Netflix Arcane – League of Legends (2021): The True Price of Inequality
- Zebediah Oke
- Dec 1, 2021
- 4 min read
Arcane: League of Legends is an animated fantasy series produced by Fortiche, a French animation studio based in Paris, and Riot Games, the American video game development company behind the highly successful League of Legends game that the show is based on. Arcane serves as a prequel to the League of Legends game, providing origin stories of several characters from Piltover and Zaun.
Across the regions of Piltover, a technologically advanced and prosperous utopia and Zaun, it’s neglected and repressed undercity, two sisters, Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Powder (Mia Sinclair Jenness/Ella Purnell), find themselves on opposing sides of warring ideologies, explosive political struggles, technological breakthroughs spurred by magic and an escalating unrest that threatens to throw both cities into disarray.
Flows
Art style
Despite some out of place expressions on Powder’s face (I don’t mean her looks of psychological decline but more just how strangely her expressions generally are), I really enjoy the art style of Arcane. This is also despite me not being too enthusiastic about the Steampunk aesthetic (it feels like I’ve seen it so many times before), there’s a lot of experimentation . The Black characters are animated well . Despite the style feeling a little dated to me, there was a lot of creative innovation within it.
Silco
Silco was an excellent villain. His voice performance by Jason Spisak is one of my favourite villains in recent memory. He says it himself–he’s not the smartest, strongest or richest. He’s simply determined. He wants it more and is willing to do anything to get it and to keep it. And that makes him terrifying, maybe because it’s a terrifyingly human way to be. It portrays a strength of will, which is the type of strength people follow you for. It also reveals a real messed up sense of honour that Silco has. He’s almost tortured by the terrible choices he makes. This isn’t a villain who lusts or revels in violence but is someone who has watched violence equalise so many and attain so much that he has had to become at home with violence, even work around it towards his own end. He’s unnerving and unwavering in his morality. And it makes him a perfect antagonist.
Viktor
Viktor (Harry Lloyd) was my favourite character of the entire show. I feel terribly for his dire situation yet, in his pursuit for survival, he doesn’t barter the lives of others. As soon as his research hurt someone (the nature of the accident and the distribution of blame can be philosophised endlessly but his intention was to heal and not harm, as opposed to his counterpart Jayce (Kevin Alejandro) who journeys to the Undercity with the express intent to forcibly engage workers who were simply pawns farming the drug, Shimmer), Viktor shut it down his experimentation and moved to destroy his research. He’s a tragic figure who deserves reprieve and has managed to be uncorrupted by the harrowing world he had to grow up in and I hope he maintains that.
Fight scenes
The fight scenes are animated brilliantly. I needn’t say more.
Ebbs
Narrative pitfalls
The series falls into narrative holes, some of which make it distracting to the story. For instance, how much time passes after Vander is killed? Also, the effects of Shimmer seems to have a very fluid and chaotic effect dependent on whether the show values the character or not. After Vi gets stabbed, she’s given Shimmer and heals wondrously after not being able to even walk straight, the same Shimmer that has mutilated people in the underbelly of the Undercity and we’ve seen turns into people crack hulks.
Jinx blows up a grenade and Ekko gets away with a sprained ankle and Jinx has no visible mortal wounds (you’d think that her hand would’ve been blown off at that distance). She’s simply unconscious and so we don’t know what the Shimmer is even doing to heal her.
Ekko
In a cinematic universe where magic is being harnessed by steampunk scientists, a 300 year old rabbit sits on the Utopian city’s high council and a drug epidemic that transforms people into giant purple zombies runs rampant in the squalid slums–the least the creators could do is not provide yet another image of a Black person getting shot by the police. They obviously have more creative material and control than that. Watching Ekko become an innocent victim of police brutality made my heart and stomach sink. It reminded me when (mostly white) comic book fans reacted to Black Panther’s success by proudly announcing that #WakandIsntReal on Twitter. Black folks can’t even catch a break in the FANTASY GENRE?
(Ekko ends up surviving but the imagery it reproduces seems extremely hamfisted and tone-deaf).
Song choice
The musical choices in this show were... kinda corny.
Conclusion
Arcane is an excellently animated show that unites steampunk science and rune magic as a canopy to a tale that is, beneath its surface, about the true price of inequality. It makes some interesting character explorations by choosing to focus heavily on the people in the Undercity and their will to survive. This mostly yields great results but has its stumbling moments. The modern trend to explore the moral ambiguity of protagonists means that some characters who are portrayed as misunderstood heroes whose own selfishness leads them to being crappy people.
The most interesting parts of Arcane, ironically, comes from the characters who are overlooked. While Vander and Silco made deals with Piltover’s police force, Ekko created a sanctuary around the only piece of greenery in the Undercity whilst trying to cut off the supply of Shimmer into the city. Viktor, despite his dire situation, never wavers morally morally and has collected great burdens he’s had to carry in order to reach the position where he can enact real change. These characters are actually the most interesting and entertaining, and I hope in the coming season, their arcs are explored with depth and care.
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