Why do you think arcane is slop?
Arcane is a quarter billion dollar, 12 hour commercial for a video game that became famous primarily for having a bot problem, microtransactions, and the most infamously toxic player base of any video game of the last decade.
The developer of League of Legends, Riot Games, has a Wikipedia article whose table of content looks like this.
By the late 2010s, league of legends was a joke. It was a shorthand for toxic shithead gamer behavior. It wasn’t taken seriously as a game by anyone anymore, so Riot Games had to do something with it, the company’s only profitable IP.
So Riot Games basically bought a French ad spot studio, pumped money into them, hired some writers, and set about to make a TV show based on a then decade-old video game. Why? To rehab the IP. And they pulled out alllllll the stops to do it.
Every aspect of the plotting is a safe bet. It’s a cop show. It’s vaguely edgy. It’s lore-friendly. It’s designed not just to appeal to players but to bring new people in. Sure most of them probably won’t play the game much, bur you really only need a few whales to make money off microtransactions, right?
Sure it has “great queer rep,” but those queers are cops so you know they’re the good kind of family-friendly, nonthreatening queer.
Arcane managed to win critical acclaim primarily because it did its best to appeal to the broadest audience, which it did by saying absolutely nothing of interest.
Art reflects its creators. Arcane is a vapid, empty show because League of Legends is a vapid, empty game. It’s a Skinner box designed to fleece teenagers with access to dad’s credit card of hundreds of dollars in bullshit cosmetics. It cannot be anything but slop.
