Emotional responses are part of being a system of biochemistry, and the balance between being overwhelmed by them and tempering them with experience is simply the duality of the dynamic between lower & higher brain function. Lower brain function is raw sensory & survival primary formed through biological nature, whereas higher brain function is contextual & analytical and more directly impacted by environment. It's not just as simple as "nature vs. nurture" or even "emotions vs. logic" so much as it is subconscious survival reflexes vs. conscious survival planning – both of those things can be damaged. Viktor being a healer and eliminating pain to form his commune isn't erasing the joy of the people there, nor is it removing their individuality. Everything that he does with Warwick/Vander shows that he's sacrificing parts of himself to heal them, and to allow them to overcome that and be the people that they were, so that they didn't have to just accept pain as an inescapable structure of control over them – the same way that Zaun didn't have to accept Piltover having control over it.
That type of suffering DESERVES disdain & rejection – not acceptance. That needs to be rejected not JUST by the one suffering from it, but by those with the power to assist in overcoming it – but the help needs to be given by the terms of the one suffering –
which is the entire premise of the series.
Vi can't dictate who Jinx is and make her back into Powder just like Silco can't dictate who Powder is and make her into Jinx. That's why Jayce dictating Viktor's survival by refusing to honor his DNR request and using the Hex Core to keep him alive is a betrayal of trust. Who Viktor & Jinx are as a result of that is something that they both take their own undesired messianic paths to heal from on their own terms. The issue with that is that when you're living with pain that is fundamentally inescapable, you HAVE no true agency over it. Jinx being a jinx is why that gets to the point of being so overwhelming that she makes the "choice" to kill herself, which is only because she doesn't have the strength left to choice another path that is permanently trapped by that suffering. Thus, Ekko intervenes to help show her the path to survival that she can't see herself. It's about not being beholden to something that's inescapable but which is FUNDAMENTALLY a suffering that you can be freed from.
Everything in Viktor's commune is at peace, because they don't have to attempt to have a flawed translation of their own experiences to one another through the limitation of normal human communication tools. They're linked mentally, and they have reached peace through understanding with one another as an extension of being able to be healed from the chronic suffering that Shimmer or debilitating injury wrought on them. It's only the external factors of Jayce refusing to accept that change which creates the conflict by forcing pain back into that – which LITERALLY starts by him arriving and murdering a cripple who's given back the ability to walk.
This escalating to Jayce's near-assassination of Viktor is what leads to everyone's collective pain returning as the parts that had repaired them failed – hence Singed approaching Viktor and framing the issue of needing Warwick's body to keep him alive so that he could maintain the colony that he'd build, while refusing to sacrifice Vander's individuality in order to achieve that. This is why his ascendance is also the burning away of the watercolor memories we saw as Vander was getting back his own individual identity from beneath the pain & survival trauma of the Beast which had overshadowed it, whilst simultaneously being Viktor letting go of his own emotional pain in the form of Skye, and why he would no longer feel the sense of pain over missing their talks together after his full ascension. It's the loss of one man to repair everyone else, and the simultaneous erasure of the overpowering emotion that had prevented him from being saved at the same time.
The post-assassination ascendance into the more robotic shells is an even more deeply networked collective consciousness between everyone in an attempt to prevent that type of misunderstanding from happening again. The complexity here is that it's unclear where that power dynamic would exist, which is why it's co-opted as a tool of Ambessa's conquest in order to position it with a moral alignment that it fundamentally lacks. This only all occurs because everyone's experience of the balance between their own raw sensory data doesn't have equal input from others to help shape it, and communication breaks down to create conflict ...unless there's someone like Mel who has been subconsciously using the Arcane to manipulate everyone's
empathy to align them to one another in spite of what they may have chosen on their own. The series has shown using empathy as a tool to REMOVE that choice from others just as much as it emphasizes the importance of it in forming understanding with one another, but it doesn't manage to show why Mel's application in Season 1 is any less of a violation than Viktor's in Season 2 – as she even subconsciously uses that power to artificially save herself & Jayce from death, and then intentionally uses it as a power to fight with & guard others against Viktor... but it doesn't take a closer look at why it wants one of those to be noble and the other to be anathema.
