THE RESILIENCE OF HUMAN NATURE IN THE CHARACTER OF JINX

Arcane is a wildly popular animated series geared to adults. The show emphasizes relationships and delves into their underlying psychology. The central character, Jinx, endures one accident, injury, and tragedy after the next. These events drive her to insanity and evil. The climax of the series depicts the character choosing between two identities represented by her current nickname, Jinx, and her childhood nickname, Powder. It is a false choice. Both supposed identities have exactly the same nature, values, and goals. Jinx is simply the adult version of Powder. In attempting to show the transformative power of trauma and environmental factors—what psychologists call nurture—Arcane demonstrates the power of values and the resilience of a person’s nature.

Jinx's BPD

The story begins with a flashback to a burning battlefield strewn with bodies. Powder, then a small child, clings to the side of her older sister, Vi, as they look for their dead parents. For Powder, the trauma of this event develops into borderline personality disorder. The DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) says that individuals with borderline personality disorder “are very sensitive to environmental circumstances. They experience intense abandonment fears and inappropriate anger even when faced with a realistic time-limited separation or when there are unavoidable changes in plans” (“Personality Disorders”). In episode three, Vi and their friends leave Powder behind to go on an important but dangerous mission. Powder goes ballistic, ripping the head off one of her toys and slamming her box of belongings to the floor. She chases after her sister and friends, convinced that she can help.

In her attempt to help, she blows up the entire building that her friends are in. Vander, the man who raised Powder and Vi after the death of their parents, dies in the aftermath. Vi survives but, when she finds out that her own sister killed everyone she loved, she has to walk away, leaving Powder sobbing in the rubble. Silco, the villain Powder intended to blow up, finds Powder. When he kneels down to help her, she immediately embraces him. This is an unmistakable sign of borderline personality disorder:

These individuals are prone to sudden and dramatic shifts in their view of others, who may alternatively be seen as beneficent supports or as cruelly punitive. Such shifts often reflect disillusionment with a caregiver whose nurturing qualities had been idealized or whose rejection or abandonment is expected. (“Personality Disorders”)

Powder suddenly sees Silco as a new caregiver. In her head, Vander has abandoned her just like her parents did. In her eyes, Vi’s understandable need for space is absolute abandonment; only a minute later Powder declares, “She is not my sister anymore” (“The Base Violence Necessary for Change”).

Jinx's PTSD

Powder, henceforth called Jinx, develops severe PTSD from killing her friends. She repeatedly manifests symptoms of PTSD outlined in the DSM-5:

1. Recurrent, involuntary, and intrusive distressing memories of the traumatic event(s).
2. Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world (e.g., “I am bad,” “No one can be trusted,”…)
3. Irritable behavior and angry outbursts (with little or no provocation) typically expressed as verbal or physical aggression toward people or objects.
4. Reckless or self-destructive behavior. (“Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders”)

The last symptom explains why Jinx carelessly tosses around explosives and, in episode seven, chooses to blow herself up rather than be captured, all but killing herself.

PTSD aggravates her preexisting disorder. Individuals with borderline personality disorder can exhibit psychotic symptoms during times of stress (“Personality Disorders”). Jinx experiences both hallucinations, hearing the voices of her lost loved ones when she tries to make decisions, and ideas of reference, seeing everything that the people close her do as a sign of imminent abandonment or betrayal. These psychotic symptoms intensify after she reconnects with her sister only to lose her again, and after she nearly kills herself; she has visual as well as auditory hallucinations and experiences them more frequently.

Comparing Powder and Jinx: Personality Traits

Could any part of Powder’s nature survive this much trauma? The Big Five personality traits will be used to assess nature. Timothy Bainbridge, Steven Ludeke, and Luke Smillie found that most models of personality and temperament related closely to the Big Five traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (771). For each trait, Powder’s behavior will be compared to that of Jinx.

From the first episode, Powder displays high openness. Psychology Today explains, “People with high levels of openness are more likely to seek out a variety of experiences, be comfortable with the unfamiliar, and pay attention to their inner feelings more than those who are less open to novelty” (“Openness” par. 1). Powder always wants to be part of whatever her sister and friends were doing, but she also seeks out invention and art on her own. She creates mechanical weapons even though no one in her life is inventive. She constructs these devices with faces and paints them, and she enjoys drawing designs and doodling even though none of her compatriots show any interest in art. Jinx brings years of practice to these childhood interests. Doodling evolves into tattoos and graffiti; she uses graffiti to personalize her hideouts and sign her acts of mayhem. Her mechanical devices range from powerful explosives—still embellished with faces—and firearms to figurines that represent the friends she killed.

