What! Every review I've read says that arcane is the best series on Netflix so far
98 percent user metacritic score

 

Top 10 as in most viewers. Netflix has a category for the top 10 things people are watching any given day. Arcane didn't make the list on any of the days the episodes dropped.

That's great news.

 

https://www.upcomer.com/arcane-retakes-no-1-rank-on-global-netflix-charts-with-act-2/

Not true, actually. It hit #1 multiple times.

More to the point, I don't play League but ended up giving Arcane a try after a recommendation from a friend who works on Wild Rift (the mobile version of LoL).

Even as someone who doesn't play the game and knows none of the lore, this series is incredible.

It has incredible art, great music, self-contained character arcs, world building - pretty much everything you need in a fictional universe.

In my opinion, Arcane has dethroned The Last Airbender as the #1 Western Animated Series ever made. It's seriously that good.

Can't believe we have to wait until at least 2023 for Season 2.

 

I've been pleasantly surprised with the season 9 of Dexter, or "Dexter: New Blood".
The original show is good for the first four seasons (1, 2 and 4 more so than 3), then less good, but still enjoyable for 5 and 6, and just bafflingly bad for 7 and 8.
This ninth one is set up almost like a limited crime miniseries of sorts and care is put to make sure new viewers won't get lost.
Basically, if your unfamiliarity with the previous seasons prevented you from checking it out, you should do so without worry.
Now I just hope it doesn't get bad as more episodes come out.

 

I'll echo the praise for Arcane. Really shocking how good it was as a series. I really hope it wasn't lightning in a bottle, and that this will give Riot (and maybe Blizzard) the motivation to explore this medium further and more seriously.
To give a degree of perspective, I do think that all the shiny successful parts of Arcane help blind to some of its failures that upon looking back become more evident, mainly in the writing contrivancies, but they are easily forgiven and overlooked.

However:

I'll disagree. I was ambivalent on Jinx. I understand the need to make a character that is conceptually irredeemably villainous more sympathetic, considering her popularity and the nature of the show, and I appreciate the difficulty of such a task.

I'm not quite sure it succeeded, though it tried very hard to do it. In the end, for me, Jinx had no positive or redeeming qualities. Her only grace is that she can conveniently blame all of her many (many) negative traits and horrible decisions on mental illness. That's not a positive trait. At best, it is the abscense of negative traits through a convenient explanation to dump them on.
Jinx was a well made character, but not a very sympathetic one for me. Which is unfortunate considering her prominence. I wish literally any other character could get half her screentime, plot armor and agency. The show kept trying to get me to feel bad for her, and in a way I did, insofar as she is mentally unwell, but that doesn't make her not responsible for her actions.
I won't go into specifics of her actions because spoilers but holy shit is that character way past any reasonable argument for villainy. And her arc sort of petered out.


Everyone else I had no trouble getting behind though. Silco is an excellent villain, Ekko was incredible, Jayce's storyline had me very interested, Victor was a cinnamon roll and didn't deserve this, etc etc.

I think among the many things Arcane did well was nail a good, solid pacing. Fairly quick, but not breakneck.


Also holy shit.

Spoiler

Singed turning Vander into Warwick was planned years ago and I am so here for it.

 

Arcane is good but now you're just huffing glue.

 

Nah. The Last Airbender is so well regarded because it's - on the surface - a children's show that grew into so much more. That gives it a nostalgia bonus, but it also means that it had to succeed in spite of its medium/target audience. ATLA had a lot to overcome. That certainly makes what the writers did more impressive, but that doesn't translate directly to better.

Arcane provides the same upside (well developed characters, an interesting universe w/ a solid blend of magic/"technology") with a more serious / less cartoony art style. If you watch ATLA, there are great things an adult viewer can enjoy, but there are also scenes clearly targeted at children that as an adult aren't as enjoyable to watch.

