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As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers will remain unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Why didn't Vander cut Silco instead of drowning him?

• Given Silco grabbed Vander's knife off his belt and fended him off with it, it's obvious Vander would have been better off using his knife to slit Silco's throat rather than trying to hold him underwater until he drowned. That being said, given Vander stated he regretted the attempt entirely and doesn't begrudge Silco hating him for it, it could be inferred that Vander's heart wasn't truly into his murder attempt so he didn't want to execute Silco in such a certain manner.
  • Vander's a brawler by nature. When "running on automatic," like he was when he was attacking Silco in a rage, it's not all that surprising that he'd fall back on his bare hands rather than using a weapon, even if the knife would be a surer and quicker tool.
  • Vander might have been really pissed at Silco for some reason or another and thought it would be painful and fitting for him to drown in Zaun's waters.

If Silco's eye was scarred from being in the river, why wasn't Vander's stab wound?

• The two of them both had open wounds in a toxic river from Vander's murder attempt, but only Silco appears to have been permanently scarred from it. While Vander's could have been easily hidden under his clothes since it was on his torso, The Law of Conservation of Detail would imply he simply doesn't have such a thing when it could have worked as a symbol of his past and history with Silco if he did.
  • Presumably, since Silco isn't greeted warmly upon sight by Benzo when he sees him, it seems Silco wasn't looked fondly on in Zaun during their previous fight for equality, with it being implied that, similar to Vi and Powder, it was only Vander who stood between him and the consequences of his decisions. When Vander turned on him, it seems Silco had to flee the city immediately for his life, thus presumably being unable to get his infected wounds properly treated, whereas Vander was able to get his allies to somewhat disinfect his own injuries. Additionally, Silco's wound was submerged beneath the waterline for a significant period of time, whereas Vander's injuries were all on his upper torso, and thus he was able to keep them out of the polluted water for the most part.

Details of Jinx's Pentakill

• So, Jinx bombing the council chambers was a brilliant scene that brought the character full circle, and there's essays that have been written about why she decided to kill the council and solidify herself as Jinx. But I'm more wondering about the details of how she pulled this off. Mainly due to it being ambiguous about how aware of the situation Jinx is at any given time. Firstly, how did she know the council was voting for peace in the first place? Silco told her about the offer, but he didn't mention them having a vote on the matter (assuming he even knew). Secondly, how did she know they were meeting right then and right there?
  • She might not know either thing, and is just attacking the Council for its own sake. That would open up a few new avenues of conflict for next season.
  • Even in that case, how did she know the council was meeting at that time? It was late in the evening, when most people are going home, and it was really far away so I highly doubt she could see them through the window.
  • Again, she might not have. An attack on the building alone is pretty serious. It could be that next season Jinx finds out that the Council was in session, and how much deeper trouble that puts her (and Zaun) in.
  • Attacking the seat of a government is a pretty serious message, even if the building is deserted. Also, Jinx might not have even aimed at the council room directly, and just at the tallest building she could see. Plus, the entire series had a recurring theme that every time Powder takes direct action to try to accomplish something on her own, there are dire unforeseen consequences that bite her in the backside, jinxing the entire situation.
  • Come to think of it, perhaps she expected the chambers to be empty because of the time of the day. As far as she knew, the conditions were that she had to give herself in, and even that was made with Silco in place. With him dead, who's to say Piltover won't go back on their concessions and decide to double down on crushing Zaun by force? Blowing up the council building would serve as an effective show of strength, give them pause and hopefully bring them back to the table. Of course, it would've helped to make sure the chambers were actually empty, but that's where Jinx' tendency to not think things through kicked in.
  • Her conversation with Caitlyn in season 2 makes clear that she didn't know the Council were in session, not that that would've discouraged her from carrying out the attack.

"Where is your sister?"

• How did Silco know that Powder and Vi were sisters? They just met.
  • Surely Silco knows about Vander's adopted kids.
  • Silco has spies throughout the city. We saw that he knew about them as early as the first episode (when their heist was reported to him.)
  • Season 2 sheds some light on this while still raising some questions; Silco was good friends with Vi and Powder's mom, Felicia, along with Vander. For some reason, he never *met* her kids - multiple lines of dialogue in both seasons confirm this - but he was still friends with hers for several years after the kids were born, as season 2 also reveals that Silco & Vander's falling out happened after Felicia's death.

Why doesn't Caitlyn have trouble breathing in Zaun?

