spicy

they/them, AuDHD, 20, Wasian. animation student, emo, communist

[revenge-of-the-shit]

No actually I need to add on more to this. Arcane very unfortunately suffers the same issue that a lot of "progressive" shows suffer in Western media, where they go like "here are some real, systemic issues that exist and look at the consequences of these issues", and then either (1) forget to continue with the theme, and/or (2) don't do anything about it beyond slap on a half-hearted Band-Aid solution that never addresses it.

Caitlyn gassing civilians; lack of accessibility for Viktor which created barriers for him due to his disability; enforcers as oppressors, going hand in hand with Noxian imperialism; Jayce weaponzing hextech, and him already having killed a child because of it; not a single moment is really spent on any of these in S2. If anything, the enforcers are really flattened at the end of this season with little nuance, the complexity that shone in characters like Marcus and Grayson disappearing. Many Piltovan characters do not get even a single second of introspection as to how their actions actively contribute to the oppression of Zaun.

[spicyycarrot]

TLDR: the writers fundamentally don't understand the story they wrote because they don't understand the real world it's meant to reflect.

long version:

I saw someone on twitter make an interesting observation about the s1 prologue opening where vi & powder are on the bridge - only one enforcer has the evil hallucination scribbles on their face, likely the one who killed the sisters' parents. to me this just speaks volumes about the fact that the writers only utilize police brutality & systemic oppression as a tool for some traumatic character backstories and not to actually make any intelligent social commentary. the writers recognize that police brutality is obviously bad but the way they make their characters talk about the oppression they face makes it clear the writers aren't interested in exploring larger systemic issues in Piltover/Zaun. it's extremely surface-level stuff.

especially after s1 act 1, Vi only negatively talks about enforcers relating to how they killed her parents. the failed uprising that resulted the death of Vi & Powder's parents is portrayed like a naive decision on the Zaunites' part that led to "senseless" slaughter rather than the inevitable result of decades of oppression on Piltover's part. the root cause ofclass inequality between the cities never gets properly addressed, let alone resolved, it's there for set dressing.

Ekko gives Caitlyn shit for being a piltie but doesnt have the same attitude toward Heimerdinger who, as a councilor, is directly responsible for the poverty in Zaun.

a scene that's always particularly irked me is in S1 where Vi and Jayce attack one of the shimmer factories and Jayce accidentally kills a kid, Vi says something along the lines of "that kid knew what he was getting into when he took that job" which is fucking CRAZY? Vi of all people should KNOW that Zaunites don't have the luxury to choose "good" jobs. also the fact that it's a CHILD working in a factory (irrespective of the fact that his mom is a chembaron??) should tell you how truly desperate these people are for any damn money. if you have to send your CHILD to work that means YOU'RE REALLY FUCKING POOR! I'm not even mad at Vi for saying this, I'm mad at the writers for throwing that out there, making a character who should be able to empathize with this kid more than anyone say something so idiotic and tone-deaf. the narrative NEVER challenges this notion. the writers clearly don't fucking understand class struggle AT ALL and it shows whenever the class inequality in question is part of the world and not just directly related to one character's trauma.

it's a shame they didn't give Jinx a proper revolutionary symbol arc. I know people have been saying "oh but she was never interested in becoming one!" but honestly that feels to me more like a failure on the writers' part rather than a natural continuation of Jinx's story. in the finale of season 1, Jinx correctly identifies the council as the source of all her past and current pain and trauma. then she gets declared a terrorist and she goes into hiding. despite all the imagery from the les miserables-ass intro shot of her waving a flag to the trailers that made it look like she was really connecting with the Jinxers, the blatant abuse of state power against them shown for split-seconds in montages and music videos - they just sorta put it out there. it doesnt cause any real uprising, it doesn't give Jinx the power and motivation to fight against her people's oppression, there's no real lasting tension between her and her class traitor of a sister - it all goes out the window because they have to fight a "common enemy". we see Jinxers & other Zaunites lose their lives fighting for the people that starved and gassed them, what reward to they get once the war is over? Sevika gets a seat on the council? that's the most blatantly obvious lib shit I've ever fucking seen. I can barely put into words how much this season pissed me off. honestly, it makes sense with all the centrist word salad the showrunners have been throwing out there that they have 0 understanding of politics or socioeconomics or anything important for that matter.

