arcane spends the first season highlighting how brutal and unforgiving the piltover occupation of zaun is its objectively and cartoonishly evil there are almost no redeeming qualties for it but it all shifts when jinx does the piltover equivalent of 9/11 and the messaging shifts from brutal occupation and conflict to the characters not being able to cope with trauma so they now commit facism
jinx and zaun are constantly shunned by the show while caitlyn and piltover are so quick to be forgiven
but in the end its okay because they find a common enemy and obviously the biggest enemy is collectivisim
the show is so hilariously amercian and lib it is not even funny
caitlyn gets to win the girl but jinx gets so guilty that she tries killing herself multiple times and ends up faking her own death and escaping her only family
i am genuinely so fucking pissed
what did you expect from a 250 million dollar advertisement for a free-to-play MOBA?
to be fair, I read a post saying that trying LoL because you enjoyed Arcane is like trying meth because you like Breaking Bad and I think that's pretty much the truth lol
They don't need you to play league of legends, they just need you to have personal investment in the brand.
How does my investment in the brand make them money if I'm not playing the game and paying for skins or whatever?
something something brand equity (having investment in the brand you are statistically more likely to one day become a customer of them, making the brand more valuable)
Funnels and conversion rates
You contribute by watching, increasing the show's numbers, which makes others curious...
which some % become fans...
which some % convert into players...
which some % into paying customers.The two leavers you have are increase conversions or widen the funnel. The show, including its large budget, is a marketing campaign aimed at widening the funnel.
That would explain why season two is composed of 10-second adverts for the game. I gave up watching at the start of E4, wondering whether any of those adverts would mature into a watchable plot.
It's barely even acknowledged that caitlyn does anything wrong because using repression to protect existing power structures is an understandable mistake, but using a fraction of that violence to upset those power structures like Jinx does is unforgivable.
Death to piltover
There's a moment when Jinx is grappling with her revolutionary impact and Ekko is struggling to salvage his eco-socialist collective and Jayce is facing the consequences of his vulgar materialism when you get the sense they might have something to say.
But then it crumbles into Monster of the Week, in the race to set up the next round of action scenes.
Death to piltover
The dilemma of Piltover and Zaun is fundamentally the dilemma of waste management. Piltover dumps it's exhaust into Zaun, poisoning the citizens. Then Silco uses the desperate Zaun residents as canon fodder for his own play to the top.
But the idea that Piltover going away solves the problems is as misplaced as the Vander-esque submission to overwhelming power. The problem is, at its heart, the pollution and its consequences. Shimmer presents all the same hazards as the Hextech of Piltover and produces all the same negative externalities. Silco longs to sit on the council, not abolish it. Jinx longs to get even, not lead a revolution. Ekko is the only real decent person in this story, and he's perpetually sidelined by the plot.
I really like this essay on this phenom in media:
https://redsails.org/the-swerve/
Why do stories that may start out so promising and suggestive seem to always turn to crap towards the very end? Because any consistent working-out of problems tends towards communism.
That fits very well in this example. The cathartic storyline would clearly have the main characters team up and defeat the city on the hill and the main characters who had to defend the hill would have to feel bad about their actions. Can't have (a) the poors rooting for heroes or (b) anything to make watching-cops from questioning their loyalty to the empire.
It drives me nuts that the plot of the new season sucks as much as it does, because it's also one of the best looking shows I've seen in a while. The battle scenes are genuinely pure cocaine and I want them injected straight into my veins. I - unfortunately - had a great time watching it.
But the plotline, the ending especially, isn't just lib. It's straight up fash. Two seasons of a revolutionary civil war of an oppressed population against their elite get resolved by... uniting against a common external enemy? That's the plot arc of fascist Italy in the '20s. Or Weimar Germany.
It was all over the place, without the steady escalating tempo of the original. Even the fight scenes were clipped and visually abbreviated - switching to these dramatic vinettes in a bunch of the Warwick and Vi combat scenes.
S2 had some interesting and clever movements... but yeah. It was 2-3 seasons crammed into one, and it showed.
