Jinx's Hallucinations, Or Lack Of Them, Are Retrospectively A Glaring Symptom Of The Problems Season

god i know im just drawing the same scene literally everyone else is in my basic af style but i wanted to put together a print of the boys because i am unwell :') so here's one more meager addition to the pile. godspeed jayvik nation.

The moral of the arcane season two act three is that if you're suicidal you should just go ahead and kill yourself

My other arcane hot take is that if anyone in the jayvik pair is asexual, it's jayce. Have you ever actually seen that man initiate a sexual encounter in the show? No. He just rolls with it when it happens. Mel kissed him first. He never takes the lead. He's either a sub, asexual, or possibly both. Also? His name rhymes with ace. I rest my case.

My hot take is that Viktor is not ace, or more specifically, that he was never written to be. You can't write a character as asexual if you don't even know what the word means. That would be like serving me a latte with oat milk instead of soy and saying it IS soy because all of them are just Alternative Milks to you. You got the thing confused with another thing because you don't actually know anything about either of them and as such, no, I do not believe either of them informed your writing process at all.

let him cook ✨️

Everyone talks about the angst of ye olden times vaschete and the coffee shop AU but i love the little puppy versions of them you draw sometimes. The baked potato and crinkled tissue are so cute!

The Adventures of Baked Potato and Crinkled Tissue

I had a sudden vision: two psychics burdened with prophetic visions who illustrate what they see in their chosen mediums. Yves paints exclusively in blue, while Tim's tool of choice is a ballpoint pen. Yves' technical skill far surpasses Tim's, as someone said to have been born a prodigy, but Tim finds that art soothes his endless anxiety and as such enjoys art much more than Yves does and is much less prone to artist's block. One day they both have visions of the end of the world, and so it's up to them to figure out what happens and how to stop it. Also, Tim has a massive and painfully obvious crush on Yves, but Yves is far too jealous of Tim's quick improvement to realise it.

I have nothing against platonic/queerplatonic jayvik but every time someone tries to explain why it would somehow be better than romantic jayvik all the reasons they give literally just also apply to romantic jayvik. Like any profound thoughts you have about the nature of their bond still apply if they happen to also kiss about it

My sonic OC, Hylic the Speed Demon. The fun thing about chalk is that you can easily edit it into normal lineart, and I really like how sketchy and dynamic it looks!

Yeah, I've heard, which is why s2 feels like a bunch of interesting multi-chapter fanfic concepts squeezed into one season. But even so, it IS technically possible to write a story this way. You have to do it a lot in video games - certain levels and quests and other gameplay features will be made and you have to write around those. It's definitely a more difficult way to write a story, but it's possible (although why you would write a story like this when you AREN'T beholden to video game writing restrictions is beyond me) and one of the reasons I find video game writing kind of interesting. It's like a creative exercise.

Thing is, one of the things you have to do in that case is put in additional scenes that make the scene you HAVE to include make sense. Like, if the scene you want to include is x character disappearing to another dimension, that's fine, but you then also have to add a scene where people react to that and start looking for them, since that would be the natural consequence. You still get to have your cool scene, but then the scene you added reinforces the connective tissue between your cool scenes.

The thing that baffles me in season two is they just didn't do that. That's why I'm so confused - putting in a scene I think is bad on a critical level is one thing, but choosing not to put in something that would be so obviously natural to include is baffling. It probably was an intentional writing choice, but not including such an obvious action -> consequence element makes it seem like they just forgot. I get that they were trying to resolve everything in one season so they had to be picky about what scenes they included, but if you ask me, following up the disappearances of several people is more important to me than than flashbacks or new plotlines.

Besides, if they DIDN'T want to write in such a way that would require extra scenes to properly connect all their different ideas together, then they should have included less ideas in the first place. Each act in s2 feels like it should have been a season by itself. It's harsh writing advice, but sometimes you really do have to kill your darlings. The writers do this a lot with individual scenes...

(See: them not including any jinx or sevika interactions after act 2 because somehow they felt like all the other scenes had already said anything that needed to be said, completely disregarding that having two characters bond for two whole arcs and then never talk onscreen again is weird.)

...But they seem unable to do this with any of the bigger concepts they want to play with, like the noxus invasion or hexcore brainwashing everyone. I say this as a viktor and mel enjoyer (not that mel ended up having anything to do with the noxus plotline anyway), but removing either one of those plotlines would have left the rest of the season a lot more room to breathe.

Anyway, it also wouldn't be so bad if this was just one character they did this with, but every single time a character goes missing (which includes Sky as well, now that I think about it) it sets up the expectation that surely at SOME point, SOMEONE is going to start looking for one of them, and then that expectation is never fulfilled. That's why I can't just call it bad but WEIRD. Like, why would you do that? It makes it seem like nobody cares about them. Actually, no, to be fair, the firelights do make a mural for ekko, so good on him for being the only missing person anyone actually cares about, I guess.

There's some stuff in arcane s2 that's bad, like, on a critical analysis level, but there's also some stuff that happens that's just plain weird. Like, did you notice any time someone disappears in s2, nobody goes looking for them? Jayce, Ekko and Heimerdinger go missing and nobody ever mentions it. Same for Mel. It makes it seem like they were only gone for two seconds, but they were definitely gone long enough to notice.

Hmmm. That would be interesting, actually. A stepmother-type character who never actually tells rapunzel they have to stay in the tower, only that they should, for their own good. Now that I think about it, does the stepmother ever actually say rapunzel has to stay in the tower or is that just implied? I'll have to re-watch the movie.

I kind of like the idea of a timebomb rapunzel au because jinx has such ridiculously long hair so it's easy to imagine visually, but the stepmother character would logically be silco, but that doesn't really make sense to me because 1. His problem in season one is everyone kept saying PUT A LEASH ON THAT GIRL SHE'S EXPLODING THINGS and he was like no. She can do whatever she wants. Even to the point where it was actively detrimental to his own revolution. So basically I can't imagine him trying to keep her in a tower. He's not the healthiest of guardians but that's not really something he'd do. Secondly, I don't think he COULD do that if he tried. Keeping someone in a tower does not work if they find a way to explode the tower