• The show establishes that the air in Zaun is polluted, and downright toxic in the depths of the city. However, in episode 6 Caitlyn follows Vi to what seems to be the lowest of said depths, and she never seems to have trouble breathing.
  • The air in most of Zaun isn't polluted enough that supplemental air is required for topsiders; the Enforcers wear their air filtration masks partly out of prejudice. Other Piltovians like Grayson and Jayce also go without any sort of mask without issue. The really bad air, such as what Silco used on the chem-barons, is specifically from the mines.

Does Jinx know what happened to Ekko?

• I don't really get if Jinx knew what happened to Ekko from the night Vander died, to when she sees him next and calls him "The Boy Savior". Does Jinx know what happened to him during the time skip? Or did she see Ekko on the bridge, recognise him - just like Vi did - and make a educated guess on what he was doing? If the second is true, would Jinx even know about Ekko's connection to the Firelights?
  • Jinx's use of the title implies that Ekko's actions in creating and protecting the sanctuary are known. It's possible that she didn't know Ekko was The Boy Savior until she saw him on the bridge, but Ekko never made much of an effort to conceal his identity. It's not surprising that a well-connected underworld enforcer would know of his exploits (even if she hadn't connected them to him until then).
  • Follow up: You're right, Jinx probably knew about Ekko's actions under the mask, and would've put it together by the bridge scene, but did Jinx know Ekko was alive?

Where did the Firelighters' hoverboards come from?

• They look decades ahead of other non-hextech based technology, and even the portable hextech is a very recent development. So where did a street gang get them? Who invented/made them and why is there no other comparable vehicles or weapons?
  • Their green glow is similar to that of those used by the Chem Guards, so there is likely a third, fairly common non-Shimmer or Hextech power source that exists. It's also possible that's the extent of their advancements as it's merely a hoverboard while Hextech devices borderline on magical.
  • From a mechanical standpoint, they're essentially just small VTOL aircraft that seem to control similar to something like a Onewheel or real-life wheeled hoverboards, and are probably made from scavenged or stolen materials. Complicated, but not so much that it's out of the question that Ekko could have designed them after much tinkering. "You'd be surprised what you can pull off when your life depends on it," as he says.

Where are all the colorful-haired people?

• Vi, Jinx, Caitlyn and the Firelight girl with pink hair stick out like a sore thumb among a world of people with realistic colors of hair. They are shown with this color growing up implying they are natural. Where are all the other people with naturally bright hair or why are these select few the only ones with such trait?
  • It's just a rare genetic trait. You might as well look at the real world and ask "Where are all the green-eyed people? Where are all the people with heterochromia? Where are all the albinos?" They all exist; they're just rare.
  • There are other colorful-haired people. Caitlyn's father is the most prominent but there are also some background Zaunites with unnatural hair colors. And as said above, it's a rare trait.

Ekko could have stayed with Powder

• So why couldn't Vi have Ekko stay with Powder while they were off to rescue Vander?
  • Vi had to move very fast once she realized what was going on, and Ekko had just gone through something extremely traumatizing. Vi didn't want to cause Ekko more stress by forcing him to go somewhere, and maybe didn't even have the time to track him down and ask him to stay with Powder.

Stillwater's Inmate Increase

• So Vi's prison number is 516, which is a little joke about double meaning for the tattoo on her face (because V=5, I=1, VI=6, and Vi spells Vi, her name), but that still means Vi was the 516th prisoner to go to Stillwater Hold, which happened pre-timeskip. And the prisoner Caitlyn asked to speak too after the timeskip was inmate number 2135. In about five years, less than a decade, the number of inmates increased by about 400% (please correct my math if I did it wrong). And all over the city, nobody is acting weird at all. No curfew, no more officers than usual, nothing to indicate high crime rates. How? Is Silco just hauling Vander's old friend off to Stillwater with Marcus' help just because he can or something like that?
  • In that time Silco cranks up Shimmer production and spreads it through Zaun and even gets it into Piltover. Widespread drug abuse (especially a drug that doubles as Psycho Serum) could well account for that spike in crime.
  • We also don't know if they re-use prisoner numbers. There probably aren't over two thousand inmates in the prison right then, that's how many have cycled through.
    • If there's not at least 2,000 prisoners in Stillwater, then why does the inmate have the number 2135? Shouldn't it be a smaller number, especially if they re-use prisoner numbers?
    • Who said there aren't 2,000+ prisoners? The question was whether the numbers of inmates increased dratically during the timeskip, and there's no reason to conclude that from the two numbers we're given alone, at least not definitely.
    • The numbers could be a code of some kind. Or just arbitrarily assigned from a pool at random.
    • There is no point in numbering prisoners in the order of arrival and there is definitely no sense in renumbering every prisoner when the number of inmates goes down. For instance, there could be three main cell blocks, two of which are later additions. So prisoners in the first cell block could have three number codes, while those in the other two would have four numbers where the first number signifies their block. The next number could be a floor or a sub-block and the last two could be the prisoner's personal code that remains the same even if they are transferred between blocks.

