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Brilliant video as always. I really hope this is not the last time we see Singed and Orianna because I want to see how they reimagine the lore and see where their relationship goes. I think it would be cool if she objects to Singed making weapons for Noxus and it drives a wedge between them.
I enjoyed video but I see it as a wishful thinking. It is very uncomfortable to think that someone so evil can succeed, but such things just can happen You assume that Singe ability to understand others emotions is a sign of his need in others, but it might be just his observation skills and analytical mind, of a great scientist. You believe he valued society and comfort before the death of her daughter, but it's more likely that he just like Victor valued his own science and probably a couple of closest people (Orianna obviously) You say that his actions leaded for lots of troubles, except everyone's actions leaded for lots of trouble. Arcane is the series about characters making lots of trouble and Singed is not even in top three by that, probably. Will his future be happy? We don't know. However there is a big chance that Orianna is really back, that she might accept her new existence, and that she will not know precisely that cost her father paid for this. Singed made a goal for himself and it looks like he achieved it exactly at the level he wanted. This the only definition of success. Once again, it's uncomfortable to think about it, but we should accept it. Although, you can go the Singe way instead, and make a video explaining how he actually lost, oh wait...
@schnee1 Imo i think to Singed “Alive” means it fits the functions of living things (MRS GREN) Moves, Respires, Is sensetive to stimuli, Grow, can reproduce, Excretes and takes in nutrition That’s it as long as Oriana does those thing she’s “Alive” to Singed completely ignoring - personality, desires, ambitions, feats and all the little things that make us truly alive
I think a big reason for Singed "winning" was because, unlike other fathers like Vander and Silco, whose daughters conflict with their goals, Singed's daughter *was* his goal. So many of the problems other characters in Arcane faced were due to conflicting wants, but through the whole story, Singed only ever wanted one thing, his daughter. He never needed to sacrifice anything he valued because the only thing he valued was already taken from him. And he'd do anything to get it back
I think this is spot on and it is pretty much referenced in every single episode. Everyone believes they have a choice but dont realize they made the choice a very long time ago. Singed just admits the truth without shame.
This is exactly in essence Signed in this story is Mr. Freeze. all Freeze cared about was finding a cure for his wife. All Singed Cared about was a cure for his daughter. But did he really win? Orianna is a hextech android, modelled after what he perceives his daughter would have been. She is not his real daughter. And the things that go on to happen after this with him and noxus and Ionia. Even in Arcane I didn't have any sympathy really for Singed, because of the blood on his hands. If anything the only thing that happens to Singed is that he falls further into his own delusion.
@@talisredstar1543 but that's what he wants. and you're not really supposed to feel sympathy for him, or at least, extremely little. he is the pinnacle of selfishness. he is the ultimate evil genius. he wants one thing and one thing only and i think what he got is EXACTLY what he wanted.
Yes. He is just indifferent to everything except his daughter. a complete pragmatist. I am very interested in where they take him in the future. Lorewise his most evil acts are still to come..... Will they kidnap Orianna or something, who knows.
@@TYsdrawkcaB I mean thats the only diffrence between a Villian and a Hero. A villian will sacrifice the World for 1 person, while the hero will sacrifice 1 person for the World. Now is singed evil in my eyes? No, it's just a matter of perspective, he is dad that protects and tries to save his one and only family. he is just extremly selfish and human about it by not asking for help
@@knoxtagas319 I wonder if they came to that conclusion independently or together. We don't really know much about Singed and Silco's relationship beyond Silco getting Shimmer from Singed, and that Silco trusts Singed enough to save Jinx's life. It seems likely that Singed helped save Silco, given that his eye treatment uses Shimmer, but we don't know how or why they met. I think that link may be important for Singed in the future, since his "happy ending" both doesn't seem completely happy nor totally like an ending. Perhaps if Jinx survived, they can meet and partially bond over a shared connection to Silco, just as Jinx and Sevika did. Maybe I'm saying that just because I really want the Jinx-Singed relationship Shmee outlines here, but it does seem compelling and left suspiciously absent from Arcane despite how close they came to interacting.
Singed in the end embodied this idea way more than Silco. Tbf he only had one relationship. He was “willing to do anything to achieve it”but also willing to do less to achieve it as well. He avoided conflict whenever he could
I've been thinking that Singed taught Silco that. In the past we see this lively idealist trying to do what he thought was right, that could have been easily manipulated by someone like Singed who was trying to separate himself from Piltover and their morality. We see his lab down in the mines, where he could have met Silco and started controlling things from the shadows. The entire series was dictated by the actions he took, it's not too far to think that every event leading up to episode one was also his doing. Silco never seemed like the one in control which made him try even harder to feel like he was. Thinking it was all his idea to liberate Zaun when he never really had any involvement in the advancements that took place. He was only just a face, a scary man in the background that felt like he was in control. The moment it slipped, he freaks out. Vi gets away and he takes it out on the nearest person. Not really the actions of someone confident in their abilities.
@@mossymosscreature seems pretty likely. Singed’s immortality challenges other peoples worldviews and similar to Heimerdinger he isn’t completely wrong. It’s just his perspective doesn’t apply to everyone. So when he’s proven right characters like Viktor and Silco learn from it in their own way. They didn’t 100% switch to Singe’s worldview but didn’t ignore it either
He's a monster, he committed crimes against humanity. I don't think he's chill. He's got more blood on his hands than anybody except maybe Ambessa. He's got live with that forever.
I would also like to mention the tiny little moment he had with Isha when they were being transported to Stillwater. He absolutely did not have to say anything to her but he felt the need to comfort her in his own way. It just goes to show how strong his instinctual need for connection is, especially in this paternal way
@@jamakaya1332 To be fair, it was a possibility, but I'm pretty sure that his plan was for Warwick to get them out of jail under his command. With the rest of the guards dead, and the prisoners behind bars, it should've been an easy escape. But then the Vander-Powder connection happened, and he lost control of the beast, which in turn forced him to adapt and play his cards differently, appealing to Ambessa's warmongering to get what he wanted. Up to that point he really didn't need them, at best he would've needed Viktor's help.
My theory as to why singed gets a happy ending is sacrifice. The biggest motiff of the show is sacrifice overall, silco has to sacrifice jinx to get what he wants and it undoes him, jayce has to sacrifice his political ambitions to save his friend, vi has to sacrifice her understanding of piltover v zaun and powder to do good, etc etc etc. Singed by all accounts sacrificed more than any other character. He had a prestigious job at the academy, and sacrificed it for Oriana, he had a powerful backer in Silco and seems to have sacrificed that too eventually when their visions differed. The man was the only character who when presented with a sacrifice said, 'yes, take my eye, take my health, take the undercity, take the whole world.' without even blinking. and the story rewards all those who made their sacrifices, so he wins, but at the cost of *everything*
I think this, combined with the point of the video, is really the point of Singed. He made a Faustian bargain with the devil, and was so obsessed with what he'd gain that he doesn't even care he lost his soul in the process.
He's also the only relatable "evil" character. Everyone else who causes harm is deranged by cartoon evil goals like power, revenge, conquest, etc. Important for a plot, but personally who gives a fuck. Might as well be the Joker. Singed is a dad who lost his daughter. Unlike every other parent, though, he might actually be able to get her back. He does what any parent would do, if they thought it was at all possible. Fuck fair, fuck community, fuck acceptance, fuck pain, fuck good & evil, if you can get your kid back, you do it. THAT makes sense to me in a way that Ambessa, Silco, Viktor, Jayce, etc., NEVER will.
I hope it will be a running joke of every future show just have Singed, Orianna and Blitzcrank, appear in the background, having the time of their life. While the most depressing shit is happening in the stories =D
He was never in for the war, he was the one selling the weapons to achieve his goal. In that sense, he never got involved in the horrors, he made it possible for people to commit them to fuel his research to achieve his own separate goal. He was never in for the war, he exploited the people who were caught in the war for his own benefit.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the parallels between Jinx and Viktor. They’re both kids from the undercity who define themselves as “weak”, they’re brilliant inventors, and they both become symbols to the people of Zaun. They’re two of the first people to experiment with Hextech, and their experiments lead to the death of a loved one. Jinx blows up Milo and Claggor, Viktor disintegrates Sky, and they both continue to see and talk to these people long after they’re dead. Also, Singed operates on both of them in order to save their lives, and as a result they’re both permanently mutated by Shimmer. Honestly, it’s amazing these two only interact ONCE throughout the entire show.
Their paths don’t really run close. Viktor is someone who left the Undercity, Jinx did not. Viktor was poisoned literally as a child by the atmosphere there, Jinx was metaphorically living through the ideological atmosphere her whole life. While they have plenty of similarities the ways their narrative evolved and the paths their lives took them are not.
If Orianna follows old League lore (what seems to be a running theme with a lot of Arcane characters) she will be herself but empty Orianna in League is a human ship of theseus, she worked with her father (a clockmaker) and got sick like half the Zaun cast. Her father gradually replaced her body parts with clockwork prosthetics as the disease ate at her, consuming her from the inside. Until suddenly, there was nothing left. With all of what made her human gone, Orianna still remembers her father and thinks she remembers herself before the change. But she's empty. There are no emotions. No feelings. Just a deep void In that sense, she's an antithesis to Gwen, the other doll character in League, who, despite never being human, is so full of life and curiosity. Yes this is a desperate cry for Riot to have Gwen and Ori interact in any capacity. Like please. I need this
Orianna’s lore is old, but there is something of a discrepancy. The only part of her untaken by the disease and thus not replaced with machinery was her heart but when her father suffered a severe heart condition she had hers transplanted into him with a clockwork heart for herself prepared in advance to save his life. The old lore painted her as an emotionless machine but she did receive some lore updates later on that contradict them slightly. The newer (operative term) would state that yes she does feel hollow, somewhat distant from her humanity and desires to feel human again… but that she still has the vestiges of her core traits. Her love for her father most of all still remains, and she does consider herself sentient to the point she pities mindless automata. So technically there is space for both.
@vincentgesue4851 OK maybe no emotions was a bit hyperbolic, but her story makes it clear that her emotions were mostly a memory of the time she was human and that her arc is about her kinda "relearning" to feel them properly since she basically is a new person now
I've already read your comment and the replies you recieved (yay, online responsabiliy), so my only input will be this: the tragedy of Orianna is that she doesn't "feel" sad, but she remembers what emotions are like, and how they used to be. So she _thinks_ herself sad, and it seems like she doesn't consider that to be actual sadness.
Him winning and getting away with war crimes galor is literally his in game lore. The man causes mayhem and destruction and pain and suffering and he gets awat scott free every time getting what he wants or needs and everyone else has to deal with the consequences.
I'm going to ask then, what about Oriana? Is he her father in the game, too? Does she run away or resent him? I want to see if there's precedent for Singed's victory being as hollow as it seems.
@@boppertron4929 As far as I'm aware, Orianna being Singed's daughter is a piece of purely Arcane lore. These two characters, despite both hailing from Zaun, are near entirely separate in League's lore. This might potentially be altered with Riot declaring Arcane as canon but who knows if they'll follow through on that storytelling beat.
@@boppertron4929 I don't think the orianna in the game has any connection at all, to the orianna in Arcane. It's pretty much just using the game one as a template to inspire this character. She is a murder robot in game, and i believe her lore was; she was the daughter of a clockmaker/artificer of some kind. So im just saying; orianna in game can't be used to prove anything or shed any light.
@@roseinan I have no clue what you are trying to say here. I think you meant to say arcane is made cannon, and league lore isn't now. Both can't be cannon at the same time if they are different. Unless you're talking some multiversal shit, in which case; i have no clue what you are saying.
I feel like the whole point is that he DOES only care about Orianna. This is "success" for HIM. He is that far gone. And he plays every card just right to get what he wants. I think he is genuinely the *_perfect_* "evil genius" archetype. Because why would you make YOURSELF the supervillain if you're that smart? Then you put a target on your back. So he finds a way to get funded by Silco, and the chembarons, and when Ambessa comes along, she too comes for him. He hides in the shadows behind the "villain". Also, sidenote, Sky* (*EXTREMELY HEAVILY IMPLIED to be the manifestation of Viktor's humanity) is "extracted" into a different vat, and many speculate that is what was used to give robot Orianna "humanity".
its success right now, yes, but this videos is suggesting that in the future his daughter will figure out what she is and what he did and resent him for it, or his daughter will not fully be human and will not be truly able to fill the void of human connection he so desperately desires. its true that this was a success for him, shnee is just saying that the success is warped and wont last long
@@ursidae97 honestly probably because his only goal was to have her alive. I think there’s plenty of parents that would prefer their kids to be alive and hate them then dead
@ I agree, but like the video said, he only really cares about the function of it. He just wants things back the way they are. He probably didn’t consider her mental state or whether she be mad at him all that much as long as he had her back.
What I love about Singed in Arcane is he is a complete force of nature as a character. His single-minded goal and his actions to pursue it are the cause of so much of the series, yet he remains largely in the background the whole time, bidding his time. He isn't heartless/inhuman as his interactions show, but he is willing to sacrifice anything and everything for his goal, he really is just "it's nothing personal kid" as a character.
22:28 He's never named, but it might be how he got his name. His face is singed, so the people who saw him might've started to refer to him as "the singed man", until it eventually turned into just "Singed" 🤔.
@ Very few people know that though. I don't think anybody in Zaun knows his name. Also afaik, Dr Reveck used to be a different person from Singed. Arcane fused the two into one person for the needs of the story.
@@louisrobitaille5810 A lot of Arcane lore is readapted. Originally Stanwick Piddidly, which was named at the very start of episode 4, was the one who invented Hextech, but now it's split between Jayce and Viktor. It wouldn't surprise me that some other things may change in the future for Noxus.
Imagine knowing that all of the horrible things, the pain and death, destruction of whole communities, was done just because of you. I couldn't imagine being in Orianna's place.
i was just thinking that. kind of reminds me of ellie and joel from the last of us. how do you reconcile a relationship where you're only alive because someone refused to let you go, and he hurt unfathomable numbers of people because of the choice he made on your behalf?
it's not her fault at all and his father did that out of utter love. could you say you truly love someone if you were willing to let them die just to avoid hurting people you don't know?
It's very similliar to Viego and Izolde story. He ruined a kingdom, island, people's lives just to get her back. She didn't want that. It's not love. It is a selfish desire. If all of focus and sense of life is on another person, it won't make happy neither the pursuer nor the desired.
Here’s my interpretation of this. If you take conflict with and acceptance of change as a central theme of the show. I think singed is the one character that never was conflicted about it. He’s the exception because he never accepted or allowed the change to be part of him. With all the others they have some form of denial they live in, or times where they get into great conflict over the difference between what was and what is. But singed never had to struggle over what was and what is. He never interacted with the idea of the present and therefore he’s detached from the idea of accepting change. That’s why he gets a happy ending, because the others only get happy by overcoming the conflict, he never gets into the conflict.
