So Like, Arcane's Final Season Is Kinda Wack

Once again, the GOT Season 8 conuundrum

You see kids, I like Arcane. The first season was fucking baller. I love League of Legends stuff. In fact, Jinx is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction. I love animation. I love great voice acting. I like good adapted video game media. I also really like Jinx. So it pains me to say, I did not think this final season was all that great.

I might get crucified for such a belief. You see, Arcane has the same issue that League of Legends has. Their fanbase is passionate… but they also tend to be insufferable. But League players hate themselves. Arcane fans simply don’t believe in imperfection. Arcane also has the issue of being really gay. LGBT representation? Pretty cool, we should strive for more. I’ve just noticed that when there is LGBT representation in media, the fanbase tends to quite rabid, overly obsessed with shipping, and their desire for gayness overrides any good-faith criticism you can have about said show.

Maybe I’m on Twitter too much. Then again, this is League of Legends we’re talking about here. Liking their work leads you down a rabbit hole of despair.

The biggest issue with Arcane, Season 2 is the fact that it actually needed -you aren’t going to believe this- a few more seasons to actually round itself out. Listen, I had no expectations coming into this new season. Shit, I barely gave it any thought until the trailer got released like a month ago. So it’s not like I am left disappointed because I didn’t get to see something I wanted to see.

No, rather I am disappointed because I just think Arcane really dropped the fucking ball on this one lads. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to enjoy about this season. It isn’t horrible, it’s mostly good. But it’s Arcane. You don’t expect perfection, but you do expect it to be better.

Now, the fellers writing this have stated they wanted to explore other parts of the LoL lore, to write new stories. Understandable, the lore is better than the game. But it would’ve been nice if you could’ve at least tried to finish this season properly before moving on to the next one, dude. From recent interviews, it seems that the show’s writing team were forced to rush things, since there is a level of dissatisfaction evident that they couldn’t do all they wanted to do.

Shame, because that rushing is remarkably evident in the show.

Non-spoilers? Good stuff out of the way first; the voice acting is great, the animation is great, and a lot of the music is good.

On the other hand, the pacing is kinda wack. It feels like the show is all over the damn place, running a dozen subplots at once and 90% of those either go nowhere or don’t have the best of endings. The music is (at times) egregious. League of Legends media has always had a hard-on for its montages and music videos and what have you. Season 1 of Arcane managed those pretty alright. Here? I don’t know. At times, I felt a bit annoyed and felt like it was out-of-place.

And if you took all the nuance from last season, put it in a box, then set it on fire, that’s Season 2. Now, defenders will tell you to look at the subtext or something-something subtle animation body language, but show don’t tell can only take you so far before you run into the part where you need to start telling, mate.

So, SPOILERS! If you don’t care, read on ahead. Otherwise, I give this final season a… 6? 6.5? Somewhere below a 7/10.

Act I was alright. Not much for me to really talk about. Gives us the aftermath of the ending from Season 1. As the first act, I think it set up things pretty good (if we were to assume that it’d play out well). Piltover is mad, Zaun is in chaos, and the Noxus people are expanding their sphere of influence.

Though, this is where (in hindsight) that I realized things were going to be a bit convoluted. You see, last season, there were different subplots, sure, but they all tied back to the overarching conflict between Zaun and Piltover.

Additionally, the driving force behind the first season was the dynamic between Jinx and Vi. The issue? Both of those factors are shafted. I didn’t find a satisfying conclusion in either because both get dropped to the wayside. I’ll elaborate later.

So, at the end of Act I, Caitlyn and Vi’s relationship gets broken up in like, ten minutes, and Caitlyn is installed as… dictator? Commander-in-chief of Piltover’s military? I had suspected that the big sister fight would come at the end of Act I. Though, I did find it funny that this supposed ‘death match’ the writers were building towards ended up looking like a sibling squabble.

Call me biased, I also think if this fight was going to be as serious as they wanted us to believe, I severely think it would’ve been one-sided… for Jinx. The shimmer super-soldier serum she got last season should’ve made her superhuman? Yeah, she’s fast, but she was shown to be also strong enough to lift Vi’s gauntlets without the Hexcore, which by the way, Vi couldn’t do? I’m sounding like a DBZ power-scaler, but I just found that a bit inconsistent.

