 seasons was literally helping slaves be freed, even if it meant dalaying her own plans of winning the iron throne. If you build up a character who is so concerned with the "low-life" and using that as a contrast with Cersei who despises anyone who isn't of high birth, making that character burn the poor parts of the city just doesn't work very well. It would be a whole lot different if she just decided to destroy the red keep, accidentally triggering all the stashes of wildfire Cersei placed in the city and having crumbling towers fall on streets full of innocent people. That would have made sense, not that much of a shocker compared to what actually happened in the series but in my opinion a lot more reasonable.
To be fair I’m not so sure why everyone, who watched a character burn every city down everywhere she went the entire series, was shocked when she burned a city down.
Like sure, she thought she was better. And they could have portrayed it better. But it wasn’t a shock she burned ANOTHER city down. She literally created anarchy wherever she went.
Could they have done a better job? Of course. I think a lot of people were just deluded into believing she was a good person. As she herself was. Not everyone she killed was a criminal.
@@beyondredemption5369 She didn't burn down Astapoor or Meereen. What cities are you talking about?
I was terribly abused as a child and at some point I forgot most of the shit that happened to me. But after I started remembering, in distressing moments I felt like this whole other self was trying to inhabit my brain. I started calling that self Little Cedar because they were the person I put all that hurt I went through on so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. I was very torn about how to handle this younger self because I wanted to comfort them but also make them stay away. I didn’t want that person to be me. Seeing Jinx being torn between Powder and Jinx and talking about how Powder is gone, Powder is dead or lost, very much reminds me of how I separated myself from Little Cedar to make living easier. I would talk to my therapist about what Little Cedar was feeling and what Little Cedar went through instead of what I went through. I’ve incorporated Little Cedar now. It makes me sad that Jinx couldn’t incorporate Powder but I remember how difficult it was for me to do.
"Anakin sometimes thinks of the dread that eats at his heart as a dragon. Children on Tatooine tell each other of the dragons that live inside the suns
"But Anakin's fear is another kind of dragon. A cold kind. A dead kind.
Not nearly dead enough.
Not long after he became Obi-Wan's Padawan all those years ago, a minor mission had brought them to a dead system: one so immeasurably old that its star had long ago turned to a frigid dwarf of hyper compacted trace metals, hovering a quantum fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Anakin couldn't even remember what the mission might have been, but he'd never forgotten that dead star.
It had scared him.
"Stars can die?"
"It is the way of universe, which is another manner of saying that it is the will of the Force,” Obi-Wan had told him. “Everything dies. In time, even stars burn out."
"that is the kind of fear that lives inside Anakin Skywalker: the dragon of that dead star. It is an ancient, cold dead voice within his heart that whispers: all things die"
The general trigger of Anakin's arc is fear of loss, that is what always haunted him through his life building up with each and every time he lost someone (His mother, Qui-gon, Ahsoka) and the fear of Padme's death, the person he loved the most being the final trigger.
:o
for anyone wondering, the source of the quoted passage is the revenge of the sith novelization by matthew stover
@@ttwings Theres a great UA-cam video of it too out there called the hero with no fear or something.
Arcane is by far one of my favourite shows- and your videos have helped me understand it to a deeper level and take inspiration!! I am currently writing a manipulative character who ends up driving herself to madness through the delusion of her superiority- so this video was UNBELIEVABLY helpful!!!
I always saw the straw that breaks the camels back as it is a build up, and that last straw is the limit of what it can hold. The straw is alone, its a stacked up problem right at the brink of the limit and then one staw is added and it spills over.
"It's hard to do madness in the show because it had 8 seasons of no madness." They could've fixed this by having other characters like Jon, or Cersei get more and more self-conflict moments, or straight up could turn a character like Arya mad in order to create parallels between characters that is regularly encountered in the series.
