Arcane (part 3: episodes 7-9)

Here, the tragedy of Piltover is completed. And it is a tragedy.

I've heard that a second season of Arcane is supposed to come out this fall, but the way that the first season ends makes me question its necessity. League of Legends is a game about hordes of soldiers being sent up or down the lanes to die to the other player's defences, and the culmination of Arcane's events is...pretty much that exact situation.

I suspect that the way Arcane got there retroactively makes League of Legends a much, much, much darker game than it was ever intended to be. But I also don't think that a second season of Arcane would change that, so, yeah.

There are criticisms to be made. Act 3 has the same problems as act 2 in terms of timeline compression, and at this point the arcs of individual characters start to really suffer because of this. Changes in methods and motives that would make sense if they happened over the course of years become nonsensical when the show has them happening in days (Jayce and Vi in particular suffer from this). There are also a few character decisions that baffle me even aside from that.

I'm also starting to have some issues with the worldbuilding, or at least the presentation of that worldbuilding; for instance, I'm very confused about what each power source in the setting (steamtech, wizardry, and alchemy) can and can't do. Which in turn makes the significance of, eg, new hextech inventions much harder to gauge, even when the show clearly wants you to gauge them. Also, much moreso than in acts 1-2, there are a bunch of things that feel "I clapped when I saw it" for League of Legends.

But, despite these failings, Arcane continues to make its point quite effectively, and they don't soften the ending in even the slightest. I'm going to be much, much more critical at certain junctures in this post than I was in the previous two, so keep that in mind until we reach the ending in question.

Also, because the plot gets very finnicky before it gets over, I'll be doing this review a bit more broad-strokes than the previous two, barring a few specific sequences that call for a detailed summary.


We pick up with Vi and Catelyn in the custody of the Firelights, who turn out to be something much different than they initially seemed. Earlier, I made the observation that Vander was a left-wing revolutionary who wasn't willing to go far enough, and Silco is a right-wing revolutionary who is (that last part is now explicit rather than just implicit; Silco refers to himself in as many words as a Zaunite nationalist in act 3). Well, these goblin glider riders turn out to be the thing that Zaun really needed all along!

Unfortunately, as their miserable performance throughout act 2 shows, they just aren't strong enough to do a successful revolution. They have a nifty little solarpunk refuge in the least polluted part of Zaun that isn't controlled by Silco cronies, where they help people get off of drugs and hide them from both Piltover's police and Zaun's gangsters, but when it comes to taking the offensive the best they can manage is a little bit of sabotage here and there.

Their leader is Ekko, one of Vi and Powder's few childhood friends who didn't die at the end of Act 1. This fact is pretty much the only thing that allows Catelyn the cop to keep both her freedom and her life.

Apparently they released an Arcane music video focused on Ekko and his childhood friendship with the sisters in between acts 2 and 3 coming out. His appearances in act 1 are so minimal that many people (including myself) wouldn't have remembered him at all without that. A little clumsy of the show, I must say, but he at least turns out to be a pretty cool character so that's nice.

Anyway, Piltover's government might be the Firelights' ultimate enemy, but Silco is currently a more pressing and determined one. He wants to make sure he has all of Zaun under his control before theoretically doing something actually revolutionary, and the Firelights are one of the last bastions of resistance. Even the cops that come after them are more likely to be the ones who are in Silco's pocket.

Unfortunately, there isn't a single person among the Firelight community who isn't scared to death of "Jinx." She's killed more of them than any other person, Piltoveran or Zaunite. Vi and Powder's faces are both present in their spray-painted mural of the lost right next to Vander's; Vi because she was thought dead, and Powder because no one wants to think about Jinx being a living version of her. Which puts Vi in a difficult position.

In the end, they agree to rest their hopes - at least provisionally - on that idealistic new council member who Catelyn fortuitously has a close friendship with. They managed to grab the case with the power crystal in it from Powder at the same time that they grabbed Vi and Catelyn. Catelyn will escort Vi and Ekko to Piltover, get them a meeting with Jayce, offer him the crystal as a show of good faith, and then see if he can get the council to start un-fucking Zaun.