While
Childhood's End is the foundation for all of these stories – even beyond that there is no reason to think that being somehow disconnected from emotion would bring about that sort of stagnation & apathy that Jayce sees in his post-apocalyptic world, as Vulcans in
Star Trek have existed for over half a century as an examination of how the absence of emotion isn't an absence of individuality or curiosity. Even the introduction of the Borg's assimilation in 1989 is predicated upon the framework that they're feared because it's the overt removal of choice and the erasure of the individual into the will of the collective... but
Arcane's ascendance eliminates emotion rather than individuality – Jayce's presence within ascended Viktor's mind shows that he still sees the mindscape of everyone there as an interconnected individual.
That alone is sufficient as a source of internally unique aspects of a collective which is just fundamentally untrue for how human beings are. Simple things like curiosity and the unknown continue to drive action & purpose, even just as much as enjoying the fact that every sunrise & sunset are still unique experiences. There is no sudden erasure of purpose when insight into others erases the core source of conflict. This is why it's important to address what empathy is and even what a sense of belonging, community, and individual even are in the first place and how this is territory that has been DEEPLY explored any why it's important to look at the foundation of those questions & what's been explored by them.
The balance of those individual experiences and the attempts to try to share them with one another despite the functional limitations that we have as human beings is what relationships & community are. It's driven by an artificially externalized recreation of the singular individual existence that we are thrust into when we lose the non-dual relationship that we have with our mother upon birth. We stop being a single shared biological entity and become separate individuals. This is why the Japanese novel, film, & game
Parasite Eve tackle this facet of individuality & the fact that even within our bodies
all the way down at a singular cellular level, we are a collective symbiotic existence that ultimately has to defer to the will of one for the benefit of all, and why it's focused around representing that entity through the Mitochondrial Eve, and attempting to give birth to the Ultimate Lifeform that has the Mitochondria take charge over the Nucleus as the dominant driving will from a sub-cellular level to alter that fundamental relationship. This has links to familial lineage as Mitochondria are inherited only from the mother, so the real world Mitochondrial Eve was a real person who existed ~155,000 years ago and is just the Mitochondrial-Most Recent Common Ancestor of current humanity, which scientifically is like how there is also a Y-Chromosomal Adam as a Y-Chromosome Most Recent Common Ancestor but where that goes back ~200,000-300,000 years). All of humanity is already a massively extended familial group, and we choose to focus on human beings as the scale for when individuality matters – but that's not necessarily an absolute truth about life or existence – but it is important when looking at how we experience life, but especially in regards to growing up and what we experience about the world through the lens we have.
This is why early childhood development that leads to the various traumas from parental loss when child's minds are still developing create the types of traumas that the Season 1 of
Arcane very acutely depicts. The trauma & ways that this shapes both individual developmental relationships like Powder's strongly dependent relationship upon Vi after their parents die, and it manifests differently based on their age & the relationship dynamic in which they exist, which is part of a wider social relationship between Piltover & the Undercity. The constraints of that as a mechanism to cause pain and the forced acceptance of being underneath the authority figure and forced into a life of illness & suffering is a result of a breakdown of trust & communication – hence why Mel's subconscious manipulation of the empathy of everyone around her is what starts to shape the entire city into HER vision of Piltover even when that doesn't agree with what Jayce & Viktor want. There's pushback and conflict around that interconnected relationship that is messy & complicated, and ultimately is trapped by terminal illness and other suffering that they're attempting to solve – as Viktor's own health is an extension of the fact that he grew up disabled and unhealthy because he's from the Undercity, and like with the initial catalyst to bar Jayce from the Academy, the conflict is around the limitations of individuals to be able to have the space or the authority to communicate the importance of their needs to one another in a way that is appropriately recognized.
