Arcane (part 1: episodes 1-3)

This review was commissioned by @boo600


Warcraft 3 was the last Blizzard game that I bought. I didn't love it, and nothing the studio has released since then was able to win me back. I'm not sure how much of this is down to actual decline in quality of the games, and how much of it is down to me growing up and refining my tastes (for context, I was in high school when Warcraft 3 came out). I therefore didn't pay much attention when the Warcraft 3 modding community took off and started making mods that outshone the official material in popularity.

I was aware of one particular mod, "Defence of the Ancients," that was getting ultra popular during my twenties. Mostly because my boss at the time was addicted to it. I watched him play it. It still didn't seem like my thing, so I shrugged and thought nothing more of it.

Then I started hearing about this entire genre of original titles that were apparently inspired by Defence of the Ancients. And I was a little bemused, but still not terribly interested. Then, just a few years ago, I heard about how this company I'd never heard of before called Riot Games was involved in some bigtime sex abuse controversy. It turned out that this company's one solitary claim to fame that had made it an industry leader was "League of Legends," a Defence of the Ancients clone.

Looking at Blizzard's own recent history, I guess the apple didn't fall far from the tree on that one. But I digress.

Last year, when I received this commission, I had no idea what the Netflix animation series "Arcane" was. A few months ago I looked into it to start preparing for this review, and it turned out that it's League of Legends: the Show. Licensed adaptation thingy.

And, that is all that I know about Arcane going in. That it is a series based on a game based on a mod of another game that underwhelmed me twenty years ago.

The nine episodes of Arcane's first (and thus far only) season is formally divided into three arcs of three episodes each, so I think one post for each arc seems like the right approach. Let's check out those first three episodes.


Okay. I saw arc one now, and this was not even remotely what I expected.

Frankly, I'm not sure how the hell you ever could have extrapolated this story out of a tower defence MOBA game. To the point where I wonder how much of this story already existed in someone's notes before it ever came in contact with League of Legends' IP stamp.

Well...actually, maybe not. Thinking about it some more, there are some elements that I can maybe see turning into the ingredients for a tower defence scenario after enough plot happens to them. The fantasy-steampunk city that the story takes place in has a criminalized lower-class district called "the lanes." One of the power players in the story commands an army of masked and helmeted police enforcers, and another of them is creating alchemical monsters; both of these could provide the mook swarms that the game genre hinges on. It really wouldn't be obvious what this was all building toward if you didn't go in already knowing, though, and it seems like a *lot* of stuff is going to need to happen before the situation gets to the point where a LoL match could theoretically happen.

Anyway, the basic shape of it! Most of this world's history has been dominated by tyrannical sorcerer-kings. A few centuries ago, some forward-thinking people established a city state free of magic. The city of Piltover faired well, becoming a world leader in science, technology, and industry, but its progressive founding vision didn't work out so well for all of its members. By the time of the series, there's an entire lower city - euphemistically "the lanes," more formally called Zaun - that just got shut out of these prosperous developments. Zaun is shrouded by the long shadows of Piltover's shining towers and choked by the smoke from its marvellous steam contraptions. Its buildings are rotting and run-down. Its people are poor and criminal. The whole setup feels kinda like a mix of 19th century London and 20th century Detroit, with some other historical influences weaved in here and there.

Several years ago, a failed uprising by the Zaunites incurred a brutal crackdown by the Piltover police enforcers. We're talking "masked death squads burning down whole apartment blocks" brutal.

Since then, Piltover-Zaun has been locked in a barely maintainable semblance of order. The status quo is backed up by the capitulation of some Zaunite community leaders on one hand, and the constant maintenance of a state of fear by Piltover's police on the other. A powderkeg under pressure. At the series' start, the spark comes in the form of a simple burglary-gone-wrong that sets multiple domino chains in motion across the double-city.

I think the best way to discuss the rather intricate plot that expands dramatically over the course of these episodes would be to go by character. For all the intensely political and setting-specific backdrop, "Arcane" is a very character-driven story. In fact, the degree to which the personal and the political are hard to either separate or to reconcile might be the main theme of the work.


Powder and Vi

Our main protagonist duo, at least at the beginning. These sisters were orphaned during the police crackdown a few years ago.

They were adopted by community leader and failed revolutionary Vander, who feels responsible for their situation after getting his people into a war they couldn't win. They grow up chafing under the former firebrand's new - effectively submissive - posture toward the Piltover authorities, and yearning to pick up the revolutionary torch that he abandoned.

