Episode Discussion - Act 3, Ep 9 - The Monster You Created

This show is inspired.

There is love for the craft and the product absolutely saturating every single scene.

The cinematography is completely breathtaking. Every single still from this show is poster promotional ready. There is no weak link in the chain here.

The dialogue, the world building, the character development. Everyone has their unique motivations and you can find empathy for each character. The ability to portray gay characters, as well as strong female characters without directly drawing attention to it is such a welcome sight. The writing doesn't bash you over the head and beg for brownie points for being inclusive. As in real life. The people.. are just people. None of the characters are specifically defined by being gay, or being a 'strong woman'. They just "are". And to me that breathes respect into the characters. Giving them personality and agency and story motivations that have nothing to do with those traits.

The fight scenes are fantastic. While short, each scene was very generous in explaining power dynamic in fights as well as silent story telling with facial expression and obviously each fight has plenty of eye candy. Visually stunning. Every impact is satisfying and every fight has an enormous amount of rewatch value and hype.

I wont get in to the relationship dynamic between Silco and Jinx, and how Jinx's mental issues are presented respectfully, but with gravity. Because there are a ton of people that have already covered that better than I

And I'm not great at analyzing shows, i'm fairly easy to impress, but one thing that struck me while watching were the mirrored story beats. I'm sure there are more than this but I really liked that Silco sees himself as abandoned by his 'brother' Vander early in life and it shaped his life trajectory, and we see that again as Powder feels abandoned by Vi and it shapes her arc.

We see the same mirrored beat again. As we saw in the episode when Powder was abandoned. Initially when Vander is captured, Vi and crew are on the up and up and are about to escape when Powder, while well intentioned, does what she thinks is right and releases her empowered monkey bomb, killing her friends and father and ultimately ruining the would be successful mission.

Fast forward to the last episode and we see that despite some troubles, Peace will be brokered between Piltover and the Nation of Zaun. The overarching goal that Silco had is finally coming to fruition. And yet we close the season on another 'would be' successful mission tarnished by Jinx with her rocket to the capitol building where the peace deal is being reached. I absolutely LOVE it. I'm so impressed how that was written. There's a beautiful poetic rhythm to it.

/r/arcane Thread