@@King_of_Hearts I think this mentality would also explain his willingness to perform the atrocities he does without concern for the consequences. He is in denial over a single specific change, not change in general. He changes Rio so she survives, he changes Vander so he survives, he changes Jinx so she survives, he changed himself so he survives, and he changed the world just so Oriana could survive. His denial is of death and death alone, the final change, a change he only experienced with his daughter's sickness and then refused to ever experience again. The consequences of his actions do kill possible thousands, but he never met those people so he didn't *experience* their death like he did with Oriana, which makes him completely callous to that death. Like you said, he has no conflict over change, no desire to go back or stay where he is; because his denial of change is exclusively projected onto one other person, who he views as unchanging.
according to his own words "i too once had a daughter". there's no denial here, no refusal of change in that sense. he perfectly acknowledge and accept that she died and decide to change it anyways. does fixing your car means you are in denial of it breaking down? do you always have to be emotional about refusing to live in a world were your pen is out of ink? he doesn't know yet how that can be fixed, but he's a scientist, he knows how to do research, and he simply decided to find out how to fix the death of his daughter.
@@niscent_ Just to say, this is beautifully worded. Some people in the comments said he is chaotic. He is not. He follows pretty much any order, never lie, and succeed at what he is asked for. He is just doing his own thing at the same time. 4D chess for this one is a constant reality. I will do my job, but any action is to fulfill my goal, nothing else is important.
He did plead with Viktor not to experiment on himself, stating there will be consenquences I doubt Singed will gas Ionia. They can give spiritual, mental and emotional support to Orianna Ionia would definitely ask Singed to gas Noxus as payment for his daughter's therapy
Great video. I came to the same conclusion about singed's monologue, it seems to be clearly him speaking on himself and attempting to contextualize his own actions and backstory. I also think its says even more about his mental state because he realizes that this explanation is for no one. Ambessa doesn't know or care what his backstories or motivations are. Singed might not even be consciously aware that he is defending himself in explaining Warwick. He simply relates so heavily to his creation that the idea of someone else calling him a monster is difficult to hear and something he needs to explain away.
You would have to assume that what he got is what he wanted. We only saw him showing his "daughter" the ballerina toy and she was expressionless, almost like she wasn't exactly there.
Well if you know League lore it's pretty likey that the daughter is Orianna And she's just a robot girl who's relatively fine He got his happy ending lmao
@@Sappysappster said lore is very much subject to change. kinda like how Ambessa is both in the game, but dead canonically. Or pretty much all the characters in Arcane having their old lore retconned. We don’t know for sure if she’s fine or not. Hoping a spinoff sheds some light on that.
@@Sappysappster you mean the lore that is set to be changed. Besides you are only telling me that she is the one happy, but what about him, the person in question
@@IndividualTour1There’s 100% going to be a spinofff tho. It was halfway confirmed by Christian Linke and the other writers themselves. And there’s also the interviews that suggests a spin off. But we probably won’t get anything until a few years.
Though it's very possible Orianna's lore may change should there be any sort of continuation of her story in Arcane, her characterization in LoL is as an almost child-like yet soulless killing machine. Given how the humanity got stripped entirely out of the automatons made by Viktor, I wouldn't expect Orianna to keep much of hers following resurrection. So much like any of Singed's victories, Orianna's resurrection may just be another tragedy for Zaun & Piltover. Viktor's automatons had no autonomy and worked according to his will, they were just puppets. But Orianna still has her autonomy, she can think for herself. Which really begs the question; what would someone who has been stripped of all their humanity but kept their will actually *do?* If Singed's secretly wants connection more than anything, I think it would only make sense for the story that Orianna be incapable of human connection.
I feel like it's also a way to allow Viktor his final defeat/rest with Jayce while also not eliminating his characterizing crusade. It's just that Orianna is the one picking up the flag. She's still that same hexcore tech, and now not even someone like Viktor has a hand on the wheel at all.
Knowing how arcane humanizes every character, I would suspect a fully realized Orianna would be a full human character, but WOULD be symbolically soulless because she had to see what her father became, what he TURNED her into. And now she's the newest highly powerful enemy hunting him down, and monsters like him.
Something I find interesting about Singed and Vander is him mentioning "The mind, I could not recover." Singed as a scientist is precise with his terms, his process. This implies that even with everything he did to make Warwick, he made an attempt to try and salvage Vander's mind somewhere in the process. I find that interesting considering he could place partial blame on Vander for the burns he suffered at the Shimmer warehouse.
It doesn’t need to make sense tbh. Singed got away because that’s just how things sometimes turn out. The same way good people/characters in the story get tragic endings, bad people get good endings. It feels realistic (and not in a cheap way) when not every character has an equally depressing or tragic ending. If anyone has watched JJK, it feels very similar to the Nanami and Mei Mei situation with Malaysia
Nanami and Mei Mei's respective endings make good sense from a story perspective. Nanami dies because he decided to see his path as a sorcerer to the end. He left and came back because he was unfulfilled working a normal job. Mei Mei was always in it for the cash, so she cut her losses when things got too dangerous for her and left. Someone else pointed out that Singed's ending makes sense in that of the parent characters. He's not undone because his child never actually comes in conflict with his goals. Vander got kidnapped because Vi tried to turn herself in to keep the peace, Silco had to turn in Jinx to get Zaun, Ambessa was defeated by Mel.
1. Singed is more of a passive observer, and gives others a way to deal with their internal pain. 2. He's also reminds me of a snake. He just slithered away to make his desires be fulfilled. 3. #1 thing is when you bring someone back from the dead, you never get the same person. 4. Singed is just so numb after losing so much, he doesn't care about pain or hurting others.
Orianna gotta have one of the craziest backstories in this show... "My origin? Well, I died... But then my dad became a mad scientist who created a war, violated the laws of nature, and resurrected me in this metal body." 💀
He's definitely a character foil to others, which means he exists in the story to heighten the choices other characters make. So that is a very intriguing proposition.
14:12 The insight into this contrast was a great catch. It’s almost as if Silco desires to learn to “let loose” from his mentoring of Jinx. This is evidenced by her endearing place in his heart: letting her get “passes” for things his other subordinates would never be able to (save for maybe Sevika). He was completely vulnerable when asking Singed to save Jinx as well, a rare state for us to see Silco in. He *could not* lose her. If we take Silco at his word, he told Jinx he was never going to give her up to Jayce / Piltover before he died. Even when his dream of (a united) Zuan was hypothetically being dangled in front of him. Some part of Silco’s being *needed* Jinx: she was the Yin to his Yang: the chaos to his order. His Jungian shadow made manifest. She made Silco feel whole again, which probably hadn’t been the case since Vander’s betrayal (in Silco’s estimation). This internal conflict parallels with his external conflict of desiring a united Zuan (Undercity & Piltover working together in common purpose). The storywriters did fantastic work with this conflict. Ultimately, Silco was forced to choose between satisfying his internal desire for unity OR his external desire for unity. Evidently, the former “won”, which makes sense as that internal desire was more primal and fundamental in nature. It is as Jung said: ~”Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.”
I see Singed as a foil to Silco and Vander as fathers. Where Silco and Vander end up forsaking themselves for their daughter while Singed forsakes the world for his daughter.
Singed is such a fascinating character to me, and I think there are additional points that could be made about his character. For starters, it has to be pointed out that he as a character is built with same building blocks as the other characters. The mantra "is there anything so undoing as a daughter?" seems to be the mold by which almost all the main characters are formulated. I think the only exceptions are Jayce, Viktor, and Ekko. Everyone else is either built with a character arch that can be summed up with some kind of parent-daughter relationship. So it makes complete sense that this character, Singed, is also built with the same mold and his character story is built around the concept of a daughter. And how it undoes him. Secondly, Singed reminds of one of my favorite "tropes", but actually done well. The trope of the character that has ambition (in this case a singular goal) and is willing to sacrifice everything for that goal. Usually this trope is done as just the character that wants to have all the power and is willing to do anything to get that power, usually for very poorly explained reasons (if any at all) like "he hates the world and wants to watch it burn". But since Singed was built with that mold of a daughter, his singular goal is very clear and his role in the show can be seen always working towards that goal. Even if we don't directly realize it in the beginning. Since Singed has such a singular goal, he is willing to forgo everything to reach it. Including his own life. It seems like he knows this too, that there is no way he could possibly get his daughter back unless he sacrifices everything about who he is for that singular cause. He "wins" by having his goal met, but he loses everything about himself. I think there is an interesting mirror to this trope in the way it is usually written for the protagonist. Often in the story the protagonist is so consumed by his goal (usually revenge) but along the way they realize that the goal isn't everything. That there is more to life than fulfilling that one single goal, and so they change. Though they usually still get that goal, it's just hollow and not the "real" goal that they walk away with. (Usually it's getting the girl) The mirror I see in Arcane that sticks out the most is the fight in S2E3 between Cait, Vi, and Jinx. Cait is consumed by her goal of killing Jinx and at the very end of the fight she is almost willing to sacrifice everything to reach that goal, even if that thing is possibly missing and hitting an innocent child. Cait is showing what monster she could have turned into, but didn't. Singed shows us the monster he became by not ever stopping in his quest. He's the equivalent in some ways to "What if Cait took the shot and killed Isha", maybe even "and Jinx too". He's the monster that a person has to become if they want to fullfill that ultimate goal. The only character that is coming to my mind right now that has a similar concept is, unfortunately, Thanos. In order to get what he wanted most, he had to become a monster by killing his own daughter. He "wins" but had to sacrifice everything to do so. His singular ambition was so great that he didn't let anything stop him. I see Singed as the same way, but way better written. Lastly, the interesting part I find about Singed is that his ambition is not necessarily for himself, but for someone else. It's not entirely altruistic, he does want to have his daughter back, but it's playing on the concept that a parent wants to give their child absolutely everything, even if it means sacrificing a part of themselves. I find it interesting only because it is a more complex motivation that you don't see as often. Usually if there is a motivation like that, it's poorly written in. My mind goes to Resident Evil, the original creator of the T Virus was trying to find a way to cure his daughter's paralysis. It's not exactly a 1 to 1 comparison, but it's what comes to my mind right away. In Singed's case, he really is trying to give his daughter life more than he is trying to give himself a life. He gives off the air of someone who has dedicated everything about himself to his daughter, no matter what it takes, even losing himself. He doesn't care, as long as his daughter lives. At least that's how I see it.
I like that Singed didn't entirely fail. Every other antagonist we see killed or driven off, but he got what he wanted for better or worse. Every episode of both seasons was leading to this one final moment. His desire to augment humanity leading to chemtech, his chemical genius leading to shimmer. Even Silco being in charge feels like his design. He sparks conflict in everyone around him and poisons every relationship he finds himself in. The toxicity of stagnation overtook his life but he still had this one singular goal, and he would do anything to achieve it. Sacrificing anything and everyone to further his goal in a desperate attempt to create progress. But you can't progress if you're stuck in the past, and now he has a living reminder of the past that will likely drive him to further depravity. She'll never be whole again, and anything less than perfect isn't enough for Singed.
And most importantly, the power of his own. - Silco have to lend power from other barons to cement his power as the king of Zuan. - Mel have to lend power from her house and the council, without them she is no one (before she became a mage) - Even Ambessa have to lend her power from what Noxus still willing to give her and her house. - Singed? He only, literally, lend his power to other characters. He might have to use other power but he didn't have to in the slightest.
With this framing I find it interesting that he is the one character that constantly talks about change and it’s necessity. Here are some quotes: “Nature has made us intolerant to change, but fortunately we have the capacity to change our nature” “Love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress” And most damning to viktor “Not fate. Evolution. Nature’s greatest force, forever in flux.” He is literally arguing against the idea of viktor which is entirely against change and chaos and wishes for it to all come to a standstill. He seems to embody this ideal of the only constant is change and even willfully defends it. I think to him the idea of bringing his daughter back is an act of great change, like necromancy, there’s an acceptance in letting things lie and that is actually allowing things to slow down, for a good reason, to be processed because what is actually important is conscious change, to head towards change consciously. The villain for so many characters in this show is exactly that, they are so willingly striving for the change they wish to make into the world and yet once they achieve it they find themselves not having made things better but irreversibly worse. The error is they strove for this change within the disguise of their own narrow beliefs which made their actions lack the necessary conscious intent to actually improve conditions. Powder and her monkey bomb, Vi and her fists, Jayce and Viktor and hextech, Caitlyn and her detective skills leading to a deep paranoia, Silco and Zaun vs Jinx. The arbiter against this is clearly Hiemerdinger, he is constantly telling people to stride and think carefully because of his experience. Actually his arc being shaped by this in itself gives a greater weight to the idea, he holds it as a dogmatic faith, he almost instinctively acts on it, we see this with him wanting Jayce and Viktor to destroy the hexcore. Yet this is actually a failure to meet this ideal of conscious change because it fails to recognize the often subjective nature of careful and conscious action, hiemer wasn’t wrong but what choice did viktor have, either fork was a profound change for his own well-being, careful and conscious action in such a predicament can seem vastly warped from hiemer’s own perspective. It was only through ekko that Hiemer could come to understand this failure, why when one’s own life or existence is a constant predicament one is faced with, something Hiemer has no experience of, the decision to live and go on no matter what can be understood to be an act of something deeply conscious that his piltover surroundings have no connection to any longer. He expressed his realization of this profoundly contradictory nature of conscious action when faced with its finitude in a beautiful way, by expressing to Ekko “I must say that since I’ve met you, lad, I’ve truly lived.” Poetry. Coming back to Singed, he clearly represents the antithesis to this. And I think this perspective fits nicely back into your narrative of at what cost and will reaching it be what is wished for. Clearly not and it is exactly because singed is like a Darth Sidious level representative of this antithesis, a pure representative of progress no matter the cost. The question why now stands even stronger now though? Like sure his daughter is a meaningful enough loss to understand his current actions but the way he has developed himself to that point has to even predate that, he doesn’t have this ability and instinct just because he lost his daughter, and I think that can only be explained by understanding what was his falling out with Hiemer is over. It certainly is over him not accepting his daughter’s death, but there could be something more there, a deeper lying antagonism that could parallel the antagonism between Jayce and Viktor by the end of the show. Which seems very arcane like with Vi and Jinx explicitly being parallels of their fathers. In the next show in noxus Singed is about to produce some of the most horrific atrocities in all of runeterra, since the rune wars, in Ionia. Since he no longer has his daughter to represent as the actual material reason for his attitude, the exploration of his character through these actions could take on this more metaphorical tone and a greater exploration of his relationship with Hiemer, similar to how the death of Silco meant Jinx finally had to confront how much jinx was built off of powder in the first place in the second season. The funny thing is this attitude still holds onto the part of the Zaunite ideal that Silco wished to bring to the world which is striving against fate, this might be the most damnable form of it, but still. Striving against fate is often associated with Nietzschean philosophy, what could be more against fate then the death of god itself. The character in media most associated with this is Guts from Beserk and if their is any character in runeterra that might represent that in Noxus(beyond noxus kinda already being a massive exploration of the will to power) would likely be Riven, she’s a noxian soldier who was orphaned a birth, and if she has any Griffith moment it would be in confronting the horrors of what Singed’s action cause in Ionia.
I think singed in league lore has always been the "guy trying to do right, just doing what he's asked to" but always increasingly "no matter the cost." Like, he's a character at the very core of what our sciences and medical knowledge comes from and that's often atrocity. He's the humanity in this darkness, but also the monster lurking in it. He can fell a domino leading to wars and genocides while justifying this newly gained knowledge through material ingenuity. A character that can learn from bloodshed, thus leaning into his wicked desires. Where we see war he can see opportunity. I think that's why he came out of this so unscathed. He knew the cost and was ready and willing to pay it, unlike everyone else. End the end we will all see him as evil or twisted for his actions while he accepted them long beforehand. Maybe I'm crazy i haven't even watched the video yet...