Well, older sister Vi does. Powder has something a little weirder and more complicated going on. The only thing she really seems to care about is being useful to her big sister and the other members of their adoptive family, with her politics pretty much just following from that. Maybe Powder was just too young to understand what was really going on when they lost their parents. Or maybe she just dissociated too much to have any strong, self-motivated desire for revenge. She just wants to help Vi.

There's also more than a few indications that Powder has mental health issues. Histrionic outbursts. Dangerous, incorrigible fixations. Fits of self-loathing where she seems to be on the brink of taking a knife to her fingers. In their social and economic situation, unfortunately, she isn't getting the help she very obviously needs. Vi, meanwhile, makes plenty of dumbass decisions of her own, but they're the kind of dumbass decisions you'd expect a disaffected teenaged street ganger to make, not the kind that suggests mental illness.

Incidentally, Vi is a brawler who uses brass knuckle-like weapons much like their adoptive father, while Powder is an amateur tinker and bomb-maker. This is going to be very important in a few more sections.

The inciting incident of the series comes when Vi takes her sister and two fellow fosterlings to go engage in the revolutionary praxis of breaking into some rich guy's house and stealing everything that isn't nailed down. It turns out that the rich guy in question is a student at Piltover's premier college of physics and engineering. And also that he was in the middle of some highly illegal research into the forbidden arts of magic. Poking at the magical crystals he'd been experimenting with causes an explosion that takes out a big chunk of the building, nearly gets them all killed, and gets the attention of the entire city government and police force. The four youths manage to evade the police and slip back to their home in the Lanes, but there's no escape from the consequences of what they've done.

From the beginning, the show emphasizes what a crab bucket the sisters live in. In the first episode, their heist in the upper city and subsequent escape from the enforcers is directed like lighthearted fantasy-adventure cheesiness. When they get back to the lower city though, they have to defend their loot from a rival youth gang, and this scene is a downright horrifying work of gritty, brutal, desperation-fuelled violence with nothing romantic or whimsical about it whatsoever.

This brutal street punch-out results in Powder impulsively throwing most of the loot into a river, meaning that everything - the heist, the explosion, the escape, and the brutal street fight - ended up being for nothing. The only loot that she didn't throw was a handful more of those magic crystals. Which she keeps secret from everyone except Vi (who has no idea where and to whom to sell them) and also later decides to try weaponizing. Like I said, there are undiagnosed mental health issues here that may well go beyond the childhood trauma effects.

It turns out that throwing the loot in the river was actually the best thing Powder could have done at that point, as it turns out, because selling absolutely anything from that heist would bring the cops down on them in a heartbeat. A fact that Vander is very insistent on lecturing Vi about when he finds out about the shit they pulled.

Unfortunately...it's still not enough. The police are probing Zaun, and they won't stop until they've arrested or killed four kids who more-or-less match the descriptions. Vi's arc for the subsequent pair of episodes involve owning up to the responsibility for what she set in motion, effectively going through a microcosm of Vander's own defeat years ago. In the end, she's prepared to offer herself to the police in exchange for the others' lives...only for Vander himself - their beloved foster father who had been warning them away from doing this stupid shit all along...to offer himself up for his foster daughter(s) before she can.

I'm not sure if Vi's arc can rightly be called a positive one, given that her learning responsibility also comes with something adjacent to the breaking of her spirit. But, it's a hell of a lot better than what happens to Powder. Rather than trying to reverse course from her mistakes, Powder doubles down on them, hoping that the sunk costs will eventually redeem her actions. She unilaterally tries insane ploys to hide them that just end up making things worse. And in the end, well, she uses those magic explodey-crystals again, totally unilaterally, in a combat situation where friendlies and enemies are all mixed up in close proximity. I'll talk more about it in the following sections, but this time they aren't nearly as lucky as they were last time when everyone survived with only minor injuries.


Jayce

Starting at the beginning of episode 2, we begin alternating between the desperate situation in the lanes, and a political situation unfolding in the spires. Jayce Talis (I just now realized his name is a play on "talisman") had his life saved as a child by a random act of generosity from one of the wizards who rule distant lands.

He somehow got ahold of these arcane energy-crystals, and has been secretly trying to devise a method of tapping them through technological rather than ritual means. Essentially bypassing Piltover's wizardry-taboo by creating "hextech" as he dubs it. Unfortunately, he turns out to have been very right that the government would be sceptical of this research if he didn't already have results to show them. Especially when the way they find out about it is a giant explosion triggered by some dumbass burglars poking around in his unsanctioned home laboratory.

