Jinx is the reason plenty of people who have never launched League of Legends in their lives ended up watching Arcane. The blue-haired, bomb-obsessed gunner from Zaun is today the best-known face of all of Runeterra, and yet she had been in the game for years before she got a story of her own. We’ll look at who Jinx is, how the frightened girl Powder became Jinx, why her relationship with her sister Vi holds the whole series together, and how her in-game and on-screen versions differ.
Who is Jinx
Jinx is one of the main characters of Arcane and at the same time one of the oldest and most popular champions in League of Legends. In the series she is voiced by Ella Purnell. She comes from Zaun, the poor, industrial underground part of a city split in two: wealthy, orderly Piltover above and neglected Zaun below, soaked in toxic fumes. Jinx grew up surrounded by a chemical substance called shimmer and with a constant feeling that she was to blame for everything that went wrong.
Her defining trait is her arsenal: in the game and in the series she fights at range and switches between three weapons, the Pow-Pow minigun, the Fishbones rocket launcher and grenades. In the game, Jinx is a champion played in the ADC (marksman) role, who excels in the late game, when she can shred an entire team as long as nobody gets close to her.
From Powder to Jinx
Before she became Jinx, her name was Powder. In the first season of Arcane she is the youngest of four siblings raised after their parents’ death by Vander, a former fighter and father figure to all of Zaun. Powder lives in the shadow of her older sister Vi. She is clumsy, oversensitive and obsessed with inventions that often blow up in her hands. The rest of the crew (Vi, Claggor and Mylo) protect her, but they also make it clear that she doesn’t have the nerves for Zaun’s rough trade of theft and surviving on the streets.
The turning point comes in the third episode of the first season: the crew goes on a heist in Piltover that goes wrong, and during the retreat Powder is supposed to secure a way out with her own improvised bomb. The charge goes off too early and unintentionally kills Vander and two of the other siblings, Claggor and Mylo. In shock and despair, Vi calls her a “jinx” (a word for bad luck or a curse) and leaves to try to save what she can, leaving the terrified Powder alone in the middle of the wreckage.
Silco, a Zaun crime lord who had long been working to break Zaun away from Piltover and make it an independent city, seizes that moment. He finds Powder and, instead of punishment, offers her acceptance with no conditions, exactly what she needs at that moment. Under his wing she gradually grows into Jinx: confident, unpredictable and more and more dangerous, with marks from the explosion on her face as a permanent reminder of what happened. Behind her bubbly, playful facade, though, lies constant guilt and the fear that she deserves it for what she did.
In the second season Jinx literally fights herself: in one of the key scenes she confronts a hallucination of herself as Powder, who blames her for everything that followed. Her relationship with her own identity, not a fight with some outside villain, is the main axis of her whole story.
Silco: the father she didn’t choose
The relationship between Jinx and Silco is the second most important relationship in her story, right after the one with Vi, and in many ways he is the one who turned Powder into the Jinx the series shows us. Silco takes her in, no questions asked, protects her from his own people and gradually becomes the only constant in her life. At the same time, though, he uses her as a tool in his own power game against Piltover, which is a source of tension that builds throughout the series.
At the end of the first season Jinx kidnaps Silco, Vi and Caitlyn and takes them to her own lair. In the middle of the chaos, when Silco tries to aim at Vi, Jinx pulls the trigger in desperate confusion and shoots Silco, the one man who accepted her unconditionally, with her own hand. It’s the moment that finally convinces her there is no way back to Powder, and it leads straight into the scene with the two empty chairs, where she decides who she wants to remain.
Her relationship with Vi
The relationship between Jinx and Vi is the emotional backbone of the whole series. They are sisters who were once closer to each other than to anyone else in the world, and what happened to Vander split them apart for years. Vi spends most of the first season in Stillwater prison, while Powder turns into Jinx under Silco’s influence. When the sisters meet again years later, Vi hopes to find the Powder she knew. At the end of the first season, though, Jinx kidnaps her and confronts her with a choice of her own making: two empty chairs, one labeled Powder, the other Jinx. She chooses to remain Jinx, because she believes Powder is gone and that both of them have changed too much to find their way back to each other.