Singed and Ambessa actually share the same philosophy when it comes to family. She said she would watch the entire world burn to save her family and Singed does exactly this. He would sacrifice EVERYTHING for Orianna
Singed loses his humanity in order to resurrect his daughter, and it’s so poetic that when he finally brings her back, she looks as inhuman as he does. Thank you so much for making these videos. If it weren’t for people like you, I wouldn’t have given so much thought to art and media in general. Even in my own life, I didn’t realize how important it is. TH-cam has changed me from someone who was blind to someone who can think, and I owe that to you and many others on this platform for helping me become a better person.
I love your point about Singed talking about himself while he talks about Vander, because that also happens several times in the show. When Silco does his speech about power to the first human test subject, about power coming to those who do anything for it, he is clearly talking about himself. Every time Viktor speaks about "people who need help now", he is talking about himself...etc
Despite everyone else, Singed plays the long game to his goal without fail. He does not intervene with the world until necessary to get his goal or to help others a little bit. So Singed has no enemy (I mean you could count Viktor at the end but still there is no hate involved in it) and can cling to anyone who may help his goal. Even every "selfless" help pays off in the end so you could look at those as long term investments or opportunities. Also Singed never demands anything from others but makes himself useful with mutual goals that benefits both parties. And that is why he "wins" in the end. But winning over death has always a high price and seldom is there a story where there is not a downside to it.
Ambessa: "I've discovered a fourth principle. One that heightens all others. SACRIFICE" Singed would have (and did) sacrifice anything he could to get his goals
Singed does not get a totally beautiful happily ever after. In his Pov, yes. But only because he is totally tunnel visioned on achieving this one thing. Aside from that, his life is still pretty bad, and more importantly he ruined the lives of basically everyone around her. One might also consider it to him recieving his "payment" for saving Jinx. He is the guy Silco turned to when he couldn't accept that Jinx's status was final. Singed is never "evil" he is incredibly dedicated. More of a "chaotic neutral" if you want to stick allignment to it.
For those who think Singed was the only one who got a true "Happy ending", the most important part is not seeing Oriana's reaction being brought back. She *could* be happy and grateful for his sacrifices, but knowing everything we do there's scarce reason why she would be.
Oh my god... This touched me on a very deep level. It shook me a bit. It's like i've felt someone else, AS someone else. I didn't expect to get such a deep insight into a human's nature. And i honestly can't tell if it's the writers' work that you've simply highlighted or it's your doing of phrasing and narrating it in a manner that kept hammering it home until it broke something in me.
This video also reminded me of Slay the Princess, with the whole theme of Change vs Stagnation. Though the game twists the message into change = death, it still fits with the video some way
Interested to see what this title means Edit: Totally agree with most of these points! I didn't think Singed's ending was weird or out of place from a storytelling standpoint, but that's because I never saw it as happy past the surface level, glad to see you got a similar conclusion.
I recently watch Jentry Chan vs the Underworld and the villains goal is to bring back their daughter back to life but after it’s done turns out the daughter didn’t want to be brought back to life
There's a point in Buffy where one of the characters gets brought back to life by the heroes and really does not handle it well, and ultimately nothing is ever the same for anyone involved after that. For the type of show that Buffy is, it had some really well-done themes and explored some deep ethical questions in it's own right.
1:48 this just makes singed sound like the biggest giga chad in the story, "story wants me to follow a some deep themes about change? nah thats gay, imma just win"
The timeline where both Viktor and Powder end up being adopted by Singed. That's a scary amount of potential in one place, but in that constellation there might be a lot of good that comes out of that.
9:02 I should have noticed, I can't believe it's just clicking for me. It makes him worse for me. The torture Rio lived through, and he didn't necessarily care. Just needed a new host for his crazy ideas.
maybe he knows his life would be better if he move on and open his heart to loving new characters like viktor and jinx but his fatherly SELFLESSNESS to save his daughter even at the cost of his own life couldn't let him. and one other matter is if he perhaps psychologically was totally unable to love any other person in his life (which I personally don't believe that's possible for human). there is A LOT to say about the difficult state that viktor and specially singed are in, in comparison to other characters of the show who were totally powerless to get back what they lost and the only option for them was accepting death, they also had a lot of things in life to latch onto to refill their void when singed and possibly didn't have that luxury. him not being a good father figure to viktor and eventually loosing him could be both a way of showing that he had the chance to love again and didn't accept it (you suggest out of foolish obsession and thinking still the only winning for him is reviving his daughter, which I disagree...) OR it confirms that it is indeed IMPOSSIBLE for him to bond with anyone even in optimal situation. you're done dumbing down possibly the most genius and wise character. there's a lot to wonder about
Kind of off topic, but i can't wait for a video on VI, because i did not understand her arc this seaosn nor what they did with/to her character and maybe you could bring light because she was my favourite on season 1
I think Vi's arc parallels her story in season 1 perfectly, but with more self-blame and hopes being destroyed. But I wouldn't mind a video like that either, so as not to write posts of a thousand words each time. during constructive dialogues
I feel like no one is pointing out the fact that in the show, they showed us the ballerina in the box with her instead of just showing us her face. I think they’re trying to tell us she’s just like the ballerina in the box, animated but not alive
i think there's two things going on with Singed: 1. when it comes to characters having some sort of goal, it always comes with sacrifice. of all characters, Singed never hesitated when it comes to sacrificing because he already lost the only person he ever cared about. to him, losing his life and his title and his status and his eye is nothing compared to losing his daughter. he had nothing to hesitate over, nothing to think over - if he thinks it'll bring Orianna back, he WILL do it and he doesn't care if it'll destroy the lives of everyone else 2. if Orianna is going to be anything like she is in game, Ori is going to eventually leave Singed and he's going to have to suffer with "losing" her again. she's alive, but just won't ever be a part of his life again because her being "alive" is empty. she's just a vessel, she's not like Gwen who has the love and part of Isolde's spirit to give the doll (what we considered) life - Gwen has actual goals / ambitions and even emotions; Orianna doesn't
IMO the ambiguity you’re seeing could’ve been brought to life by making Orianna an actual character whose wishes differed from her father. Then we’d have some sense of loss at the end. As it is, I’d say Singed is portrayed as successful in Arcane. Orianna is a prize that he earns in the end through his sacrifices. 13:48 had a similar idea, Jinx+Orianna instead of Jinx+Isha. Singed and Jinx would be foils, with all their commonalities, filling opposite roles in Ori’s life. Jinx’s definition of saving Orianna would be honoring her free will and humanity, even if it meant killing her. (Agree it would’ve been nice to see some Jinx-Singed relationship.) Nice video as always!
But that's kind of the point. Singed treats Orianna like a prize. A clockwork doll that he gets to play Parent with. Not an actual human child with agency of their own. His idea of being a parent to her got so deeply mutated and distorted, that it's now the same as a child singing a lullaby to a doll. So yes, he got his doll back, and gets to play pretend for a while - until reality comes crashing down, eventually.
@@t.vinters3128 The narrative itself treats Orianna like a prize. We don’t actually know if that’s how Singed sees his daughter. All we know is that he’s trying to reverse her illness or death. Maybe Orianna is happy to be alive, or maybe she’s horrified. Maybe she’s emotionless, and Singed accepted the price he’d pay to save her...or maybe he’s dissatisfied. We just don’t know, since we aren’t given enough context.
I always thought of Singed as the "single minded loss". Most people lose someone, they grieve, and then they either recover (like vi and Silco) or they crumble (like jinx). But there is a smaller category of people who become hung up on that loss and looking for a "solution" or a "fix" becomes their sole purpose for existing, and they have no regard for what the cost is to achieve that solution. It consumes them, all of their surrounding relationships, desires, goals, and often their morality. It is the "I will destroy the world for you" version of grief and it is very different from the more moral Gray we see in characters like Silco. Silco has relationships and other people he cares about beyond just Jinx (even if Jinx is at the top of that list), he isnt fully willing to forsake anything and everything. He will forsake a lot, but not /everything/. Singed has no emotional relationships, to him, the people he "assists" or "works for" are just a means to an end. He is fully willing to forsake literally anyone and everyone at the drop of a hat if it means he will get his daughter back. As a result, there is no real limit to his cruelty or his desperation. It almost doesn't matter "how alive" his daughter is, just so long as she is living.
idk if you (or anyone here 😭) have listened to EPIC the musical but some of this actually reminded me of that- how instead when odysseus gets home he acknowleges that hes changed but his goal never changed for 20 years. I feel like its pretty rare to see a character do that but yeah both these stories were about change and i LOVE how they were both written
In the three times I watched the finale not once did I see the singed scene and think he’d won. He’d succeeded yes- but what now. How does he take his horribly twisted and destructive self and be a father to his daughter? Or even if he was willing to do anything for her to be alive even without him being there- how is she going to live? Definitely not in any sort of way without a load of hardship that she never asked for. If the message is: adapt, accept loss, win- then all the “good guys” win and all the “bad guys” have died or lose. Don’t think there’s any ambiguity or morale contradiction
One thing I noticed is that the antagonists in arcane s1 that are pulling the strings is Silco and Singed who gets their face destroyed and cover up their face(Silco’s eye gets makeup and Singed has a scarf after the hextech explosion) but in s2 the antagonists wear something that covers their face and then it gets destroyed Medarda wears a battle helmet which gets destroyed by Warwick and Viktor wears a mask which gets blown up
Never thought about singed talking about himself and Vander at the same time. But it makes sense, especially with how quick he is to defending vander/warwick.
Singed is such pivotal behind-the-scenes influence in so many strands of LOL lore. I cannot claim more than a cursory grasp of the massive Runeterra lore; someone who does may very well poke this theory full of holes…and, of course, Riot has many other stories they want to tell, so who knows what consequences future stories will have on the lore…I understand that the origin and nature of Hex Crystals, which used to involve The Brackern, may be retconned…but here’s one thread that occurs to me: Perhaps related to Icathia, or something else, it’s been suggested that there is a Void rift near or beneath Zaun. Oshra Va’Zaun, of course, is an ancient city stretching back before the Shuriman empire. I think Singed is far older than he appears; it’s interesting that he looks exactly the same when Viktor is a child, and when we first see him in Ep1. “Patience is a product of age; both of which I possess in abundance.” (I’ve wondered if he might have originally been a Yordle who somehow hybridized himself with humanity, but that’s a reach.) In the lore, Orianna apparently became sick from the Zaun Grey when she went to help people. If (and it’s a big if) the Zaun Grey is related to the Void rift, and the fact that production of raw Shimmer seems to require a still-living Void-corrupted organ, then what Singed is doing kind of makes sense. The Void wants to consume all life and reality, because the creation of Runeterra woke the Void from slumber, and reality’s existence is painful. But Void (I would assume) cannot consume Void. If Runeterran life can be hybridized with Void “essence,” wouldn’t that mean that such life cannot be consumed by the Void? Perhaps that is Singed’s true goal?
But again, at what cost. Zaun isnt immediatly perfect, in fact most likely it´ll remain the bloody drugriddled wreck for at least a long time. She sacrificed Zaun while trying to save it.
@@gentleshark972 ya but it was already like that before. Her getting on the council did t cost her zaun If anything she put herself into a position to cause change.
@@fbauzo024fb it was bad, but not shimmer and mob ridden bad. It was a poor industrial town during Vanders leadership, but Silco and Sevika made it into the criminal hellhole we see for the rest of the series.
@@gentleshark972 ya but now with Sevika on the council and Vi on the enforcers Zauns future looks bright. Most stories ending with a despot being removed doesn't really show the turnaround. Season 1 ending led to the how bad zaun became. So season 2 ending is kinda doing the opposite.
The thing that makes Singed "win" where other characters fail is because at no point does he compromise on what he wants to do. All other characters make some kind of sacrifice or give up on their original goals to preserve something more important. For example, Ekko wants to live in a stable and happy community with the person he loves, he is handed that opportunity on a plate yet decides to give it up for the greater good. Silco wants Zaun to be independent, but gives up on that mission to protect Jinx, is another good example. If Singed was a position like them he would take it no hesitation and no question, he has no morals or goals outside of that.
He did, though. Presumably, when his daughter was still alive, they had some kind of a meaningful father-daughter relationship. But now all he gets is a superficial, hollow pretense of that. A toy that does the gestures of a child, but isn't really a child. A person doing the motions of a dotting father, but isn't one. And either he is too far gone to be able to tell the difference - or he has to keep lying to himself indefinitely, and keep pretending not to have realized it's empty. Hell, this is probably the worst ending out of all of them.
spot on analysis! Regarding Orianna, I too believe that she is more like a husk who either does not remember anything or lost her emotions (like Victor and Warwick after their transformation - also she loses her emotions in the original canon lore after her heart was replaced with mechanical parts so she was fully mechaso I think this fits perfectly as a retcon). In that ending shot she has a very empty air about her (not even freaked out about her appearance) so I believe she lives but is without emotions at least or even lost her memories and soul. This is truly tragic and as you described this will be a hard journey ahead for this father /daughter duo. I think this is a perfect theme to carry over into the next series, since this story can be expanded a lot. It would be the perfect reason for Singed to go to Noxus in search of a method to regain Orianna's emotions and memories which will lead to him being involved in more war (with Ionia etc.).
I think on a thematic level the reason Singed wins is because he accepted from the beginning there was nothing you could do to escape the power of love. Everyone struggles with it except Singed. Jinx cant go Joker mode bc she still loves her sister. Vi can't stop Jinx because she will always love her. Ambessa can't take Piltover because she cant fight her own daughter. Silco can't achieve his goals because he could never betray Jinx. Everyone says they have beliefs and ideal and goals and they think in the face of what they believe is right and just they can bear to sacrifice that which they love. But nobody can. All of them try and they all fail and lose something. Except Singed, because he accepted from the beginning that there was nothing he would not do for his daughter and accepted the consequences well before he had to face them. So in a way, he is the wisest character who already knew how the story would end and accepted it but everyone else had to go through the 5 stages of grief to finally accept that the story could only end one way, not because of fate, but because of who they are. PS: To quote one poet "The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves."
Another beautiful essay. I love how each character is deconstructed and how they reflect real human conflicts that we have, had, or are facing every day. To Singed it is a victory, but to the rest of the world, he is a madman who lost everything for a moving doll.
We don't know if Singed got a happy ending. We saw he had a dollified version of his daughter. She may not be mentally the same. Maybe she's like Viktor and is plotting a post-human arcane ascension, maybe she's lost her emotions, maybe she lost her memories and doesn't identify as the daughter Singed lost, maybe she is the same person but she's disgusted and distressed by her new body, maybe she's disgusted by the man her father became to bring her back, or maybe she's literally an inanimate object that Singed is convinced is alive. We just don't know, but given the themes of the show I imagine Orianna's story is bittersweet at best.
When Viktor went to Singed for the first time, Singed said: "Nature has made us intolerant to change, fortunately we have the capacity to change our nature. [...] A variant (referring to shimmer), it should provide everything one needs to survive a violent transition." I think that is why Orianna and Vander continued living after Viktor was gone, they could whistand the change into a machine and keep on living, whereas the people that did not have the shimmer couldn't and were just mindless automatons. Given that the Beast's mind lived on in Vander after Viktor was no longer in control, it is possible that to some degree Orianna is still herself.