It took me a long time to get invested in Jayce's story when Vi and Powder's has much higher stakes. At worst, Jayce (who comes from a middle-class background) might face the prospect of exile, which means his worst-case outcome is literally the girls' status quo. Still, even if I had trouble worrying about Jayce's life prospects, the nature of his research and the political interests it starts to attract slowly got interesting.

Jayce essentially acts out a more comfortable, upper crust version of the same arc taking place down in the lanes. Trying to decide whether or not the status quo is worth pushing back against. Also like the Zaun side of the plot, he picks up a more determined counterpart in the form of an administrative assistant named Viktor. Viktor is a young man of around Jayce's own age, the son of poor immigrants, whose career has stalled out at the "professor's file clerk" level on account of his origins. Viktor thinks that encouraging Jayce on the path to status-quo-shattering greatness might be his own ticket to further social mobility, and he seems to earnestly believe that risking everything for the slim possibility of improvement is worth it for both of them.

He's totally open about his philosophy and motives, with Jayce. Like, there's no manipulation going on here. He tells him all this in as many words, and Jayce decides to accept his help in covering up further experiments knowing this. The friendship the two of them build is really wholesome, honestly. And also feels like it might have a bit of sexual tension going on, but that might just be my gay goggles, idk.

Their reprieve comes when they attract the attention of a very wealthy and powerful patron in the Piltover government, who will cover for them as long as she can (but will throw them under the bus the moment she can no longer do so). And, they manage, just in time, to get some rudimentary hextech basics working. Though it seems likely that their new, Machiavellian patron might just be the one who gets to dictate what they get to use it for and who gets access to it.

This also means letting the authorities know the significance of the energy crystals, specifically. Which means the cops won't rest until they've recovered all the missing ones. And are given essentially unlimited resources to do so.


Vander

God, this poor shmuck.

Vander was the people's hero. He still is, to a large extent, the people's hero. At least, for a big chunk of the people in the area cantered around his bar/restaurant in downtown Zaun. But ever since the failure of the rebellion he co-led, and the brutal retaliation that ensued, he hasn't been the same.

He still wants what's best for the undercity. He's still Zaun's best go-between for smugglers, thieves, and mutual aid organizers alike. He still maintains order of a sort, and does his best to prevent the strong from bullying the weak within his territory (and he maintains enough armed loyalists himself to have the strength to do so). However, he's ultimately gone from revolutionary to collaborator.

He maintains a cordial, almost friendly, relationship with the police captain in charge of Zaun. He keeps the most disruptive criminals from targeting any of the really important neighbourhoods in Piltover, and helps the cops come down on Zaunites who break the unspoken rules. After what happened the last time, he's decided that the best he can realistically hope for is to maximize the amount of scraps that get thrown their way by Piltover's elite and minimize the violence with which Zaun's people fight over those scraps. He doesn't like it. He's not happy about it. But...at the same time, his position is a more comfortable one for himse than he'd like to acknowledge. As years go by, it's hard to say how much his revolutionary fervour is still being dampened by genuine fear, and how much of it is now down to personal contentment as he grows a shell of provisional privilege without realizing it.

He's not corrupt, in the sense of embezzling aid money or assassinating political rivals or the like. He's a good man. But he's not someone interested in making things better anymore. This is what frustrates his adoptive daughter Vi. Her rebellion against his mandates is what kicks off the plot, and the sheer power of the forces turned against them by the authorities eventually push her into making the same choice that he did; surrender and hope that will stop things from getting even worse. Except he surrenders before she can. Leaving her and her little sister alone.

He doesn't actually get arrested as it turns out, though. Just as the police are dragging him away, a third party intervenes and drags Vander away in a completely different direction. And, here's where the story reaches its real thematic focus.


Silco

For a long time, I wasn't sure what the hell the point of this guy was. Evil-looking alchemist and drug dealer, doing evil-looking experiments in the background while plot happens elsewhere. He's buried to the head in villain coding, but the story seemed like it already had a perfectly good villain in the Piltover government, so his purpose eluded me. I wasn't until the third and final episode of the arc that he came into his own.

Silco was another of the leaders of the failed revolution. He had a falling out with Vander that resulted in the latter attempting to drown him in the river, but the details of this incident have not yet been revealed. Silco learned the opposite lesson from the crackdowns than Vander learned: Power comes from ruthlessness. Victory goes to whoever blinks last. If at first you don't succeed, keep doubling down until either you win or you die.

