Oddbean

I’ve been thinking a lot about fight scenes in media lately, and how to make them not suck. While there are many amazing ones, the majority bore me. Basically, something like 10% of fight scenes are so good that I can remember their details a decade later, and the other 90% are borderline unwatchable and I forget them soon after watching. Sometimes it’s about choreography, but usually it’s deeper than that. But it’s not just emotions either. It’s generally a blend of choreography with emotions. It’s the full creative spectrum. Many weak fight scenes hit one or the other, but the real great ones hit both and in a way that synergizes to make 1+1=3. Here’s a fun thread, using Arcane fight scenes as examples. With some spoilers of course. Even if you don’t care about the show, I’ll give context and links for the examples even if you won’t get the same emotional impact as watching the full show itself. Arcane, the highest-budget and one of the most well-rated animated shows ever, is 15 episodes in now, as it approaches its finale next week. It has a tremendous number of good fight scenes. But despite a rather hard selection since so many are amazing, I can quickly list my top two as of this time. My two favorite fight scenes from among the many great ones. And they’re complete opposites of each other, because they nail different concepts well. And I’m about 80% confident that none of the fight scenes from the final act will surpass these in my view, but it’s possible. And that’s partially because simplicity goes a long way to making a fight scene amazing, and the final ones are likely to be more complex. My first top fight scene is Ekko vs Jinx on the bridge in season 1. This is one of the most creative fight designs I’ve ever seen, and this view is very popular so I’m not alone on this in terms of how good it was. Ekko is the hero here, and Jinx is an anti-hero that has been rampaging over everyone else without being checked sufficiently this season, including killing multiple of Ekko’s gang members whenever they attacked her. So, in most viewers’ minds, even though many of us might appreciate Jinx, the Ekko win feels very right here and it’s his side, along with his good allies, that we’re supposed to be on. Jinx and Ekko were childhood friends, but Ekko went on a lighter path and Jinx went on a darker path, and they’ve been enemies ever since despite both having reasonable path dependencies for how they came to their views. Jinx is trying to get back a very important crystal and already killed a ton of soldiers with a butterfly bomb attack on the bridge, while Ekko is trying to stop her from getting that important crystal back after almost everyone else is down due to that attack. They already had a mini-skirmish where Jinx broke Ekko’s hoverboard, and now they are about to fight for the final stakes directly. https://youtu.be/OkscEokV238 The challenge from a writers’ perspective is that Jinx is a ranged fighter; she builds novel guns and bombs that are advanced for her world, and uses them in creative ways. Ekko is a melee fighter and very fast, including building hoverboards, but Jinx already broke his hoverboard in their earlier skirmish so he’s limited now. This *entire fight* is going to basically be done in 5 seconds from this point and is very binary; either Jinx shoots him before he can close the distance, or Ekko is badass enough to close the distance and win. So how do we make this interesting? As the fight is about to occur, Ekko takes the initiative and signals to Jinx. She is stuck in the past, whereas he focuses on improvement. When they were little kids, they often had duels, her paintball gun vs his play sword, and Jinx would usually win vs Ekko. Ekko remembers those, and remembers how Jinx shot. But it’s been a very long time. So, we get this animated flashback of them play-fighting as kid friends. This 1) reinforces the emotional aspect that these are two young adults are fighting to the death for high stakes despite being childhood friends and 2) that Ekko remembers their fights well, and improved on them whereas Jinx sticks to her patterns. Ekko replays the animated scenario in his mind where he loses to Jinx’s paintballs, and then, in the present, he makes sure to avoid the same mistakes. She shoots very similarly to how she did back then, whereas he incorporates new moves that he didn’t have back then. He dodges her shots, gets close to her, and beats the ever living fuck out of her in those five seconds. But after he does that, and she’s utterly defeated, he sees her bloody face while on top of her and hesitates. He sees the childhood friend that he used to have. Vulnerable. Bloody. A girl. So, he pauses. He’s a good person. It’s not easy to beat a woman to death that he knew as a child. But she uses that moment to unpin one of her grenades to kamikaze with him. Because in reality, she’s *not* the girl he used to know; she’s a violent woman that is willing to open a grenade right next to herself to kamikaze rather than lose. Ekko