Arcane avoids The Last Airbender's biggest weakness by targeting a more mature audience, making the viewing experience a lot more consistently enjoyable.

 

Yeah, gonna take my turn to shout into this echo chamber that Arcane is excellent. Shockingly excellent. As someone who was 100% ready to shit on it after the cringe fest that is Seraphine and KDA, I am still just blown away.

Every character was perfectly adapted, the world was beautifully rendered, the 2d special effects and editing were gorgeous, the themes were mature and and challenging, and the plotting was interesting and paced very well. So much to praise.

I cannot wait for season two and really hope that they can keep up this level of quality. I really would rank it up there with Avatar.

 

Spot on regarding Jinx. I think what makes her sympathetic in a sense is that she doesn't seem like she's really having fun with the evil shit she does. She's just pushed back and forth by her psychosis and struggling to find something to hold on to. Plus, neither the viewer nor many of the protagonists of the show can see past the girl she once was. The fight scene with Ekko (fucking hell was that a good one) really showcased this. She's incredibly tragic and her choices make sense, but with her choice at the end of the ninth episode she very pointedly and intentionally pushed herself past any point of redemption.

This fucking show. I can't remember anything really leaving me this much of an emotional wreck in a damn long time. Well, whenever Riot put out more I'm ready to be hurt again, I suppose. Which in a sense is the perfect MOBA-based show, isn't it? You sit down for a bit of flashy, colourful fun and all you end up with is pain and regret.

Now if ya'll will excuse me, I'm going to write some angsty fix-it fic where everything turns out alright eventually.

 

I'll say that happened way earlier when she

Spoiler

murdered a bunch of guards that were just sitting there.

 

In a sense, yeah... but I don't think Vi would've condemned her for that. She would've put that on Silco (which she very much did when the two of them had a little chat in episode 5.) It'll also be interesting to see how Vi copes with having Caitlyn on one side, Jinx on the other.

 

Iirc Silco was unaware that Jinx was going to do that, never mind ordered her to do it.

The worst thing Silco ever ordered her to do was create a horrible weapon; that's it. (Most of) Jinx's murders were of her own accord. You can argue that she was on that airship and killed the Fireflies on a mission from him though; I think that's correct.

I like that about the series tbh; that it doesn't try to shift responsibility for Jinx's actions to someone else who's manipulating her. Jinx has all of the agency.
It does try to negate responsibility through mental illness, but that only goes so far.

 

Oh, absolutely. I'm not saying she wasn't responsible. I was saying that Vi might not see it as such. She likely would've reasoned that all of this was on Silco and that she could've still gotten her sister out of that whole mess.

 

Hmm. Interesting point. Now that Runeterra has a more mainstream vehicle to tell its story, I imagine there will be a sharp uptick in fanfiction. Especially since there is going to be at least a year and a half until season two, with a very deep bench of canon lore and characters to pull from that most viewers will have no fucking clue existed. Plus, you know, all the angst and fix it fics.

And Jayce bashing fics, because some people can't stand nuance lol

 

Jayce was my favorite and the Jayce Victor storylines the best, imo.

 

My only problem with him is that his storyline hinges on most of his supporting characters being simple window dressing.

The council is hilariously bad and his ascension to the 13th seat was pulled off weakly. I know the show didn't want to get bogged down by boring politics. But the whole council thing was just bad.

He went from near exile, to effectively the president on top side in a matter of a few years, with absolutely no one challenging him or undermining him.

At least even Silco was challenged after he started becoming ineffectual.

A good example of why I didn't enjoy Jayce wasn't interesting was perfectly summed up by Silco, "The boy didn't even haggle" he gave everything he wanted in exchange for someone, as far as Jayce knew, was an expendable mook to Silco.

 

Just got done with Arcane, binging all one night/early morning. I went in with the no knowledge about league of legends apart from a few names from game trailers.

God, I haven't been this excited since season 7 of clone wars.