Unfortunately, the forces arrayed against them are just too numerous and too underhanded.

There are now police checkpoints at every entryway from Zaun to Piltover. They foolishly trust in Catelyn's credentials to get them through, but they get intercepted by Captain Acab and a team of his most porcine underlings. He makes to kill all of them, including Catelyn, only for Powder to catch up with them again and slaughter him and his men with her clockwork bomb-drones before they can react.

Unfortunately, Powder ain't here to continue the tearful reunion with Vi. Not when she sees Vi accompanying members of both of her enemy factions carrying the crystal to Piltover.

For some reason, Ekko decides to hold Powder off while Catelyn and Vi bring the crystal to Jayce. Which was the first of several real "what the fuck?" plot moments in act 3, for me. He's the one who can actually negotiate on behalf of his people, and Vi is the one who has even the smallest hope of talking Powder down (and also equally capable as Ekko in a duel, if it still ends up coming to that). But, uh, okay I guess.

Powder and Ekko have a duel. There's an artsy thing where they both appear to turn into childhood verions of themselves fighting with toys that struck me as profoundly unnecessary for communicating the tragedy we're witnessing and honestly kind of cheapens it.

Even though it’s also very pretty and impressively well animated.

Honestly? This is a good place to segue into one of my biggest complaints about Arcane. That being Powder as a Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl.

...

Powder is a traumatized, mentally ill girl who's been victimized in some way by virtually everyone she's ever relied on. She's dangerous, unstable, unpredictable, ruthless. An object of both fear and pity, with whom the audience is meant to have a painful empathy. Her tragedy is the most on-point representation of Piltover's own fall out of the entire cast.

But she's just soooooo cute and quirky about how she does it! She has cute, quirky PTSD flashbacks. Cute, quirky hallucinations that all look like magic marker drawings. She uses cute, quirky deathtraps and custom-made weapons in battle.

The magic marker trauma-hallucinations in particular are the literal worst. Even when post-act1 powder is at her most sympathetic and interesting, I spent every moment that she was onscreen dreading the next cutesy hallucination.

My understanding is that Arcane's creators sort of backed themselves into a corner with this one. Jinx was apparently an extremely popular player character in League of Legends, and fans of the game would be disappointed if she didn't have a big role in the series. The problem is that back when Jinx was introduced and made her big splash among the playerbase, League of Legends barely had a plot at all. "Pretty steampunk city and ugly alchemy city are at war. It doesn't matter why. Now march your dudes at the other player's towers."

Jinx's introduction to the game was accompanied by this vid, and it was pretty much the extent of her characterization:

And like, in that sort of context? Sure! Fine! Make up whatever gimmicky, visually distinctive cartoon characters you want to defend your towers from the other player's dudes with. "Meet the Medic." "Meet the Pyro." "Meet the Harley Quinn." Knock yourself out.

But then you try to make that character the center of a pretty serious, pretty dark, pretty political story, and expect her in particular to bear a lot of that weight. And you can't change her aesthetics, because then she just wouldn't be Jinx anymore.

So, because of those factors, I'm more sympathetic to the creators' decisions here than I would otherwise be. But it still sucks that it happened, and I feel like there had to be a better way of threading the needle.

...

The outcome of this encounter ends up being Powder and Ekko both out of commission, with Powder by far the worse off on account of her having another one of those impulsive last-second decisions and trying to blow both of them up with a grenade. Ekko managed to put enough distance between them at the last second to get off with just a broken leg, while Powder is left in critical condition. Both of them get dragged away by third parties before more cops can make it over. Powder by Silco. Ekko by the last person I'd have ever expected.

The real punchline to this joke, though, is that the carrying case never actually had the crystal in it; Powder had it in her pocket at the time of the attack, and she still does when Silco triages her. Caitlyn and Vi have nothing to bring to Jayce to bargain with.