For Jon, he could go in a self-conflict, or paranoia after learning about his lineage. He has had an initial push back when his fellow Night's Watch members betrayed him, the one who loved, Ygritte betraying him by nearly attempting to kill him, and now the fear of betrayal by the North when they learn that the man that leads them is the same one that comes from the lineage that the North hate so much, so he could get in a major conflict with himself over accepting his lineage, or dismissing it. Sort of regularly getting conflicted between his Targaryen side, and his Stark side.
As for Cersei, it would be the children and the family that would push her over the edge. Since forever, her character was all about protecting her family and her lineage. The story handled it well by having people vanish from her family one by one, her son, her father, Tyrion, Myrcella, Tommen and later on even Jamie also leaves her. It would actually have been a very good madness story to develop, because she had all the right pieces to set up a good mad queen story. Instead of her blowing up the sept that lead up to Tommen's suicide, it could've been other way around. They could've written a story where Tommen went in a huge self-conflict about deciding between his mother, and his wife, which eventually could've lead up to a little teenager like him to end his own life instead of choosing between them, and in a rage Cersei, leaning towards getting mad could have started hearing voices that blamed the faith for his death, just as how she blamed Tyrion instantly for Joffrey's death. After this, she could get herself isolated from grief, or Jamie could betray her by saying something like "You're not Cersei" after she tells him some insane thought.
And the one that would be the best choice for a madness arc imo is Arya. She was a kid, her sister and the prince betrayed her, she had to give her wolf away, her sister's wolf got killed in front of her, which could initially start thoughts like "I'm the one who killed him, it was my actions." And later, her father is killed in front of her, she becomes isolated after the Hound isn't with her, and she goes to a place where she has to decide between two identities, and kill other people in order to become an assassin that has no emotions? Like the whole no one plot was almost the same as Jinx's character. She has a tragic past where she had her family killed in front of her, got seperated from them, was influenced to force another personality onto herself and forget the past, had only one person (Jaqen, or lady Crane) that she could trust in the entire city. There was a part where they did try to make it seem like Arya was struggling between the two while she was trying to become no one, but in the end out of nowhere she decides she's Arya, gets assassinated, and spits on every plot device that was trying to make her more of a no one, then the plot says she's now no one? No, she could have gotten paranoia from the whole faceless men idea after seeing how they decieve people and kill them and are master at lies, which would make her Arya side give her doubts about trusting them, but the no one side would try to fight back. They could've established more of a teacher-student bond between her and Waif, or Jaqen, and then made her accidentally hear the waif tell Jaqen about how Arya's not a suitable candidate to become no one, as all her missions failed, thus setting off to assassinate her. In another reveal of betrayal, and shock from killing Jaqen in self-defense, her no one side would convince her that all this was her fault because she could not accept to become no one, which had led her to lose the only other person she could trust, her mentor. They even could've pulled a Silco moment by having Jaqen give some final words to Arya, such as the "Now a girl truly is no one", or "I was mistaken, a girl could never truly be Arya Stark", and they would give her the final decision, as Jinx goes to pick her identity, arya could have picked no one, and become no one, her post-trauma self.
jesus christ why did i spend almost 40 mins writing a 800 word youtube comment
@@alimammadov1415 good comment tho
@@alimammadov1415 you might say... it was madness. Good comment though
They didn't cause like this comment it would have required effort, and they were already checking out and eyeing the Star Wars deal they thought they had coming.
They've been kind of outed that while they did have some skill in crafting the show and are owed props for the visuals and adaptation... the problem is they leaned HEAVILY on Martin's writing to the point they were trying to push him to finish his next book...so they could adapt it, and not have to wrap up the story using their "own" creativity...and we saw how that turned out.
You know who would be perfect for the example of turning to madness? Tyrion.
Book Tyrion leaves King's Landing after killing his father vowing revenge on his family and all of Westeros for betraying him and casting him out. He is not the dwarf who "drinks and knows things" from the show. His thoughts are full of deeply disturbing desires, including raping and killing Cersei. He is well on the track to madness, and will likely be egging Dany on rather than holding her back in future books.
It's a real shame the show softened Tyrion so much. Tyrion's descent to madness would provide a wonderful precedent for Dany.
