Visions of Vulnerability: The Artistic Depiction of Psychological Decline in Arcane
In recent years, the entertainment industry has begun to delve more deeply into the once taboo topic of mental health and its complexities, expanding the representation of characters with mental illness beyond the two-dimensional caricatures that such screen representations began with. Riot Games’ animated Netflix series Arcane (Christian Linke & Alex Yee, 2021-) stands out as a compelling addition to this discussion, particularly through its creative representation of one character’s increasing mental instability (Fig. 1). In this blog, I will analyze how Arcane draws from real-life manifestations of psychosis in order to create a visceral illustrated experience through the psychological deterioration of the innocent Powder into her unstable new identity, Jinx.
Fig. 1 - The Netflix series Arcane (Christian Linke & Alex Yee, 2021-).
Released on Netflix in 2021 and directed by Pascal Charrue and Arnaud Delord, Arcane follows the story of two sisters, Vi and Powder. Born amidst the tumultuous clash between the utopian city of Piltover and its oppressed underbelly, Zaun, they found themselves embroiled in a war for independence fueled by conflicting views on magical technological innovation. Originally inseparable, Vi and Powder relied on each other growing up together in Zaun despite their differing interests and personalities. However, a freak accident involving one of Powder’s inventions drove a permanent wedge between them, killing their childhood friends along with their adoptive father and leaving both sisters harboring resentment. As they grew older, Vi began to align herself more with Piltover by working closely with one of its enforcers, Caitlyn, in order to investigate the growing unrest in Zaun. Meanwhile, Powder adopted the name “Jinx” and began to descend into madness working with her newly adopted father-figure and infamous crime lord of Zaun, Silco.
Arcane’s ability to evoke empathy and connect viewers with Jinx’s psychological struggles begins with the way it allows viewers to experience her point of view. The programme establishes visuals associated with Jinx’s psychotic episodes to be childlike scribbles flashing across the screen and defacing flashbacks of characters from her past, as well as choppy transitions in the middle of scenes with the addition of auditory distortion. The noted absence of these kinds of visuals usually indicates Jinx channeling the buried presence of Powder, both in an intentional and manipulative way and also in unintentional moments of clarity. Jinx’s scenes are meant to be jarring and unpredictable as she constantly pivots between her two identities, allowing the viewer to see that even she is not sure of who she is anymore. This emerging contrast is utilized to its full extent in the final scene of the show’s finale episode, “The Monster You Created”, where Jinx kidnaps Vi, Caitlyn, and Silco, holding them all hostage at a deranged tea party of her own creation. The climax of this internal conflict can be observed when Vi shouts out to Jinx just as she is about to shoot Caitlyn, imploring her to remember her past and the people she once loved, sending her over the edge into a psychotic episode--a prime example of the emotionally evocative style Arcane approaches the depiction of Jinx’s fragile psyche with.
Fig. 2 - A still from Arcane Episode 9.
To understand why the representation of Jinx’s mental breakdown was so effective, we can look to real-life examples of visual manifestations of psychosis. A study conducted by Rachel Lev-Wiesel and Tal Shvero analyzed the effect of schizophrenia on patients’ self-figure drawings, searching for indicators of anxiety, aggression, hallucinations, and reality distortion through the sketches. The study attributed numbers (via a points system) to visuals traits like hollowed or shadowed eyes/eyebrows, large emphasized ears, disconnected body lines, and stick-like fingers, which were then used to determine if the patients had schizophrenia based on how highly they scored (Wiesel and Shvero 2003, 14). Almost all of these traits appear in the scribbled drawings that are shown during Jinx’s moments of mental instability throughout the programme, something that is not entirely surprising considering how her mental health struggles correlate to real-life experiences of mental illnesses. Although it is hard to give a fictional character an exact diagnosis, Arcane shows the audience very clearly that Jinx experiences intense paranoia and anxiety with the way that she seems to be constantly on edge and distrusting of those around her, even with the people she trusts most deep down, Silco and Vi. When it comes to her more intense psychological issues, the extremities of emotion and hallucinations Jinx experiences seem to indicate that she struggles with something similar to schizophrenia.
Fig. 3 - A still from Arcane Episode 9.
Wiesel and Shvero found through their study that schizophrenia patients’ figure drawings were noticeably different than the control group, often exhibiting exaggerated features relating to the kinds of hallucinations they experienced (Wiesel and Shvero 2003, 16). For Jinx, we know that she experiences both visual and auditory hallucinations, which manifest in the scribbled drawings appearing over the memories of her loved ones having exaggerated features, most often their eyes and ears. We can see this especially during Jinx’s intense mental breakdown in the finale episode, with exaggerated shadowed eyebrows appearing on the scribbled Milo (Fig. 2), flashes of darkened eyes, and fragmented outlines of large spiky ears appearing on the scribbled Vander (Fig. 3), and many of the aforementioned traits manifesting in the monsters that torment Jinx as Vi unearths memories of their past (Fig. 4). This effect provides a heartbreaking illustration of the influence of psychosis on a person’s mind and memory, distorting the image of the people they once cared about to an unrecognizable point. It is, therefore, no wonder the onslaught of these hallucinations sends Jinx into a frenzy, the constantly shifting visuals and warped audio in these scenes showing how Jinx is not even safe in her own mind. You can barely figure out what is happening in the scene until Jinx finally snaps and begins wildly firing her gun, after which both the viewer and Jinx regain their senses and look around with baited breath to see what damage was caused.
Fig. 4 - A still from Arcane episode 9.
Overall, Arcane provides no shortage of opportunities to understand complex mental health struggles in a hauntingly immersive way, drawing from real-life manifestations of mental illness to show a glimpse inside the fragmented and deteriorating mind of Jinx through the expressivity of animation. Though elements like dialogue and environment design are vital factors in telling a character’s story, Arcane proves that expanding on intricate issues through visual means and inviting audiences to connect with them only requires a brief opportunity for the audience to understand these alternate points of view.
**Article published: February 14, 2025**
References
Lev-Wiesel, Rachel, and Tal Shvero. 2003. "An Exploratory Study of Self-figure Drawings of Individuals Diagnosed With Schizophrenia." The Arts in Psychotherapy 30, no. 1 (2003): 13-16.
Biography
Sydney Smith is a recent graduate from the University of Texas at Dallas, Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. Her main passion and focus is on visual effects within all different forms of media, from real-time VFX for video games to high-quality rendered VFX for movies and animation. Earlier versions of this text were developed with the help of Dr. Christine Veras and peers from the Animation Studies course.