#about brothers but this is also Vi and Jinx coded :((

[clonerightsagenda]

Arcane S2E5

Oh hey it's the guy whose jaw Vi broke last season. He's got a metal jaw now. I relate to him.

Vi looks like she's doing awesome. Of course living in the underground she's constantly bombarded by either people cosplaying her sister or her ex establishing military law.

Are these drunken hallucinations, or does Vi also have elements of her sister's psychosis, and she just wasn't under the right kind of stressors to bring it out before?

Oh man Mel your skin has gone so ashy, have you been in a coma with no lotion for the entirety of the timeskip

What exactly did the doctor do to Jinx to save her life? She's corpse pale, and I don't like the look of those veins around her eyes. Did she die?

Journey into the transgender cave (trans flag walls)

Sibling behavior

Singed and Hilbert should hang out

That's… not really her brother is it

Nice, Mel caught on quick and immediately went for the kill, she internalized at least a little bit of being mommy's little monster. Not everyone could immediately smash the head of someone who looks like their brother

Oh hey, Mel has magic powers? Iirc she wasn't a LoL character pre-show so I figured she'd be normal

Unrelated but having rewatched s1 where Jinx was driven to a jealous frenzy over Caitlyn and Vi standing next to each other I'm surprised she threw in that "I hope you at least got to have gay sex before I kill you <3" comment. You'd think she'd be in more of a love loses mood.

Oh god I can only imagine how many people are now thirsting over scarless young Silco. Young Vander on the other hand is objectively a downgrade imo

Not sure how I feel about Vander and Silco knowing Vi and Jinx's mom beforehand. I kind of liked them just picking up random kids off the street rather than doing it because 'hey I know that kid'. Vander in the spirit of community mutual support, Silco because he has problems

Appreciate that Warwick comes with color coded mood signifiers

I'm sure this one moment of the sisters happily hugging their werewolf zombie dad is the last hope spot for the next 4 episodes. Since I just read Anne Carson's Antigone and it is On My Mind I'm thinking about the chorus while all the characters rush offscreen hoping to make it in time to stop the tragedy (they won't. it's a tragedy. they were all doomed from the beginning) going "we're still here, we're all fine, we're standing in the nick of time"

Aaaaaaand nick over, we are now in the industrial chamber of doom

Oh hey when the transgender furry mentioned a good doctor I thought she meant Singed, not Viktor. Well, enjoy your new legs I guess, elf council guy. Possibly evil legs? Because all prosthetics in this show are Sinister except Jayce's mom's fingers. Actually Jinx's finger is fine. You heard it here folks: fingers! the one body mod the showrunners don't think is too scary

Jayce is back from the shadow realm. Is he… glitching?

Jayce what the fuck man

Wait if Jayce was in some weird nightmare dimension that he just popped out of was he... in.... hammerspace........... (I'll see myself out)

[shimmerandfists]

Just saw a good post about Amanda's comment "Vi found family in Caitlyn". It's got a very Caitlyn critical which is fine tbh, they made a lot of good points I agree with. I dislike how some things in season 2 were handled, I don't mind Caitlyn as a character, she definitely could've used some different narrative choices and more screen time though.

More under the cut

She is comparable to Silco and Ambessa inarguably. Like not an opinion, it's used to tell the narrative and move the story in canon. This isn't good or bad although I consider it good because I like the story personally.

She does move Vi, knowingly or otherwise, to leave the rest of her family and her city. Once again, not good or bad this just like objectively true. The actions she takes takes Vi further away from it all and she did sign Vi up for the enforcers before talking with her and before she even presented the badge to her.

That's the main point from the post, Caitlyn takes Vi's family not gives her a new one in herself.

My question from a ViJinx perspective is why does Vi need to find family in another blue haired blue eyed girl who is also a parallel in parts to Jinx 😭 A good portion of ViJinx canon material is the comparisons they use between Jinx and Caitlyn.

It's too easy bro and why are we comparing Jayce and Viktor as brothers and Vi and Jinx as sisters. Two are literal sisters and the other two are fiercely shipped and arguably romantically canon.