I wonder if the appeal of Nazism was a paradise where there's no moral grayness, no deliberation. Of getting so swept up in unified screams of glory, that you forget life could never be a paradise of conformity.
It reminds me of doublethink, from 1984: "War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength." If unified ignorance is all it takes to block out a painful world, it's much harder to say no.
(NOT glorifying naziism, just pointing out the similar mindsets)
There is peace in believing your cause is completely just and not having to deal with petty things like nuance. People still get sold on that all the time. It is a seductive notion that a cause is so correct that anything required to push this cause forward is morally justified. It allows you to do terrible things and maintain your self image as a "good person."
@@RobearRich agreed. Mob mentality is dangerously seductive.
The fact that social media can create even a fake online world like this; gives me chills.
Pretty much hit the nail on there.
@@JackSparrow-re4ql
It’s the real world, but on an enlarged scale.
Hi Schnee, I've been watching your Arcane videos for a while and I wanted to say thank you for putting this series out.
The show is an incredible base for human exploration with the complex plot and storytelling, but the way you extrapolate these concepts and phrase them in a way they can relate to us on a personal level, that's really an amazing gift.
Crazy enough, this one video made me look at my own thoughts, the ones that feel "mad" and uncontrollable, in a new light. I couldn't crack this mechanism in my mind and somehow you managed to give me the tools.
It doesn't make the thing better, but knowing where it comes from is incredibly comforting.
You use psychology in such a creative way and very original. Your dad must be proud.
I found your video essays(?) when I was looking for learning to analyse stories, because I like to tell mine with more depth. I think I came across your channel through Arcane stuff and have been hooked since then. I love the way you question things, look into depth and bring new perspectives. Your videos have taught me how to look at things differently and allows me to understand how "things" work. So thank you!
The better way for Dany to go mad is of course much earlier. We need to see hints of it in Qarth and Mereen. And I would turn her into her brother, whom she new intimately, not her father she never did. She despised her brother for his weakness and disconnection from reality, so seeing her become him when she realizes governing a city is hard and people don't love her would be very powerful.
we did see that when she killed mossador. when she killed the khals. when she killed the tarlys. the actress just did a shitty job. because she confused show with admiration in teal life.
@@CaitSithOfWutai This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read. Thank you for typing it out though it made me want to stop reading this comment section and go back to being productive.
@@CaitSithOfWutai Mossador’s actions undermined Daenerys’s rule. The Khals were directly challenging her power. She gave the Tarly’s plenty of options out of their execution, which was brutal, but pragmatic to set an example. Also the act of execution has always been portrayed as something you must do, that was one of the first things Ned Stark did. It’s only portrayed as wrong when the person being executed should not be, not that executing your enemies is wrong. There is a massive leap between her previous actions and burning hundreds of innocents for no reason. Especially when she previously stayed in Mereen specifically to help innocents, delaying her arrival in westeros to do so.
I feel like there is something in the idea that she struggles between the peacefull/poltical but very ineffective/compromising method and the brutal/tyrannical but effective method. we see a little of that in mereen, where she is confronted with both the consequences of power (her dragons killing the little boy, could have done more) and the consequnces of ineffectiveness (the harpies or opening of the 'fighting' pitts). but as with almost everything in the later seasons of GoT itsn't not properly developed. Dany locks her dragons up immediately after the confrontation with the murderen boy, but thenlater just set free, without real consequences; her marriage with the Hizdar guy is a sham but we dont really get the idea its a burden (especially if you consider the other bad/abusive relationships in the series). the entire city of Mereen and the political conflict there is just kind of left after season six and there is no real impact felt of her rule there afterward (appart from maybe some thowaway lines).
But thats the jist of the failure of GoT really; there was so much there, potential from almost every angle, but they ran out of books and just rushed to a finale.
@@liamtreat5194 Wanted to add on the whole Tarly:
Dany gave SO MUCH options more than the other leaders who would have just executed them without any excuse.
The Tarlys could have definitely lived. When Tyrion suggested sending them to the Wall, it seems like Dany was at least going to listen to that idea.
