“Was Sky fringed and, if she has, is it all that bad?” is a conversation that has been and still is ongoing when it comes to Arcane Season 1, and here’s my take on it: Sky has been fringed, but the writers probably tried (and failed) to not make it so. It is bad, but it is not that bad. Wow, way to not commit, you must be thinking. Just bear with me, because here’s the thing: I might be wrong, but I suspect that the writers didn’t know exactly what they wanted to do with her. On one hand, we don’t see her enough to establish a strong connection with her, on the other hand, we see her too much for the very point of her death to be that she was a random innocent bystander.
Sky was fringed in the sense that she is a character we hardly knew anything about whose death was used to further Viktor’s character development. It is a valid take that we were supposed to feel sad that she died, not because we had any connection or particular feelings towards her, but because Viktor, whom we know and love, did. Or that we were supposed to feel sad because she loved Viktor. Same thing. The fact that she is in Viktor’s flashback, implying that she has loved and admired him since childhood and stuck with him into adulthood, and the fact that she has two scenes establishing her (almost certainly) romantic feelings for him in Arcs II and III seem to support that theory. Arcane did not have time to go in depth on Sky’s backstory and her relationship with Viktor but tried to communicate it through those three scenes so that when she died, we were sad that it was her, specifically, who died, because she had this connection to Viktor. Arcane does similar things with other characters: for example, we see Powder have a mental breakdown only once, but we are supposed to infer from it that she has always struggled with mental health issues, and it works. For Sky, however, the result is that we are given a character – whose only defining trait is that she likes Viktor – being killed so that Viktor can be sad and grow as a person. Textbook fringing.
On the other hand, Arcane also goes out of its way to let us know that this relationship was very much one-sided: Viktor does not interact with her in the flashback scene, calls her “Miss Young” when they are adults, prioritises his work over her, has no idea about the research that she is doing and no idea what to do with her ashes when she’s dead (real question: does she not have family? Does he know whether or not she has family? Does he care? Is he keeping her death a secret to protect himself? For real, who knows that she’s dead? Does Jayce know?). Yet when she dies, the score, the cinematography, Viktor’s reaction… all of it indicates that we are still supposed to feel sad. Her death is a tragedy, but if we choose to focus on the fact that Viktor and her did not really know each other, then it is the very fact that she was a background character that we never noticed or paid attention to before that makes it so sad. It reminds us as well as Viktor that not only his life is important, that even somebody who is not a genius inventor with a tragic backstory has value, that every single death is a tragedy and that any experiment that will take life is not one worth conducting. Which is nice. It’s a nice message.
It doesn’t work though because the first interpretation can be made. Sky is not a stranger, per say. She’s a character about whom we know too little to care, but too much to not notice.
I feel like there is a simple fix to this problem; it’s just for Arcane to commit. If you want to commit to making her a full-blown character, then include more scenes of her and give her a life and personality outside of her connection to Viktor. If you want to commit to making her a nobody whose death is tragic because we don’t know her, then do not show her in Viktor’s flashback and tone down her interactions with him (maybe don’t have her speak at all until her death scene, that would be a slap in the face). I personally think the second solution is the best, simply because Arcane clearly doesn’t have the time or space to make Sky a more prominent character, the cast is already packed, and she doesn’t have enough depth as she is that we would miss her screentime.
Bonus: This is complete speculation, but I’m thinking, maybe the writers originally wrote Sky to just be there, have a crush on Viktor, and die, then thought “No, we can’t have a character just exist to die, we should develop her a little more so that her death can have more impact” and then inserted her into Viktor’s flashback. A mistake, imo.