I wish they'd given Vi any agency at all this season. I wish Cait's horrifying actions hadnt gotten glossed over and excused as "she's grieving and getting manipulated🥺🥺", I needed to see the oppressors face real consequences.

IMHO Ekko & Jinx should've gotten to lead their people into an uprising against Piltover's politicians & the Firelights should've become the leaders of an independent Zaun, none of that "put one Zaunite on the council and call it a day" bullshit.

honestly this all speaks to the fact that the writers fundamentally don't understand the story they wrote because they don't understand the real world it's meant to reflect. I think this is the fatal flaw of Arcane's writing. it makes observations about real issues but draws entirely false conclusions from them.

they fail to identify the cause of real world issues and misattribute them to individual personal failures. e.g. they acknowledge that the cycle of killing/violence started before Jinx & Vi or even Slico & Vander but STILL have Jinx leave because "the cycle only ends when you find the will to walk away"?

I have many, many more things to say about how disappointed I am with the writing this season & how it soured my view on what I thought was a near perfect S1 but this post is long enough as is and Idek if anyone cares😭😭 but yeah Arcane has always been better at telling very personal stories of trauma & troubled relationships etc. and really suffers when this individualistic perspective is applied to larger political & systemic issues since again, the writers lack the education, insight & understanding needed to handle big topics like that. I'm hardly saying I'm a better writer than anyone on the team but just my thoughts

[whitney-bird]

hey guys are we rocking with 1920's femcr or is this too niche????

[junglejim4322]

I’m like the joker if he wasn’t the joker and didn’t do any of that stuff at all

[ironmordis]

Sketch is done ✨

[delsincloud]

timebomb

[trashcangimmick]

[yrkhn]

messy stuff

[1nky-quill]

“Jinx and Caitlyn are equally as bad”

Okay but what if I hit you repeatedly with a shovel

[alasion-art]

Runaway 💥

[ratatattouille-deactivated20251]

My problem with Mel’s arc is that it focuses on defeating Ambessa (in combat) rather than politics. Ambessa was not who Mel needed to physically defeat, but someone she needed to ideologically defeat. And we don’t see any of that. By the time Ambessa calls Mel “the wolf” it’s hollow, because it’s about Mel being a more powerful combatant than a wise ruler. In this moment, her “foxness” is about how she figured out the “deception” of the Black Rose and not how she outmaneuvered her mother politically. Perhaps it would be epic if we knew what the fuck she meant by “I see your face deceiver!” and then super sayan-ing out of nowhere. Her not having mercy on her mother is about being a Medarda, a question that wasn’t the focus of season 1, merely a catalyst. Becoming a Medarda was the goal Mel had, not the need. She needed to learn how to rule. Instead, she learns how to kill. And then she’s off to her home in Noxus as more of a soldier and spy than a queen. 

Which likely means two things:

-S2 got bored of Mel and just gave her cool reflective powers to make up for it. Making every interesting development about her character happen off-screen, in the writers room, or on another show.

-S2 was deliberately trying to communicate that it sided with Ambessa. That violence and combat, war, is not merely a failure of state craft, but necessary or inevitable to political growth. That militarism is the only thing that can answer militarism. That the only way to ensure the progress you make is secure is arming yourself. Even though this topic has some grey areas, Arcane explicitly picks a side by narratively using Ambessa to justify Piltover’s weaponization of hextech.

i know fandom has a lot to say about Mel being a “strong-black woman” character, but as a black woman myself, I hated how they stripped her of what made her such a strong, enigmatic presence in S1. Her prowess, her wit and cleverness. Her sheer intellectual power made her so FORMIDABLE.

She’s just a lost, hurt uwu little puppy for most of S2 before she’s given her US government assigned Avengers superhero uniform.

I miss when Mel hated her mother and knew she couldn’t plead with her like an adult. Mel in Act I was already using Lest to spy and we almost got a good story then—POOF!—Black Rose.

If I was to give my entire review for Arcane in one sentence it would be this: What was the point?