Reliability, organization, and impulse control are associated with conscientiousness. Powder has none of these qualities. She is, however, hard-working and goal-directed. In episode seven, Vi comments that “Powder could get obsessed” when working on her inventions (“The Boy Saviour”). She trains with the older members of the group, pushing herself because she hates being weaker than them. Jinx works and trains completely independently. She can be incredibly industrious when she has a project in mind, yet her hideouts are always messy, and, at any moment, she might take off to pursue one of her other goals. This is the same disorganized diligence of her childhood.

Despite her fear of abandonment, Powder is very introverted. She lurks at the back of the group and at the edges of rooms and retreats to her secluded bunk. Jinx exaggerates these behaviors, interacting almost exclusively with Silco. When other members of the organized crime ring visit Silco’s office, she disappears into the dark rafters. Much of her time is spent at a lonely hideout that only Silco has access to. When the organization takes over an airship, Jinx stays in the dark cargo hold away from the rest of the crew (“Happy Progress Day!”).

Both Powder and Jinx are low in agreeableness. They are anything but polite, trusting, or cooperative: qualities associated with this trait in an article by Psychology Today (“Agreeableness”). Powder resists every command that she is given. When people imply that she is weak or incapable, she does everything in her power to prove them wrong. She does the same thing as Jinx, blowing up a building and making an example of Silco’s second-in-command when her abilities are questioned (“Happy Progress Day!”). She displays a complete lack of concern for the other members of the organized crime ring.

Finally, neuroticism is a person’s propensity for negative emotion. In the first episode, Powder bemoans that her bombs will never work (“Welcome to the Playground”). When she overhears one of her friends say that “she jinxes everything,” it confirms what she already believes about herself (“Welcome to the Playground”). Later, she adopts the nickname Jinx. Her neuroticism amplifies her mental disorders. According to the DSM-5, individuals with borderline personality “usually have a self-image that is based on the feeling of being bad or evil” (“Personality Disorders”). Jinx embraces being evil, however, this is more due to her values than her conditions.

Comparing Powder and Jinx: Beliefs & Values

Powder grows up in the Undercity, her values based on the crime and brutality that surrounds her. Michael D. Berzonsky defined moral development as “the process by which people internalize and orient their behavior according to socially sanctioned rules” (par. 1). The only rule in the Undercity is strength. Powder grows up believing that strength is a person’s capacity for violence. Among their friends, Vi is the leader because she is the best fighter. This capacity for violence is the measure of a person’s worth, so that is what Powder values. That’s why she works on her weapons and trains to fight. Jinx is the culmination of those efforts, capable of immense destruction. As mentioned earlier, when Jinx is questioned, she commits acts of violence to prove her worth.

Berzonsky highlighted three aspects of the moral developmental process: judgment, behavior, and emotion (par. 1). For Powder and Jinx, morality is not what you do but who you hurt. Hurting and killing topsiders, the people from the wealthy part of the city, is good. Hurting friends and family is bad. Powder feels evil for messing up her sister’s and friends’ “jobs” and, later, for blowing up those friends. Jinx feels evil because she doesn’t know who to hurt; everyone seems to be her enemy.

The False Choice

What then is the climactic significance of choosing between the names Powder and Jinx? Powder represents weakness. She is a little girl, incapable of destruction and, therefore, worthless. Jinx represents strength, which is the capacity for violence and the capacity for evil. Nonetheless, Powder already believed that she was evil, and she would have been blowing people up from the get-go if her bombs had worked. Powder and Jinx are one and the same identity at different stages of life. The climax is a lie: the character cannot become a child again. The one choice she does make is to give up on her old coping mechanism. She decides that clinging only ever leads to abandonment and severs all emotional bonds so that no one can ever abandon her again. The series ends with her killing Silco yet still finishing the job that he had given her.

Arcane subjects its central character to one of the most tragic and traumatizing lives imaginable. Her relationships are destroyed, her morality and sanity become increasingly twisted, yet her nature remains the same. The values that guided her as a child continue to guide her as a young adult. Experiences and environmental factors provide raw materials: facts or lies for a person’s nature to act upon and hardships to challenge or solidify the person’s values.