Tarlys were the ones going "nah burn us".
Every single traitor is executed in the show with no option of mercy being given throughout the series.
Dany was willing to give some form of mercy and they are the ones who denied it.
That is so FAR from burning down the KL that I feel frustrated when ppl compared these two different events.
In my eyes Jinx did not "choose madness", she just accepted in a moment of absolute clarity (the voices in her head go completely silent after Silcos death) the sad reality that she is a real danger to everyone surrounding her and that she causes people to get hurt or die, no matter if she wants it or not.
She accepted that she has become a real Jinx due to her mental illness and thanks to Silcos inconsequential upbringing and that Vi - who is now in love with an enforcer - could never see her as anything else than a Monster now.
You did a great job explaining that, I genuinely can't remember when was the last time I've listened to a 45 min monologue and lasted till the end. A perfectly logical, interesting, in-depth explanation. Thanks.
What I have taken from this video is that I need to watch Arcane. Also, Dany's madness arc really needed one thing: Time. The entire show needed at least two more seasons to pull off what it was trying to do. It probably wouldn't have stuck the landing then either but Dany's arc would have been at least somewhat more believable.
Arcane is pretty good.
jinx is one of the fictional charachters i’ve related to the most because of how well they represent her mental issues and stuff. it’s like watching myself on screen, even in the first few episodes. it’s rare that i see the ugly side of myself represented like this if that makes sense. when people write mental illness , they tend to romanticise it. but im all honesty , my illness makes me both a victim and a villain at times. this was a ramble but
Yeah they don't make her mental illness fun or romanticized, AND they don't stigmatize it at the same time, and that's just so refreshing when you either see mental illness? Evil. Or mental illness?' So quirky and wistful and fun!
I think another hidden meaning in the "Nothing ever stays dead." line, while not as super meaningful and poetic, could be that when she was getting the shimmer she was in Singed's lab with Warwick. While Jinx is crazy, she isn't dumb; a genius actually. It wouldn't be unrealistic to assume that after waking up she looked up at least once and saw him.
this is truly one of the best film analytical videos I've watched. It's very articulate in its deep dive, pulling evidence and reasoning for every claim and observation, just so so impressive
Fantastic video. Nailed everything I felt watching both GoT and Arcane. One of my biggest annoyances with Dany's arc was that they never once had her question whether she might potentially go mad in the future. She was such a good and intelligent character initially, and she never once asked whether she was actually the right person to break the wheel, knowing what could happen if her coin flip landed wrong once she had power. Someone that smart, who was as determined to be a good queen, should've at least considered that she might follow in her father's footsteps. It's not like the Targaryen madness was a secret, after all.
Dany's a megalomaniac though. Once she got a taste of the power and adulation she'd been denied her whole life she couldn't simply stop and kept needing more. Her time in Slavers Bay clearly shows that, as do the billion of titles she has Missandei announce for every person that came to petition her... When she came to Westeros and didn't immediately receive the same treatment there you could tell by her face she was not amused. The people running away from her and in her warped mind turning to Cersei rather than Dany herself made her snap as she realised she'd never be seen as anything but a conqueror/tyrant in Westeros and they would show her only fear instead of worship. This coupled with the inbreeding, a history of various mental disorders in her bloodline and the recent deaths of those closest to her simly pushed her over the edge. Could it have been done better? Yes. Is it unbelievable in the way it is currently written? No.
I think they writers of GOT fell by their own hubris. They wanted to give a totally unexpected finale. They fell prey to the praise. "They always subverts our expectations!" "You never expects what happens!"
You can totally tell this happened when you analyze the death of the Winter King. When asked why the fuck Arya Stark killed him, they said something like "It's the character you never would have expected". Which is just bad story telling.
Same thing happened with Denny. They were so focused on making it unexpected that they completely forgot to properly foreshadow it.