The middle part of Act 3 focuses more on the leadership again. In Zaun, Silco's lieutenants the "chembarons" (amusingly literal fantasy synonym for "druglords") are starting to seriously lose faith in his leadership. His daughter is out of control and might get them all killed, if she doesn't snap and kill them herself. He's becoming more interested in preserving the status quo than expanding operations either for profit or in the name of Zaun. He keeps himself on top for now through brute force and clever spycraft, but he can no longer convince himself that the situation is sustainable. When Powder's injuries prompt him to drop everything and hurry her off to try to save her.

Looks like I called it, with Viktor's shady alchemist mentor having also been Silco's shady alchemist mentor. Silco's narcotics and combat drugs were pretty much all adapted from this crazy old Adeptus Mechanicus-looking hermit's research into tissue restoration.

Anyway, he saves Powder, but it's an agonizing process that exacerbates her emotional instability.

On one hand, this sequence perfectly illustrates Silco's relationship with both Powder and with Zaun. Grandpa Admech warns him that saving her will be so agonizing for her that just letting her die might be preferable. Silco demands that he do it anyway, insisting that she's strong enough to persevere, that any amount of pain she has to suffer is acceptable no matter how she (with her notably self-inflicted grenade wounds) feels about it. He really does love her, but he's too damaged himself for his love to be anything but twisted and masochistic.

On the other hand...the amount of talking up that Grandpa Admech does, and the horror-movie discretion shots of the procedure, end up seeming disproportionate to the end results. It made it seem like he was going to turn Powder into a hideous mutant or something, but the only visible changes are 1) her eyes being the glowy purple alchemy color now, and 2) her being just slightly crazier than she was before.

The fact that Silco vanished off to save his daughter (ie, the one responsible for causing this situation, at least in the eyes of the chembarons) only further undermines his position. In the wake of that, he needs red meat for his base, and he needs it now.

We'll get back to this.

Jayce and Viktor are barely spending time together, on account of the crisis taking up Jayce's time and energy and the evil girlfriend taking up even more of Jayce's time and energy. Jayce is also, predictably, coming to see Zaun as a foreign adversary that Piltover is just barely grabbing by the neck rather than part of the same city inhabited by what should be fellow citizens. When Vi and Caitlyn approach him, his first response is to go attack Silco (apparently, Silco has been investigated multiple times by the Piltover government, but nothing ever stuck). And, here's where character arcs suffer really badly from the timeline compression.

First, Jayce. Him becoming a council member happened...not more than a few weeks ago. Until then, he was just a celebrity scientist. Now, all of a sudden, he's picking up prototype hextech weapons himself and leading troops into battle in person.

His characterization up until now suggested that he'd never so much as thrown a punch in his life. Even if he might declare war or order police raids, I'd have never expected him to lead the enforcers in person, let alone lead from the front with a derpy oversized trick-weapon in hand and smashing enemy fighters to death left and right without blinking. It's like the show suddenly remembered that Jayce Talis is a League of Legends character and hastily turned him into one.

Then it...kinda goes back...on this? In his raid on one of Silco's chem facilities, Jayce ends up fatally shooting a preteen boy before realizing it. This prompts him to freak out, start vomiting, and look around at the environment in self-recriminating horror. He then abandons the operation and refuses to continue down this path.

Like I said before, if this took place over the course of a few years it would be a perfectly good arc. Jayce starts making weapons for the enforcers, then using the weapons himself (initially because he wants to make sure they're not being misused, or because he feels wrong sending other people to risk their lives without doing so himself, but eventually just as a matter of course). Then, he eventually kills an innocent bystander in person, at which point the realization of what his warrior-career has done to him and how far he's fallen from his old sciencey self all comes slamming down on him. However, the plot does not allow for another multi-year timeskip between acts 2 and 3. Jayce is written as if there was another timeskip, but there wasn't one.

Vi though. Ohhhhh god Vi. Vi's poor, poor characterization.