tries to run at the last second. The explosion goes off, and at the end of the episode we don’t see the immediate result. The spoiler result in the next episode is that Jinx is mortally wounded by her own grenade while Ekko is less wounded due to jumping out of the way, but Jinx got the crystal back, holding it in her hand as she is dying on the bridge while her father’s forces come to intervene, and that’s very relevant for the season climax. The overall result is less important than the fight itself. The writers went with the creative path here; how to prolong a ranger vs melee fight, and how to make it interesting. Their Ekko mental replay animation did that amazingly well. And as a third point, it foreshadows that Ekko will eventually get time-altering powers based on the game lore. In that fight he just mentally used those powers by remembering the past well and doing better than he would have done in the past, but in the future his character will literally get the ability to briefly go back and time and fix things, which is what he did here already. And by extension, it kind of shows why he deserves those powers. The second top-tier fight scene is Jinx vs the Beast in season 2, which unlike the first one, most people probably wouldn't list as a top fight scene. But I think it is. By this point, Jinx is quite different. After to her mortal wound in the Ekko fight, her father had his mad scientist pump her full of chemicals to save her life, so she has limited super speed and durability in addition to her pre-existing gun/bomb making skills and overall scheming. She got a buff, in other words. And then she basically won season 1 since she ultimately kept the crystal vs Ekko and used it to deadly effect, but didn’t know what to do after that win since it’s a dark win, went through a major character arc, and is now doing something that the viewer would likely agree with. She’s trying to bust her adopted child out of prison, along with a bunch of other oppressed people out of prison. She succeeds. But then for details that I won’t go too far into, a giant beast attacks the prison, coming after one of the prisoners that summoned it. This beast has been built up for like five episodes at this point, and has insane regenerative powers. As every episode ends, we see that this scientist is building some beast. And in this episode, he *finally* unleashes it to come and bust him out of prison, not knowing that Jinx is already coming to bust him and others out of prison. Season 2 has a “Big Bad”, and she happens to be inspecting the prison at this time, and this beast literally knocks her to the side like a joke. She’s an utter badass but this beast is like “gtfo here”. So we get the setup that this thing is unstoppable even comparable to other badasses. So Jinx, her right-hand woman Sevika, her adopted child Isha, and this prisoner that summoned the beast to him, are all at the bottom of this prison dealing with guards after everyone else escaped thanks to Jinx, and this unstoppable hyper-beast comes down ready to kill everyone. https://youtu.be/YHrF7gbBB6w The guards turn their attention from Jinx to the beast as he breaks through literally everything. Jinx herself focuses on the beast too. As he breaks down to that bottom floor, his first strike killing guards initiates heavy metal music. So, we get a well-synced audio change that fully amplifies the sheer magnitude of this problem relative to prior threats in the show. He busts through all the guards like a joke. Jinx shoots the beast with her magical weapon that would insta-kill most things, but he heals from it instantly. She gets that “oh shit” look on her face, and immediately tells her right-hand Sevika to get her adopted kid Isha out of here, while she hangs back to deal with this insane beast to distract him. Jinx at this point has been actively declining to be any sort of hero, saying she’s not fit for it. She’s instead been trying to be an adopted mother to this orphan kid Isha that she saved, which directly conflicted with her other path of being a violent hero, since being that violent hero would make it harder to raise her adopted kid. But in this moment, both paths converge. She came here to save her adopted kid Isha, but to be a mother for her and keep her safe she needs to be a violent hero in this moment, so she focuses everything on holding the line and basically sacrificing herself against this hyper-beast. As Sevika brings Isha out, Jinx fights the hyper-beast all-out. And at this point, she has super speed and durability vs when she fought Ekko, along with her better weapons, so she’s going all-out against this thing physically and technically in a way that most others could not. But she’s constantly on the defensive since he’s so damn unstoppable even against her magic weapons and chemical durability/speed. We get scenes back and forth between Jinx fighting the beast, and Sevika bringing Jinx’s kid Isha out (Isha’s perspective is desperately worried for her adopted mother Jinx). And then