Yes but also we can also just say that from his perspective he got what he wanted and the series doesn't do anything to say otherwise, it is on us to imagine differently which fair we love head canons, but yes, not what we saw
You walk along the edge of danger And it will change you Why would you let this voice set in your head? It is meant to destroy you You summon storms, you play with nature Now watch it hurt you Why would you want to shape the world in your hands? You will never make it through Catch the fire burning out your soul Just make it die or you will turn it all To ashes and blood You waste your life to gain power You shift the game rules How does it feel to reach the line that no one ever got to cross? Does it make you a god now? Every sin will be forgiven If you lay down your weapons to the ground
I feel that Singed gets what he wants because of a few reasons. First is that thematically he echoes Silco’s musings on power. He does anything to get what he wants. He shifts alliances freely, allows terrible things to happen and ultimately enables Viktor in a bargain to save Orianna. Secondly is that his goals and relationships are simple and uncomplicated. Compared to the extremely messy, emotionally fraught and bitter relationship web between Vander, Silco, Jinx, Vi, Caitlyn, Jayce, Viktor, Ambessa and Ekko, Singed knows exactly what he wants. He’ll patiently ally with whoever enables his research until he hits on the golden opportunity that is Viktor. Providing a service only he can administer to make a deal with a nascent devil. He’s not hung up on old betrayals and issues of family, he’s not confused or stuck between who he is or where his loyalty lies, and lastly he has no morals or values that stand in his way like the others do. All the others were ultimately unwilling to sacrifice family for what they want. We see it when Vander hesitates to kill Silco. We see it when Ekko can’t bring himself to kill Jinx. We see it when Silco can’t bring himself to give up Jinx for Zaun. Singed was willing to sacrifice anything for family. His family wasn’t in the way of his objective, it was his objective. Once he had it, he bows out of the plot and doesn’t let ambition drive him to loftier goals like Ambessa or Viktor. Lastly Arcane has been pretty clear that this is not an idyllic setting. Good people don’t get their happiest endings. Bad people don’t always get just punishment. It’s not meant to be satisfying in that way, it’s actually rather thought provoking. On the one had Singed absolutely deserves to get raked over the coals for what he did, but for the sake of Orianna who was innocent in all this, is it entirely wrong that someone taken too soon should get a second chance? You can’t separate it, without Singed she would be dead, it wouldn’t have happened.
does viktor not have at least the 3 best (serious) lines? singed has "love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress" ig but viktor has "if you're going to change the world, don't ask for permission" "in trying to to great, we failed to do good" "there is no prize to perfection, only an end to pursuit."
Damn dude, that was a pretty dense video! I just love to hear your thoughts, honestly, its great to see a deep interpretation of his end. Singed is my favorite character, exactly because he shows that what matter its not his end; but his progression. He lost himself; he changed who he was to something worse, in his madness goal do reject death, and the external change in his life. Such great video :)
Great analysis! There's still some things that don't make sense for me tho. Like why does Singed say to Silco that "sometimes death is a mercy"? What's the whole thing about "the same look when someone covets a weapon"? He already made shimmer for Silco, and it seems like he has some comments about that, so maybe there's something to dig into here?
The beginning of the video made me laugh out loud! The editing of this channel continues to change (haha) This video just gave me a whole new perspective on life, great work! I love how you always analyze the series with the themes in mind, something that many times goes over my head
13:55 Nah what Silco did with Jinx was terrible lol. Vi punching Powder and then leaving her was horrible but it's still something she could have recovered from over time, Vi would have come back and tried to make things up with Powder had Silco not stopped her. Human beings are *generally* resilient and they can recover from emotional damage if given enough time and care, but if anything Jinx in episode 4 is more broken mentally than she was in episode 3 and I'm 99% sure it's because Silco effectively manipulated her into being emotionally dependent on him. He definitely loved her, but to me that doesn't at all justify or excuse how he would have had to treat Jinx for her to end up in that state.
Vi punching powder and leaving was traumatic, but let's not forget she also killed all of her friends that day which seems to be the bigger trauma. It's her friends she sees in her psychosis as well, not Vi. Silco would have had to be a licensed therapist for that not to eat her up.
@@ayuminor I don't know why you're implying that I'm forgetting that. I was simply pointing out that Silco isn't at all a good father figure like so many people claim he is. I do think Powder would have become mentally stable eventually, but even if she didn't, that doesn't change whether Silco even tried to help her, and from the way they interact in season 1 it really sounds like he made her WORSE by making her dependent on him because he was desperate to have someone else who felt as betrayed by her family as he does.
Damn once again another stunning and eye opening analyses, really interesting. And as always very well paced and explained with passing visuals and captions putting focus when the details are important. You deserve all the success you've gotten and I'm happy that it didn't only skyrocket with Arcane but that s2's success exposed your amazing arcane and other (analyse) content too even more people who clearly are interested or entertained by it.
Okay, so now here's a thing: In League's voice lines, Orianna is a heartless, cold, killer-bot thingy. If they mean to somehow preserve Ori's league personality in this, then perhaps Singed still "Won", since she maybe adapts to his teachings and accepts his decisions as the correct ones. I think it could be entirely possible that singed actually has his happy ending. And you know what? That's okay. Life does not abide to our perception of "Fair". Why is it "Fair" that Vi thinks her Sister killed herself because of her mistake for the rest of her life? It's not. In my opinion, Arcane is not only about having a higher sense of Moral teachings, but also about showing pure and real life in a fantastical world. Bringing realism to the unrealistic. And in that, having Singed come out as a "Winner" in this, would also be completely fine and okay. Because life doesn't care about what you perceive as "makes sense". :)
I have. SO MANY thoughts on singed. But, I'll start with the quote - one that you yourself pulled and used in it's more literal direct context! that _not only_ defines quite a bit of Singed as a character, but that also is part of this HUGE prevalent theme underlying the show: *"Love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress."* Now, the way he frames it isn't _exactly_ accurate, but he IS getting at something that we see in Arcane in so many different forms over and over and over. And that is this concept that one's life is made of three different things: Love (ie; interpersonal connection), Legacy (the communities, lives changed, and projects you create that will continue forward even once you die), and Progress (change on a deep and fundamental level - whether it be in terms of society, or science, or any kind of Very Big Breakthrough). The thing is, it's near impossible to absolutely dedicate yourself to all three of these things at once; people just don't have the capacity for such a thing, as each takes a lot of energy and time to work towards. And so, if you want to focus on one thing, if there's one bit you cherish the most, you have to let _at least one_ facet of the other two go. Hell, even just in Act 1 Season 1, we see this in action over and over and over: - In the cold open, we see the moment Vander chose to sacrifice any progress he'd made on the revolution to instead raise and love Vi and Powder in a relatively safe space, alongside making the legacy of Zaun as a community who sticks together through thick and thin (with him as its Hound), - Jayce almost has his future legacy and progress destroyed (hextech prototype + being banned from the academy) all so he's allowed to stay with his loving mother in Piltover - the only things that allows this to change at the last moment is Viktor sacrificing any future chance he had to continue as Heimerdinger's assistant (legacy) by breaking into his office, Jayce actively making peace with the fact that everyone who _thought_ was in his corner (love) apparently decided that believing in his dreams alongside him wasn't worth it, and Mel losing any positive rapport she may have had with Heimerdinger on the council (another sacrifice of love - you can sacrifice multiple things in one category, or things from multiple categories, in order for something to have a bigger impact than it would otherwise!) - Without knowing it, Powder sacrifices half the people in her previous family and the bond she had with Vi (love) in order to make her bombs work for once (progress), and in the process she becomes Silco's new living legacy! - Marcus turns out to be a fool who unknowingly sacrifice the life and legacy of a well-respected sheriff, and become a pawn in establishing Silco's legacy, just so he could progress up the career ladder and get promoted to sheriff himself. Like, why do you think people mention the word 'sacrifice' over and over and over in this show? This is something that the show is actively bring up all over the place, all the time. And Singed embodies this rule of sacrifice to the absolute extreme; he is someone who is _constantly_ sacrificing budding connections, other people's communities, lets himself become cogs in other people's machines of legacy, ALL to progress at something that's considered otherwise impossible: truly bringing a loved one back to life. at this point, all he _has_ are the tokens of the many many many sacrifices he's made (all his jarred specimens and scars and the horror he brings just by being involved in a scene).... and just the one, small token he carries with him of what he's doing this for (the locket). The other big lens I like to think of Singed through that I already mentioned a little is that of something of a Knight of Cerebus, or perhaps more accurately as (what I like to call, just to be dramatic) a *Horror Herald.* Whenever his hands get _pointed out_ as being involved in a situation, you know _at some point soon_ the narrative is going to take into the kind of scene taken directly out of a horror movie. We see this from the get-go in how the narrative introduces him: Silco comes over, talks to him a bit, and then all the stuff with the rat and cat in the tank. and _this keeps happening:_ Dekker taking Shimmer after Singed nodded at him, only for Dekker to ruthlessly splatter Grayson's head the ground; Vander willingly taking the Shimmer we briefly saw the alchemist working on in the warehouse earlier, who then almost loses himself to the monster inside and unwittingly sets himself up to be Warwick; giving Viktor the Shimmer that leads first to his mad scientist body augmentation scene and then the followup scene of Sky paying for Viktor's scientific hubris. To be clear: this ISN'T a correlation between Shimmer and horror scenes that we're seeing and that I'm misconstruing as connected to Singed. There's scenes that involve Shimmer that aren't framed as horror at all - the Dirty Little Animals sequence we see in episode where people were actively smoking Shimmer at the club, Sevika in her fight scene with Vi where her cyborg arm is powered by Shimmer, and Salo getting his legs painted with it in season 2 are all prime examples of this. Meanwhile we have scenes with Singed where Shimmer isn't involved _at all_ and this ends up happening; The hallucination sequence Jinx has when Singed is bringing her back to life following Silco asking him to bring her back to life, and Singed showing up at the fountain rally that then leads to the Slasher/Monster movie sequence where Warwick tears through the prison guards are the biggest examples of this at work. And, what makes it even more terrifying is that _he seems to realize this on some level._ It's why he knew to close the bars to his cell and not make a sound when Warwick was about to show up in Stillwater. It why he only brought a scalpel with him to the fountain rally and told Isha they would get out soon _before_ all that; it's why he _doesn't_ show up in the final battle, as this is one of the only cases where someone else has more of a hold on the horror vibes that him (that being Viktor and his huskdolls, of course). ....But. I would argue. His ending is actually the biggest example of this at work, and also the most subtle case of them all: this is a man who we've seen use intellect, rationality, and cunning to do _precisely what he needed_ to be relevant enough to make big moves that get the plot moving, but never letting himself stay the focus or the limelight, kept attention off his back and held his head low so no one would think to drag him into direct battle... and what does he get in return? Why, nothing more than exactly what he had been working towards this entire time. If that's not a horror movie-level 'bad guy wins' ending, I don't know what is.
Singed needed to win, because he needed to join Noxus side for the invasion of Ionia. It's basically necessitated by the event timeline. The Stories of all other major champions introduced in Arcane end with the shift away from piltover. Their stories are told to its conclusion basically. But singeds isn't, especially considering the switch to focus on noxus now.
Great analysis. Another thing I think is important to take into consideration would have to be Oriana's story. Which parallels what you said about Corrin loosing everything to keep his daughter alive another thing that the story also said was that she lost a lot of her own humanity due to all the changes that happened to her. The only thing that wasn't replaced was her heart. And when Corrin got sick Orianna created a Hex-tech heart for herself and gave her own heart to Corrin so that he could live. And then she left him so that she could explore the world for herself. Leaving her father all alone. Which I'm hopping this story line will be explored in a future storyline.
@@wartyrant8627 oh my gosh thaaank youuu, I feel so seen. 8'D I use Sony Vegas Platinum 11.0 to edit videos. FireAlpaca, sometimes Gimp, for drawings and collages. I've also gotten stronger by working on a pomodoro/interval timer.
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Brilliant video as always. I really hope this is not the last time we see Singed and Orianna because I want to see how they reimagine the lore and see where their relationship goes.
I think it would be cool if she objects to Singed making weapons for Noxus and it drives a wedge between them.
That was such an awesome plug I didn’t even skip the actual ad 🐝✨
congrats on the sponsor, so deserved
I enjoyed video but I see it as a wishful thinking.
It is very uncomfortable to think that someone so evil can succeed, but such things just can happen
You assume that Singe ability to understand others emotions is a sign of his need in others, but it might be just his observation skills and analytical mind, of a great scientist.
You believe he valued society and comfort before the death of her daughter, but it's more likely that he just like Victor valued his own science and probably a couple of closest people (Orianna obviously)
You say that his actions leaded for lots of troubles, except everyone's actions leaded for lots of trouble. Arcane is the series about characters making lots of trouble and Singed is not even in top three by that, probably.
Will his future be happy? We don't know. However there is a big chance that Orianna is really back, that she might accept her new existence, and that she will not know precisely that cost her father paid for this.
Singed made a goal for himself and it looks like he achieved it exactly at the level he wanted. This the only definition of success.
Once again, it's uncomfortable to think about it, but we should accept it. Although, you can go the Singe way instead, and make a video explaining how he actually lost, oh wait...
@schnee1
Imo i think to Singed “Alive” means it fits the functions of living things (MRS GREN)
Moves, Respires, Is sensetive to stimuli, Grow, can reproduce, Excretes and takes in nutrition
That’s it as long as Oriana does those thing she’s “Alive” to Singed completely ignoring - personality, desires, ambitions, feats and all the little things that make us truly alive
I think a big reason for Singed "winning" was because, unlike other fathers like Vander and Silco, whose daughters conflict with their goals, Singed's daughter *was* his goal.
So many of the problems other characters in Arcane faced were due to conflicting wants, but through the whole story, Singed only ever wanted one thing, his daughter.
He never needed to sacrifice anything he valued because the only thing he valued was already taken from him. And he'd do anything to get it back
I think this is spot on and it is pretty much referenced in every single episode. Everyone believes they have a choice but dont realize they made the choice a very long time ago. Singed just admits the truth without shame.
This is exactly in essence Signed in this story is Mr. Freeze. all Freeze cared about was finding a cure for his wife. All Singed Cared about was a cure for his daughter. But did he really win? Orianna is a hextech android, modelled after what he perceives his daughter would have been. She is not his real daughter. And the things that go on to happen after this with him and noxus and Ionia. Even in Arcane I didn't have any sympathy really for Singed, because of the blood on his hands.
If anything the only thing that happens to Singed is that he falls further into his own delusion.
@@talisredstar1543 but that's what he wants. and you're not really supposed to feel sympathy for him, or at least, extremely little. he is the pinnacle of selfishness. he is the ultimate evil genius. he wants one thing and one thing only and i think what he got is EXACTLY what he wanted.
Yes. He is just indifferent to everything except his daughter. a complete pragmatist. I am very interested in where they take him in the future. Lorewise his most evil acts are still to come..... Will they kidnap Orianna or something, who knows.
@@TYsdrawkcaB I mean thats the only diffrence between a Villian and a Hero. A villian will sacrifice the World for 1 person, while the hero will sacrifice 1 person for the World. Now is singed evil in my eyes? No, it's just a matter of perspective, he is dad that protects and tries to save his one and only family. he is just extremly selfish and human about it by not asking for help
It’s like the quote when Silco said “real power only comes to those who will do anything to achieve it” singed encapsulates that.