See, I could believe her deciding - over the course of a few years of constant exposure to sexy, idealistic cop girlfriend Caitlyn - that Silco is a greater big picture evil than the Piltover authorities. I could see her eventually coming to hate him enough that she'd prioritize fighting him over improving Piltover's treatment of Zaun. It would be a very similar kind of corruption arc to the ones most other Arcane characters undergo. It would make sense as another of those bitter ironies; that this whole story kicked off because she got sick of Vander's comfort with the authorities, only to eventually herself become even more comfortable with the authorities. Could be good. Depressing, just like most of the arcs in Arcane are depressing, but good.

Thing is, she just got out of her unjust confinement in Piltover's horrible, hellish prison system two damned weeks ago.

It's not just that I'm disappointed in her doing this already. It's that I don't believe that she would or even could do this already.

In fact, aside from making a few mouth noises about their longtime neglect and callousness toward Zaun, Vi's main frustration when she gets to talk to the council is that they're hesitant to start a shooting war with Silco's group.

Two weeks after getting out. At most.

To Arcane's credit - and I will indeed give Arcane a lot of credit for this - when Jayce himself loses his will to keep fighting and Vi gets mad at him for it, the show frames Jayce as being in the right. Silco needs to go down, but this is not the way to do it, and trying to do it this way will just keep making more Silcos if not something even worse. So, good on Arcane.

...

Once again, my problems with this whole sequence would be solved if there were just five extra years passing between shots.

...

Now, before getting to the ending, there are three subplots introduced in the last two episodes that don't go anywhere yet, but are interesting enough to merit talking about. I still feel like another season of Arcane is unnecessary overall, but these parts were written with the expectation of there being another season, so.

First, Viktor! With Jayce barely having time for his dying friend anymore, Viktor gets Grandpa Admech's help in prolonging his own life so he can see the changes in the world he's been working toward. And, Grandpa Admech helps him! Sweet old man, he just helps anyone who asks.~ An alchemical treatment makes Viktor's body mutable to outside mystical influences. By then interfacing with the experimental "smart" hextech logic engine and letting his body communicate with the semi-sentient forces of magic through that machine interface, he starts replacing parts of his failing flesh with these bizarre eldritch synth-materials. Unfortunately, he doesn't complete his transformation into a full-body wizard cyborg before some dumbass lab assistant tries to save him from the device he's clutching and his lab floor gets a brand new carbon-ash finish.

I feel like this is trying to be another illustration of good intentions leading to tragedy, which to be fair it is. On the other hand, there wasn't any corruption or misuse here, just a freak accident born of misunderstanding; those happen all the time. Doesn't really send as much of a message as I think the show wanted it to.

I suspect Viktor will either get over these tragedy-induced second thoughts and become a full hexborg in season 2, or he'll die and someone else will finish his experiments. Anyway, hexborg Viktor would be cool. After all, he's one of the very few characters who doesn't undergo a corruption arc in this season, he deserves a break.

Now, on to another character who doesn't have a corruption arc. If only because she had nowhere to go but up.

Councillor Maderda's mother arrives by airship to provide Piltover with some advice and assistance in these turbulent times. And, uh, it turns out the councillor might have been downplaying certain aspects of the kind of dynasty she hails from. Playing up the mercantile aspect. Playing down the warrior aspect. Despite the latter, at least in her mother's case, being the bigger part of it.

The "early failures in life" that Maderda was sent away to Piltover for were, basically, "being too insistent on trying economic and political domination in lieu of military domination." Not killing readily enough. Being too soft on enemies. Part of the reason for her own ambition in Piltover has actually been to prove to her kill-happy warlord mother that you can become just as powerful through business as you can through military conquest.

It isn't working though, because their difference is more fundamental than "which methods are preferable." Maderda Junior is willing to make as many corpses as she needs to in order to make money. Maderda Senior is willing to make as much money as she needs to in order to make corpses. They have different understandings of what being "powerful" means at the end of the day.

Anyway, the real reason Maderda Senior is here is because she finally provoked someone too powerful to just push over, and now her son - Junior's brother, the crown prince - is dead and the enemy is just getting warmed up. She heard about hextech weapons, and she wants them. She'll give Piltover's regime as much support as she needs to in order to get them. Ideally, she'd also like to see Piltover have a short victorious civil war in order to field-test those weapons before she has to rely on them herself. Also, she wants to drink all the local wine and fuck all the local femboys while she's here, and doesn't even bother to make sure Junior isn't literally watching as she starts doing it.

