cashew | Arcane: League of Legends

There's less than two hours before the final between Argentina and France, so I'm puttering away time because I'm too nervous to do anything else.

Anyway, I watched Arcane: League of Legends (heretofore known as A:LoL) on a recommendation. The show has an extremely high rating and is hyped as "the best show based on a game", probably because League of Legends doesn't have much of a story and therefore the writers have a lot more freedom to not follow dumb game logic.

The short version: Go watch Tales of the Abyss anime if you want an actual good show based on a game. (Seriously, I challenge you not to cry by episode 25.)

The long version: Oh, boy, let's get into this thing.

To give credit where credit is due, the technical aspects of the show is genuinely insanely good. The animation style is unique, the movement during fight scenes really transmits the grittiness of a fight (comparable to some of the best fight scenes I've seen in HK kung-fu movies), the character designs are faithful to their game designs while deviating just enough to establish its own aesthetic, the background music is well composed. In short, this is exactly the level of polish you could expect from a high budget video game.

Meanwhile, the story...uh, is exactly what you'd expect from a video game, which is to say, juvenile and shallow.

Let's start with the world building.

The world of A:LoL takes place in the city of Piltover, a city that consists of a "topside" where everything is clean and shiny and filled with the society's elite and a "fissure" where the society is overrun by gangs/mafia and poor people suffer. Unsurprisingly, the "topside" rests on top of the grungy "fissure".

So far, no problems. The use of geographical stratification to represent socioeconomic stratification is a well worn trope and works great if you plan to address the systemic inequalities that enforces the stratification. Final Fantasy 7, Xenogears, Tales of Vesperia, are just a few such successful examples.

The problem comes when you realize nothing in the story actually addresses the social stratification built into the world. The narrative never discusses how the people at the top put in policies to remove upwards mobility so that they can continue to extract resources and concentrate it in the hands of a few. In fact, the show goes out of its way to show that such stratification is the result of neglect, not deliberate oppression.

Oh, and by the way, if your government is incompetent at providing for the poor, don't fight back or try to topple the government or start a new one, oh no, because that's bad according to this show. You should just work within the system and strike under-the-table deals with the good people in power, that's much better than trying to fight for your rights, because people *gasp* might die. Y'know, more than they're already dying from pollution and neglect and oppression.

Oh wait, that's right, there isn't actually oppression. No no, that's not a thing. The grungy boroughs is just a cultural thing. It's not the logical result from deliberate policy by the ruling elite or anything.

If the sarcasm isn't obvious by now, let me clarify: that was sarcasm.

So the story essentially fails to actually call out the systemic oppression of Piltover. OK, fine, maybe the story isn't interested in sociological storytelling. That's legitimate. The world is just a backdrop, there's other ways to tell this story. Maybe the characters are interesting?

Except the characters have essentially one defining trait and...that's it. Jinx is a spoiled brat who screws things up all the time, Vi is edgy and only cares about her sister, Jayce is a social idiot, Viktor wants to cure his disease, Heimerdinger is a cute old man, Caitlyn is a well meaning liberal yuppie, Mel is sexy and hates war, Ekko is...uh, seems like the show forgot to give him a character? Ekko got short changed so very hard.

There are little moments in the story where the character interaction is fun, where characters get to explore themselves a little. But having to follow eight characters' growth over the course of a 9-episode series (albeit at 40 minutes per episode) meant the character growth was painfully sparse. Had the show spent its 9-episode run focused on the sibling trauma between Vi and Jinx and the jealousy Jinx felt toward Vi's new relationship with Caitlyn, then the story might have been more compelling. But that personal drama got diluted with shallow political intrigue. It was simply too busy shoving "hey look, we included minorities!" into the audience's face to remember to give those minorities plot significance.

Oh, and let's get to the shallow political drama. Not content with trying to do a deep dive into the trauma of Jinx's mind (something that would have at least had a little fucking meat to it when addressing things like mental health and how we are shaped by our environment), A:LoL decided to try their hand at a "region in a land decides to go independent" story. This is a pretty uncomfortable subject, involving all the complexities and nuance of statescraft, nation building, and the conception of a national identity. If there is one thing that has been true about gaining independence, it's that successful secession requires a) establishing a powerful local government, b) build up a large military power to resist state violence, and c) the weakening of the state that the region is trying to secede from.

Literally none of that happens. Instead, Silco (the bad guy leading the secession movement) simply manages to strike a deal with Jayce (the impotent councilor) for independence, and Jayce agrees because he's traumatized by seeing a dead body. That's it. That's apparently all it took for the "fissure", now known as the Nation of Zaun, to gain its independence.

Except Silco decides to reject this deal ultimately because Jayce wants Jinx (Silco's adoptive daughter) as a scapegoat. So I guess Silco had a heart after all, even though he slaughtered people in cold blood, but he loves his crazy psychopath daughter so he's redeemed now.

And then Jinx blows up the entire Piltover council so THE ENTIRE STORY WAS MEANINGLESS.

Thanks, A:LoL. Why the fuck did I sit through 9x40 minutes of this bullshit?

The show was an ideologically and thematically confused series that didn't know what it wanted to say. It's a vibes only kind of storytelling and indulged in details that ultimately had no payoff. The sibling drama had no real resolution, personal relationships are built on shallow bonds with even shallower conflict, the exploration of madness was superficial, the world is built without any identifiable ideological framework...

And the worst of it all is that the series was boring. There was literally nothing engaging to keep the audience interested. The characters were boring, the plot was boring, the world building was boring, the ideology cannot be more status quo. It's just bland.

All I can conclude is that people have equated technical competence with narrative competence and that's just a really sad place for us to be.