When I watched Arcane‘s first season, I felt it was a masterpiece, a complete success in terms of story, themes, music and character building. It was difficult for me to imagine it away from the pantheon of animated giants like Toy Story and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Going into Season Two, I was very excited to dive back into the political spiderweb that Piltover and Zaun had made themself out to be, only to find that Arcane’s second season has become rather muddled and entangled in concepts it perhaps shouldn’t have been.
Now writing this after watching the end of the season. I can come to the conclusion that Arcane is a story about cycles and characters going through the same mistakes over and over again. Chasing after some magic cure to their ailments, but the truth of the matter is we are imperfect, and that’s okay. Perhaps this has reached the form of an imperfect story that we can still love at times for its intrinsic value. Putting this into perspective, we can see how some of the writing doesn’t measure up and that these cycles aren’t maintained in a way that keeps the characters intact.
To answer this question, we have to understand that Season One had a masterpiece ending. A tragic climax that promised to irrevocably change the lives of every character in this series. But in Season Two, we find it really didn’t. Some characters are revealed to have died: Jayce and Mel lived, Caitlyn’s mom and some background councilors died. But Jinx’s big gesture of never going back seems to have resulted in very little tangible meaning.
We don’t get to see any sort of real Zaun and Piltover conflict; in fact, what we do see of this is manipulated by a hostile outside force and not a real conflict of ideologies that Season One reveled in. All that happens is that Caitlyn goes into manhunt mode and tries to catch Jinx, which is again manipulated by this outside force that, by all rights, should not have become such a prominent part of the narrative. Silco’s revolution against Piltover just sort of vanishes, which is not okay. So, let’s go into what is wrong with this season.
Vi is, for all purposes, the character we are supposed to root for. Her sister goes crazy, commits terrorism, kidnaps and tortures her girlfriend, and her girlfriend then leaves her over her retained morality even in the face of all this. However, Vi’s strength is an illusion, and her personality degrades to insufferable levels. She forgives Jinx incredibly easily, continually makes choices that place her loved ones at risk, cannot seem to ever win a fight despite being “The toughest person in Zaun,” makes questionable decisions, and ultimately, betrays everyone she cares about at some point during the story.
I don’t know how the Vi of Season One, who underwent the hero’s journey and consistently struggled against the odds could become the victim of a character assassination. Vi has no loyalty, no care except for her own fear of being alone, and in my personal opinion, has very little relevance to the plot aside from being “Jinx’s sister” or “Caitlyn’s girlfriend”. They really dropped the ball on this character. Vi is really just Chloe Price from Life is Strange with huge mallet hands.
Last season, we saw Jinx say goodbye to Powder forever by launching a powerful missile straight at Piltover’s government. As it stood, she seemed poised to take up Silco’s mantle and destroy the topsiders in his honor after she killed him in a psychotic rage.
Whoops, sorry she’s acting like Powder again and seems quite suicidal until she picks up a stray kid who she treats as her new sister. The kid idolizes her, and she decides to pack up the terrorism life to become, frankly, an amazing guardian to this child.
But what is wrong with that is that Jinx loses the progression she made at the end of Season 1. Her autonomy and strength are stripped away to double back on last season’s painful truth that family can, in fact, save you despite family being the cause of all her grief. In the end, this need to be part of a family destroys her, both mentally and in the climax.
What made Jinx an effective villain was her righteous disregard for family as the cause of her psychosis. This season even reinforced this with episode seven, showing that in a world where Vi dies early, Powder completely flourishes. It’s based on this revelation that her characterization becomes complicated. Turning her from a villain created by others into a redemption-driven-anti-hero, which, for me, is a tough pill to swallow.
There really isn’t much to say about this one. Caitlyn is a devoted police officer who is dedicated to the rule of law and order. The people matter to her. But her mom dying and a laughably evil bad influence can cause her to become evil even for as little as a year? Even worse, what causes her to reverse course back to her regular self is being called cupcake. It just doesn’t seem to make much sense for her. The reasons don’t add up in a meaningful way.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Ambessa; I think she’s a militaristic despot who will sacrifice everything for power. That is good. But in this series about magic and the arcane? They had to bring in the Black Roses (Noxian mages) and tease the heck out of the League champion Leblanc to make her inclusion thematic enough. But she doesn’t belong here. This is a Piltover and Zaun story; why would they decide to make her a focal point of this story when she only just got introduced to League of Legends lore herself? It’s confusing and takes away from story points that need far more focus and love.