Naturally, Senior tries to push Jayce and the other councillors into taking a hardline stance on Zaun. But, her presence here triggers a downright transformational change in Junior's stance. And not just her stance. To a degree, also her personality. Unlike with Vi, it's a quick change that I had no trouble believing.

The story tells itself without needing to be told. Junior wasn't just pulling Jayce down to her level in acts 1-2. She was also, out of desperation to get results, pulling herself further down into the abyss and justifying it out loud in Jayce's direction. Realizing how close her behavior still is to her mother's, and how it's been getting closer, shocks her back again. Suddenly, she's the one calling for restraint! She's the one willing to negotiate with Silco and/or other Zaunite power players and encouraging the rest of the council to do the same!

She also, increasingly, latches onto Jayce for emotional support. Up until now, it was never clear if she actually liked him, or if she just thought seduction was her best option for control. I still don't know what she was thinking at the time. In any case though, NOW she really does need him, regardless of how much he did or didn't mean to her originally.

I wonder. Maybe, while Junior was visibly and intentionally pulling herself and Jayce further down, Jayce was invisibly and unintentionally pulling her up? Maybe seeing her mother again was just the last straw in her starting to act on it.

I stand by my earlier assessment of Junior as the closest thing Arcane has to an ultimate personal villain. But at the end, that's very, very rapidly starting to change.

...

On a worldbuilding note, what role do the wizards actually play in geopolitics in the present day?

We were told that Piltover was founded as a refuge away from their domains, but we've seen a bit of the neighboring countries' governments now and there's no mention of them. Maybe they've lost power in the world overall in the last century or two? Not sure.

...

The last new thread I need to yank on is the beginning of yet another rare redemption arc. Remember when I said that Ekko gets his leg fixed up after his duel with Powder by the last person I'd have expected?

After his unseating from the council, Professor Heimerdinger donned a hooded cloak and began walking the streets of Piltover-Zaun. He trudged through smoke-choked industrial hells. Waded through gutters flooded with leaking sewage and seething alchemical waste. He saw orphans living in alleyways. He saw sick drug addicts left to die in the streets. He saw parents dragging their children away from him in fear when he tried to help them fix their one, broken clockwork toy. He saw the thugs and the brigands, both those with gang tattoos and those with enforcer uniforms.

He also saw a young man with a broken leg and a damaged goblin glider, and was glad to have found someone with problems he was able to help with.

Even among the resentful wretches of Zaun, Heimerdinger has remained a sort of legendary figure from before their disillusionment with Piltover. Once people recognize him, he is given an honored welcome by the Firelight commune, whose determination to live good lives and make the best of a bad world inspires Heimerdinger in turn.

...

Throughout most of the series, Heimerdinger and Maderda Junior were essentially the two faces of liberal government. The starry-eyed utopian who's too busy being enlightened by his own intelligence to look outside, and the capitalist lizard-person who games the system until it breaks and then keeps on gaming the pieces.

Seeing both of them start creeping toward redemption at the end, after the show brutally details their manifold sins, is not a move that I expected. I like it though. It's a touch of optimism that casts all the rest into stark relief.

Especially in Heimerdinger's case. Remember, this is the kind of world in which lone geniuses in little cottages can devise world-changing inventions and put them into practice. Heimerdinger is a world-famous engineer, and he's just found his way into a tech-using faction that could really, really do with a force multiplier right about now.

That said...I can also see another very compelling - if also very sad - resolution for Heimerdinger. If the Firelights fail, and he continues wandering the streets of the double-city throughout the coming era of civil war. Helping people fix things. Treating wounds. Repairing houses and purifying water. Like a blinded Oedipus in the gutters of the kingdom he once ruled, trying eternally to make up for his horrible mistakes in whatever small ways he can and knowing that it will never, ever be enough.

