The animated series Arcane, based on characters and settings from the League of Legends video game franchise, has been one of the most popular Netflix originals of the past few months, winning acclaim from critics and fans alike. The show’s breakout popularity is owed to several factors — its stellar animation, thrilling action scenes, engaging story, and of course, its characters.
The character writing in Arcane is widely considered to be one of the show’s biggest highlights, taking characters who were little more than one-dimensional tropes in League of Legends and transforming them into nuanced, fleshed-out figures with compelling character arcs. The hot-headed yet compassionate protagonist Vi, idealistic Caitlyn, and rebellious Ekko all have their share of fans, of course. But for many viewers, the best-written characters in the series are its villains.
Get Jinxed
The most prominent antagonist in Arcane is of course Jinx, voiced by Ella Purnell. In League of Legends, Jinx is a mischievous agent of destruction, bloodthirsty and cheerful in equal measure. Due to her rather limited characterization, the game’s Jinx comes off as more of a half-baked Harley Quinn stand-in than a fully-developed character in her own right. However, the Jinx found in Arcane is a very different story, to the point that she hardly even feels like the same character at points.
Arcane reimagines Jinx as the younger sister of Vi (Hailee Steinfeld of Hawkeye and Spider-Verse fame), originally named Powder. Powder is introduced as a kind and innocent child, who only wants to help her family with her prodigious engineering talent. However, when she tries to use a homemade bomb to save her adoptive father Vander from the Undercity crime lord Silco (Jason Spisak), she ends up causing Vander’s death instead, along with her friends Mylo and Claggor. In a fit of grief-induced rage, Vi blames the guilt-stricken Powder for the accident, abandoning her at the scene of the tragedy. And at her lowest point, Powder is saved by none other than Silco, her father’s brother-turned-nemesis, who takes Powder in as his own daughter.
Many years later, Powder is feared all across Piltover as Jinx, Silco’s deadliest lieutenant. But while she’s shown to be more than capable of taking lives without remorse, Jinx is more than just a sadistic killer. She’s still haunted by the trauma of her past, and longs to mend her relationship with Vi once the sisters’ paths intertwine once more. But before long, it becomes clear that things can never go back to how they were, and Jinx begins to descend further and further into darkness.
Jinx is a truly multifaceted villain — she can be bubbly and carefree one moment, terrifyingly ruthless the next, and then tormented by grief the next, even within a single scene. Far from her cliche-by-comparison game counterpart, this Jinx is a tragic figure whose fall to villainy is completely believable. She’s the rare antagonist who manages to be heartbreakingly sympathetic even as she commits unspeakable atrocities. Even after she’s moved well beyond redemption, Jinx has earned a place in the hearts of countless fans.
Lord of the Underworld
Of course, one can’t talk about villains in Arcane without bringing up Jinx’s employer and father figure, Silco. The sinister, scar-faced schemer is introduced as a vicious crime lord with ambitions of ruling the Undercity. However, it soon becomes clear that there’s more going on with Silco beneath the surface. Silco doesn’t just want power for power’s sake — he’s a former revolutionary who longs to transform the Undercity into the nation of Zaun, an independent state free from Piltover’s control. As cruel as his methods are, his goal is nevertheless a noble one.
More importantly, it’s shown after the timeskip that Silco is a genuinely loving father to Jinx. He sees her not just as a subordinate to be ordered around, but as his own daughter. Not only does he forgive her failures and show fear when she’s in danger, Jinx is the only person who Silco lets down his guard around — with her, he isn’t just a coldhearted kingpin, but a vulnerable human being. Silco is so fond of Jinx, in fact, that many of his associates believe that he’s gone soft because of her, and begin to plot against him. As Silco himself muses in the Season 1 finale, “Is there anything so undoing as a daughter?”
But make no mistake: Silco may be a loving father, but he’s hardly a good one. After all, he’s the one who forged Powder into the merciless murderer Jinx. He earnestly tries to be a good parent, but his fatherly advice is always tainted by his power-obsessed, Machiavellian worldview. And despite his grand vision for the nation of Zaun, Silco proves to be a tyrannical ruler of the Undercity, enforcing his rule through fear and death while flooding the streets with his supernatural drug Shimmer to keep the populace addicted and loyal. Underneath all the lofty rhetoric, Silco sees the individual citizens of the Undercity as nothing but means to an end. In that regard, he’s become little better than the Piltover Council he once rebelled against.
Glorious Evolution
The antagonists of Arcane aren’t just one-note mustache-twirling villains, but humanized characters who are just as multidimensional as the heroes. Even the secondary villains have some level of depth: Silco’s lieutenant Sevika is an honorable warrior who struggles with her conflicted loyalties, while the twisted mad scientist Singed was a wise mentor to Viktor, and once lost a family of his own. And speaking of Viktor, his League of Legends counterpart is a megalomaniacal cyborg who seeks to forcibly evolve humanity through technology — a far cry from the humble, kindly young scientist of Arcane, who is gradually driven to morally ambiguous deeds out of desperation to cure his illness.
While a lesser series would leave its villains as cartoonish cardboard cutouts who exist only as plot devices for the good guys to punch, Arcane has proven that it isn’t that kind of show. Jinx and Silco are some of the most compelling, well-developed animated villains in recent memory, and their massive popularity among fans of the series reflects that. It just goes to show that not all animation is only for kids, and not all villains are boring cliches.
