When it comes to writing about Arcane Season Two, I feel the best approach is to do a deep dive into one of the shows’ main characters, reflecting how the season as a whole was a brilliant representation of the difficult, messy journey of grief and healing. As expected then, this review will be spoiler heavy, so if you haven’t seen the new season yet I highly recommend watching it before you go any further.
Arcane Season Two is a lot to unpack and one character that endures a considerably difficult journey is Jinx. Initially Season Two Jinx finds herself in the same position as she was at the start of Season One: no family, no friends and – as the song Wasteland by Royal & the Serpent points out – she knows it’s her own fault she’s alone. Because of this, she reverses back to many of her old coping mechanisms. In the first fight between her and Vi in Episode Three, she shows extreme rage, shouting and screaming as she rushes towards her sister. There is no love left within her and she is coping with her pain the only way she knows it, explosively and dangerously (just as Silco taught her when she was much younger and first abandoned)
But this then is interrupted. When Vi is about to kill her, resignation falls across her face. She mutters quietly and defeatedly, ‘I’m glad it’s you’. There is something so subdued about this , it feels very un-jinx like. Then, the little girl Jinx adopts, Isha, saves her by blocking Vi, and there is a beautiful shot of the three of them where the two divided, raging sisters are separated by a little girl, semblative of their lost kinship and childhood. Many see Isha as a version of Powder, the young Jinx before everything fell apart, but I think she is more significant than that, representing instead in this moment the kindness that these sisters could have for each other and was forgotten through (mostly Jinx’s) violent and destructive acts.
This scene is so significant because it represents a hope of healing. They could never be what they once were before everything, but through this new character we see an alternative path of goodness neither character has been shown until now. Sadly, this moment is disrupted by Caitlyn’s blind rage and grief, but it’s a moment that foreshadows the larger journey Jinx must take to heal herself.
After Jinx and Isha have bonded more, we see Jinx’s lab which no longer has the sinister drawings or dolls that represent her past losses. Whilst still distinctly her, it is softer, more wholesome as if the sharp and rough edges of her character are slowly being smoothed over by Isha’s presence, someone who isn’t just good for her, but represents the good that she can do.
This is brilliantly shown when Isha gets captured by the Piltover Enforcers and Jinx’s psychosis returns. Throughout Season One, the animation captured Jinx’s broken mind through terrifying sketches. Whilst we never hear the voices in her head, we could see these scratchy faces haunt her vision. Throughout Season Two, these images are no longer present, but in this moment, the animation creates a very similar effect. It zooms in close to her face, and traps her in the frame, mirroring how she is trapped in her own mind. Voices can be heard– the voices of Silco, her sister– characters which shaped her broken psyche in the first place. In having this moment be very similar to her other breakdowns, but also subtly different, we feel the dread of her relapse; she is once again abandoned, once again someone close to her is gone. However, unlike before where she would have let these thoughts consume her, the distinct absence of those scratchy images reveals her resistance to falling apart again. She is going to fight now; to be the ‘big fat hero’ people have somehow come to regard her as, even if she herself won’t believe it.
But in a gut-wrenching turn of events, Jinx loses Isha. However, instead of relapsing into her old explosive chaos, her reaction is one of defeat, reflective of her growing character despite appearing more broken. Sitting in prison, her hair down, stripped of her gadgets and tools, no shoes, picking at her nails until they bleed… she is vulnerable and exposed. Unlike at the moment of Silco’s death where there were tears ,screaming and pure rage, her physical reaction here is entirely subdued and broken. She is scarcely the Jinx she once was. This is a scene worth focusing on because it reminds me so much of the opening to Season One, where we see a very young Powder who has just found her parents dead. Whereas baby Vi breaks down at this moment, Powder seems to have no more tears left to cry and just stands in silence. This parallel could suggest that while Jinx is far from okay, she is also holding onto who she once was, there is still that child within her that is no longer buried beneath the psychotic villain she played in Season One. She feels utterly broken, but she is also learning to endure this grief in a way that won’t push her into the same cycle of chaos and violence that damaged so much of her life. She is now Jinx AND Powder, rather than simply one or the other.
This is why Season 2 was such a brilliant season – because it developed the characters so beautifully to show their growth and change, whilst not forgetting who they were in the past. People are not blank canvases, we are a mosaic of everything that has happened to us, even the things we appear to forget, or want to forget. Arcane is so amazing for showing its characters as real people, people built by their past and present actions and growing beyond the limits others place on them and the roles they believe they must play. I could write pages and pages about this show, but I will end my review by saying just how much I enjoyed the emotional journey Arcane Season Two took me on.