As for Maderda Junior's resolution, hehehe, well, about that...

...

After parting ways with Jayce, Vi tries to do a one-woman vigilante war against Silco's organization. Predictably, she doesn't get very far. While wounded and exhausted from an ill-advised battle, she gets found and snatched by Powder.

...

In Caitlyn's family home, after being berated by her parents for disobeying orders and associating with dirty stinking Zaunites (they even brought one into their house! EWWWW!), and after a disheartened Vi turned her back on her and vanished to go vigilante-ing, Caitlyn finds herself in the shower. A long, long, very hot shower. Trying to make herself feel clean, to no avail. She looks at the pristine tile walls, and sees only the burned-out buildings left by her organization's crackdown that orphaned the sisters. She looks at the water droplets falling around her, and sees only oily, polluted rain flooding the gutters where starving children recoil in terror at the sight of her uniform. She looks down at her vagina, and sees only Vi's vagina.

What is she even supposed to do, at this point?

Emerging from the shower, she sees some childish finger-drawings in the condensation on the bathroom mirror. Ruh-roh Raggie! Powder knocks her out and drags her away before anyone else even notices the break-in.

...

After a painful conversation with Viktor, Jayce comes to a high walkway to stare at the sunset and think. While he's brooding all Byronically and stuff, he is approached by a lone Silco. Desperation has, to my pleasant surprise, driven Silco to attempt something completely reasonable. And, unfortunately, despite having made a positive course-correction last episode, Jayce is the one who fucks this up by being less reaonable. He hasn't course corrected enough yet, it seems.

The proposal: Silco will turn the hex-battery and all other stolen technology back over to the Piltover government, renounce any vendettas or redresses against Piltover, and do everything in his power to prevent Zaunite actors from conducting criminal acts in Piltover. In exchange, Zaun must be recognized as a sovereign state with full independence, control of its own borders and trade routes, and negotiated access to the mass relay tower-things. From now on, they will stop being each other's problem.

This is it for Silco. The chance to make it all worth it. The Nation of Zaun will have him as its founding father, and none of the chembarons will be able to say he's forgotten about their political ideals OR their business interests. Zaun will continue to be a despotic, drug-infested shithole under his reign and that of his likely successors, but it'll be a despotic, drug-infested shithole with the potential to improve now that the outside pressure is off.

Jayce likes the sound of this, at least compared to the alternatives, and promises to pitch it to the council as best he can. On the condition that Jinx be turned over to face justice.

Silco tells him that everything Jinx did was on his orders; if Zaun is to be recognized as an independent nation, then its soldiers must be treated as such rather than as Piltoveran criminals. But Jayce won't budge. Either because he thinks too many of his countrymen will demand blood before they'll see reason, or - more likely, sad to say - it's his own ego wanting revenge for all the trouble she's caused him personally.

The enemy leader just offered peace on completely fair terms. And Jayce said "yes, but only if you sacrifice your only child."

He was bouncing back from his corruption arc. But...not fast enough.

They take time to think about each other's terms. Jayce seeking Junior's insight. Silco going to a murky fountain in Zaun to do some Byronic brooding of his own now. Powder has always been a symbol of the city, both for the audience and for Silco. Now, he has to separate them. Choose one or the other. All the complaints of the disgruntled underlings about Powder circle in his mind. He whispers them out loud, to himself, along with his own increasingly flimsy-sounding excuses.

Powder is listening in. She knocks him out and drags him away.

...

Vi, Catelyn, and Silco wake up bound to chairs around a table in a scene that I cannot take seriously because it's Tiny Tina's tea party.

Screencap from Arcane season 1 episode 9, timestamp 26:55.​

Well, I've already complained about their aesthetic choices surrounding Powder enough. I don't need to repeat it all again. I'll just stick to the substance.