[mitchipedia]

[daebelly]

[crowwkui]

back from the dead to wish you a happy progress day and condolences for your terrible new job 🎉

[martybaker]

Oh my goodness I feel like my third eye was opened. Like I just upended an icy water bucket over my head and finally can see clearly

Please everyone disappointed with how the class struggle and Zaun’s fight for freedom were swept under the rug in the Arcane series,

and esepcially everyone who doesn’t play LoL and isn’t familiar with the game lore, please please watch this video

It came out BEFORE the first season and accurately predicts and warns about riot’s lack of interest in following a class conflict into a succesful revolution of the lower class

It gives examples of LoL stories and worldbuilding where clearly the message is to uphold the system and the rebellion is only an issue of a couple of bad apples causing trouble

We were never gonna get a revolution. Zaunites were never gonna get freedom, justice, equality.

It’s not a story Riot is interested in telling

[lesly-oh]

Jinx ‼️💥

[rowie264]

After going through all the stages of acceptance, I decided for myself to treat season 2 as fan fiction Every not new char acts like OOCs; dialogs are not so deep and good written in compare to s1; conflicts either forgotten/ignored either solved within moments; romantic relationships are formed just for fanservice or bc creators themselves shipped it So yeah. Fanfic. Good looking 250 million dollars fanfic

[q8qwertyuiop8p-deactivated20250]

Something that has really bugged me about season two is Jinx's hallucinations and PTSD. It magically disappears when Silco dies, save for two scenes. I remember when people on reddit were literally making jokes about the writers going this route because it would be so stupid.

One of the things I loved about season one was the realistic depictions of mental illness that you just don't see often in media. I don't know what it is like to experience schizophrenia, but I have experienced PTSD and paranoia, and seeing how it was represented in Arcane was actually one of the things that helped me through it.

And then season 2 comes around and they just completely neglect this side of Jinx.

PTSD isn't a switch that can magically be flipped off. Recovery is a slow and gradual process. In absolutely no world would Jinx killing yet another family member cure her of her conditions, it would make them 10 times worse. Not to mention just before killing him she has an extremely severe psychotic episode, which would only make forgetting her trauma even more difficult since it was just brought up fresh in her mind.

And what even about the end of s1 was it that healed her? I genuinely have no idea, because she finally chooses Jinx only to once again go back and forth between Jinx and Powder in season two, because apparently all that buildup for her final decision was for nothing.

She does experience two hallucinations (I'm not going to count the jail silco thing in act three because what even was that?) when she sees enforcer Vi and when Sevika talks about the attack at Vander's statue, but suddenly that is all that triggers her?

In season one, just seeing Vi, or even someone who looks like Vi triggers her. But now when Vi is literally trying to capture and possibly kill her she is fine, it's only the mask that bothers her? Wasn't that her worst fear, that Silco and Sevika were right, that Vi only wanted to stop her? And she is constantly triggered by Cait in season 1 but not 2?

And then there was the insulting ending, where jail Silco tells Jinx to 'break the cycle' (something he would absolutely never do) and Jinx finally finds redemption by literally killing herself after Isha kills herself in what is framed as an act of heroism (and if Jinx actually didnt, than what even was the point of that scene?) What happened to Ekko trying to stop Jinx from doing that? What happened to Silco having Singed revive her to save her life after she attempts to take it? Or Jayce and Viktor talking each other out of it? Or Silco choosing to keep fighting rather than give into the "peace in water"?

On purpose or not season 2 frames suicide as a glorious, edgy, perhaps even necessary thing and it's disgusting.

[sandraharissa]

the thing that bothers me about the writers excusing themselves as 'it's a story about how both sides bla bla bla' is that if that's what they did and it was well written then I’d be ok. but we only get the zaunite having a change of heart cos an enforcer was nice to a grandma and we only get zaunites helping Piltover etc. but where's all that 'both sides' energy the other way around? where's a scene where an enforcer has a change of heart cos they see a zaunite saving a kid? where's a scene of Piltover e.g. paying for reparations?

the only shot that "concludes" the independent Zaun matter is Sevika on the council and we get a scene of Sevika being given dirty looks instead of thanked for the sacrifice zaunites paid to protect Piltover sdfghjhgfdfghjhgfdghj

You may say it would have been too simple and unrealistic to have the councilors have a complete 180 change of heart and thank Sevika but it was also unrealistic to have zaunites put on uniforms and die for Piltover so... again where's the 'both sides' message now?

By """"both sides"""" they just mean "Zaun bad. otherwise why are zaunites choosing to be criminals? they need to make up for their wrongdoings and then they can have a treat."