Arcane (Season 2)
Second season of the French animated series Arcane, loosely based on the MOBA League of Legends. I didn't love the first season of the series the way some people did but I begrudgingly respected it as something that was, if nothing else, extremely well executed. It was, effectively, a mashup of a variety of things that were already popular, tailor made to appeal to as many people as possible as efficiently as possible with as flashy a presentation as possible. It wasn't high art, by any means, but it was pop art, nothing more and nothing less than the sum of its parts.
I don't usually think that creators, even creators of media meant for a mass audience, should primarily focus on giving people "what they want", because it's my firmly held belief that most people don't actually know what they want until they get it. But I do think that Arcane's first season was a very succesful attempt at anticipating peoples expectations and fulfilling them. Season 2 is their attempt to get it right a second time and a lot more representative for how it usually goes.
Season 2 follows immediately after the first season. The tensions between neighbouring cities Piltover and Zaun, one wealthy, the other one poor, have escalated after Jinx managed to kill multiple members of Piltover's ruling council in a terrorist attack. Meanwhile Ambessa, ruler of the militarized nation of Noxus plans to exploit the situation and get her hands on the hextech core which turned scientist Victor into a messianic figure heading a cult commune in Zaun.
Does that about sum it up? Not really, which kind of gets to my core complaint about the season. It starts off straight forward enough, but by episode 6 of its 9 episode cycle it derails into something borderline incoherent that I found difficult to follow and, frankly, impossible to actually care about. There were quite a few moving parts to season 1 already but not to the point they ever threatened to spin out of control. A bit more than halfway through season 2, they finally did.
A character turns into a Final Fantasy villain, another character from the first season gets revived as a beast, another one gets trapped in a pocket dimension and learns she's a mage, yet two other ones end up in a parallel timeline, someone gets transported to the future... to paraphrase a friend, at one point it just started to feel like they were deciding which plot points to include by throwing darts at a corkboard. Meanwhile actual, natural character development gets mostly thrown under the bus or is rushed so much it might as well not be there.
I said it before, I never thought the first season was as great as some people were convinced it was but it was incredibly competent. It was a very focused, very disciplined work, everything about it was fine tuned to work as efficiently as possible. It wasn't very ambitious in anything but its visual direction (which, credit where it's due, is still very impressive in season 2) but it was made extremely professionally. Meanwhile season 2 feels loose, overstuffed and underedited, bogged down by a lack of priorities, adding subplots where it should have been cutting down on them.
Hey, ever think about how Jinx and Vi are presented as the center of this story in all the key art? How that would suggest it's fundamentally meant to be a drama about how those two sisters become enemies as they end up on opposite ends of a conflict and, potentially, how they might reconcile? Because that's a universally relatable, timeless bit of drama that could have easily carried the show if they hadn't let it get drowned out by the cascade of other stuff that's going on.
And that's the tragedy of it, you know. There's a lot going on and the dialogue (if this sounds backhanded, that's because it is) tries extremely hard, but Arcane demonstrates that an excess of plot can very well lead to the same result as a lack of plot, by which I mean, something that feels less like an actual story with actual emotional stakes and more like watching someone bang action figures together for reasons you don't much care about. Mind, Arcane S2 is still far from the worst thing I've ever seen but following its first season I can't call it anything other than an underwhelming follow up. By its last third I just wanted to get it over with and move on to literally anything else.