The limitations of how we interface with one another is something that
Ghost in the Shell: SAC explored over 20 years ago in overt detail, given that the Section 9 cyborgs can not
only brain dive to sync to one another directly, but can also directly share raw sensory data with all of the built-in individual emotional responses as well over a digital network. The artificial intelligences in the Tachikomas are all identical and synchronize all of their data every night, and yet they still develop individuality within their respective shells simply through minor differences in those physical forms shaping their individual curiosity. It emphasizes that speaking and language are different type of communication because they're not effective data transfer tools. It's all about the phenomenon of a copy to manifest even in the absence of any original, and also for an individual to still be able to come about despite the complete interconnection of collective experience. It fundamentally emphasizes that perspective of what & when an individual exists isn't always cut & dry, but also dives
monumentally DEEPLY into the core history & philosophy of all of those concepts.
That's why, not only is sudden emergence of indifference & apathy inaccurate in a collective, or the absence of emotion or empathy something that would vanish within an individual inaccurate just from a real-world neurobiological & psychological perspective – even from a fictionalized standpoint this is fundamentally antithetical to the core existential points about this reunification being symbolic of humanity overtly no longer being attached to the illusion of choice that individual pain forces us to experience that leaves us forever trapped as individual children desperate to be understood, but lacking the tools to achieve true understanding. That's why the novel that established this idea is literally called,
"Childhood's End" as it represents an uncomfortable and alien transcendence of humanity into a form that the adults are left rejecting as their children are collectively unified and move beyond them. The conflict is because the adults are being left behind, and so the inherent power dynamic is unclear, as it's not the adult's place to enforce a power dynamic to force the psychically empowered children to disconnect and live a human existence the way they did. They evolve into a hive mind that is fundamentally different from what came before, and leave the last adults behind on Earth in a way that permanently transcends the existential pain that we have at birth.
It frames existence in a way that forces you to understand that all of your own cells are a unified collection of individual living things. The way in which we choose to categorize what makes a life individual from one another is DEEPLY complicated, and doesn't have a clear answer the deeper you dig into the foundation of those existential questions both from a philosophical and from a biological standpoint. This gets even more messy when you start to marry those themes together with MAGIC the way that
Arcane does, and also why it's important to fully understand the existential question that you're attempting to address if this is the form of story that you want to use in order to do that.
While narratives like
Neon Genesis Evangelion focused on a similar narrative conflict about the souls & human experience where the core mechanic of the Evangelions is that they are created from the souls of the child's mother, so that when Shinji or Asuka are put into the plugs where they exist inside a womb-like liquid environment, that non-dual synchronization is what allows them to operate the Evangelion as though it was their own body, as well as why when it goes berserk – it's a schism between the body, mind, & soul of the child from that of the Evangelion made from their mother. The entire series is focused deeply on helplessness, abandonment, depression, and the emotional inability to accept oneself and value that's necessary in order to become an adult. The A.T. field is the concept of what separates the soul and individuality from one being and another at an existential level (and why it's still Japanese slang around introverts who struggle to open up and connect). It overtly looks at what a collective unification of everything would be and how the inability to recognize others is what erases the self – but that's only because in this context, the mind gives form to the self, and the pure unification of everything is indistinguishable from nothingness, which is why Shinji's self-acceptance comes about in the rejection of the Human Instrumentality Project. Even just listening to the presentation from that finale is just... perfect because it's presented as an explanation.
In
Rebuild of Evangelion, that same core message is re-examined where the answer is that you just have to grow up, and make your own life, rather than being constantly controlled by the circumstances around you or shaped by those pains. It's not JUST acceptance, and it's not just control either. It's a messy answer because it's an answer about the human experience, and those solutions aren't a one-size-fits all, but that the answers to those questions have to be VERY specifically considered in the context of the narrative message that they're telling. The message of
Evangelion of rejecting that collective ascension and
Childhood's End of embracing it are both correct, because they're utilizing the framework of that existential narrative structure to examine different experiences that have radically different perspectives that you have to take into account to understand why those paths are appropriate and not contradictory. in
Evangelion, Shinji doesn't have choice and is an asset of his father and others to be the catalyst to the Human Instrumentality Project, whereas in
Childhood's End the parents have to accept that their children are something else that has changed beyond them and that they cannot constrain into the form of what humanity has been before simply because they're uncomfortable with it.