importantly, one of the later scenes is that Sevika brings Isha out of the prison, and we see the front gates. It’s an utter bloodbath; this beast just sheer broke through the main front gate uncontested against their forces. It re-affirms the sheer magnitude of what Jinx is dealing with down there even more than we saw prior, even as she’s already losing gradually. And then as it ends, the beast beats Jinx, and she pulls herself against the wall. She accepts the defeat, saying “you got me hairball”, and she tries to kamikaze with a grenade toward him like she did with Ekko. But the beast even stops that (and probably would have survived it anyway). So, Jinx is defeated even in her kamikaze attempt, is frightened, and readies herself for a painful death, but was successful at getting her right-hand and adopted kid out. There are spoilers beyond that which I won’t go into. What’s notable about this fight is that it’s not particularly creative like the other one was. Some unstoppable hyper-beast vs an agile, badass, ranged, underdog character we want to survive. As the plot later reveals, this beast has a ton of plot implications, but we don’t even know those at the time, and yet it’s *still* an amazing fight for a few reasons. The first reason is that’s well-telegraphed. The show didn’t fuck around with telling us ahead of time how unstoppable this thing would be. They built him up from late season 1 into season 2 in various end-credit scenes, for like 5+ episodes. So even for those that didn’t know the video game lore, when he was finally released, we knew this thing wouldn’t fuck around. The second reason is that it was well-choreographed within the episode. The beast literally flings the season’s later Big Bad away like a joke. The Big Bad might be more impactful overall since she has armies and all sorts of political machinations in addition to her physical badassary, but in a direct fight nothing stops this thing, nor is it close. And then he busts through down to the prison, through every single defense. And we get escalating scenes of just how bad this is, like toward the end we see that he literally just bloodily massacred the entire front defense and pushed in. And his attacks are timed with heavy metal music to boost the impact. He was amplified perfectly to the viewer. Those details matter in terms of execution. And then the third reason is we have a character development, narrow win condition, and emotional stakes. Jinx, deciding to stay here and distract this unstoppable thing to get her right-hand and kid out, is a hero move, which she has been rejecting. Previously, she rejected being a hero because 1) she literally thought she’s a jinx, bad luck, that nothing good comes from what she does and nobody should follow her and 2) after moving beyond that view, she felt that protecting her new adopted child meant forgoing her previously violent self that she has slowly accepted herself as being. This moment, however, required embracing her violence to protect her child, and she gladly did so. So she made the choice to embrace her violent self and likely die fighting this thing so her right hand and adopted child could get out. She decided to be a hero, for her child. There was nothing uniquely creative about it. Instead, it was just perfectly executed. We are signaled ahead of time how unstoppable this thing will be, when it’s unleashed we are increasingly shown that it’s as unstoppable as we suspected it was in terms of narrative and well-synced music, and then when it impacts the people we care about, we see character decisions to try to interact with it to save others, which gives us emotional stakes amid a well-choreographed fight. So, while I’d say the Ekko vs Jinx fight maximizes the combo of creativity and emotion, the Jinx vs Beast fight emphasizes amplification and character. Very different. But both amazing. Both perfectly executed. There were many other amazing fights in Arcane, but I think those two were the best. The show presents some fights that are *supposed* to impact me more than some of these, but for me they don't fully capture it. Since Violet and Jinx are the two main characters, when they fight in early season 2 that should be the best fight ever. And while it's decent, I don't think it's the best. It feels too much like the writers wrote it. Like it's structured as a scene, that we've been expecting. When I watch it, I am thinking, "what are the writers going to do here?" When writers do their best, we don't see their handiwork. We just feel like it was character decisions. When writers err, we can more easily see their hand at play. The Jinx vs Violet fight, as epic as it was, had too much of the writers' hand at play for me to call it a top fight of the show. That's part of why I'm pretty specific about these other fights. Ekko vs Jinx. Jinx vs the Beast. They feel organic from the characters' own decisions, the writers hands' were hidden, and there was amazing creativity, amplification, emotion, character, and/or execution.