Her connection to Mel Medarda made her relevant; however, Mel herself gets shoved to the back of the room this season, making her plot much less interesting and irrelevant when compared to Ambessa, who was brought in to enhance her story but is now the other way around.
Undoubtedly, my favourite character in all of Arcane is Ekko. He and Heimerdinger prove that both sides can co-exist in a hugely positive way. In Arcane, most characters come in pairs. Ekko and Heimer are the most cohesive and loveable duo. The young prodigy and the old prodigy work together to create miracles. Ekko himself is so insanely cool, and I think his scenes must have gotten all the extra love in the world. And yet, you hardly see them. They’re the focus of only one episode this season, the same as Ekko getting one episode to shine in Season One. I don’t feel like these characters got enough attention. Heimerdinger himself is more of a mentor character, which means he has to “die.” We don’t know if he truly does, but it has incredible meaning, which is a positive for this story.
While Ekko does get a big moment in the finale, it does feel like that moment is undercut by other characters’ stories always coming to fruition around him. Jayce and Viktor’s big finale feels as though Ekko’s moment only enables the climax of their story. He saves Jinx from her destructive mindset, allowing her to reach the end of her story. We don’t get to see if his ending is happy or not, and his tale is left unfinished. He’s just a cool guy who turns up, does what needs to be done, and then vanishes, at least in terms of the story. I hope that we can see him again in a future spin-off.
I don’t know what was going on with Jayce and Viktor this season. Are they together? Just really good friends? I couldn’t even tell. Half the time, they seem to really hate each other, and the other half they can’t live without each other. Jayce even kills him at one point citing that “Hextech is a curse on us all.” Then it turns out Viktor from the future is backing past Jayce to stop his younger self because he’s bored and made a mistake? Present-day Viktor only recovers so that he and Jayce can fight and disappear into a “magic void” where we don’t know what happens.
One minute, they’re killing each other; and the next, Jayce is like, “Waaa, I want my partner back.” Then Viktor turns himself into Robocop and goes on about “Glorious evolutions” like he’s a crazy Pokemon trainer.
Aren’t these guys scientists? For a couple of scientists, they both flunked chemistry! At any time could these two sit down and talk through their experiences and actually come to a conclusion, but they’re both so convinced the other one won’t listen to them that they’ve gotta get out the test tube full of Phosphor-hate.
At any rate, Viktor made a cult this season, and Jayce turned into a homeless person after a trip to the ruined future. At least now with Jayce becoming the Terminator and Viktor becoming Robocop, we have that epic Robocop versus the Terminator TV show we always wanted.
This show made the vital mistake of bringing in an enforcer squad of people with distinguishable features and models. These people aren’t champions in League of Legends. They’re getting an uncomfortable amount of focus. They’re going to die, aren’t they?
Yep… all dead in the finale. Oh hey, the one called Maddie was a Noxian spy who slept with Caitlyn while she was in dictator mode. Hold on… her name is “Mad”-die. Was this character actually inserted just to make the fanbase mad by inserting herself in between their relationship? It doesn’t seem like this plot point had any other use. I feel like her inclusion was to create talking points and fan reactions rather than any meaningful story beats.
Warwick as a champion has always been quite loved. He’s supposed to be a big wolf who sniffs out prey and rips them to pieces. Turning Vander into Warwick was a good idea.
Turning him into a beast with little to no control over himself, giving him some mental power to see what he was doing, and then taking it away again was not. As it is, a character who should have been given more time, love and attention is reverted to “Big wolf goes awoo” and serves as a rabid beast who keeps trying to kill the main cast. It’s a case of massively wasted potential in my opinion. Poor Vander gets mind-controlled at least three times throughout the season. It feels like fanservice that could have been better used to create a sad tale for Vander, more than him being a mindless beast who just happened to once be a character we loved.
So, to conclude, all of this contributes to a giant jumbled mess of a show that honestly could have used a far better direction than what ended up happening. Characters just sort of turned on their own motivation and morals at will.
However, what we did get was a graphically astounding show, with amazing amounts of care put into the animations. The thought put into the little details, the focus on really cool moments, such as Ekkos creation of his time rewind device, or the pure cruel and dark landscapes as Jayce moved through the ruined future, giving real shades of the artistic beauty of something like Samurai Jack. This show is ascendant visually, and the music is not as good as the previous season, but still above par. Arcane Season Two is sadly let down by its lackluster story, random character decisions, and poor focus.