Genuinely, we can have a story with sisters written normally in a familial sense and not have them romantically coded. It's been done. ViJinx is not that and I think the writers realized at some point, damn we kind of wrote these two sisters in a romantic way. We have to backpedal this and the backpedaling kind of sucks.

Caitlyn and Jinx are very similar in a lot of surface level scenes but they are also very similar in more meaningful ways to Vi. It blows my mind that Vi absolutely sees traits of Powder and Jinx in Caitlyn. The narrative flow of her spending 7 years yearning after her sister she feelings like she abandoned only to be found by a person who is a mirror to that sister. To find out Powder is dead in many ways but Jinx is still alive. For Caitlyn to show so many traits of the Powder Vi lost while Jinx stands there unrecognizable in Vi's eyes.

For Jinx to make so many comments and be so jealous of Caitlyn stealing her sister from her. Which, considering how things went she was actually so right for that one, she did go about it the uh wrong way though. I just can't get over the fact that Caitlyn at that point was more Powder coded than Jinx was in Vi's eyes and that was probably why she was naturally drawn to Caitlyn 😭

Here's a nice video showing some similarities between Jinx and Powder and Caitlyn:

I'm not really looking to debate anyone which is why I made my own post. And because like, from a non shipping perspective I know a lot of people don't like to see incest and get the knee jerk disgust reaction. They also don't like to see some, and I'm not saying mine are, valid takes on the ViJinx coded stuff in Arcane simply because it implies incest.

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

one episode from finishing arcane s1, and I’m frankly surprised that it’s had compelling things to say about deconstructing found family tropes, and how trauma shapes the characters’ relationship with and expression of familial bonds. this also has an interesting intersection with queerness

for a show that’s explicitly been billed and marketed as a queer story, with front and center queer romances, the actual writing for these romances (caitvi, jayceviktor) is leaning more on implications. where in any other show you might think the tension and jealousies aren’t intentional, or are just queer bait, which is very patently not the case here. they even go out of their way to establish a couple potential het dynamics for these characters, where again, in most other stories, you might expect those to be the real endgame relationships. (caitlyn and jayce’s initial friendship is introduced a lot like an opposite sides of the tracks style romance) the character writing isn’t particularly deft imo, but it’s always pretty deliberate. and thats further elevated by the animated medium, where you know that even the smallest gesture and glance on the characters' part was put there on purpose. the result is a show that's very aware of its own subtext

the juxtaposition of silco and vander referring to each other as (former ig) brothers, so early in the show, with the most intense homoerotic subtext in their dynamic. the tie that has to the long history of queer coded relationships in fiction using similar sibling specific terms as a euphemism, but also to the implication that neither of them seem to have had any real family anyway

vander seems to be the least flawed parental figure in the entire series, but it’s still pretty explicit that he failed those kids, and even if things didn’t go so poorly, the sort of family and safety he could provide for them in a street gang just wasn’t going to necessarily result in any of them being particularly well adjusted. meanwhile silco has been pretty much overtly grooming jinx. everyone calls her his daughter but I highly doubt they have ever had a single normal interaction. meanwhile during the scene where jinx is being… operated on ig… she hallucinates that vi has replaced her with caitlyn, and is clearly jealous meanwhile caitlyn is vi’s love interest. I don’t even think there’s been any real incestuous subtext between jinx and vi (edit: nvm I watched the s1 finale lol) but it makes sense that jinx wouldn’t have the emotional context to really differentiate relationship types, considering all she really knows is her dynamic with silco

most of the characters don’t seem able to really process familial bonds, or have a real idea of where the boundaries should be. how to categorize any of their relationships. and it dovetails well with the theme of queerness in a heteronormative society (not even necessarily homophobic— I have no concept of how accepted it is for people to be gay in this world. could be pretty inconsequential) resulting in romantic feelings being misidentified. and how all of those messy feelings and confusion would realistically be very present in your average trauma riddled found family dynamic