These are a deeply fundamental and extensively explored concept that takes radically different approaches to what the end answer is, and how that interconnects to experiences of trauma as diametrically opposed conflict, and inescapable existential isolation.
Final Fantasy VII marries magic & science when exploring a blurring lines of identity between Cloud & Sephiroth as they're unified by Jenova's cells drawing them together in Reunion. They & their mother are a singular existence and Cloud as a Sephiroth Copy even as Sephiroth becomes the will that controls Jenova's cells is a direct extension of the scientific concepts around existential loss where parts of this were split out into
Parasite Eve which shows more cinematic influence from John Carpenter's The Thing for alien assimilation even as
FFVII maintains a much closer link to how that all plays out, and why Cloud's battle is one with his own trauma the same as Sephiroth's as they're both victims of tragedy and their mother dying leaving them with an irreparable rift – but that existential ambiguity is what makes Sephiroth's role one where if he has the power to create a world that's free from that pain, not doing that would be an injustice. Hence why the
FFVII Remake Project has to re-tread those concepts from a perspective that's more complex given that it's a story that's been told and the limitations of free will are fundamentally different from the original work, but at its core there is a nihilistic anguish from an eternal existence being unable to return to the Planet in death, which fuels the conflict with the Remnants in
Advent Children as well as with the Gi and Black Materia in
Rebirth. that have a relationship to the Planet as a means to be reunited to a lost mother, as well as reunified with the Lifestream and the lives of all those in order to allow those things to persist, rather than to reject that pain and erase everyone else simply as a means of self-soothing to reject a trauma, rather than to allow that to fade into memory.
Even as those science fiction & psychic themes became more & more intertwined, those are the same things that
StarCraft used to frame the differences of the psychic interconnection of the Protoss in juxtaposition to the assimilating Hive Mind of the Zerg as the result of the Xel'naga attempting to create a perfect mind & perfect body and then to unify those into a new existence, where the psychic capabilities of the Terrans through Sarah Kerrigan being abandoned results in that self-justified wrath & indiscriminate individual dominance of Kerrigan over the swarm to become a dark tool where the person that you loved gets left for dead by someone who betrayed them, placed into a Chrysalis by an antagonistic force, and is then reborn into a strange, cold, alien with unparalleled power – exactly like Viktor, except that Kerrigan maintains all of her cunning & emotional capacity and wields it like a weapon, and she is no longer who she once was by the end of BroodWar such that her victory FEELS cathartic but that conquest is ultimately a loss... except that the Xel'naga still represent an even greater threat where that power may be a necessary tool in order to overcome an even greater system of control – which leaves the end of the original game expansion brilliantly ambiguous such that Terran, Protoss, & Zerg factions all have an ending that's neither a total win or a loss, simply an upending of the status quo that throws all of those systems and alliances into question.
This is where it's important to understand the role of the Atheist God in dismantling systems of power where there is an absolute being. If you want the thing fighting against that system of control like Cloud, Kerrigan, or Jayce to be the good guy... they have to take up the role of Asura rising against Indra – which is about a transcendental escape from a system that necessitates creating a cycle that gives artificial purpose and agency to suffering itself. It's the Samsara cycle of Buddhism and the reason that modern Japanese heroes shifted away from being the prodigious Indra-like character who represents the ideal form of ascended perfection, and embraced the gritty rebellious underdog standing against them in order to bring about something completely different. This can't JUST be a return to the status quo, but it typically represents a total dismantling of the world & conflict and presents a complete apocalypse that ushers in an advent to something that is somewhat unknown or unknowable. This is the what you have in the endings of
Princess Mononoke,
Final Fantasy VII,
Evangelion, and multiple other stories where the existential trauma of fighting against the injustices of a world that no longer exists in the way that damaged you and overcoming the reaction to perpetuate that cycle of harm upon others, and shattering the mechanism by which it is able to do that is fundamentally altered.
