One of the most touching scenes in Arcane Season 2 comes when Jinx confronts the specter of her adoptive father, now metamorphized by a science experiment into an inhumane beast named Warwick. Eyes seething red, he’s poised to take her out, but something within him stops him, despite himself. A flicker of faint recognition. Just before the fog seeps in again. It’s a heartbreaking long beat.
Season 2, which finished up earlier this year on Netflix, is full of pensive moments like this, quiet montages that say more with pictures than with words. It is quite the tonal shift and departure from its source material, League of Legends, where Warwick is more likely to be your trolling Jungle teammate who is missing all his abilities, and Jinx your recklessly useless bottom lane ally, constantly assassinated by the opponent. Both characters are given a new lease on life in Arcane, expanding beyond simple caricatures into a profound exploration of grief. These and more creative liberties were happily taken by French animation studio Fortiche with the oversight from League parent company Riot Games.
Now in its sophomore season though, Arcane has been met with mixed reviews, notes about its pacing, and some complaints about the plot’s convolutedness. While showrunner Christian Linke admits he’s still processing all of the feedback, he restates his commitment to telling personal stories in his style, and highlights how catering too much to the fans can actually be deadly for efforts to make good art.
“People very easily say, well, you have to put the audience first, right? I think that can also be very dangerous,” Linke tells Inverse. “It needs to be two steps. You have to be part of the audience, truly, very authentically. And then you must put yourself first as a member of the audience. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to make something that is amazing or says anything, because if you’re making something not for yourself, it’s just bound to fail.”
So instead of simply providing fan service, Linke advocates for telling personal stories.
“How are we not just a little sibling of Hollywood, and how are we different?”
In: Video game adaptations
Video game adaptations are finally having their moment, with the Minecraft movie, Dungeons and Dragons, Tetris, The Last of Us on HBO, Fallout on Amazon Prime, etc. But when Arcane first premiered in 2021, there were few successful adaptations and video-game film and TV shows had a reputation for being trite and campy in a bad way.
“Sometimes we need to be also honest with ourselves, like the video game story needs to level up their game,” Linke says.
Arcane’s influences include Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, Vikings, Blade Runner 2049, and the Charlie Chaplin movie, The Dictator. The writers joked they had a Lord of the Rings jar for staff to put a dollar in each time they made a reference.
“Now it’s about $17 million,” Linke jokes.
Spinoffs, Untold
Season 2 of Arcane wraps up the love story of Vi and Caitlyn and the sisterly bond between Jinx and Vi. The showrunners have plans to create several spinoffs featuring new characters but were skimpy on the details of which lands they planned to explore next and what viewers could expect to see. Linke simply said they were working with new writers to discover new stories. Netflix declined to share more details.
“We’re really just still in a developing and exploration phase where we’re investing in people,” Linke says. “I know that’s not the most satisfying answer.”
For now, they say they’re looking forward to telling new stories and giving the audience new reasons to care about a different cast of characters, featuring any number of League’s many diverse worlds. We could see more of the spiritually zen and aesthetically pleasing Ionia, or the unforgiving guillotines and cutthroat culture of Noxus. Regardless of where the story goes, you can trust that the team will try to take creative risks.
“It’s easy to forget the creative risks you take that work out,” Linke says. “When you’re successful, in hindsight, it doesn’t seem like something that was risky.”
Linke points to how many rules they broke in Season 1, to critical acclaim. New main characters only getting revealed in Episode 2. A time skip after the first three episodes. Two pilot episodes in a row. An animation for adults that features kids. Season 1 defied all those conventions and it still worked.
It’s for these reasons that the teams behind Arcane are some of the ones doing the most interesting work in video game adaptations these days. They are, in the words of co-director Bart Maunoury, just concerned with making “a cool TV show.”
“You also need to think about: ‘What do we, as a gaming generation and collective of stories and IP, what do we have to say?’” writer Amanda Overton, who also worked on Severance, tells Inverse. “How are we not just a little sibling of Hollywood, and how are we different?”
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