Arcane: League Of Legends (Season 2) [Acts I-III]
In case the name Arcane doesn’t give it away, the second and final season of this show is mysterious, transcendent, and very difficult to understand.
Visually beautiful as always, with fantastic direction that energizes every gesture, some really satisfying moments of character growth, and gorgeous experimental animation, this season has too much to love to consider its short-comings irredeemable. Yet, I can’t overstate how much this season, with its paralysing, ecstatic mess of colors, feelings, and hallucinogenic ideas, absolutely drained me of my ability to watch it critically.
Much of this season, particularly the last act, left me frozen to my futon with little ability to parse through exactly what I was seeing. Motivations are short-lived, and the emerging goals of characters are just as often gripping as they are baffling.
There is a lot to love about Arcane’s season 2. I hardly need to reiterate the trance-inducing beauty of Fortiche’s animation, but I can’t exactly ignore it either. Season 2 is as visually stunning as the first. This season has extrapolated on season 1’s many energetic, thrumming montages that set the pace for the action of the show. The first act, which aired on November 9th, uses these montages to catch viewers up on how Jinx’s actions in the finale of the first season have affected Piltover. Using visuals and music alone, we’re given poignant images of grief, political discord, and grimy portrayals of Caitlyn’s morally ambiguous occupation of Zaun.
Fortiche blends the subtle realism of its stunning 3D animation with classic pose-pushing that makes each movement as expressive and impactful as possible. A character doesn’t simply accept a hug: they lunge forward and grab the air, hesitating briefly before returning the embrace; a clothesline doesn’t just knock someone to the ground, it sends the world spinning as they fall on their upper spine. At times, the energy is so frantic that fights border on illegible, but I found myself so mesmerized by moment-to-moment visuals that I began to lose track of the scenes’ progressions to marvel at the spectacle.
Unfortunately, that tactic doesn’t work well on a broader scale. The biggest story moments of this season are bold and fascinating, until a moment’s thought shatters the illusion and sends you swirling into your own mind to try and sort through all the information you’ve been given. Twists and turns have a time and place, but integrating each seemingly arbitrary development into my understanding of the plot began to feel more like homework than experiencing the climactic end of an epic story. This is the final season of a rather short-lived series: twists should eliminate possibilities until the story is laser-focused on its end-goal. This season feels like it adds so much material, so many threads of new story, that no ending in a mere 9 episodes could possibly feel complete.
I have never played League of Legends, and it could be that I am missing vital pieces of the story because of it. But I managed the first season just fine: of course, there were many things I didn’t understand, but that’s just how fantasy works. I took it as a given that the arcane had a dark history, that House Medarda wanted political influence in Piltover, the vague shape of this world’s cycles of violence that sets every party at everyone else’s throats.
But season 2 often feels like it’s being compelled to explain itself in ever more complex ways. Characters whose main motivations have been singular seem to stray from their main areas of concern, and the themes of their stories become hazy as a result.
Ekko is one such example for me. Season 1 Ekko was the embodiment of how Piltover’s ivory-tower ideas of progress have no regard for the people at the bottom who get crushed by the debris of the changing winds. In this season, he is suddenly pulled so far into the ethereal and theoretical that he ends up in a reality where the battles he fought his whole life become irrelevant. This doesn’t challenge his motivations, but needlessly complicates them; his desire to save the Fighterlight’s tree by eliminating human involvement with the arcane unravels itself when he manipulates the arcane to save the world. The intimate goal becomes vast and inconceivable, and this character loses his identity in the plot.
The dizzying ideological tango between Viktor and Jayce is another example. By the end of the first season, it’s Viktor who takes the Zaunite side of the conversation: that little people get crushed by big dreams and the institutions that fund them. (“In the pursuit of great, we failed to do good,” he says to Jayce). While the two are in uneasy agreement, it’s clear that Jayce is conflicted about how to deal with the raw, violent reality of hextech, while Viktor has determined unambiguously that it must be destroyed.
And yet, the third act of season 2 sees a full reversal of these roles. How Viktor connected the ideas of ending individual pain and suffering to this grand ideal of a human-mind-singularity is well beyond me. This man, who was willing to die (and allow the deaths of thousands more who could have benefitted from the Hexcore) because of a single casualty in the first season, is now willing to pair up with a blood-thirsty political powerhouse to achieve his unearthly goals.
That said, besides the two sisters at the heart of this story, Jayce and Viktor’s relationship is the strongest in the series. I was caught off-guard by this, and it took the third act discord between the two to make me realize how much I cared about their partnership. In the last act of season 2, Jayce, who was once willing to go against his promise to Viktor in order to save his life, becomes hell-bent on killing Viktor to prevent him from achieving his “Glorious Evolution.” While still baffled at Viktor’s character development in the last act, I was sincerely heartbroken by this. Without completely spoiling the ending, the journey of this relationship in the last three episodes of the series becomes far more compelling than any singular character’s arc.
Despite the comments of the creative team, it seems obvious to me that this story was never intended to be told in two seasons. Or, if it was, that this was an overly ambitious aim that didn’t quite hit. Pieces of the story were wrapped up without even being properly introduced; characters concluded arcs we never saw them begin; character dynamics began, changed, broke, and repaired themselves far too quickly. This is far from a perfect season of television.
But if Arcane has taught me anything as a writer, it’s that a handful of excellent moments that feel authentic to the human experience and sincere to the storyteller’s heart will generate a better piece of art than a perfectly crafted structure every time. Arcane’s moments of genius rarely feel calculated: they feel spontaneous. Season 2 works as an ending because its multitudes of loose or severed threads are outweighed by moments of artistic truth that can’t be calculated to perfection.
In A Nutshell
Despite a dizzying array of new and uncompleted story threads, the last season of Arcane delivers a powerful climactic season while leaving the door open for far more content.
★★★★☆
Shain Slepian is a screenwriter, script consultant, and content creator with a life-long love of animation and media analysis. Their work can be found on Medium, and on their YouTube channel, TimeCapsule. Shain's book, Reframing The Screenwriting Process, is available on Amazon.