Arcane follows that path... but it reverts things into the way that they were before simply by unifying against a common enemy without understanding what it is. Ambessa is utilizing it as a weapon, but how does Viktor exist beyond that. Viktor's ascension to perfection REMOVES suffering and eliminates this false dependency upon it... and that's a path to Enlightenment, whereas Jayce subverting that is creating a reality in which needless suffering happens in order to present the illusion of choice in a way that doesn't truly create healing or new opportunity, which is exemplified in the way that it closes out the story with Jinx and her barely maybe ambiguous fate. In order to follow that model, EVERYTHING would need to be systemically altered such that it cannot return to how it was before. In
Princess Mononoke, both the Forest God AND Iron Town are destroyed, in the ending of
Final Fantasy VII Meteor, Holy, AND the Lifestream all come together to leave a wholly different world behind where life eventually returns but humanity's presence is unclear aside from the sounds of children's laughter.
Asura's Wrath being a stylized adaptation of those religious narratives is all about obliterating a system of manipulation that used humanity as a resource and used his daughter, and while it killed him, she was still free to live and he was finally free of the framework that had wrought that cyclical system of pain.
Sometimes there IS no perfect answer, which is how themes like this continued into games like
Bloodborne examining the existentially inescapable isolation of the Great Ones being unable to have offspring who aren't just still themselves – meaning they're always abandoned aging orphans longing for connection to others that's impossible to maintain. Thus the closest thing that they have is manifesting the reality from within a dream whilst using another being as a host for that dream. No matter which path you take to free yourself for that cycle, you're forced to give something up, your friends, your mind, or your existential humanity. All three can be motivated by love or malice, and there is no perfect path. There is a concession for its story that even amidst the incredible and fantastically cosmic struggle, that this same existential absolute is a defining truth that's fundamental to the human experience, and you have to decide which form of that acceptance & which form of that rejection matches to your understanding of those concepts – because the narrative is specific to the role each player takes. It doesn't have an absolute narrative... but even then, the core framework of what exists in those states is still in direct opposition to what
Arcane is attempting to frame them as when it comes to the experience of trauma.
Arcane eliminates emotional anguish of pain that's ultimately unnecessary suffering through this collective consciousness. While it frames this as indifference & apathy, if it's truly a singular unified mind – that existential isolation is either a Nothingness in the sense of Zen, or it is an inescapable existential loneliness where that emotional anguish is still all-consuming. If there are still individual shells through which everyone exists in an interconnected network – then that's not a loss of what fundamentally defines people as individuals, as curiosity allows the interest and examination of purpose even within a singularly shared collective will, and the only division is whether or not to accept that scale of compartmentalization of what the individual is. Freedom from being bound into a position of accepting the false necessitation of suffering is also breaking the cycle of Samsara that represents the path to Enlightenment which is BEYOND the realm of Heaven where pleasure still ultimately dictates action out of a self-focused cling to comfort. Indra becomes the villain, because there is no one more selfishly attached to authority & pleasure than the King of Heaven... but while ascended Viktor is terrifyingly alien, he is also none of those things.
The core of Viktor's story is about looking at the relationship of the power dynamic where when pain has power over you, it has the power to define who you are... which means that you don't have any agency of choice, only the illusion of choice because your pain is individually unique. Viktor is always the one moving away from weapons, and grounding things in how the desire to do great that they failed to do good. But Jayce is chasing the rejection of his own failure and seeking to undo the harm of not honoring the human Viktor's choice of wanting the Hexcore destroyed. It's arbitrarily drawing a line of where individual agency exists to who Viktor WAS –
not to who he is.
