Arcane: Season 2 (part two)

These three episodes combine some of the things I'd long been hoping Arcane would do and am very glad to see, some genuine surprises that are developing in directions I'm curious to learn the destinations of, and some really dumb shit.

I don't want to overstate the last part. Most of the things that Arcane has always done well continue to be done well in this act. If you've enjoyed Arcane up until now, you will almost certainly continue to do so. It's more a matter of how good it is. At this point, I can confidently say that season 2 isn't as good as season 1, and that S1A1 wasn't just an isolated rough patch. It's still good, but not as good.

The story gets both more fractured and more interwoven in these three episodes, so I think I'll be breaking this post down into a larger number of shorter, character-focused sections.


The Fall (and Rise?) of Catelyn

You know, it felt like Caitelyn had told us everything we needed to know about her at the end of the previous part. But the first personal moment we have with her in this one is somehow even more telling. We timeskip ahead a few weeks or so, with Zaun under martial law, violent suppression and mass incarceration running rampant, Ambessa slowly but surely turning Piltover into a colonial holding, and Catelyn sleeping with one of her underlings.

I know, right? Like, this is her immediate reaction to Vi leaving her in disgust over her treatment of Zaun. Ramping up the jackboot beyond all rational proportion, and getting a new girlfriend completely under her thumb who literally can't leave her without jeopardizing her own career.

Like I said before, this feels less like a corruption arc and more like a reveal. None of this contradicts what we saw of Catelyn's personality in the show up until now. It's disappointing, because she seems like she easily could have *become* better, but it isn't surprising. She's the kind of person who's progressive and compassionate until the very millisecond it runs up against her own comfort and privilege. Moments like Jinx's attack and Vi's leaving her are both examples of such.

Unfortunately for our charming young heroine, squeezing Zaun harder is having...well, it's having the effect that squeezing an already disaffected population always has. The first episode of the act is called "Painting the Town Blue," for exactly the reason that you and I both predicted.

A month ago, Jinx was the dictator's unstable daughter who everyone just barely tolerated. Now, thanks in large part to Catelyn, she's Che Guevarra. Her deranged, personally-motivated terror attacks, likewise, have now been endorsed by the Zaunite population as representing their collective will, and so too have those of her copycats. Her ever-growing number of copycats. Nobody manages to do nearly as much damage as her, of course. This is fundamentally still a heroic fantasy setting with superhuman high level characters surrounded by normies. But a large volume of low-impact incidents still adds up eventually, even before you consider the occasional large, well-organized militia action like the memorial attack that Ambessa secretly enabled.

At the same time though, Catelyn isn't completely stupid. Or completely heartless. She's stupid and heartless, don't get me wrong, but not completely so. Maybe it's the natural compassion that her upbringing didn't manage to completely stamp out of her, maybe it's her experiences with Vi in season one, or maybe it's just her Piltoveran nationalism being tripped by Ambessa's increasingly naked soft-conquest.

It also seems like Catelyn's emotions are calming a bit as more time passes since the death of her mother and her abandonment by Vi. It comes to a head during an expedition into the outskirts of Zaun, when...well, I'm getting ahead of myself.


Jinx and Vi...

It's actually quite a while before Vi makes any appearances at all in this act, but Jinx is a major POV character from the start.

Jinx has just started to accept her identity as a shunned saboteur and enemy of all, accompanied only by a tiny handful of companions as she continues her terror campaign against Piltover simply for want of anything better to do. As she told the little kid who's now tagging along with her in the previous act, "If you ever need to curse a sibling, or a family, or a society, you know who to call for." Her self-identity is, literally, that of a living jinx.

This makes things very awkward for her when she is informed that as far as the Zaunite people are concerned, she is Che Guevarra. Like, her initial reaction is just a flat "Huh?" followed by multiple seconds of baffled silence. The effect it has on her once it's managed to sink in is pretty profound. She even starts mentioning her old name again, despite the previous act having her infuriated at any mention of "Powder." She even tells her old name to the kid (who herself is now named as Isha), not long before Isha dyes her own hair blue and starts trying to give the people the Jinx they want even if the original is reluctant to rise to the occasion.

Jinx Prime, for her own part, is...surprisingly encouraging of this. Perhaps she sees this as a way of being a positive contribution without letting a potential revolution be cursed by her personal involvement. Even as she keeps up the facade of apathetic cynicism to Isha, Sevika, and anyone else who gets close enough to see her.

The next phase of the plot is kicked off when Sevika helps organize a rally of Zaun's remaining powers who have been inspired to resist Piltover/Noxus' repression by Jinx's actions. Some of the remaining chembarons, former Silcoist militia groups, even representatives of Ekko's Firelight commune that used to hate Jinx's guts, have all agreed to make a showing. Jinx either doesn't want to come to the event, though, or is just afraid to, leaving Sevika to try and unite these disparate factions into an alliance on her own. Unfortunately, Sevika is just not the inspiring public speaker or champion full of superhuman mystique that Jinx, Silco, or Vander used to be.