Maybe Jinx’s true strength comes during bouts of insanity. But still, questions remained. How were they going to finish this off? How was the undercity conflict going to play out? What are the ramifications from Jinx’s antics? I mean, she did gas Piltover, did she not?

What about Vi? She technically lost both her sister and her recently-new/broken-up (ex?/situationship?) girlfriend(?) with the span of like five minutes, so I would guess her mental state is something the writers would have to-

“Oh no, super easy, barely an inconvenience.”

What? Ah, so we only get two minutes of Vi being a pit fighter, becoming an alcoholic, and hallucinating her situationship only to drop it the moment Jinx shows up? What about the whole Zaun-Piltover conflict? Oh? We drop it entirely within the span of an episode?

Act II is where you start to see the cracks. Actually, never mind, it’s where you begin to see the gaping wounds.

Jinx becoming a revolutionary symbol? We spent like twenty minutes on it, only to drop it afterwards. Like, I don’t know, for a moment I thought she’d be like the Lisan-al-Gaib of Zaun only for it to be never brought up again. Hell, after the prison break, it has practically no impact on the rest of the show.

Oh, and she’s also very sane now. Turns out you just needed to give the mentally ill a child to take care of. I’m not demanding that Jinx remain in agonizing psychological turmoil, I’m just a bit surprised she’s incredibly the most logical out of the entire cast this season. I guess you can chalk it up to her finally embracing her identity as Jinx, but I just don’t think mental illness goes away that fast, if at all.

The mental illness part isn’t even a complaint, I’m just confused.

Caitlyn? Now this is a complaint. How’s she doing, after almost shooting a kid? Pretty mellowed out, turns out Zaun was like pacified in a day. And she’s banging the Scottish woman? Didn’t she ever learn not to trust gingers? I don’t think Caitlyn ever had to deal with the consequences of her little dictatorship either, because the whole Zaun conflict was dropped.

Ku Klux Kiramann was gassing Zaun’s streets with toxic air like an SS officer, imposing martial law and sending her goons into the undercity to find Jinx, and ceding control to a warmongering Noxian. Her betrayal of Ambessa would have done little to change the plot. Jayce would have still shot Viktor, everything would’ve gone to shit, and Viktor would still come back as robot Jesus. Seriously, what was the point of Caitlyn? Congratulations, you lost an eye. I wished you lost both.

Vi? In general? Eh, she’s kinda just used as a plot device for the other characters. Do we elaborate on how she feels about anything? Does she have agency of her own instead of simply reacting to events? You’re funny. Like, she’s part of the main cast and more often than not she feels like a side character in her own story. Personally, I think the writers hate Vi. Actually, I think one of the writers even admitted to shafting Vi’s character.

This is troublesome. She’s passive, not proactive. We don’t really explore more of her character. She’s just a side piece to the rest of the cast. What was the point of the whole two-minute alcohol montage? You could’ve cut that out entirely. It’s a shame because she was a main character last season.

While I liked Isha as a character, I felt like she was also bit of a plot device to end Act II on… flipping through my notes here… a child being blown up for no other reason than to get Jinx very sad. She’s not even mentioned in Act III. Sure, it shows in how depressed Jinx is, but you could’ve swapped out Isha for any other tragic event and very little would change, I think. Show don’t tell can only work so far.

Again. I mean there’s Vander (Warwick!), but I don’t know. I felt like his main purpose was for Jinx and Vi to start talking again, then to be another tragic character death for the sole reason of enacting as much misery on the sisters as humanly possible.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with plot devices. You need to get the story moving somehow. But when a character just feels like a tool to get things going, it kinda removes some of the enjoyment or feeling out it, you know what I mean?

It’s a bit hard to describe. Like the writing mostly does it job, yet at the same time it leaves the notion that they could’ve done more. Like you get it, but it feels somewhat barebones to what it could’ve been, like you were given the SparkNotes version of Harry Potter instead of reading the whole thing yourself. It feels like you’re told what happened, but you’re missing a few steps to why it happened.

The result is that it feels oddly disjointed; plot lines are either just dropped or seemingly rushed and characters shafted or barely present. The most annoying thing is that not of these plot points are bad ideas. They’re good, actually. However, they were never given time to simply breathe and expand. It’s like somebody broke your kneecaps before you could ever run.