This is the same issue that exists in
StarCraft with Kerrigan as the Queen of Blades no longer being the same as Sarah Kerrigan when she was human. There is an attachment to the last HUMAN version of someone as a valid individual... which rejects anything that doesn't conform to that version of them from someone who was close to them. This is fundamentally the flaw in perspective that Season 1 of
Arcane ends on with Violet & Silco in regards to who Jinx is always being defined in an absolute in terms of their relationship TO her – not to who she is on her own.
This is in juxtaposition to Ekko where he sees who she ISN'T, and saves her because he recognizes who she still COULD be. Jinx fundamentally exists in a way where she HAS to continue to grow through the things that happen to her – including Isha's death.
She is focused on breaking the cycle by removing herself from becoming a tool through which that pain continues to repeat... because those are things she doesn't have the power to change or stop by any other means.
This ISN'T TRUE of characters like Singed or Viktor. They have that power over death and suffering, so there has to be a framework for looking at that in a completely different strata of existential conflict, but which still carries all of the same threads into the perspectives of individual choice, rebellion, acceptance, and justice. While Singed saves his daughter from death, that's a mixed bag for the reasons that I mentioned in my last tl;dr post, whereas with Viktor... he's not in the wrong. Assimilating everyone is a better solution that allowing Ambessa to murder them. He's forcing understanding with the conflict, but instead that's being framed as being her own tool, despite the fact that the second he's ascended, there would be NOTHING that could stop him from assimilating her as well and he has no emotional attachment or logical reason to do that, especially as she represents the core of that emotional blindness that he's apparently attempting to erase. The motives & elements of what's taking place don't add up, and so the ways in which they're being pitted against one another or brought to resolution don't carry weight or even accurately represent the themes of the story.
While one can learn to appreciate adversity – pain & conflict aren't necessary for growth. They don't make you who you are, they simply define the things that you aren't by what you learn from the experience with them... so long as it doesn't kill you. As Brandon Sanderson's
Oathbringer puts it,
“Ten spears go to battle and nine shatter. Did the war forge the one that remained? No, Amaran. All the war did was identify the spear that would not break.” Pain, conflict, suffering, & disability can inform who you are, but they're not a necessary part of yourself that you need to maintain. It's why the fully able-bodied Jayce telling the life-long disabled Viktor that he didn't need to try to fix the parts of himself that were broken rings especially hollow – but especially since he literally murdered a healed cripple, and is overly focused on now having a broken leg seemingly for the first time as a thematic mirror to what Viktor was... while still not understanding that he can't go back and retroactively make that choice for who Viktor was. He can't preach acceptance whilst simultaneously embodying rejection.
While acceptance is important there's no need to over-ascribe the fact that when healing is possible that improvement for quality of life IS THE EXACT PROGRESS & PURSUIT OF GOOD THAT BOTH JAYCE & VIKTOR WORKED FOR. Viktor literally healed Huck and removed that debilitating suffering that Shimmer left him with, because the circumstances he ended up in were wretched, painful, and inescapable – and he got there because he was attempting to escape the helplessness of always being afraid of everyone abusing a power dynamic against him, and Vander was no longer around to provide community level support to protect him. Jayce removed the agency of ANYONE who came to Viktor asking to be healed, or anyone he ascended who was voluntarily willing. How or why should be be allowed to make that choice for so many others? When there is an absolute binary conflict between the two opposed perspectives that are the core fundamental opposites of the nature of reality... you have to get those Indra-Asura dynamics correct, otherwise the messages of your narrative will end up being self-contradicting once you look a bit further below the surface.
That's why this particular piece of the writing in the show fumbled the landing and makes it difficult for me to have a conversation about the message it's trying to convey because the small details end up poking holes in those same values that it's attempting to reinforce – mostly because it's vastly oversimplified a really pivotal existential examination of the core human experience that's been... exceedingly heavily explored over the last half-century in media, and makes this take on it feels awkwardly amateur and naive – amidst what is otherwise a DEEPLY well-understood examination of those human themes that does some of those other facets of it better than any other piece of media.