@@knoxtagas319 I wonder if they came to that conclusion independently or together. We don't really know much about Singed and Silco's relationship beyond Silco getting Shimmer from Singed, and that Silco trusts Singed enough to save Jinx's life. It seems likely that Singed helped save Silco, given that his eye treatment uses Shimmer, but we don't know how or why they met. I think that link may be important for Singed in the future, since his "happy ending" both doesn't seem completely happy nor totally like an ending. Perhaps if Jinx survived, they can meet and partially bond over a shared connection to Silco, just as Jinx and Sevika did. Maybe I'm saying that just because I really want the Jinx-Singed relationship Shmee outlines here, but it does seem compelling and left suspiciously absent from Arcane despite how close they came to interacting.
Singed in the end embodied this idea way more than Silco. Tbf he only had one relationship. He was “willing to do anything to achieve it”but also willing to do less to achieve it as well. He avoided conflict whenever he could
I've been thinking that Singed taught Silco that. In the past we see this lively idealist trying to do what he thought was right, that could have been easily manipulated by someone like Singed who was trying to separate himself from Piltover and their morality. We see his lab down in the mines, where he could have met Silco and started controlling things from the shadows. The entire series was dictated by the actions he took, it's not too far to think that every event leading up to episode one was also his doing. Silco never seemed like the one in control which made him try even harder to feel like he was. Thinking it was all his idea to liberate Zaun when he never really had any involvement in the advancements that took place. He was only just a face, a scary man in the background that felt like he was in control. The moment it slipped, he freaks out. Vi gets away and he takes it out on the nearest person. Not really the actions of someone confident in their abilities.
Does that imply that silco would have turned out just like singed had he lived to carry it out?
@@mossymosscreature seems pretty likely. Singed’s immortality challenges other peoples worldviews and similar to Heimerdinger he isn’t completely wrong. It’s just his perspective doesn’t apply to everyone. So when he’s proven right characters like Viktor and Silco learn from it in their own way. They didn’t 100% switch to Singe’s worldview but didn’t ignore it either
I was thinking this! "Nothing as undoing as a daughter" Until he undid his daughters death and then he's just chill
I think that was more of an observance of his current state rather than a judgement of Silco.
"Is there anything so undoing as a daughter?"
Tbf he did sacrifice pretty much everything for his daughter, without a second thought every single time.
He's a monster, he committed crimes against humanity. I don't think he's chill. He's got more blood on his hands than anybody except maybe Ambessa. He's got live with that forever.
@@MrViscious Ambessa aint got shit on him especially post Ionia.
I would also like to mention the tiny little moment he had with Isha when they were being transported to Stillwater. He absolutely did not have to say anything to her but he felt the need to comfort her in his own way. It just goes to show how strong his instinctual need for connection is, especially in this paternal way
Yes, as he unleashed a beast who could have killed that same child. What a paragon of paternal instinct!
@ such is the Singed paradox. We see these impulses from him, all of which he ends up avoiding or disregarding
@@jamakaya1332 To be fair, it was a possibility, but I'm pretty sure that his plan was for Warwick to get them out of jail under his command. With the rest of the guards dead, and the prisoners behind bars, it should've been an easy escape. But then the Vander-Powder connection happened, and he lost control of the beast, which in turn forced him to adapt and play his cards differently, appealing to Ambessa's warmongering to get what he wanted. Up to that point he really didn't need them, at best he would've needed Viktor's help.
@@Karanthaneos Now I'm wondering if he would've taken Isha with him had things gone according to his plan
My theory as to why singed gets a happy ending is sacrifice. The biggest motiff of the show is sacrifice overall, silco has to sacrifice jinx to get what he wants and it undoes him, jayce has to sacrifice his political ambitions to save his friend, vi has to sacrifice her understanding of piltover v zaun and powder to do good, etc etc etc. Singed by all accounts sacrificed more than any other character. He had a prestigious job at the academy, and sacrificed it for Oriana, he had a powerful backer in Silco and seems to have sacrificed that too eventually when their visions differed. The man was the only character who when presented with a sacrifice said, 'yes, take my eye, take my health, take the undercity, take the whole world.' without even blinking. and the story rewards all those who made their sacrifices, so he wins, but at the cost of *everything*
I think this, combined with the point of the video, is really the point of Singed. He made a Faustian bargain with the devil, and was so obsessed with what he'd gain that he doesn't even care he lost his soul in the process.
Could not have said it better myself. Thanks for writing that out.
He's also the only relatable "evil" character. Everyone else who causes harm is deranged by cartoon evil goals like power, revenge, conquest, etc. Important for a plot, but personally who gives a fuck. Might as well be the Joker.
Singed is a dad who lost his daughter. Unlike every other parent, though, he might actually be able to get her back. He does what any parent would do, if they thought it was at all possible.
Fuck fair, fuck community, fuck acceptance, fuck pain, fuck good & evil, if you can get your kid back, you do it. THAT makes sense to me in a way that Ambessa, Silco, Viktor, Jayce, etc., NEVER will.
Brilliant observation
but without cost
Vander: "No one wins in war Vi"
Meanwhile Singed:
Singed: "I do not do war. I just do war CRIMES."
Singed: "I believe that is what they call a Skill Issue"
I hope it will be a running joke of every future show just have Singed, Orianna and Blitzcrank, appear in the background, having the time of their life. While the most depressing shit is happening in the stories =D
@@AlexanderForsman the link between all the shows is just Singed traveling around Runeterra making everyone's lives worse as he does SCIENCE!
He was never in for the war, he was the one selling the weapons to achieve his goal. In that sense, he never got involved in the horrors, he made it possible for people to commit them to fuel his research to achieve his own separate goal. He was never in for the war, he exploited the people who were caught in the war for his own benefit.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the parallels between Jinx and Viktor. They’re both kids from the undercity who define themselves as “weak”, they’re brilliant inventors, and they both become symbols to the people of Zaun. They’re two of the first people to experiment with Hextech, and their experiments lead to the death of a loved one. Jinx blows up Milo and Claggor, Viktor disintegrates Sky, and they both continue to see and talk to these people long after they’re dead. Also, Singed operates on both of them in order to save their lives, and as a result they’re both permanently mutated by Shimmer. Honestly, it’s amazing these two only interact ONCE throughout the entire show.
yeah I remember seeing a tumblr post about the parallels between jayce and viktor to vi and jinx
Their paths don’t really run close.
Viktor is someone who left the Undercity, Jinx did not.
Viktor was poisoned literally as a child by the atmosphere there, Jinx was metaphorically living through the ideological atmosphere her whole life.
While they have plenty of similarities the ways their narrative evolved and the paths their lives took them are not.
Is sky a loved one if Victor barely noticed her? She was a barely a friend.. but yea i get what you're trying to say
if viktor is a fortune cookie then is jinx a sugar cookie
If Orianna follows old League lore (what seems to be a running theme with a lot of Arcane characters) she will be herself but empty
Orianna in League is a human ship of theseus, she worked with her father (a clockmaker) and got sick like half the Zaun cast. Her father gradually replaced her body parts with clockwork prosthetics as the disease ate at her, consuming her from the inside. Until suddenly, there was nothing left. With all of what made her human gone, Orianna still remembers her father and thinks she remembers herself before the change.
But she's empty. There are no emotions. No feelings. Just a deep void
In that sense, she's an antithesis to Gwen, the other doll character in League, who, despite never being human, is so full of life and curiosity. Yes this is a desperate cry for Riot to have Gwen and Ori interact in any capacity. Like please. I need this
Orianna’s lore is old, but there is something of a discrepancy.
The only part of her untaken by the disease and thus not replaced with machinery was her heart but when her father suffered a severe heart condition she had hers transplanted into him with a clockwork heart for herself prepared in advance to save his life.
The old lore painted her as an emotionless machine but she did receive some lore updates later on that contradict them slightly.
The newer (operative term) would state that yes she does feel hollow, somewhat distant from her humanity and desires to feel human again… but that she still has the vestiges of her core traits. Her love for her father most of all still remains, and she does consider herself sentient to the point she pities mindless automata.
So technically there is space for both.
But she shows emotions in her backstory. She is very empathetic towards the circus doll whom she belives to be alive after she ran away from home
@vincentgesue4851 OK maybe no emotions was a bit hyperbolic, but her story makes it clear that her emotions were mostly a memory of the time she was human and that her arc is about her kinda "relearning" to feel them properly since she basically is a new person now
I've already read your comment and the replies you recieved (yay, online responsabiliy), so my only input will be this: the tragedy of Orianna is that she doesn't "feel" sad, but she remembers what emotions are like, and how they used to be. So she _thinks_ herself sad, and it seems like she doesn't consider that to be actual sadness.
@SirEriol Well yeah, emotional detachment, apathy, depression all that fun stuff basically
Him winning and getting away with war crimes galor is literally his in game lore. The man causes mayhem and destruction and pain and suffering and he gets awat scott free every time getting what he wants or needs and everyone else has to deal with the consequences.
I'm going to ask then, what about Oriana? Is he her father in the game, too? Does she run away or resent him? I want to see if there's precedent for Singed's victory being as hollow as it seems.
@@boppertron4929 As far as I'm aware, Orianna being Singed's daughter is a piece of purely Arcane lore. These two characters, despite both hailing from Zaun, are near entirely separate in League's lore. This might potentially be altered with Riot declaring Arcane as canon but who knows if they'll follow through on that storytelling beat.
@@boppertron4929 I don't think the orianna in the game has any connection at all, to the orianna in Arcane.
It's pretty much just using the game one as a template to inspire this character.
She is a murder robot in game, and i believe her lore was; she was the daughter of a clockmaker/artificer of some kind.
So im just saying; orianna in game can't be used to prove anything or shed any light.
@@deseanlothian arcane and league was made canon but the original and arcane now are still different i believe
@@roseinan I have no clue what you are trying to say here.
I think you meant to say arcane is made cannon, and league lore isn't now.
Both can't be cannon at the same time if they are different.
Unless you're talking some multiversal shit, in which case; i have no clue what you are saying.
15:00 BRO OUTTA NOWHERE
🙃
RIGHT??
funny funny guy
that was a legendary pull
That was so good, I'm not even mad. Didn't skip. XD
I feel like the whole point is that he DOES only care about Orianna. This is "success" for HIM. He is that far gone.
And he plays every card just right to get what he wants.
I think he is genuinely the *_perfect_* "evil genius" archetype. Because why would you make YOURSELF the supervillain if you're that smart? Then you put a target on your back. So he finds a way to get funded by Silco, and the chembarons, and when Ambessa comes along, she too comes for him. He hides in the shadows behind the "villain".
Also, sidenote, Sky* (*EXTREMELY HEAVILY IMPLIED to be the manifestation of Viktor's humanity) is "extracted" into a different vat, and many speculate that is what was used to give robot Orianna "humanity".
But will he consider it success if she sees what he's done and vows to destroy him?
its success right now, yes, but this videos is suggesting that in the future his daughter will figure out what she is and what he did and resent him for it, or his daughter will not fully be human and will not be truly able to fill the void of human connection he so desperately desires. its true that this was a success for him, shnee is just saying that the success is warped and wont last long
@@ursidae97 honestly probably because his only goal was to have her alive. I think there’s plenty of parents that would prefer their kids to be alive and hate them then dead
@@Remelia-co2ej maybe he will. But most parents would rather their children love them than hate them too.
@ I agree, but like the video said, he only really cares about the function of it. He just wants things back the way they are. He probably didn’t consider her mental state or whether she be mad at him all that much as long as he had her back.
“Ima do my own thing” “yo go girl” these quotes are gold
What I love about Singed in Arcane is he is a complete force of nature as a character. His single-minded goal and his actions to pursue it are the cause of so much of the series, yet he remains largely in the background the whole time, bidding his time. He isn't heartless/inhuman as his interactions show, but he is willing to sacrifice anything and everything for his goal, he really is just "it's nothing personal kid" as a character.
in a sense, throughout the events of arcane, singed used one of the most powerful tactic he use in the game: proxy
@@niscent_
He proxy farmed AND took murk wolves
"The exception which proves the rule."
This phrase originally came from the original meaning of 'prove', which was to _test._
22:28 He's never named, but it might be how he got his name. His face is singed, so the people who saw him might've started to refer to him as "the singed man", until it eventually turned into just "Singed" 🤔.
his name is dr corin reveck, caitlyn calls him that
@ Very few people know that though. I don't think anybody in Zaun knows his name. Also afaik, Dr Reveck used to be a different person from Singed. Arcane fused the two into one person for the needs of the story.
@@louisrobitaille5810 and I've also heard something along the line that riot was originally gonna have Renata Glasc in Silco's role too
@@louisrobitaille5810 A lot of Arcane lore is readapted. Originally Stanwick Piddidly, which was named at the very start of episode 4, was the one who invented Hextech, but now it's split between Jayce and Viktor. It wouldn't surprise me that some other things may change in the future for Noxus.
@@Karanthaneos I have a feeling that the Faceless one won't be Leblanc, idk why 🤔.
Imagine knowing that all of the horrible things, the pain and death, destruction of whole communities, was done just because of you. I couldn't imagine being in Orianna's place.
i was just thinking that. kind of reminds me of ellie and joel from the last of us. how do you reconcile a relationship where you're only alive because someone refused to let you go, and he hurt unfathomable numbers of people because of the choice he made on your behalf?
He kinda did all of this for nothing
Singed did nothing wrong
it's not her fault at all and his father did that out of utter love. could you say you truly love someone if you were willing to let them die just to avoid hurting people you don't know?
It's very similliar to Viego and Izolde story. He ruined a kingdom, island, people's lives just to get her back. She didn't want that. It's not love. It is a selfish desire. If all of focus and sense of life is on another person, it won't make happy neither the pursuer nor the desired.
Here’s my interpretation of this. If you take conflict with and acceptance of change as a central theme of the show. I think singed is the one character that never was conflicted about it. He’s the exception because he never accepted or allowed the change to be part of him. With all the others they have some form of denial they live in, or times where they get into great conflict over the difference between what was and what is. But singed never had to struggle over what was and what is. He never interacted with the idea of the present and therefore he’s detached from the idea of accepting change. That’s why he gets a happy ending, because the others only get happy by overcoming the conflict, he never gets into the conflict.
@@King_of_Hearts I think this mentality would also explain his willingness to perform the atrocities he does without concern for the consequences. He is in denial over a single specific change, not change in general. He changes Rio so she survives, he changes Vander so he survives, he changes Jinx so she survives, he changed himself so he survives, and he changed the world just so Oriana could survive. His denial is of death and death alone, the final change, a change he only experienced with his daughter's sickness and then refused to ever experience again. The consequences of his actions do kill possible thousands, but he never met those people so he didn't *experience* their death like he did with Oriana, which makes him completely callous to that death. Like you said, he has no conflict over change, no desire to go back or stay where he is; because his denial of change is exclusively projected onto one other person, who he views as unchanging.
according to his own words "i too once had a daughter". there's no denial here, no refusal of change in that sense. he perfectly acknowledge and accept that she died and decide to change it anyways.
does fixing your car means you are in denial of it breaking down? do you always have to be emotional about refusing to live in a world were your pen is out of ink? he doesn't know yet how that can be fixed, but he's a scientist, he knows how to do research, and he simply decided to find out how to fix the death of his daughter.