The conflict between Vi and Jinx got resolved… rather quickly? I like that the sisters made up, but again, I just felt like it needed more time to settle, ya know? Given that their relationship was the driving factor of last season’s storyline, I wished it had more prominence in this season and delved into a bit deeper instead of them making up so soon after Act I. Turns out, you just needed thirty minutes mate, a sad flashback, and a time-skip.

Oh right, Act II takes place several months after the end of Act I. Do we elaborate on the human condition of our characters? No, that’s too much work. And again, it’s jarring they dropped the whole Piltover-Zaun plotline. That was your overarching conflict of the entire last season!

It doesn’t even feel resolved, it was just pushed to the wayside. This conflict made the world of Arcane feel grounded. Poverty? Class warfare? An oppressive ruling class? All of those feel tangible, something that we can find realistic in our world. It kept the focus on the characters and how they fitted into this hostile, dynamic environment. The conflict and setting made clear how these characters were shaped and molded.

All that got dropped for the usual ‘save the world’ plot point we’ve seen a million times over. Now, saving the world isn’t bad. It’s just that the transition between “oh look, we might have a civil war on our hands,” to “hot damn, Machine Jesus is about to start the apocalypse!” is a crazy shift in the story. And this is where we shift into Act III. I reserved final judgement until Act III, but after the show ended, I am looking back at Act II in a much more negative light.

The story between Jayce and Viktor is really good. The plot twist at the end where it is revealed that Viktor was the one who saved Jayce all those years ago as a child was ingenious. I didn’t mind that the story ended with them and emphasizing their relationship, as well as their inevitable conflict. However, this whole storyline needed time to breathe.

The way it was set up in Act I was done well, in my opinion. Viktor becomes Jesus, Jayce gets sent to an alternate dimension. However, by the middle of Act II, it supersedes the Zaun storyline as the main plot when, in all seriousness, it could’ve warranted a whole season of its own. The shift from focusing on the sisters and Zaun to trying to stop the end of the world feels so abrupt that it feels like the writers were being held at gunpoint to switch gears as fast as possible.

If you’re going to write a story about the end of the world, I don’t think you can resolve such a plot in any meaningful manner in like, two episodes. I don’t mind that the show shifted to the idea that Hextech was dangerous. It was well-established last season that messing with magic has consequences.

I don’t mind the fact that Viktor switches from hobo Jesus to magic-Stalin, but like everything else, it needed time to settle. Give us a moment to see more of his day-to-day. His whole commune collapses and he decides the best way to alleviate human suffering was enacting a peace where all individuality and emotion was wiped out. Not bad, I just wanted like twenty more minutes to see him gradually come to that conclusion. Jayce? Yeah, he’s fine. I don’t think I have anything to say about our big hammer boy.

Now, Episode 7 is widely regarded by fans as the best episode of the season, where Ekko ends up in a parallel universe where Jinx never became the gunslinging serial killer we all love her as. It’s great because it felt like the show slowed down just for a bit. It felt like the show was given a chance to stretch, to not barrel towards a conclusion at break-neck speeds. I do find the transitions between Ekko enjoying his best life and Jayce winging it through Dark Souls funny. You’re seeing Ekko laughing and smiling and then there’s Jayce having a mental breakdown in a cave.

Also, why are Caitlyn and Vi having sex in a jail cell? I care little for scenes like that, I just think it’s blatant, unnecessary fanservice (especially since that was the cell Jinx just escaped from).

Yet, the third act just felt rushed, as if all the preceding storylines were slung like mud at a wall. Watching the final battle I felt really numb? Was there build-up to the final battle? I don’t remember, probably because was there barely any. I looked at the final battle and thought to myself, “this is mindless violence, what are we doing here?” You know those big epic battles that every MCU movie needs to have towards the end? Yeah, it felt like that.

Speaking of final battles, I did not care for Noxus. In fact, I would’ve preferred they didn’t even in the st- oh right, I forgot about Mel. Oh dear. She’s a wizard!

Anyway, not left to say. Another rambling, as you can see. I wonder where they’ll go now. Probably Noxus. I’d like to see Bilgewater. Maybe Jinx can finally meet Lux instead of Riot giving us crumbs for the last decade.

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