Arcane Predicted October 7

I consider Arcane the best animated series ever produced. Somehow, with each passing year, it's becoming more timely. Just now, I realized it's the perfect metaphor for the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Warning: this post is going to have major spoilers for the first season. If you haven't watched Arcane yet, go watch it right now. You won't regret it!

Right. So let’s start with the basics. Piltover is Israel and Zaun is Gaza and the West Bank. Silco is Fatah and Jinx is Hamas. Now let’s unroll it.

Piltover is a wealthy and progressive immigrant nation. At the start of the show, it's on the cusp of countless scientific and commercial breakthroughs and is establishing diplomatic relations with overseas nations who’re finally starting to take it seriously. Zaun is a poor and failing society, ridden with crime and full of anger and resentment towards its more successful neighbor. The two nations are so geographically mixed they can't separate even if they wanted to, so they're stuck in endless lowkey violence and oppression. In truth, this is not a war between peoples, but a civil war.

Enter Silco and Jinx, our Fatah and Hamas.

Silco is a criminal and a terrorist, but he also has rational goals. He wants to get as much freedom as he can to run his criminal empire. He wants to turn the undercity into a base for his ambitions and is willing to decrease the level of violence to achieve this goal. Towards the end of the series he manages to realize his dream as Piltover recognizes the autonomy of Zaun, mostly to avoid having to destroy Zaun, an idea that’s more shocking for the progressive Piltover than for the belligerent Zaun.

This is a great victory for Silco and a step towards improving the lives of his people. This also relieves Piltover from a nuisance that hindered its march towards progress and international success.

Enter Jinx.

Despite her cute looks and tragic life, Jinx is a murderous extremist Jinx. She doesn’t care about any of those things. She just wants to blow shit up. And she does, destroying the hopes and prosperity of everyone in the region, but hurting most of all the people closest to her.

The missile she fires towards a peace conference in Piltover is this world's 7/10; a barbaric act of senseless violence by a monster that was ignored for too long by her enablers in Zaun and her foes in Piltover. She is guilty, but they are responsible.

The song that plays as she’s about to launch the missile starts with the words, "I'm the monster you created." But who is “you?”

It’s everybody.

It’s Silco, who always loved her and enabled her even as she destroyed the future of Zaun through barbaric terrorism. "Don't cry, you're perfect," he tells her as he’s dying from wounds she inflicted on him. This reminds me of supposedly moderate Palestinians who can’t bring themselves to resist Hamas, despite its actions setting them back decades. They’re not its victims, they’re its enablers.

However, Vi and Catyln are also responsible. They failed to destroy this monster because they viewed her as something weak and vulnerable that should be saved, not as an abomination that must be put down without mercy for the good of all mankind. This fake morality fueled by arrogance cost them dearly indeed.

"We'll show them," Silco told his violent protégé, and she did by literally killing both nations' chance for peace in an insane explosion of bloodlust. This is the price of enabling monsters.