@@niscent_ Just to say, this is beautifully worded.
Some people in the comments said he is chaotic. He is not. He follows pretty much any order, never lie, and succeed at what he is asked for. He is just doing his own thing at the same time.
4D chess for this one is a constant reality. I will do my job, but any action is to fulfill my goal, nothing else is important.
He did plead with Viktor not to experiment on himself, stating there will be consenquences
I doubt Singed will gas Ionia. They can give spiritual, mental and emotional support to Orianna
Ionia would definitely ask Singed to gas Noxus as payment for his daughter's therapy
@@christiandauz3742 we can trust...
Great video. I came to the same conclusion about singed's monologue, it seems to be clearly him speaking on himself and attempting to contextualize his own actions and backstory. I also think its says even more about his mental state because he realizes that this explanation is for no one. Ambessa doesn't know or care what his backstories or motivations are. Singed might not even be consciously aware that he is defending himself in explaining Warwick. He simply relates so heavily to his creation that the idea of someone else calling him a monster is difficult to hear and something he needs to explain away.
You would have to assume that what he got is what he wanted. We only saw him showing his "daughter" the ballerina toy and she was expressionless, almost like she wasn't exactly there.
Well if you know League lore it's pretty likey that the daughter is Orianna
And she's just a robot girl who's relatively fine
He got his happy ending lmao
@@Sappysappster said lore is very much subject to change. kinda like how Ambessa is both in the game, but dead canonically. Or pretty much all the characters in Arcane having their old lore retconned.
We don’t know for sure if she’s fine or not. Hoping a spinoff sheds some light on that.
@@Sappysappster you mean the lore that is set to be changed. Besides you are only telling me that she is the one happy, but what about him, the person in question
@@Sappysappster A normal girl who finds out her dad's war crimes isn't gonna be alright for very long
@@IndividualTour1There’s 100% going to be a spinofff tho. It was halfway confirmed by Christian Linke and the other writers themselves. And there’s also the interviews that suggests a spin off. But we probably won’t get anything until a few years.
Though it's very possible Orianna's lore may change should there be any sort of continuation of her story in Arcane, her characterization in LoL is as an almost child-like yet soulless killing machine.
Given how the humanity got stripped entirely out of the automatons made by Viktor, I wouldn't expect Orianna to keep much of hers following resurrection.
So much like any of Singed's victories, Orianna's resurrection may just be another tragedy for Zaun & Piltover.
Viktor's automatons had no autonomy and worked according to his will, they were just puppets. But Orianna still has her autonomy, she can think for herself.
Which really begs the question; what would someone who has been stripped of all their humanity but kept their will actually *do?*
If Singed's secretly wants connection more than anything, I think it would only make sense for the story that Orianna be incapable of human connection.
I feel like it's also a way to allow Viktor his final defeat/rest with Jayce while also not eliminating his characterizing crusade. It's just that Orianna is the one picking up the flag. She's still that same hexcore tech, and now not even someone like Viktor has a hand on the wheel at all.
Knowing how arcane humanizes every character, I would suspect a fully realized Orianna would be a full human character, but WOULD be symbolically soulless because she had to see what her father became, what he TURNED her into. And now she's the newest highly powerful enemy hunting him down, and monsters like him.
Something I find interesting about Singed and Vander is him mentioning "The mind, I could not recover." Singed as a scientist is precise with his terms, his process. This implies that even with everything he did to make Warwick, he made an attempt to try and salvage Vander's mind somewhere in the process. I find that interesting considering he could place partial blame on Vander for the burns he suffered at the Shimmer warehouse.
It doesn’t need to make sense tbh. Singed got away because that’s just how things sometimes turn out. The same way good people/characters in the story get tragic endings, bad people get good endings. It feels realistic (and not in a cheap way) when not every character has an equally depressing or tragic ending. If anyone has watched JJK, it feels very similar to the Nanami and Mei Mei situation with Malaysia
Nanami and Mei Mei's respective endings make good sense from a story perspective. Nanami dies because he decided to see his path as a sorcerer to the end. He left and came back because he was unfulfilled working a normal job. Mei Mei was always in it for the cash, so she cut her losses when things got too dangerous for her and left.
Someone else pointed out that Singed's ending makes sense in that of the parent characters. He's not undone because his child never actually comes in conflict with his goals. Vander got kidnapped because Vi tried to turn herself in to keep the peace, Silco had to turn in Jinx to get Zaun, Ambessa was defeated by Mel.
I feel like this answer is effective but also really, really boring
1. Singed is more of a passive observer, and gives others a way to deal with their internal pain.
2. He's also reminds me of a snake. He just slithered away to make his desires be fulfilled.
3. #1 thing is when you bring someone back from the dead, you never get the same person.
4. Singed is just so numb after losing so much, he doesn't care about pain or hurting others.
Losing*
Snakes use lies and half-truths
Singed doesn't which makes him much more ethical than Trump
Orianna gotta have one of the craziest backstories in this show... "My origin? Well, I died... But then my dad became a mad scientist who created a war, violated the laws of nature, and resurrected me in this metal body." 💀
I had to laugh at a line toward the end, "There's going to be some existential horror and drama in the future for her." Ya think?!
I think it reinforces the magnitude of Viktor's choise - leaving humanity flawed and allowing someone like Synged to exist and even succeed
He's definitely a character foil to others, which means he exists in the story to heighten the choices other characters make.
So that is a very intriguing proposition.
14:12 The insight into this contrast was a great catch. It’s almost as if Silco desires to learn to “let loose” from his mentoring of Jinx. This is evidenced by her endearing place in his heart: letting her get “passes” for things his other subordinates would never be able to (save for maybe Sevika). He was completely vulnerable when asking Singed to save Jinx as well, a rare state for us to see Silco in. He *could not* lose her.
If we take Silco at his word, he told Jinx he was never going to give her up to Jayce / Piltover before he died. Even when his dream of (a united) Zuan was hypothetically being dangled in front of him.
Some part of Silco’s being *needed* Jinx: she was the Yin to his Yang: the chaos to his order. His Jungian shadow made manifest.
She made Silco feel whole again, which probably hadn’t been the case since Vander’s betrayal (in Silco’s estimation).
This internal conflict parallels with his external conflict of desiring a united Zuan (Undercity & Piltover working together in common purpose). The storywriters did fantastic work with this conflict. Ultimately, Silco was forced to choose between satisfying his internal desire for unity OR his external desire for unity. Evidently, the former “won”, which makes sense as that internal desire was more primal and fundamental in nature.
It is as Jung said: ~”Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.”
I see Singed as a foil to Silco and Vander as fathers. Where Silco and Vander end up forsaking themselves for their daughter while Singed forsakes the world for his daughter.
Singed is such a fascinating character to me, and I think there are additional points that could be made about his character.
For starters, it has to be pointed out that he as a character is built with same building blocks as the other characters. The mantra "is there anything so undoing as a daughter?" seems to be the mold by which almost all the main characters are formulated. I think the only exceptions are Jayce, Viktor, and Ekko. Everyone else is either built with a character arch that can be summed up with some kind of parent-daughter relationship. So it makes complete sense that this character, Singed, is also built with the same mold and his character story is built around the concept of a daughter. And how it undoes him.
Secondly, Singed reminds of one of my favorite "tropes", but actually done well. The trope of the character that has ambition (in this case a singular goal) and is willing to sacrifice everything for that goal.
Usually this trope is done as just the character that wants to have all the power and is willing to do anything to get that power, usually for very poorly explained reasons (if any at all) like "he hates the world and wants to watch it burn". But since Singed was built with that mold of a daughter, his singular goal is very clear and his role in the show can be seen always working towards that goal. Even if we don't directly realize it in the beginning.
Since Singed has such a singular goal, he is willing to forgo everything to reach it. Including his own life. It seems like he knows this too, that there is no way he could possibly get his daughter back unless he sacrifices everything about who he is for that singular cause. He "wins" by having his goal met, but he loses everything about himself.
I think there is an interesting mirror to this trope in the way it is usually written for the protagonist. Often in the story the protagonist is so consumed by his goal (usually revenge) but along the way they realize that the goal isn't everything. That there is more to life than fulfilling that one single goal, and so they change. Though they usually still get that goal, it's just hollow and not the "real" goal that they walk away with. (Usually it's getting the girl)
The mirror I see in Arcane that sticks out the most is the fight in S2E3 between Cait, Vi, and Jinx. Cait is consumed by her goal of killing Jinx and at the very end of the fight she is almost willing to sacrifice everything to reach that goal, even if that thing is possibly missing and hitting an innocent child. Cait is showing what monster she could have turned into, but didn't. Singed shows us the monster he became by not ever stopping in his quest. He's the equivalent in some ways to "What if Cait took the shot and killed Isha", maybe even "and Jinx too". He's the monster that a person has to become if they want to fullfill that ultimate goal.
The only character that is coming to my mind right now that has a similar concept is, unfortunately, Thanos. In order to get what he wanted most, he had to become a monster by killing his own daughter. He "wins" but had to sacrifice everything to do so. His singular ambition was so great that he didn't let anything stop him. I see Singed as the same way, but way better written.
Lastly, the interesting part I find about Singed is that his ambition is not necessarily for himself, but for someone else. It's not entirely altruistic, he does want to have his daughter back, but it's playing on the concept that a parent wants to give their child absolutely everything, even if it means sacrificing a part of themselves. I find it interesting only because it is a more complex motivation that you don't see as often. Usually if there is a motivation like that, it's poorly written in. My mind goes to Resident Evil, the original creator of the T Virus was trying to find a way to cure his daughter's paralysis. It's not exactly a 1 to 1 comparison, but it's what comes to my mind right away. In Singed's case, he really is trying to give his daughter life more than he is trying to give himself a life. He gives off the air of someone who has dedicated everything about himself to his daughter, no matter what it takes, even losing himself. He doesn't care, as long as his daughter lives. At least that's how I see it.
I like that Singed didn't entirely fail. Every other antagonist we see killed or driven off, but he got what he wanted for better or worse. Every episode of both seasons was leading to this one final moment. His desire to augment humanity leading to chemtech, his chemical genius leading to shimmer. Even Silco being in charge feels like his design. He sparks conflict in everyone around him and poisons every relationship he finds himself in. The toxicity of stagnation overtook his life but he still had this one singular goal, and he would do anything to achieve it. Sacrificing anything and everyone to further his goal in a desperate attempt to create progress. But you can't progress if you're stuck in the past, and now he has a living reminder of the past that will likely drive him to further depravity. She'll never be whole again, and anything less than perfect isn't enough for Singed.
Singed has what Silco called "Power".
Do absolutely anything to attain it.
And most importantly, the power of his own.
- Silco have to lend power from other barons to cement his power as the king of Zuan.
- Mel have to lend power from her house and the council, without them she is no one (before she became a mage)
- Even Ambessa have to lend her power from what Noxus still willing to give her and her house.
- Singed? He only, literally, lend his power to other characters. He might have to use other power but he didn't have to in the slightest.
With this framing I find it interesting that he is the one character that constantly talks about change and it’s necessity. Here are some quotes:
“Nature has made us intolerant to change, but fortunately we have the capacity to change our nature”
“Love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress”
And most damning to viktor
“Not fate. Evolution. Nature’s greatest force, forever in flux.”
He is literally arguing against the idea of viktor which is entirely against change and chaos and wishes for it to all come to a standstill. He seems to embody this ideal of the only constant is change and even willfully defends it. I think to him the idea of bringing his daughter back is an act of great change, like necromancy, there’s an acceptance in letting things lie and that is actually allowing things to slow down, for a good reason, to be processed because what is actually important is conscious change, to head towards change consciously.
The villain for so many characters in this show is exactly that, they are so willingly striving for the change they wish to make into the world and yet once they achieve it they find themselves not having made things better but irreversibly worse. The error is they strove for this change within the disguise of their own narrow beliefs which made their actions lack the necessary conscious intent to actually improve conditions. Powder and her monkey bomb, Vi and her fists, Jayce and Viktor and hextech, Caitlyn and her detective skills leading to a deep paranoia, Silco and Zaun vs Jinx.
The arbiter against this is clearly Hiemerdinger, he is constantly telling people to stride and think carefully because of his experience. Actually his arc being shaped by this in itself gives a greater weight to the idea, he holds it as a dogmatic faith, he almost instinctively acts on it, we see this with him wanting Jayce and Viktor to destroy the hexcore. Yet this is actually a failure to meet this ideal of conscious change because it fails to recognize the often subjective nature of careful and conscious action, hiemer wasn’t wrong but what choice did viktor have, either fork was a profound change for his own well-being, careful and conscious action in such a predicament can seem vastly warped from hiemer’s own perspective. It was only through ekko that Hiemer could come to understand this failure, why when one’s own life or existence is a constant predicament one is faced with, something Hiemer has no experience of, the decision to live and go on no matter what can be understood to be an act of something deeply conscious that his piltover surroundings have no connection to any longer. He expressed his realization of this profoundly contradictory nature of conscious action when faced with its finitude in a beautiful way, by expressing to Ekko “I must say that since I’ve met you, lad, I’ve truly lived.” Poetry.
Coming back to Singed, he clearly represents the antithesis to this. And I think this perspective fits nicely back into your narrative of at what cost and will reaching it be what is wished for. Clearly not and it is exactly because singed is like a Darth Sidious level representative of this antithesis, a pure representative of progress no matter the cost. The question why now stands even stronger now though? Like sure his daughter is a meaningful enough loss to understand his current actions but the way he has developed himself to that point has to even predate that, he doesn’t have this ability and instinct just because he lost his daughter, and I think that can only be explained by understanding what was his falling out with Hiemer is over. It certainly is over him not accepting his daughter’s death, but there could be something more there, a deeper lying antagonism that could parallel the antagonism between Jayce and Viktor by the end of the show. Which seems very arcane like with Vi and Jinx explicitly being parallels of their fathers. In the next show in noxus Singed is about to produce some of the most horrific atrocities in all of runeterra, since the rune wars, in Ionia. Since he no longer has his daughter to represent as the actual material reason for his attitude, the exploration of his character through these actions could take on this more metaphorical tone and a greater exploration of his relationship with Hiemer, similar to how the death of Silco meant Jinx finally had to confront how much jinx was built off of powder in the first place in the second season.
The funny thing is this attitude still holds onto the part of the Zaunite ideal that Silco wished to bring to the world which is striving against fate, this might be the most damnable form of it, but still. Striving against fate is often associated with Nietzschean philosophy, what could be more against fate then the death of god itself. The character in media most associated with this is Guts from Beserk and if their is any character in runeterra that might represent that in Noxus(beyond noxus kinda already being a massive exploration of the will to power) would likely be Riven, she’s a noxian soldier who was orphaned a birth, and if she has any Griffith moment it would be in confronting the horrors of what Singed’s action cause in Ionia.
The doll that is his resurrected daughter is only a win if you think about it as little as he is. That guy is more empty than she is.
