In the sprawling, unpredictable world of League of Legends, few characters have left a cultural mark quite like Jinx, also known as Powder.
According to
Realms of Runeterra lore, Jinx is around 21 years old. There's always a bit of leeway when trying to reconcile the different canons from League of Legends, Arcane and Legends of Runeterra, but RoR remains our best source.
The variation in her age throughout her portrayals is an interesting look into what could have been.
The reigning consensus of Jinx’s backstory remains her Arcane portrayal, in broad strokes.
Once upon a time — before the bullets and bombs — Jinx was just Powder. Born to Felicia and Connol in Zaun, her early years were relatively happy, even if they weren’t exactly glamorous. She shared an unbreakable bond with her big sister, Vi, and life, for a while, felt almost normal.
Then everything fell apart.
When their parents were killed during a brutal clash between Piltover enforcers and Zaunite rebels, Powder and Vi were left to fend for themselves. Vander, a gruff revolutionary, stepped in as their guardian and left behind his dreams of Zaunite independence.
From the beginning, Powder stood out as inventive, emotional and fercely hopeful. Even if her creations didn't always work, we see little snippets of her tinkering background in Arcane. She fixes the target practice game for her friends and created alarms within her home in the Last Drop. It all came to a head during a disastrous heist, as Powder's attempt to help backfired catastrophically, killing Mylo, Claggor, and Vander.
Heartbroken and furious, Vi lashed out, calling her “a jinx.” And whether she meant to or not, she left Powder behind.
That moment shattered her. Under the toxic mentorship of Silco, Powder transformed into Jinx, a volatile blend of genius and guilt, kept only barely useful enough to use her knowledge of engineering and the hex crystals for the benefit of Zaunite independence.
The Netflix series Arcane peels back Jinx’s layers with heart-wrenching precision, offering the most complete psychological portrait of her character to date. It is the first work to "take her seriously", in a way. Jinx's backstory is otherwise nebulous, or handwaved away with obscure references to Vi and Warwick.
Between Episodes 1 and 3 in Season 1, Jinx — still known as Powder — is portrayed as an 11 to 12-year-old girl. After the catastrophic events of Episode 3, a timeskip pushes the story several years forward, putting her at roughly 18 to 20 years old.
Throughout the series, Arcane paints a brutal, unflinching picture of her descent. Powder and Jinx are not just two "phases" of the same person; they increasingly function as quasi-dissociative identities locked in internal conflict. Powder embodies the fawning, desperate child, while Jinx represents the violent, unpredictable survivor born from betrayal and trauma and fuelled by Shimmer. The result is not a linear evolution but a psychological fracture: Jinx flip-flops between manic violence and pitiful vulnerability, often in the same breath.
This arc of hers ultimately culminates in her accidentally killing her father figure for a second time, and choosing to sit in the Jinx-patterned chair to finally decide Powder would die.
Though Riot Games has never formally diagnosed Jinx, both fans and psychological critics draw strong parallels with several real-world conditions. Her behavior aligns most closely with complex trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), compounded by signs of borderline personality disorder (BPD), particularly her frantic fear of abandonment, unstable sense of identity, impulsivity, dissociative episodes, and hallucinations. Her relationship with Vi swings violently between longing and rage, and showcases textbook emotional disregulation often seen in these disorders.
What sets Arcane apart is that it refuses to simplify Jinx into a mere "crazy villain" stereotype. Instead, it presents her mental collapse with devastating empathy: not as weakness, but as an inevitable response to the overwhelming betrayals, losses, and manipulations she endured.
In a way, this ties her back to who she is in her other portrayals — a primordial force of anarchy, ultimately product of Piltover's control over Zaun.
In the core lore of League of Legends, Jinx emerges not as a preordained villain, but as a chaotic mystery — an explosive force whose origins are largely unknown.
Jinx was once remembered by a few as a bright, eccentric tinkerer from the undercity. How that wide-eyed child unraveled into a manic demolitions expert remains a mystery, but her trail of destruction is impossible to ignore.
Jinx’s reign of chaos began with a series of anonymous “pranks” targeting Piltover’s merchant elite. Seemingly random at first, these acts shared a singular purpose: to grind the city’s rigid order to a halt. Though the wardens first blamed undercity chem-punks, Jinx soon made her mark unmistakable.
Jinx proved herself an escalating threat. Piltover’s authorities struggled to contain the madness, while Zaun’s people debated whether she was a liberator fighting the elites or simply a dangerous lunatic fueling unrest.
To this day, Jinx remains at large. Her escalating pranks, unpredictable violence, and cryptic obsession with Vi continue to baffle both Piltover and Zaun. Whether she acts from vengeance, boredom, or some deeper, unknowable motive, one thing is clear: Jinx’s anarchic reign is far from over.
Within League of Legends, Jinx was never much of a necessarily deep character. Her origins went largely unannounced, and she tends to represent a more primordial force of anarchy and unrest that mirrors the rotting heart of Zaun within the grasp of Piltover.
She was mostly devised as the "antagonist" to Vi and Caitlyn's buddy-cop duo dynamic. It's not surprising that Vi's lore is also quite nebulous within League of Legends, pinning her as an amnesiac picked up by Caitlyn as an enforcer.
Jinx has a somewhat playful relationship with Vi, but a tumultuous one with Caitlyn. Due to Vi's amnesia and Jinx's mania, it's very unlikely they remember being sisters to begin with, if they even are in this canon. In the League of Legends canon, both Vi and Jinx are 21 years old.
Legends of Runeterra has Jinx's birthdate set in 971 AN, with the current year being 997 AN. This makes Jinx 26 years old during the events of Legends of Runeterra.
Legends of Runeterra takes a halfway path between Arcane and League of Legends. LoR acknowledges several points from Arcane, such as Vi and Jinx's shared backstory as sisters and Vi's rabbit doll. Regardless, Vi and Jinx keep a relatively amicable relationship, playing the role of two sisters who love each other, but are ultimately forced into opposite sides of the law.
Jinx sits at around 17-19 years old in Arcane, 21 years old in League of Legends, and 26 years old in Legends of Runeterra.
Across all three portrayals, she's a character shaped by loss, guilt, but also an unstable person shaped by an unstable environment. Do keep in mind that these portrayals are not necessarily perfectly canon with each other — all of these split off at some moment or the other, or never match up to begin with.