The heck you are talking about? Did we watch the same show? I honestly can’t with this “Danny was good”. You are fooled by the show. And she was crazy from the start. From the moment she watches her brother die. She justifies killings with the words “for the greater good”. She has become a tyrant. Whoever is not with her - she wants to kill. That is a way to create a good character. People are blind. All they can tell “she ended slavery, she can’t be evil”. Oh really? Why? She ended slavery and asked them
To die for her. For her right to sit on a throne. Yeahhh. She is a good person.
@@YanaPetruk "evil" is such a childish word to use... the character was morally grey and complex, like every single character in got.
And I am not saying that the "seeds" weren't there or whatever. I'm saying it wasn't properly foreshadowed. It came out of nowhere. There was a giant leap in her arc. One episode she was a possible tyrant, the next she was dropping a nuclear bomb. There's a HUGE gap there. As this video very well explains it, a season of development would have been needed, and there wasn't. One moment she was sane, the next we are supposed to buy she suddenly went mad?
It was TERRIBLE writing, and I think the fault lies in the fact that the writers wanted to be surprising and "subvert expectations" and "do what the audience least expected". Just like they did when they had Arya kill the White King.
@@YanaPetruk "Whoever is not with her - she wants to kill" basically what almost every single character in GoT did. They rape, execute, torture, etc. They all do bad things.
I've just realised that "nothing ever stays dead" is significant in another way: I'd bet money that Silco will have a significant role in season 2 because Jinx won't be able to free herself of his spectre
I sure hope so. Silco was an amazing presence.
I'm late to the party on this one but I wanted to thank you for making it. It's very well done.
I'd throw on this one thing is that Jinx's experience resonated with my traumatic experiences but especially with other people who have more similar foundations of their trauma. The word that kept coming up was "Believable."
Traumatic experiences don't simply reside in the mind. They reside in the body. Her experiences to me strike me as an wonderfully crafted artistic representation of what it's like to have that fear/hurt still soaked into her nervous system.
Your body's experiences determine your mind's inputs.
It's like trying to solve random BSODs on your computer by working on software when your motherboard or power supply is failing/not solidly hooked up.
It's all red herrings until you go through something (either a person or some new info) that recontextualizes what you've been seeing and you can finally begin to unravel the root of the problem.
Jinx is what happens when someone's hurt that bad and nobody, even the people who genuinely care about her, knows how to be that person for them and they have no idea how to find/retain that person.
Hot take: Danny needed to fail in Essos, to make her arc better. She tried to be friendly and good and it blew up in her face, she got rejected be the people she tried to save.
So now (season 7 and 8) she views every little bit of rejection as treason.
That grief component is such an important one in my mind. Every moment that worsens Jinx is one of intense grief, and with how temperamental she can be, she quickly moves through all the stages of grief in these scenes. Like think about the train it takes to go from "vi, it worked!" to "she's not my sister anymore". Or, on the bridge, from "it's just a good-bye hug" to trying self-annihilate with the grenade. Those are moments that broke her, and it sets the precedent for her being broken the hardest time.
i’m very sorry to hear about your mentor’s passing. he’d be so proud seeing your analysis videos reach so many people! they’ve helped me a lot as a young writer, and i really appreciate what you do.
congratulations on 100k💗
I love how you fixed dany’s ending. Your suggestions were so twisted, but also made so much sense as a frequent viewing of GoT and HotD
Thank you so much for this. First video I've watched from you and 16 minutes in and I've subscribed. You've really helped me with finishing my first novel.
I am so jealous of the alternate reality in which the GoT writers employed some of your writing suggestions. This could’ve been so much more satisfying!
Jinx's "scratches" are her PTSD and inner conflict with morality and the actions she's taken that she recognizes as wrong because she isn't coping with the death of her friends and father figure and she definitely isn't coping with the fact that it's definitively all her fault they're dead, and deep down she knows that to be fact or at least believes it. Jinx's arc is less a focus on mental illness or mental divergence, than it is an inner conflict that evolves into full blown madness and turns her into a monster wearing human flesh. She's in denial even though she knows it's the truth and that's what drove her mad. Because it's all her fault. In the end it's a conflict between Powder and Jinx and at the end of the first season... she's a "Jinx" that's who she is, and it's only when she accepted that fact that she was at her most dangerous and counterintuitively her most stable. Because she knew who and what she was and now had a solid direction to progress, to lash out at and to express herself as her moral compass was realigned toward... Destruction. She can finally be herself, and what's a celebration without the fireworks?
