I just finished season 2 now. Without much spoilers, it was a real mixed bag. Some parts were amazing, some parts were very mediocre, all parts felt very rushed and poorly paced. I still liked it, but I would give it a 7/10 rather than the 10/10 starting season...
That said, episode 7 was fantastic. The only episode where the writers let characters actually talk for more than 30 seconds.
Very clearly rushed so they can move on to Noxus.
#nooticing how grounded S1 arcane is and then riot urged arcane writers to make it about multiverse time loop crap.
Emotional stakes > all other stakes
It's what made season 1 so good with the climax being essentially a family dinner. I felt really disappointed that a lot of the emotional stakes were sacrificed for action set-pieces. The climax of s2 felt like Age of Ultron: league of legends edition.
I disliked how significant of a role class conflict played. I understand there is a corporate agenda to downplay such things for ideological purposes but it still disappoints me.
Act 1 was easily my favorite act.
Did anyone else find irony in the clearly anti-establishment "jinxers" faction very obviously painting a thin blue like across the entire frame. Within the logic of the story it makes sense but contextually I found that visual amusing.
Haven't watched it at all, just curious:
Did they talk about where Jayce's crystals come from?
I liked it A LOT but I'm an absolute league lore freak and a dweeb who likes my stories to be incoherent and inconsistently paced lol. I feel like I liked the end of season 2 in the same way I like the end of evangelion if you know what I mean. I get why there are mixed reactions to it.
It's nice to find a place with opinions close to my experience. YouTube is full of praise, and it was good in some aspects, but the pacing and especially the writing was disappointing to me.
[Spoilers]. Viktor is my biggest pet peeve. He goes from trying to eradicate suffering to trying to unify consciousness (huh?) to changing his mind too fast even within his world.
[More spoilers]. He's a genius with increased capacities, but apparently, it didn't occur to him that that's how the world would look and feel like. He's almost a prophet, a philosopher in many senses, but Jayce tells him "life is good even with its imperfections" and poof!, convinced, as it wasn't the status quo to think that way and as if he didn't even consider it in the past. But no, let's make the animated philosophical pessimist/negative utilitarian a radical that loses-it-just-because.
[Spoilers continue]. And the worst of all is the enormous contradiction, as he creates a state with no suffering, but somehow, he feels bored, nostalgic, longing... Those are ways of suffering! If that state wasn't enough, then it wasn't the objective and it wasn't the correct state. But no, the message had to be "life can be terrible, but embrace it because the hive-mind we are posing as non-existence seems sad from here (although it wouldn't be sad from there; we'll ignore that); also, let's ditch the message about fighting for at least improving its conditions because that's communism or something". Shitty feel-good message. They can do a wholesome, feel-good show without ruining a character and without invalidating their own characters' experiences.
[Mini spoiler]. In short, It was frustrating to watch Viktor unjustified descent, while real problems were not addressed.
It was all over the place, I barely knew what was going on half the time. The story felt empty and meaningless. Visuals were nice though.
3/10.