I don't even not like the "Perfection isn't something you attain, it's something you pursue" moral at the end of the show. But season 1 felt so dialectical. You had these historical moments building on themselves to a stunning climax.
Season 2 was handed this dramatic historical pivot, kinda-sorta looked like it was going to grapple with the fundamentals appeals and consequences of fascism, but then stumbled back down into "Everything gets solved when the Special People duke it out".
The fundamental plight of Zaun, the cost of pollution and the failure of equitable distribution, is lost in the race to fight Evil Foreigners and Fifth Columnist Traitors. A real squandered opportunity.
The most funny thing in the ending is when they show that Sevika has a seat at the city council.
1 Zaun vote vs 4-5 Piltover vote and they show that the actions of the council is decided based on the majority of the votes.
Good job Sevika I'm sure you will make a difference for the working class
The first season could be watched by someone like me who knew nothing about the game or its universe and it worked great. The second season not so much. There are a lot of things obviously crammed in just because they're in the game and they're not just little easter eggs but important plot points that just come out of nowhere as far as I'm concerned. Still, I'm not too disappointed. The animation is fantastic, I like the voice acting and there are a lot of good individual moments in the show even if it doesn't quite add up to a coherent whole.
Love this show to death but if I think too long about the both-sides politics I start to go crazy.
Bizarre that when some of the Zaunites agree to fight alongside the topsiders to stop the techbro-dystopian/feudal-warlord alliance that's trying to bring about the apocalypse the Zaunites wear the uniform of the Enforcers, the local cops/occupying army that has killed and terrorized the Zaunites for- What? Centuries? At least decades. I could accept them fighting together to stave off a worse enemy, but as depicted I thought it was more than a little distasteful.
It's just weird how often the show seems to expect viewers to have sympathy for Piltover's position when it's shown over and over that they are depriving the Zaunites of all dignity. It's at least implied that the generation before Vi and Jinx were born as a slave caste in mines underneath Piltover and narrowly won the precarious freedoms we see them with at the start of the show. Though I'm not entirely clear on the lore there.
It's even reinforced in Episode 7 of Season 2 that in a world where Hextech never exists and also Heimerdinger gives even a little bit of a shit about the people of the Undercity that the entire situation is much much better, though nowhere near parity. But I'm supposed to feel bad that Jinx blew the council to hell?
I was hoping season 2 would explore Jinx falling ass-backwards into founding a revolutionary movement (and to be fair a couple of early episodes in S2 seemed to be about this) but then Robot Jesus hijacked the show and I got a really bad re-thread of End of Evangelion instead...
Honestly I was expecting the lib ending because that's mostly how these things go, but moreso than anything else I feel like the main problem is that they crammed a season's worth of plot points into the second half of S2 and every single character (aside from Jayce and Viktor, and maybe Ekko) got really unsatisfying conclusions to their character arcs.
Jinx falling ass-backwards into founding a revolutionary movement
I want my Maoist Jinx arc! Zaunite Protracted People's War against the Piltover imperialists now!!
Better writers would have just copied the Joaquin Phoenix Joker movie except make her shed her nihilism and misanthropy as she rediscovered class consciousness through the surrogate daughter character but noooooooooo breaking the cycle involves stopping Robot Jesus from making everyone a hivemind for some reason...
Honestly the problem is that it isn't bad, it's good pretty much until the end.
Yeah season 1 setup some cool shit and then season 2 was TURBOCOPS SAVE THE DAY. Also suddenly the oligarchy out of nowhere convinces all the people's factions that they need to work together, and then throws the people right into the meat grinder and gives them cop uniforms. Wow, we did it!
I was surprised at how good the first season was and subsequently surprised at how shit the second one was
Did she fake her death? I thought she sacrificed herself to save her sister because a lifetime of trauma from KKKolonization finally broke her and she literally couldn't hold on to life any longer.
rewatch her death scene you can see a purple flash go through a vent and then caitlyn is seen looking through the vent setup of the place where jinx disappeared
They couldn't even commit to letting their cashcow character have a fitting end.