Great point but I don’t think jinx being in denial about her part in their death’s is what drove her to madness. I think that level of trauma was far too great for a little girl to even begin coping with especially since she has severe self esteem issues before. She is PAINFULLY accepting of the fact that she killed them and can’t deal with that. That and Silco’s manipulation definitely drove her so far down
@@rebbyking2823 No she's in denial because she always sees them and tries to potray them as alive in her head (hence the talking and how she invites them in whatever event she's planning). She's in denial because no one made her confront the truth as Vi was captured and couldn't made her confront what happened, Silco must've just "comforted" her and slightly leaned her towards doing his bidding.
I feel like after all this time, people are still only swiping the low-hanging fruit of this Jinx characterization. They just reword what the show specifically tells us in character exposition, for the most part, and just assume that simplicity in what they see in style and structure.
There is no conflict between Powder and Jinx as if they are two warring personalities trapped in the same body. It's all Jinx. It's always been Jinx. Powder was her mask. Jinx is the real character. Madness is only a part of that character, though, not the central theme. Neither is trauma, guilt, or despair.
Jinx's madness isn't because she has PTSD, or because she has abandonment issues, or even because she has always felt left out. Jinx's madness comes from how she finds refuge in destruction. It's a culmination of every small fracture in her psyche, not just a few. She was bullied as a kid for being small. Hell, even Mylo was bigger and more useful in the scrappy childhood lifestyle of Zaun. Jinx was the late bloomer in a household of early risers. That feeling of being on the fringe and being less physically capable is why she started inventing. But like every inventor ever, she doesn't just make stuff up in her child mind that just all comes together on the first, second, third, seventy-eighth attempt. Her inventions fail, and that leads to more bullying, which leads to a sense of inferiority and hopelessness that she knows she shouldn't feel. You can see the defiance and struggle in her when she confronts Vi about Mylo and Vi's conversation about her. She feels like they are right, but also refuses to accept that. But she's a child, and her expression of that is rudimentary.
Events of the series happen, and Jinx kills her entire family outside of Vi. She is scared and horrified by it, and it leaves a deep wound in her mind. She very obviously blames herself for their deaths, but of course there is also the aspect that she no longer has a support system. They make it a point to show us in the burglary scene that Jinx absolutely depends on every other member of her family to pull her through. And now she doesn't have that, and the only one that is still alive has abandoned her because she finally did it. She finally made something that worked. Too well. See, they give us a peek into Jinx's thought process as a kid when they show her getting so excited that her invention worked. People died, she knew that. She wanted that. She didn't want those people to include her family, but she released that bomb knowing full well that it was going to kill people. She did not bat an eye. Some might argue that she made peace with that because her family was on the line and needed help but... there are some problems with that. First, she's all of about 8-10 years old. Can't expect her to have that kind of mental capacity to grapple with becoming a murderer to help out your family. Second, she knows that she always fails. While she refuses to accept that she messes up everything for her family, she still fears it. And fear is shown to be exceedingly crippling for Jinx even as an adult (teenager? not sure). And the Jinx we see in that scene is not afraid. Finally, we arrive to what she says when she sees Vi. "It worked!" Not "Are you okay? Where are the others?" or any other such thing that would show that she has any investment in the consequence of it working, but instead just the desire to share her jubilation that it did, indeed, work.