All people who abandoned her, lied to her, betrayed her, or...well, I'm not sure that Caitlyn ever actually did anything to Powder, but good luck telling her that. Being called "Powder" by Vi only enrages her now; she will answer only to "Jinx." She's trying to decide who lives and who dies. She's pretty sure that there will only be one or zero survivors, but she isn't yet sure who. If Vi is willing to let her kill Caitlyn in front of her, then that will go a long way toward making Jinx choose Vi over Silco. In fact, she'll even drop the "Jinx" name and be Vi's little sister again. They can flee the double cities together and it'll be just like when they were kids.

Right.

Vi earlier demonstrated a knack for getting out of restraints. Which makes it amusing that she, alone out of the three captives, fails to escape from her bindings in this scene. Fucking d20 skill checks I swear. Before Vi can finish succeeding or (more likely) failing to talk her sister down, the fight begins. Ending with Silco dead, Caitlyn unconscious, and Powder realizing that Vi will never see her the same way again no matter how many people she doesn't kill in this room.

So. Jinx leaves her tied up at the table and leaves the room. An original song by an elderly Sting begins playing. It's refrain is "I'm the monster you created."

The collective "you." And, really, the collective "I" as well.

...

In the Piltover council chamber, Jayce and Medarda pitch Silco's terms to the rest of the council, unaware that he's no longer alive to make the treaty with. The council deliberates, but ultimately agrees.

Too little. Too late.

...

Maderda Senior fumes in her daughter's house, looking over memorobilia from her homeland that Junior has just defaced. Including a painting of their capital city, painted by Junior herself, that she's now scribbled over. They fucking defied her.

But she's getting a windfall. If only Junior's turnaround had happened a little earlier.

Too little. Too late.

...

This whole time, Silco has been having Powder tinker away at the hex-battery to try and weaponize it, making her fight down her PTSD every time she looks at it in order to complete the work. And he was right. She was able to fight it down and complete the work. Her mental health and the city's class tensions are barometers for one another, though, and you don't need civic harmony to know how to make bombs. Quite the opposite, really.

She needed to be on mood stabilizers five years and multiple renewed traumas ago.

Too little.

Too late.

...

The council reaches its decision. Zaun will be a free and independent state. Maderda smiles at Jayce. But then, movement outside the window catches her eye.

Too little.

Too fucking late.

The tragedy of Piltover-Zaun. A civilizational suicide hundreds of years in the making. They could have stopped it. They didn't.

That's Arcane, season one. Season two will be out in a few months. I think this is a perfectly good ending for the story, though. After this, it's dudes charging into towers to die, no further explanation required, except for maybe "how character X got ability Y."


This might come across less as praise for Arcane and more a condemnation of today's media environment in general, but I especially loved how the series handled Silco and Heimerdinger. Especially Silco.

A revolutionary villain who doesn't either a) have a good point but "goes too far" in fighting for liberation, b) turn out to be completely insincere in their rhetoric, thus enabling them to be defeated without having to actually engage with their arguments, or c) get presented as the only possible alternative to the slightly-less-bad status quo. How often do we see that? How often is that allowed to see daylight?

Granted, I'm not sure that Silco even is a "villain," despite him very much looking the part. We see the world from his perspective enough, and he's allowed to be right often enough, to fall into the antihero category.

Heimerdinger, meanwhile, is a perfect sendup of liberalism at its best. It's problem being that it can't do anything to reign in liberalism at its worst. Can't even perceive it until the consequences are already here.

He's a genuinely good guy. I hold him accountable for not recognizing the changing nature of Piltover as it grew from research institute to nation and either a) rising to the occasion or b) removing himself from leadership if he didn't think he was up to it. But...a member of such a long-lived species unused to urgency, with his hands constantly full of scientific matters and surrounded by people more than willing to tell him comforting lies...I don't know how much of a chance he really had.

Those two characters are going to stick with me. I liked pretty much all the others, occasional questionable writing bits aside, but those two are the standouts.

Honestly, if I was a League of Legends player who just wanted my derpy cartoon monsters to do Fun Violence at each other I'm not sure how much I'd appreciate Arcane being attached to it. And, some of Arcane's own flaws are definitely down to it being stuck to certain details from League of Legends. But that's almost immaterial in the face of just how powerful a work of art this series is.