Using the Hexgate for shipping

• From what I can tell, the Hexgate is a magical catapult that can launch airships to destinations that would normally take them months to reach on their own. There doesn't seem to be any sign of it being anything other than a one-way trip, meaning the ships would have to come back the long way. Baring setting up more Hexgates in other cities, something that would put them outside of Piltover's control, I don't see an effective way of recovering them. Do they just have dozens of ships?
  • Being able to cut out the return trip would still cut costs immensely. So even if there wasn't a gate on the other end, trade partners would be highly encouraged to keep buying and selling to Piltover.
  • The ships themselves might be outfitted with the means to trigger a gate, or to communicate some kind of message or signal to Piltover to open a gate for them.

Ekko's attitude on meeting Heimedinger

• Pretty much every encounter we see between topsiders, especially topsiders with authority, and Zaunites has the Zaunites—understandably—dripping animosity, yet when Heimedinger encounters Ekko under the bridge, Ekko is super polite and even friendly, and continues to be so while showing Heimedinger the Undercity and the Firelights' hideout. This is in sharp contrast to what we've already seen of Ekko's character—even wit Vi no less—and, again, pretty much every other similar exchange we've seen. True, Ekko was injured and needed help getting home, but his attitude is such a sea change that it begs larger explanation.
  • Before Ekko speaks he watches Heim comment on the changes to his hoverboard. Perhaps the new politeness was a response to a fellow tinkerer appreciating the work he did?
  • The Zaunites seem to consider Heimerdinger to be a "good" Councillor, the only one who doesn't exploit or abuse them. He embodies the idea of what Piltover should be, rather than what it is. He is a sufficiently distant figure that they don't know how out of touch with the reality he is, so it's probably easy for them to imagine that he's defending the rights of the Undercity, rather than being completely ignorant of their plight.
  • To be fair, the reason Heimerdinger is down there is for exactly that reason; he realized he was ignorant of their plight and decided to see it with his own eyes. He's out of touch, but never willfully (or maliciously) ignorant like a lot of topsiders.

Why wasn't Jinx's rocket launcher affected?

• During the fight at the end of the first arc of season 2, the hextech weapons start glitching out because of Jayce's actions at the Hexgate. But Jinx's rocket launcher is powered by a hex crystal as well and yet, besides its eyes blinking different colors, it still worked perfectly well. How come?
  • It did glitch out, just not the first time it was fired. I forget if it was the second or third time, but it did stop working eventually.

So where was Silco?

• So episode 5 reveals that Silco and Vander both knew Vi & Jinx's mom, Felicia, and were both good friends with her, to the point that they're the first people she told when she was pregnant, even before the father. We then get flashbacks from Vander showing that he was an active part of Vi & Powder's lives before adopting them, being something of an honorary uncle before the deaths of their parents. We also learn that the incident that caused the rift between Vander and Silco was the same riot where Felicia and her husband were killed, and in fact it was Felicia's death specifically that drove Vander to try and kill Silco. However, it's clear in season 1 that neither Vi nor Powder knew Silco before the night he killed Vander, something confirmed by Silco himself when confronting Vi and mentioning they've never had the chance to speak before, and further confirmed by Jinx when she told Smeesh that the night she killed Vander was the night she and Silco first met. So, why wasn't Silco an active and present part of Vi & Powder's lives after Felicia had effectively made him and Vander co-godfathers for her daughter, relying on their dream of Zaun to provide a world for her to bring her children up into?
  • There are two things to consider here. The first is that Silco is clearly portrayed as the more introverted member of the group, so he was probably happy just watching from the sidelines and being happy for his friends (notice how he is doing exactly that in the flashback where Felicia reveals she's pregnant with Vi: he's there, he's clearly happy for her, but he doesn't even say a word, letting Vander do all the talking) rather than taking a more active role with interacting with the children. The second is that Vi and specially Powder were very small when their mother died and Vander and Silco had their fight. Even if Silco had babysat them a few times before, they would be unlikely to have any memory of it and Silco would hardly consider talking to a toddler Vi as "having had a chance to speak" with her.