His own operations, on the other side of Zaun, are funded by drug dealing and inhumane alchemical research. He runs his neighbourhood like a much more traditional crime lord, taking cuts of his underlings' thefts and scams and using those who serially underperform as human test subjects (the other street toughs who tried to steal Vi, Powder, and Co's haul were from the bottom end of his hierarchy). His main projects during these three episodes are 1) developing an alchemical super-soldier serum that he can use to launch another, more successful uprising against Piltover, and 2) killing Vander and all his top loyalists and adoptive children. Literally "his two hobbies are human experimentation and child murder."

And...he might actually be on the right side of history.

At the very least, while he's a bad guy, I don't think it's fair at all to call him the bad guy. By the end of these episodes, I don't think the show is even treating him as that.

The final act of the arc, taking place while Jayce and Viktor are doing their final experiments, has Silco's alchemically-augged minions intercept the officers who were arresting Vander and dragging him off to Silco's lair, intentionally leaving a trail for his loyalists to follow so they can ambush them when they make their rescue attempt. It is in this attempted rescue and ensuing ambush that Powder - despite Vander, Vi, and virtually everyone else she knows telling her to sit this one out - comes along and uses another of the power crystals to try and free her family from a tight spot. Only, throwing a chaotic magical explosive into a dense, confusing battlefield is, uh, not the surgical precision weapon that the situation really called for. Vi, Powder, Silco, and Silco's souped-up minions survive. Vander and his two foster sons - the girls' adoptive siblings and longtime partners in crime - are killed.

Vi, torn apart by shock, guilt, and grief, abandons her sister and flees (and in her wounded state gets caught by the police). Powder is left alone, repeating babbled, tear-choked insistences that she's helping, she saved them, she made her tinkering work this time, please come back. In the end, she runs for the only person she can still see and reaches out for his affection, which he gives. He's seemingly genuine.

Silco looks uncomfortable as he hugs and comforts her, like it's been so long since he's shown affection that he can barely remember how. He doesn't seem to be faking it, though. The final shots have Silco's people tending to their wounded and mourning their dead, humanizing them to a degree they hadn't been previously. The lighting and cinematography are reminiscent of Powder's previous adoption by Vander, after that other battle years ago.

The ones who won't surrender. Who won't submit. Who won't let the powers that be hold them down. Who will do literally whatever it takes.

Like I said, Silco isn't right, but I really, really am not sure that he's wrong either. Even in the most uncharitable interpretation, the existence of people like him is an inevitable consequence of people like the Piltover ruling council. And, to a lesser extent, of people like Vander. Get rid of Silco, and you'll just go back to the situation that creates Silcos. And, perhaps, Powders. And, in a lighter and softer parallel, Jayces and Viktors. Complete with explosions.


There's a lot more to talk about. For instance, the police have their own microcosm version of the stopgap-versus-solution duality going on. The chief of police lady who has a rapport with Vander is visibly uncomfortable with the injustice she has to carry out, but not enough so to do anything about it. Her chief underling, meanwhile, is a bloodthirsty cop-fundamentalist who's getting frustrated enough with her light hand and restrained approach to maybe start plotting her early retirement. There's a little arc going on with that kid working for Silco who gets the super-soldier serum tested on him after failing to get Vi and Powder's loot, but then actually becomes extremely loyal to Silco when it turns out that the serum works. And so much more, all woven together elegantly and - with a few exceptions - with prevailing empathy for all involved.

The art is also worth gushing about for a bit. I've seen a lot of stylistically similar CGI fantasy series botch it. "Arcane" does not botch it. Unlike certain dragon princes that one might name, this show actually looks even better in motion than it does in the screenshots. And also manages to get a lot of visual diversity out of its fantasy-steampunk baseline without any of it looking off or unfitting.

The bombastic soundtrack by Imagine Dragons is just one more unexpected sensory treat.


It has the potential to get very bad very fast in the following episodes, depending on where it goes with some of these characters and the political threads their lives have been ensnared in. So far though, "Arcane" is doing almost everything right. Shockingly right, in fact. In terms of writing, presentation, themeing, messaging, pacing (well, okay, there were a few minor issues on this front, but only minor ones), all of it. So far, this is probably one of the best things I've reviewed.

I can only hope arcs 2 and 3 are able to keep it up.