A meme from the russian comedy show "Kuhnya" (Kitchen) was veeeeeery unexpected 0:16
haha i thought i was the only one who noticed
I think singed in league lore has always been the "guy trying to do right, just doing what he's asked to" but always increasingly "no matter the cost." Like, he's a character at the very core of what our sciences and medical knowledge comes from and that's often atrocity. He's the humanity in this darkness, but also the monster lurking in it. He can fell a domino leading to wars and genocides while justifying this newly gained knowledge through material ingenuity. A character that can learn from bloodshed, thus leaning into his wicked desires. Where we see war he can see opportunity. I think that's why he came out of this so unscathed. He knew the cost and was ready and willing to pay it, unlike everyone else. End the end we will all see him as evil or twisted for his actions while he accepted them long beforehand.
Maybe I'm crazy i haven't even watched the video yet...
Gonna be so real - that was the single best ad transition I've ever seen on this site. Well played 😂
😂 that squarespace transition was so smooth it jolted me out of my trance when I realized
Singed and Ambessa actually share the same philosophy when it comes to family. She said she would watch the entire world burn to save her family and Singed does exactly this. He would sacrifice EVERYTHING for Orianna
That segue into the Squarespace ad was so fuckin g smooth and hilarious that I didn't even mind it.
Singed loses his humanity in order to resurrect his daughter, and it’s so poetic that when he finally brings her back, she looks as inhuman as he does.
Thank you so much for making these videos. If it weren’t for people like you, I wouldn’t have given so much thought to art and media in general. Even in my own life, I didn’t realize how important it is. TH-cam has changed me from someone who was blind to someone who can think, and I owe that to you and many others on this platform for helping me become a better person.
I love your point about Singed talking about himself while he talks about Vander, because that also happens several times in the show. When Silco does his speech about power to the first human test subject, about power coming to those who do anything for it, he is clearly talking about himself. Every time Viktor speaks about "people who need help now", he is talking about himself...etc
Despite everyone else, Singed plays the long game to his goal without fail. He does not intervene with the world until necessary to get his goal or to help others a little bit.
So Singed has no enemy (I mean you could count Viktor at the end but still there is no hate involved in it) and can cling to anyone who may help his goal. Even every "selfless" help pays off in the end so you could look at those as long term investments or opportunities. Also Singed never demands anything from others but makes himself useful with mutual goals that benefits both parties. And that is why he "wins" in the end. But winning over death has always a high price and seldom is there a story where there is not a downside to it.
Ambessa: "I've discovered a fourth principle. One that heightens all others. SACRIFICE"
Singed would have (and did) sacrifice anything he could to get his goals
Singed does not get a totally beautiful happily ever after. In his Pov, yes. But only because he is totally tunnel visioned on achieving this one thing. Aside from that, his life is still pretty bad, and more importantly he ruined the lives of basically everyone around her. One might also consider it to him recieving his "payment" for saving Jinx. He is the guy Silco turned to when he couldn't accept that Jinx's status was final. Singed is never "evil" he is incredibly dedicated. More of a "chaotic neutral" if you want to stick allignment to it.
Babe wake up, a new Schnee video just dropped! Another chance at explaining the Schneeheart. Yay.
For those who think Singed was the only one who got a true "Happy ending", the most important part is not seeing Oriana's reaction being brought back. She *could* be happy and grateful for his sacrifices, but knowing everything we do there's scarce reason why she would be.
Oh my god... This touched me on a very deep level. It shook me a bit. It's like i've felt someone else, AS someone else. I didn't expect to get such a deep insight into a human's nature. And i honestly can't tell if it's the writers' work that you've simply highlighted or it's your doing of phrasing and narrating it in a manner that kept hammering it home until it broke something in me.
This video also reminded me of Slay the Princess, with the whole theme of Change vs Stagnation. Though the game twists the message into change = death, it still fits with the video some way
Interested to see what this title means
Edit: Totally agree with most of these points! I didn't think Singed's ending was weird or out of place from a storytelling standpoint, but that's because I never saw it as happy past the surface level, glad to see you got a similar conclusion.
I recently watch Jentry Chan vs the Underworld and the villains goal is to bring back their daughter back to life but after it’s done turns out the daughter didn’t want to be brought back to life
yeah! I thought of that while editing & almost used clips from it
There's a point in Buffy where one of the characters gets brought back to life by the heroes and really does not handle it well, and ultimately nothing is ever the same for anyone involved after that. For the type of show that Buffy is, it had some really well-done themes and explored some deep ethical questions in it's own right.
1:48
this just makes singed sound like the biggest giga chad in the story,
"story wants me to follow a some deep themes about change? nah thats gay, imma just win"
I LOVE the idea of Jynx being Singeds daughter, I never really thought about them having so much in common
I need someone to write a fic where Singed takes her in as a daughter
YES
PLEASE 🙏
The timeline where both Viktor and Powder end up being adopted by Singed. That's a scary amount of potential in one place, but in that constellation there might be a lot of good that comes out of that.
9:02 I should have noticed, I can't believe it's just clicking for me. It makes him worse for me. The torture Rio lived through, and he didn't necessarily care. Just needed a new host for his crazy ideas.
"I'm gonna do my own thing" for Singed actually got a massive laugh out of me LMAO, such a good edit
maybe he knows his life would be better if he move on and open his heart to loving new characters like viktor and jinx but his fatherly SELFLESSNESS to save his daughter even at the cost of his own life couldn't let him. and one other matter is if he perhaps psychologically was totally unable to love any other person in his life (which I personally don't believe that's possible for human).
there is A LOT to say about the difficult state that viktor and specially singed are in, in comparison to other characters of the show who were totally powerless to get back what they lost and the only option for them was accepting death, they also had a lot of things in life to latch onto to refill their void when singed and possibly didn't have that luxury. him not being a good father figure to viktor and eventually loosing him could be both a way of showing that he had the chance to love again and didn't accept it (you suggest out of foolish obsession and thinking still the only winning for him is reviving his daughter, which I disagree...) OR it confirms that it is indeed IMPOSSIBLE for him to bond with anyone even in optimal situation. you're done dumbing down possibly the most genius and wise character. there's a lot to wonder about
Kind of off topic, but i can't wait for a video on VI, because i did not understand her arc this seaosn nor what they did with/to her character and maybe you could bring light because she was my favourite on season 1
I think Vi's arc parallels her story in season 1 perfectly, but with more self-blame and hopes being destroyed. But I wouldn't mind a video like that either, so as not to write posts of a thousand words each time. during constructive dialogues
I feel like no one is pointing out the fact that in the show, they showed us the ballerina in the box with her instead of just showing us her face. I think they’re trying to tell us she’s just like the ballerina in the box, animated but not alive
2:35 did you fr buy like 20 books for this bit
TH-camrs are insane lol.
i think there's two things going on with Singed:
1. when it comes to characters having some sort of goal, it always comes with sacrifice. of all characters, Singed never hesitated when it comes to sacrificing because he already lost the only person he ever cared about. to him, losing his life and his title and his status and his eye is nothing compared to losing his daughter. he had nothing to hesitate over, nothing to think over - if he thinks it'll bring Orianna back, he WILL do it and he doesn't care if it'll destroy the lives of everyone else
2. if Orianna is going to be anything like she is in game, Ori is going to eventually leave Singed and he's going to have to suffer with "losing" her again. she's alive, but just won't ever be a part of his life again because her being "alive" is empty. she's just a vessel, she's not like Gwen who has the love and part of Isolde's spirit to give the doll (what we considered) life - Gwen has actual goals / ambitions and even emotions; Orianna doesn't
IMO the ambiguity you’re seeing could’ve been brought to life by making Orianna an actual character whose wishes differed from her father. Then we’d have some sense of loss at the end. As it is, I’d say Singed is portrayed as successful in Arcane. Orianna is a prize that he earns in the end through his sacrifices.
13:48 had a similar idea, Jinx+Orianna instead of Jinx+Isha. Singed and Jinx would be foils, with all their commonalities, filling opposite roles in Ori’s life. Jinx’s definition of saving Orianna would be honoring her free will and humanity, even if it meant killing her. (Agree it would’ve been nice to see some Jinx-Singed relationship.)
Nice video as always!
But that's kind of the point. Singed treats Orianna like a prize. A clockwork doll that he gets to play Parent with. Not an actual human child with agency of their own. His idea of being a parent to her got so deeply mutated and distorted, that it's now the same as a child singing a lullaby to a doll. So yes, he got his doll back, and gets to play pretend for a while - until reality comes crashing down, eventually.
@@t.vinters3128 The narrative itself treats Orianna like a prize. We don’t actually know if that’s how Singed sees his daughter. All we know is that he’s trying to reverse her illness or death. Maybe Orianna is happy to be alive, or maybe she’s horrified. Maybe she’s emotionless, and Singed accepted the price he’d pay to save her...or maybe he’s dissatisfied. We just don’t know, since we aren’t given enough context.
I always thought of Singed as the "single minded loss". Most people lose someone, they grieve, and then they either recover (like vi and Silco) or they crumble (like jinx). But there is a smaller category of people who become hung up on that loss and looking for a "solution" or a "fix" becomes their sole purpose for existing, and they have no regard for what the cost is to achieve that solution. It consumes them, all of their surrounding relationships, desires, goals, and often their morality. It is the "I will destroy the world for you" version of grief and it is very different from the more moral Gray we see in characters like Silco. Silco has relationships and other people he cares about beyond just Jinx (even if Jinx is at the top of that list), he isnt fully willing to forsake anything and everything. He will forsake a lot, but not /everything/. Singed has no emotional relationships, to him, the people he "assists" or "works for" are just a means to an end. He is fully willing to forsake literally anyone and everyone at the drop of a hat if it means he will get his daughter back. As a result, there is no real limit to his cruelty or his desperation. It almost doesn't matter "how alive" his daughter is, just so long as she is living.
Love that Walter White meme there at 0:31
I need it. In high rez.
idk if you (or anyone here 😭) have listened to EPIC the musical but some of this actually reminded me of that- how instead when odysseus gets home he acknowleges that hes changed but his goal never changed for 20 years. I feel like its pretty rare to see a character do that but yeah both these stories were about change and i LOVE how they were both written
In the three times I watched the finale not once did I see the singed scene and think he’d won. He’d succeeded yes- but what now. How does he take his horribly twisted and destructive self and be a father to his daughter? Or even if he was willing to do anything for her to be alive even without him being there- how is she going to live? Definitely not in any sort of way without a load of hardship that she never asked for. If the message is: adapt, accept loss, win- then all the “good guys” win and all the “bad guys” have died or lose. Don’t think there’s any ambiguity or morale contradiction
One thing I noticed is that the antagonists in arcane s1 that are pulling the strings is Silco and Singed who gets their face destroyed and cover up their face(Silco’s eye gets makeup and Singed has a scarf after the hextech explosion) but in s2 the antagonists wear something that covers their face and then it gets destroyed Medarda wears a battle helmet which gets destroyed by Warwick and Viktor wears a mask which gets blown up
Never thought about singed talking about himself and Vander at the same time. But it makes sense, especially with how quick he is to defending vander/warwick.
Singed is such pivotal behind-the-scenes influence in so many strands of LOL lore.
I cannot claim more than a cursory grasp of the massive Runeterra lore; someone who does may very well poke this theory full of holes…and, of course, Riot has many other stories they want to tell, so who knows what consequences future stories will have on the lore…I understand that the origin and nature of Hex Crystals, which used to involve The Brackern, may be retconned…but here’s one thread that occurs to me:
Perhaps related to Icathia, or something else, it’s been suggested that there is a Void rift near or beneath Zaun.
Oshra Va’Zaun, of course, is an ancient city stretching back before the Shuriman empire.
I think Singed is far older than he appears; it’s interesting that he looks exactly the same when Viktor is a child, and when we first see him in Ep1.
“Patience is a product of age; both of which I possess in abundance.”
(I’ve wondered if he might have originally been a Yordle who somehow hybridized himself with humanity, but that’s a reach.)
In the lore, Orianna apparently became sick from the Zaun Grey when she went to help people. If (and it’s a big if) the Zaun Grey is related to the Void rift, and the fact that production of raw Shimmer seems to require a still-living Void-corrupted organ, then what Singed is doing kind of makes sense.
The Void wants to consume all life and reality, because the creation of Runeterra woke the Void from slumber, and reality’s existence is painful. But Void (I would assume) cannot consume Void. If Runeterran life can be hybridized with Void “essence,” wouldn’t that mean that such life cannot be consumed by the Void?
Perhaps that is Singed’s true goal?
I feel like Sevika getting on the council is arguably also a happy ending
But again, at what cost. Zaun isnt immediatly perfect, in fact most likely it´ll remain the bloody drugriddled wreck for at least a long time.
She sacrificed Zaun while trying to save it.
@@gentleshark972 ya but it was already like that before. Her getting on the council did t cost her zaun
If anything she put herself into a position to cause change.
@@fbauzo024fb it was bad, but not shimmer and mob ridden bad.
It was a poor industrial town during Vanders leadership, but Silco and Sevika made it into the criminal hellhole we see for the rest of the series.
@@gentleshark972 ya but now with Sevika on the council and Vi on the enforcers Zauns future looks bright.
Most stories ending with a despot being removed doesn't really show the turnaround. Season 1 ending led to the how bad zaun became. So season 2 ending is kinda doing the opposite.
@@gentleshark972sometimes things have to get worse before they get better
The thing that makes Singed "win" where other characters fail is because at no point does he compromise on what he wants to do. All other characters make some kind of sacrifice or give up on their original goals to preserve something more important. For example, Ekko wants to live in a stable and happy community with the person he loves, he is handed that opportunity on a plate yet decides to give it up for the greater good. Silco wants Zaun to be independent, but gives up on that mission to protect Jinx, is another good example. If Singed was a position like them he would take it no hesitation and no question, he has no morals or goals outside of that.
He did, though. Presumably, when his daughter was still alive, they had some kind of a meaningful father-daughter relationship. But now all he gets is a superficial, hollow pretense of that. A toy that does the gestures of a child, but isn't really a child. A person doing the motions of a dotting father, but isn't one. And either he is too far gone to be able to tell the difference - or he has to keep lying to himself indefinitely, and keep pretending not to have realized it's empty.
Hell, this is probably the worst ending out of all of them.
Please PLEASE provide us with the Walter White meme at 0:31 in high rez. I need it.
spot on analysis! Regarding Orianna, I too believe that she is more like a husk who either does not remember anything or lost her emotions (like Victor and Warwick after their transformation - also she loses her emotions in the original canon lore after her heart was replaced with mechanical parts so she was fully mechaso I think this fits perfectly as a retcon). In that ending shot she has a very empty air about her (not even freaked out about her appearance) so I believe she lives but is without emotions at least or even lost her memories and soul. This is truly tragic and as you described this will be a hard journey ahead for this father /daughter duo. I think this is a perfect theme to carry over into the next series, since this story can be expanded a lot. It would be the perfect reason for Singed to go to Noxus in search of a method to regain Orianna's emotions and memories which will lead to him being involved in more war (with Ionia etc.).
I think on a thematic level the reason Singed wins is because he accepted from the beginning there was nothing you could do to escape the power of love. Everyone struggles with it except Singed. Jinx cant go Joker mode bc she still loves her sister. Vi can't stop Jinx because she will always love her. Ambessa can't take Piltover because she cant fight her own daughter. Silco can't achieve his goals because he could never betray Jinx.
Everyone says they have beliefs and ideal and goals and they think in the face of what they believe is right and just they can bear to sacrifice that which they love. But nobody can.