The end

• First off, did Jinx survive or not?? It sure looks like she plummeted to her death while also being exploded by a grenade, but we get a scene of Caitlyn looking at the Hex Gate schematics and there are side tunnels that Jinx might've escaped through. You'd think that Vi and Cait would search for some sign of Jinx's remains, in which case either they found something or they didn't. If they found remains and they're convinced that she's dead, there should be a scene at her graveside or something. And if they didn't find remains and they think she's alive, they should say so. We do see them on an airship, but where are they headed? Are they tracking down Jinx? (Maybe she teleported away somehow? That's what Hex Gates are for, after all.) Are they just dealing with some unrelated issue? I get the impression that the writers were under orders to keep things as ambiguous as possible. Or am I missing something?
  • It's very heavily implied that she's still alive. Aside from Cait focusing on the vents, there's a streak of pink that rushes away from the explosion, and Jinx herself is implied to be the one on the airship, as a Call-Back to the very first episode where she says she'll ride one someday; that's also likely why the very last image of the series, the end title card, is done in Jinx's style.
  • If Jinx is alive, do Cait and Vi know she's alive? If they do know, how did they find out? Did Jinx show up at some point? If she did, where is she now?
  • It's never "confirmed" to them, but Cait figured it out herself thanks to the schematics, but Vi is in the dark. Likely, Cait will not let Vi know out of respect for Jinx's decision, and with Arcane ending with Season 2, short of cameos in any other Runeterra-based show which are confirmed to be in development, that's all we will really get.

Renni’s son working for Silco

• What happened to Renni’s son was obviously tragic. However, there’s something I don’t understand. The Chem-Barons, from what we see, are obviously pretty rich, especially compared to the rest of Zaun. Silco and Finn tell us as much. And child laborers tend to be from very poor families that can’t provide for them otherwise. Given all that, you wouldn’t think that Renni NEEDED the extra income from having one of her young children work in Silco’s factory. So why was her son ever put in that position to begin with?
  • Plenty of rich people insist that their kids get jobs to teach them character and such. Since Ranni and the other Chem-Barons are ultimately new money, presumably she was a child laborer who worked her way up, so she got her son a similar position so that he could learn responsibility. Which is yet another reason why she is so pissed: A very large part of the situation is her fault, and Jayce makes a very obvious and understandable target to blame instead of herself.
  • It may not be a "need," but it may have been a condition of Silco's to have him more or less as a hostage. Alternatively, Renni may have sent him there so he could learn the process in an eventual attempt to break Silco's strangehold on it.

Vi and Powder's father

• Perhaps it was brief, but why is Vi and Powder's father barely mentioned? I assumed he had died or skipped out shortly after Powder was born, but he appears in a few flashbacks and its repeatedly stated that both parents were killed by peacekeepers in the uprising. Vander is such a father figure that it seemed to be setting up for a reveal that he was their biological dad, but that never arrives.
  • Episode 1 shows the battered remains of both Vi and Powder’s parents, albeit obscured enough that no discernible features can be seen (most likely because their design hadn’t been focused on much). The reason why he may not have been mentioned much is the same why Felicia wasn’t given much attention until it was necessary: it would distract the audience and divert from the story to some degree. What was important was that Vander took them in and raised them for the few years he had, and that was what mattered to Vi and Powder.

Has nobody found it suspicious they couldn’t find Jinx, or possibly, Warwick?

• It can only be assumed they never found Jinx or Warwick’s remains since the former almost certainly is alive and the latter’s fate is more ambiguous. But shouldn’t Vi be suspicious they never found Jinx’s or possibly Warwick’s (if he’s alive) bodies

The flow of information into and out of Stillwater

• So while in Stillwater, Vi was able to interrogate Silco's men enough to know that Silco has dealings with the Enforcers. However, why was she never able to get a single nugget of information about Powder? It's common knowledge in Zaun that Jinx and Powder are one and the same, and that she was raised by Vander before he died. And yet somehow none of these people ever tell Vi about this, such that it's totally new information for her when Sevika tells her that Jinx now works for Silco. In the opposite direction, how is it that Silco (who has Marcus and other Enforcers in his pocket) never learns that someone matching Vi's description is beating up his incarcerated goons and asking questions about Powder?