You see, Powder was not a personality. Powder was, as I said above, a mask. The mask that showed the innocent little girl that Vi always believe Jinx was. That Jinx wore because she thought that's how kids are supposed to act. That doesn't mean that she was always "crazy" - in fact they did a very good job of sticking to the three phases of psychosis (well, the first two). The lines are, to me, meant to illustrate the feeling of being overwhelmed by audiovisual information (heightened sensitivity to light and sound, mixed with an inability to distinguish the physical from the imaginary). And even before the death of her adopted family, we see hints of it (personal opinion, not explicitly stated in the show). Many people just stick to what is seen, but don't forget her biological family was killed. In a fire caused by Piltover's version of the SS, no less. And we can see the psychosis develop slowly. While not standard narration, the POV of their youth is largely through the lens of Jinx. And it's clear the showrunners really want to impart a better understanding of psychosis onto the viewer. So what I feel like they do, is show events how Jinx perceives them, instead of how they actually occur, whenever they can feasibly do so. And these aren't big sweeping changes, either. Things that are said to her, or amongst each other. Things she does, the danger she feels, etc. One of the signs of the first stage of psychosis is a sort of dissociation between what is actually being said (or actually happening) and what is being perceived. I think that while perhaps Milo *is* being an ass-hat to her, the nature of what we here may be a more dramatic and drastic wording or underlying message, because that's how Jinx perceives it. Not simple miscommunication or badly reading between lines, but she actually thinks she heard different words. Not quite hallucination, but rather a misrepresentation. An example being when Mylo blames Jinx and says she's useless, and Vi agrees. What is more likely to have happened is that Mylo was indeed frustrated with Jinx, but said it in a different way - not as accusatory, but instead more of an "it feels like", and while Vi's ultimate response back would be largely the same, the emphasis and pause for the first part weren't actually there. It's Jinx hearing what she heard and then not being able to focus enough to hear anything else (I mean, she heard them from farther away than she was when she missed Vi's part 2, so it doesn't make sense to say she couldn't have heard it otherwise). It's a sign of psychosis as well, first stage.
Stage 2 of psychosis comes after the death of her adoptive family. That's the hallucinations, the discombobulated speech patterns and mannerisms, the delusions, the basically everything severe she ever deals with. So no, the accidental killing of her family is not what set madness out on her and unleashed Jinx... She was already dealing with psychosis. And while her relationship with Silco was problematic for so many reasons I won't list, he gave her the one thing that she did actually need: some degree of acceptance. As a standard viewer, you might see what he did as grooming, or manipulative. To some extent, it may have been. But I don't agree. Silco's altercation with Vander is what drove him to having a psychotic episode. He is a trauma survivor. He saw the signs, and he knew that what she needed most was acceptance. He did use that for selfish reasons, but he also did help her. Like, actually help her. He helped her recognize that she was making it worse, pretending to be someone she wasn't. To see that she was Jinx, and to accept that, and not feel like she's wrong just for existing.
What's missing in this model is stage 3 - recovery. Jinx never fully accepts herself. She still fights it. She still pretends. Why? Because of Vi. Because she still believes that she can get her sister back if she just pretends. If she just becomes the little sister she was supposed to be. And in the battle for Jinx, Jinx kills Silco when she feels like Vi is in danger. She kills the only medium she has for acceptance. She can't let go of Vi, because Vi existing is Jinx's last thread to a time before she felt broken. But by holding onto the idea of Vi, she just keeps breaking. In order to accept herself and what she's done, most importantly what she's lost, she needs to lose one last thing. But losing that thing is not something she can accept, even if that thing hates her. Jinx still sees herself as damaged goods, and therefore she will continue to torture herself. She's just stuck, like a skipping record, endlessly repeating the same stretch of vinyl until it wears down completely and the whole record breaks.
tl;dr There is no Powder, there has only ever been Jinx from the moment we are introduced to the character. Everything we see from her POV is a stage of psychosis. She's a sociopath exposed to two massive traumatic experiences, and will remain trapped in an endless cycle of violent madness until she dies
Great analysis.
All this reminds me of the Korean show Strangers from hell. I know it’s not that known because it’s in a foreign language but the show is so powerful being based on the philosophy of “Hell is other people”that I really wish it would reach more people and be included in such an analysis video. What made the main character spiral into madness and where on the believability scale was his descent into madness is really something I am curious about
This was an incredible video. I love how you breakdown arcane, and explain exactly why its such an amazing show. Thanks for the awesome content!!