Just been blown away with every aspect, from the amazing characters, excellent use of music and fantastic blend of animation. The emotion they were able to capture was just amazing.

Arcane is what happens when someone sees Spider-Verse, and thinks, I can do it better.

 

Lol. The council is totally believable and accurate. Hilariously so. There's one person on that thing to be shown as competent, and the rest are greedy clowns or naïve. I dunno how you can look at the world around you and not think that's believable.

I think the show was way overhyped - I'm saying this as someone who really enjoyed it.

I've played League a lot in the past, but I know only the absolute minimum of the story (the names of places, some basic character backgrounds). I did not expect to come out of this liking Viktor as much as I did.

Ekko is still besto. The fight on the bridge wasn't what they teased it to be in the immediate prelude to it, but now that he's with Heimer, that'll change. I look forward to more from him.

Vi... is so hot, lol, and while what happens to Jinx is obviously tragic, I kinda ended up feeling the most sympathy for her.

I did find the 'spot the League character' game a bit distracting at times... having said that - was that supposed to be Ryze in the beginning?


I'm playing Ruined King now too, which I'm really enjoying, and I'm super hyped for Project L despite being absolute garbage at fighting games.

It's scary how so suddenly they're plugging holes in my heart that were left over after I ripped Blizzard out of there... That MMO they're making, I hope it has the same quality some of their latest projects are shown to have. It'll be game changing if so.

 

Can't echo the praise for Arcane enough, it thoroughly shattered the expectations I had for a) a video game based animation series of any kind and b) an animated adaptation of League of Legends of all fucking things.

As a fan of League and someone who reads the lore, its an absolute marvel to see it brought to the life in such absolutely spectacular fashion. The fact they managed to combine the stellar visual animations with such an intensely character-driven plot that intertwines with itself so well is frankly astounding, especially for a work produced and managed by an honest to god video game company, animated by a studio that had never done anything longer than shorts and music videos. It isn't a bland, family friendly marketing stunt. It feels so ambitious its almost reckless.

It does have its flaws. There is an absolutely absurd amount of plot and development that occurs in a very short screen time and there's a lot of scenes and plot points that could use a little more time to breathe. I found the pacing getting a bit stretched in the third act, though that might have been in large part because there were still so many plot threads nowhere near resolution even as the episode count ticked down. (This was before the announcement of a second season, which may have fixed that feeling.) There's also a few scenes in the third act that I felt fell flat (the Sky scene especially).

The music choices are... aggressive. Very few of them are mundane background tracks. When they're on target (Guns For Hire in Episode 6, Dynasties and Dystopia in Episode 7, What Could have Been in the final climax) they're impeccable. When they miss (the main theme Enemy with its suspension-of-disbelief shattering Imagine Dragons cameo in Ep 5, the rap track intro for Ep 7 felt out of place) they stumble hard.

The characters start off fairly tropey and cliche. This is probably a necessity to get the audience familiar with them in a short time since the show just has so much it wants to do with its screentime, and the characters get much more nuanced and complex as the show goes on, but its worth mentioning. Vi didn't feel like she got much character development compared to the rest of the cast. The dialogue is mostly uninspired, though functional.

But these are mostly minor complaints because, by God, Arcane really just sinks its claws into you and doesn't let go. The characters are engrossing and likeable and they really drive the plot believably in a way few other series I've seen achieve. It takes dark, unexpected turns. Characters unfold and evolve interestingly, one of the antagonists especially. The voice acting is wonderful. The animation is just stunning and while the action sequences are what a lot of people will focus on, the really great stuff is all the little micro-expressions, unique animations, and personality it gives each and every character. It layers on the visual symbolism and parallels for its themes and characters. And the whole thing just drips with passion for the work and its source material. Time and money will get you far (and this had a ton of both), but you can really tell the people who made this just really cared about every part of it in a way that's hard to really put into words.

 

Not nearly enough Victor lasers. 9/10, excited for the return of the laser arm.