All of them try and they all fail and lose something. Except Singed, because he accepted from the beginning that there was nothing he would not do for his daughter and accepted the consequences well before he had to face them. So in a way, he is the wisest character who already knew how the story would end and accepted it but everyone else had to go through the 5 stages of grief to finally accept that the story could only end one way, not because of fate, but because of who they are.
PS: To quote one poet "The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves."
Another beautiful essay.
I love how each character is deconstructed and how they reflect real human conflicts that we have, had, or are facing every day.
To Singed it is a victory, but to the rest of the world, he is a madman who lost everything for a moving doll.
We don't know if Singed got a happy ending. We saw he had a dollified version of his daughter. She may not be mentally the same. Maybe she's like Viktor and is plotting a post-human arcane ascension, maybe she's lost her emotions, maybe she lost her memories and doesn't identify as the daughter Singed lost, maybe she is the same person but she's disgusted and distressed by her new body, maybe she's disgusted by the man her father became to bring her back, or maybe she's literally an inanimate object that Singed is convinced is alive.
We just don't know, but given the themes of the show I imagine Orianna's story is bittersweet at best.
2:21 Afro Singed is crazy
When Viktor went to Singed for the first time, Singed said: "Nature has made us intolerant to change, fortunately we have the capacity to change our nature. [...] A variant (referring to shimmer), it should provide everything one needs to survive a violent transition." I think that is why Orianna and Vander continued living after Viktor was gone, they could whistand the change into a machine and keep on living, whereas the people that did not have the shimmer couldn't and were just mindless automatons. Given that the Beast's mind lived on in Vander after Viktor was no longer in control, it is possible that to some degree Orianna is still herself.
Yes but also we can also just say that from his perspective he got what he wanted and the series doesn't do anything to say otherwise, it is on us to imagine differently which fair we love head canons, but yes, not what we saw
You walk along the edge of danger
And it will change you
Why would you let this voice set in your head?
It is meant to destroy you
You summon storms, you play with nature
Now watch it hurt you
Why would you want to shape the world in your hands?
You will never make it through
Catch the fire burning out your soul
Just make it die or you will turn it all
To ashes and blood
You waste your life to gain power
You shift the game rules
How does it feel to reach the line that no one ever got to cross?
Does it make you a god now?
Every sin will be forgiven
If you lay down your weapons to the ground
Bonus points for saying "unalive" on TH-cam but as an actual word instead of censored "dead".
Also that Ted Talk chick is downright Schnee pilled.
I feel that Singed gets what he wants because of a few reasons.
First is that thematically he echoes Silco’s musings on power. He does anything to get what he wants.
He shifts alliances freely, allows terrible things to happen and ultimately enables Viktor in a bargain to save Orianna.
Secondly is that his goals and relationships are simple and uncomplicated.
Compared to the extremely messy, emotionally fraught and bitter relationship web between Vander, Silco, Jinx, Vi, Caitlyn, Jayce, Viktor, Ambessa and Ekko, Singed knows exactly what he wants. He’ll patiently ally with whoever enables his research until he hits on the golden opportunity that is Viktor. Providing a service only he can administer to make a deal with a nascent devil.
He’s not hung up on old betrayals and issues of family, he’s not confused or stuck between who he is or where his loyalty lies, and lastly he has no morals or values that stand in his way like the others do.
All the others were ultimately unwilling to sacrifice family for what they want.
We see it when Vander hesitates to kill Silco. We see it when Ekko can’t bring himself to kill Jinx. We see it when Silco can’t bring himself to give up Jinx for Zaun.
Singed was willing to sacrifice anything for family. His family wasn’t in the way of his objective, it was his objective.
Once he had it, he bows out of the plot and doesn’t let ambition drive him to loftier goals like Ambessa or Viktor.
Lastly Arcane has been pretty clear that this is not an idyllic setting. Good people don’t get their happiest endings. Bad people don’t always get just punishment.
It’s not meant to be satisfying in that way, it’s actually rather thought provoking. On the one had Singed absolutely deserves to get raked over the coals for what he did, but for the sake of Orianna who was innocent in all this, is it entirely wrong that someone taken too soon should get a second chance? You can’t separate it, without Singed she would be dead, it wouldn’t have happened.
Because he has the best quotes
does viktor not have at least the 3 best (serious) lines? singed has "love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress" ig but viktor has
"if you're going to change the world, don't ask for permission"
"in trying to to great, we failed to do good"
"there is no prize to perfection, only an end to pursuit."
@@TYsdrawkcaBI used one of Viktor’s quotes for my senior quote.
@@chickensalad3535 based
@@TYsdrawkcaB Yeah Viktor takes the cake I was just sticking up for Singed
@@Eoghann ah, fair. i mean, if you want to, he is pretty much the PERFECT "mad scientist" archetype character, so you could say that. (like i did lol)
Damn dude, that was a pretty dense video! I just love to hear your thoughts, honestly, its great to see a deep interpretation of his end. Singed is my favorite character, exactly because he shows that what matter its not his end; but his progression. He lost himself; he changed who he was to something worse, in his madness goal do reject death, and the external change in his life. Such great video :)
Great analysis! There's still some things that don't make sense for me tho.
Like why does Singed say to Silco that "sometimes death is a mercy"?
What's the whole thing about "the same look when someone covets a weapon"? He already made shimmer for Silco, and it seems like he has some comments about that, so maybe there's something to dig into here?
The beginning of the video made me laugh out loud! The editing of this channel continues to change (haha)
This video just gave me a whole new perspective on life, great work! I love how you always analyze the series with the themes in mind, something that many times goes over my head
The first non Jinx Schnee video for season 2!!!🎉🤣
Orianna: *opens door* "are you winning, dad?"
Singed: *shaking, not stirring* "Yes."
13:55 Nah what Silco did with Jinx was terrible lol. Vi punching Powder and then leaving her was horrible but it's still something she could have recovered from over time, Vi would have come back and tried to make things up with Powder had Silco not stopped her. Human beings are *generally* resilient and they can recover from emotional damage if given enough time and care, but if anything Jinx in episode 4 is more broken mentally than she was in episode 3 and I'm 99% sure it's because Silco effectively manipulated her into being emotionally dependent on him. He definitely loved her, but to me that doesn't at all justify or excuse how he would have had to treat Jinx for her to end up in that state.
Vi punching powder and leaving was traumatic, but let's not forget she also killed all of her friends that day which seems to be the bigger trauma. It's her friends she sees in her psychosis as well, not Vi. Silco would have had to be a licensed therapist for that not to eat her up.
@@ayuminor I don't know why you're implying that I'm forgetting that. I was simply pointing out that Silco isn't at all a good father figure like so many people claim he is. I do think Powder would have become mentally stable eventually, but even if she didn't, that doesn't change whether Silco even tried to help her, and from the way they interact in season 1 it really sounds like he made her WORSE by making her dependent on him because he was desperate to have someone else who felt as betrayed by her family as he does.
Damn once again another stunning and eye opening analyses, really interesting. And as always very well paced and explained with passing visuals and captions putting focus when the details are important.
You deserve all the success you've gotten and I'm happy that it didn't only skyrocket with Arcane but that s2's success exposed your amazing arcane and other (analyse) content too even more people who clearly are interested or entertained by it.
that ad hit me like a truck
Okay, so now here's a thing: In League's voice lines, Orianna is a heartless, cold, killer-bot thingy. If they mean to somehow preserve Ori's league personality in this, then perhaps Singed still "Won", since she maybe adapts to his teachings and accepts his decisions as the correct ones.
I think it could be entirely possible that singed actually has his happy ending. And you know what? That's okay.
Life does not abide to our perception of "Fair". Why is it "Fair" that Vi thinks her Sister killed herself because of her mistake for the rest of her life? It's not.
In my opinion, Arcane is not only about having a higher sense of Moral teachings, but also about showing pure and real life in a fantastical world. Bringing realism to the unrealistic.
And in that, having Singed come out as a "Winner" in this, would also be completely fine and okay. Because life doesn't care about what you perceive as "makes sense". :)
Scar said it best: Life's not fair, is it?
I have. SO MANY thoughts on singed. But, I'll start with the quote - one that you yourself pulled and used in it's more literal direct context! that _not only_ defines quite a bit of Singed as a character, but that also is part of this HUGE prevalent theme underlying the show:
*"Love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress."*
Now, the way he frames it isn't _exactly_ accurate, but he IS getting at something that we see in Arcane in so many different forms over and over and over. And that is this concept that one's life is made of three different things: Love (ie; interpersonal connection), Legacy (the communities, lives changed, and projects you create that will continue forward even once you die), and Progress (change on a deep and fundamental level - whether it be in terms of society, or science, or any kind of Very Big Breakthrough). The thing is, it's near impossible to absolutely dedicate yourself to all three of these things at once; people just don't have the capacity for such a thing, as each takes a lot of energy and time to work towards. And so, if you want to focus on one thing, if there's one bit you cherish the most, you have to let _at least one_ facet of the other two go.
Hell, even just in Act 1 Season 1, we see this in action over and over and over:
- In the cold open, we see the moment Vander chose to sacrifice any progress he'd made on the revolution to instead raise and love Vi and Powder in a relatively safe space, alongside making the legacy of Zaun as a community who sticks together through thick and thin (with him as its Hound),
- Jayce almost has his future legacy and progress destroyed (hextech prototype + being banned from the academy) all so he's allowed to stay with his loving mother in Piltover
- the only things that allows this to change at the last moment is Viktor sacrificing any future chance he had to continue as Heimerdinger's assistant (legacy) by breaking into his office, Jayce actively making peace with the fact that everyone who _thought_ was in his corner (love) apparently decided that believing in his dreams alongside him wasn't worth it, and Mel losing any positive rapport she may have had with Heimerdinger on the council (another sacrifice of love - you can sacrifice multiple things in one category, or things from multiple categories, in order for something to have a bigger impact than it would otherwise!)
- Without knowing it, Powder sacrifices half the people in her previous family and the bond she had with Vi (love) in order to make her bombs work for once (progress), and in the process she becomes Silco's new living legacy!
- Marcus turns out to be a fool who unknowingly sacrifice the life and legacy of a well-respected sheriff, and become a pawn in establishing Silco's legacy, just so he could progress up the career ladder and get promoted to sheriff himself.
Like, why do you think people mention the word 'sacrifice' over and over and over in this show? This is something that the show is actively bring up all over the place, all the time.
And Singed embodies this rule of sacrifice to the absolute extreme; he is someone who is _constantly_ sacrificing budding connections, other people's communities, lets himself become cogs in other people's machines of legacy, ALL to progress at something that's considered otherwise impossible: truly bringing a loved one back to life. at this point, all he _has_ are the tokens of the many many many sacrifices he's made (all his jarred specimens and scars and the horror he brings just by being involved in a scene).... and just the one, small token he carries with him of what he's doing this for (the locket).
The other big lens I like to think of Singed through that I already mentioned a little is that of something of a Knight of Cerebus, or perhaps more accurately as (what I like to call, just to be dramatic) a *Horror Herald.* Whenever his hands get _pointed out_ as being involved in a situation, you know _at some point soon_ the narrative is going to take into the kind of scene taken directly out of a horror movie. We see this from the get-go in how the narrative introduces him: Silco comes over, talks to him a bit, and then all the stuff with the rat and cat in the tank.
and _this keeps happening:_ Dekker taking Shimmer after Singed nodded at him, only for Dekker to ruthlessly splatter Grayson's head the ground; Vander willingly taking the Shimmer we briefly saw the alchemist working on in the warehouse earlier, who then almost loses himself to the monster inside and unwittingly sets himself up to be Warwick; giving Viktor the Shimmer that leads first to his mad scientist body augmentation scene and then the followup scene of Sky paying for Viktor's scientific hubris.
To be clear: this ISN'T a correlation between Shimmer and horror scenes that we're seeing and that I'm misconstruing as connected to Singed. There's scenes that involve Shimmer that aren't framed as horror at all - the Dirty Little Animals sequence we see in episode where people were actively smoking Shimmer at the club, Sevika in her fight scene with Vi where her cyborg arm is powered by Shimmer, and Salo getting his legs painted with it in season 2 are all prime examples of this. Meanwhile we have scenes with Singed where Shimmer isn't involved _at all_ and this ends up happening; The hallucination sequence Jinx has when Singed is bringing her back to life following Silco asking him to bring her back to life, and Singed showing up at the fountain rally that then leads to the Slasher/Monster movie sequence where Warwick tears through the prison guards are the biggest examples of this at work.
And, what makes it even more terrifying is that _he seems to realize this on some level._ It's why he knew to close the bars to his cell and not make a sound when Warwick was about to show up in Stillwater. It why he only brought a scalpel with him to the fountain rally and told Isha they would get out soon _before_ all that; it's why he _doesn't_ show up in the final battle, as this is one of the only cases where someone else has more of a hold on the horror vibes that him (that being Viktor and his huskdolls, of course).
....But. I would argue. His ending is actually the biggest example of this at work, and also the most subtle case of them all: this is a man who we've seen use intellect, rationality, and cunning to do _precisely what he needed_ to be relevant enough to make big moves that get the plot moving, but never letting himself stay the focus or the limelight, kept attention off his back and held his head low so no one would think to drag him into direct battle... and what does he get in return? Why, nothing more than exactly what he had been working towards this entire time. If that's not a horror movie-level 'bad guy wins' ending, I don't know what is.
Really like the word bemused
I think people are missing the plot. He turned his daughter into a robot. He didn't get her back he got a doll.
i have a feeling singed story is not over... perhaps we are yet to see more clearly the consequences of this "success"
I have the same feeling.
If Arcane tries to somewhat follow the old lore... Let's just say he will be an active participant
Singed needed to win, because he needed to join Noxus side for the invasion of Ionia. It's basically necessitated by the event timeline. The Stories of all other major champions introduced in Arcane end with the shift away from piltover. Their stories are told to its conclusion basically. But singeds isn't, especially considering the switch to focus on noxus now.
You're right. Heimerdinger didn't even show up to the council memorial
Dear god that ad transition was so jarringly smooth I think I started smelling toast
15:00 how you added the sponsor😂
Great analysis. Another thing I think is important to take into consideration would have to be Oriana's story. Which parallels what you said about Corrin loosing everything to keep his daughter alive another thing that the story also said was that she lost a lot of her own humanity due to all the changes that happened to her. The only thing that wasn't replaced was her heart. And when Corrin got sick Orianna created a Hex-tech heart for herself and gave her own heart to Corrin so that he could live. And then she left him so that she could explore the world for herself. Leaving her father all alone. Which I'm hopping this story line will be explored in a future storyline.
2:04 HBD Singed 🎉
yaay I made that !! and it's my birthday today too yippee!!
@@pinkerhero HBD to you too 🎁. You edited this vid?
@@wartyrant8627 thank you, and yes!! I'm the editor! 8D (of most of it, outside of the sponsor & outro)
@ Nice. Very funny references. I felt like Captain America seeing if I could catch them all 💀 what software do you prefer?
@@wartyrant8627 oh my gosh thaaank youuu, I feel so seen. 8'D I use Sony Vegas Platinum 11.0 to edit videos. FireAlpaca, sometimes Gimp, for drawings and collages. I've also gotten stronger by working on a pomodoro/interval timer.