High school is a place where many good, as well as many bad things tend to occur for the students in its walls. As students learn how to build friendships, relationships and individual independence, they tend to get it wrong more times than they get it right. Occasionally, they end up hurting people without necessarily trying to.
When these mistakes happen, it’s easy for the people they hurt to refer to them as a “monster”. Sometimes that label is deserved, depending on what was done. But sometimes, a different perspective can challenge that label and promote more empathy.
What is a monster?
Before challenging the term “monster”, we have to first define what a monster actually is. While doing research for an essay, I stumbled across a blog article called “Monsters” by Glenn Altschuler. In the article, he described the main four types of monsters: the created monster (Frankenstein), the monster from within (Jekyll and Hyde), the monster from the past/future (Dracula), and the monster from nature (King Kong).
While these categories work for the monsters associated, these monsters can also apply to multiple categories. While looking for examples of these monsters in modern media, I decided to look at my favorite TV show, Arcane, and how they approach monsters. Then, I compared that show with a study from Cambridge University, entitled “Longitudinal associations between early risk and adolescent delinquency” by Jay Fagan, that explored the environmental factors that contribute to adolescent delinquency in the real world.
In Arcane, monsters are not two-dimensional. Each monster has a life and a story that makes their individual status as “monsters” more difficult to identify. They all do things that would categorize them as monsters, but all of them have sides that show their humanity.
This complexity supports the data from the article on adolescent delinquency, which explained that “children’s behaviors are influenced by myriad factors, among the most critical are child, mother, father and family… The results of the SEM [Structural Equation Modeling] showed that fathers’ cumulative risk during early childhood, as well as mothers’ and children’s risk, were significantly and positively associated with youth reports of delinquent behavior.”
Arcane’s approach to monsters
Arcane is a very complex show, with multiple different themes being explored in-depth in each episode. But, the most prominent “monsters” in the show are Warwick (a monster created by a scientist that wanted to figure out how to bring back the dead), Jinx (a girl in a constant battle with herself mentally), Silco (a criminal mastermind with a constant hunger for power, profit, and authority), and Viktor (a scientist who uses dark magic to “improve” himself until he develops a savior/god complex).
These characters are difficult to classify, however, because they are much more complex than these baseline descriptions. Jinx, for example, simultaneously represents the “monster within” and the “monster from the past”. She has two identities, with her childhood self being called Powder and driving her compassion and empathy, and her “monster” self being called Jinx and coming from her childhood trauma, in the form of visual and audio hallucinations taking the form of the childhood friends that she killed.
Warwick is not only a created monster but a man who is trapped inside the monster’s body. He has memories from before the scientist chemically changed him, and he still has humanity that his children bring out of him throughout the show.
The same goes for Silco, who is both a father and a criminal powerhouse. He simultaneously saves lives and takes them throughout the show.
Similar to the scientist who created Warwick, Viktor strives to overcome his natural decline in health, by “rebuilding” himself. He uses his dark magic to cure him of the disability that causes him to rely on a cane to walk, and ends up taking it too far, eventually evolving into a god-like figure, who uses his magic to “save” others from their ailments.
Adolescent delinquency and empathy
In the study from Cambridge, multiple home environments were analyzed to determine their correlation with “delinquent” behavior in adolescents. The article explained that “family instability during childhood predicted 18-26-year-old males’ higher likelihood of arrest or incarceration.”
The article also said that “children raised in a household with no biological father present are more likely to engage in youth delinquent behavior than children living with two biological parents.”
This data, along with the complexity of Arcane’s characters, both support the idea that “monsters” (both in the fictional and non-fictional sense) do not come from nowhere. So, when I see someone being labeled as a monster, I automatically want to see where that label comes from and why that person might’ve done what they did. This creates a more empathetic view on people around me and even helps lower self-critical thoughts.