In the second season their relationship escalates further. In the third episode the sisters literally fight each other, because each of them believes the other is lost for good. Jinx meanwhile gets drawn into the Noxian conspiracy around Ambessa and Mel, while Vi stands on the side of Piltover and Caitlyn. The bond between the sisters never fully breaks, though. Through all the pain between them, they gradually grow closer again, and their relationship returns to the forefront in the finale itself, where in the end it is exactly what decides the fate of them both.
In the season two finale, Jinx, Vi and the transformed Vander/Warwick end up at the top of the Hexgate tower. Jinx saves her sister by pulling the hextech stone out of Vi’s gauntlet and is left falling alone with Warwick, with her last words “Always with you, sis.” The series leaves her fate open, though: in the final scene Caitlyn looks over schematics of the Hexgate that suggest an escape route led out of it through the ventilation shafts. Neither Riot nor the show’s creators have explicitly confirmed Jinx’s death.
Arcane announced its ending after season two
In 2024 Netflix confirmed that the second season of Arcane is also its last, and no third season is planned. Even so, the series earned record recognition for that season: at the 2025 Emmys it won the award for Outstanding Animated Program (for the second year in a row) plus three more Emmys, including categories for background art and sound editing.
Jinx in the series vs. Jinx in the game
In League of Legends, Jinx is a champion who has existed since 2013, long before she got her own story in the series. Her core personality (chaotic, explosive, obsessed with destruction) and her look carried over faithfully into Arcane, but there are differences:
- Weapons. Most of her in-game arsenal shows up in the series, both the Pow-Pow minigun and the Fishbones rocket launcher. The exception is the Zap pistol, which the series doesn’t use.
- Origin story. For a long time the game only offered a short lore text about a Zaunite terrorist who tore Piltover apart. Arcane developed that brief sketch into a two-season psychological portrait: why she is the way she is, not just what she does.
- Relationship with Vi. In the game’s lore the sisters’ relationship was only mentioned in passing. Arcane made it the central theme of the whole series.
- Playstyle vs. storytelling. In the game, Jinx is a purely offensive late-game character that the player controls like a tool. In the series it’s the other way around: she is a character defined above all by emotions and guilt, and fighting is only a consequence.
- Appearance. Jinx has blue hair in pigtails, tattoos and marks from the explosion on her face in both versions. The series, however, gave her look a backstory: the scars and tattoos make sense as the result of specific events, not just as a design choice.
Why Jinx became the best-known character in Runeterra
Jinx was popular even before Arcane: the song “Get Jinxed” and her distinctive design made her an icon of the LoL community. The series, however, took her popularity to a completely different level, because it made her a character that even people who had never heard of the game can understand. Her path from the frightened Powder to Jinx is an archetypal story about trauma, guilt and how much a single moment can change who a person becomes, and that works regardless of whether you know what an ADC or a splitpush is.
Add to that Ella Purnell’s voice, the visual style of the studio Fortiche, and the fact that the series gave Jinx room to grow over two full seasons instead of a few lines of text in the game. The result is a character who went from a video game figure to one of the most recognizable faces of pop culture in recent years. She appears on merchandise and covers even outside the LoL player community, and many new players first grew to love her thanks to the series, not a match in the game.
FAQ
Yes, it’s the same character. Jinx has existed as a champion in the game since 2013. Arcane kept her core personality and look but developed the story the game only hinted at.
The series leaves it open. In the season two finale she falls from the Hexgate tower together with Warwick, but the final scene suggests she may have escaped through the ventilation shafts. There has been no official confirmation that she survived.
Jinx is voiced by Ella Purnell.
No. Netflix and Riot Games have confirmed that Arcane ended after the second season and no further continuation is planned.
No. The Korean webtoon (manhwa) called Jinx is a separate work with no connection to the character from League of Legends and Arcane. They just share a name.
Information verified as of 10 August 2026. If you want the complete story of the series, including what happened in the second season, read our complete guide to Arcane. We break down Jinx’s relationship with Vi and Caitlyn in detail in the article about Vi and Caitlyn. An overview of all the characters in the series and their in-game counterparts is in the article All Arcane characters and their counterparts in the game. If you’re curious about the world where both the series and the game take place, check out Runeterra: how the world and its regions work. The complete overview of the game’s champions is on the page All LoL champions, and everything else around the game and the series is in the League of Legends section.