Which is too bad, because she's been the one person most persistently dedicated to the cause of Zaunite liberation all along. She made some poor decisions in how best to pursue it here and there, but in a cast full of corruption arcs and temptations her integrity is impressive.

...

Also, I just now realized something about that statue of Vander she's posing before in the above screencap.

We saw that statue at least once before. Silco was brooding beside it at the end of season one, when wrestling with himself over Jayce's ultimatum, and I think we had a scene each of Vi and Powder/Jinx reacting to it as well. The thing is...with Vander's old lieutenants either dead, joined Silco, or run off to the Firelights, and Piltover not giving a shit about him at best, who would have commissioned and erected that statue of him in the middle of Zaun's public square?

The most likely answer is Silco. For the most part, this season has been making Silco look worse and worse in retrospect as we see the consequences of his thuggish approach to governing, but this injects a bit of pathos back into the character. We're about to get more of this too; I'll get to it later in this section.

...

As Sevika is trying and failing to run the event without Jinx there to be a living symbol, Ambessa's troops attack the rally and make to arrest everyone. Seemingly without any involvement of the actual Piltover police; this is one of the events that starts driving a wedge between Ambessa and Caitlyn. When Jinx doesn't show up to hep fight the oppressors, Isha - using a lower level version of Jinx's improvised explosive weaponry - decides to rise to the occasion. Which leads to her getting arrested and sent to the island hellprison along with many others.

Well, the part that actually got her arrested was when she ran out of IED's and threw herself onto the back of the enemy captain's neck and tried to scratch his eyes or something, despite lacking Jinx Prime's strength and combat experience. Not the best tactical decision, that, but kids aren't known for sound battlefield analysis.

When Jinx Prime finds out what happened to the little girl she'd adopted, well...her nihilism shatters like glass. She's not even Powder again. It's more like she's Vander's second coming. Immediately, she sets out to perform a jailbreak. And succeeds, due in part to an incident that also occurs in the jail at the same time. Erm...I'll get to that later. The thing is, in the wake of that incident, Jinx is compelled to seek out her sister again and ask her for help with her next objective, and this is where we're finally reintroduced to Vi in this act.

Since swearing off the cops no matter how hot they are and going AWOL, Vi has been in a funk. I'm not sure exactly how much time is supposed to have passed since then - if it's more on the order of weeks, or months - but at some point during it Vi has started a career in Zaun's underground boxing arenas. And also started drinking. A lot. It's amazing, the degree to which the sisters have traded places since the midpoint of season one. Anyway, when Powder (I don't think that "Jinx" is right anymore, at this point) catches up to her again, Vi initially tries to kill her. However, when Powder doesn't even try to fight back and just stubbornly begs Vi to calm down and listen to her, she eventually manages to get through.

As they embark on their new shared mission, the sisters start the slow, painful, halting process of reconciliation. The inversion of their roles is made complete when Powder is the one trying her best to get her sister back and Vi is the one angrily resisting it. That said, there's also a really heartwarming moment that seems to rewind both of the two - just for a few seconds - to the loving siblings they were at the beginning of the series. When they come to blows again, but then both realize that Isha might get hurt, and simultaneously calm themselves down and try to make themselves look like adults while casting the child apologetic glances.

It's amazing, the way that being responsible for a kid forces you to stop behaving like (or even seeing yourself as) one yourself.

This positive trend continues as the two sisters and their tagalong orphan manage to find...I guess I can't put it off any longer. Fuck. Well, okay.


...and...sigh...Vander

Okay, so. I kinda glossed over this when it happened at the end of S1A1, but Vander's death was a little more drawn out than just "killed in the magi-crystal explosion." The wounded Vander happened to fall near a batch of shimmer ampules, and - having just seen one of Silco's minions take a dose of it to hulk out during the battle - he knew what it was and how to use it. Vi's survival of that trainwreck was due in part to a roided-up Vander going on one final rampage against Silco's goons before eventually being overwhelmed and dying for good, his corpse still enlarged and deformed in the throws of the shimmer-supersoldier bout.

Like I said, it wasn't a super important plot detail for season one, so I left it out of my summary. But um. Well. Apparently, Roid Rage Vander's body was collected by Silco's shady alchemist friend. And, well, so, you remember how I said that Dr. Shady was working on a cyborg werewolf in the S2E3 stinger?

Yeah. It's a Nina Tuckered Vander.

This was an idea that someone had. They then proceed to include this idea in the story.


...I think I'll split it here.