#arcane criticism

[voice-of-the-tower]

“You just can’t handle complex characters!” and the character in question is at best Jimmy Mouthwashing but the writers and/or fandom is blissfully unaware of the fact that their blorbo is Jimmy Mouthwashing (thus stripping away everything that makes them interesting at best or making it look like the writer and/or fans agree with their awful character at worst) and at worst a bog standard asshole with a sob story, aka baby’s first morally grey character. You can have your characters be Jimmy Mouthwashing, but you have to frame them correctly, don’t give me the most loathsome and irredeemable characters and try to make me like them or feel sympathy for them just because they suffered.

[theterpiel]

Good take in the Arcane subreddit, the world has truly turned upside down

[calcified-fluorited]

what fucks me up abt arcane (and why I can't shut up about it) is that it isn't just the copaganda where the cops do nothing bad and refuse to punch people or whatever, because for the most of the series you are shown very explicitly just how brutal and dehumanising they are towards lower class people and how they are perfectly okay with revoking the right to BREATHE from zaunites as a simple means to an end, and then the show asks you to feel sympathy for these very same cops. Yeah they did bad things but they have feelings too :( that means they are already on the path to redemption right :( fuck off lmao

[lightveils]

Amanda Overton saying in an interview that Vi needed to move past the “all cops are evil thing” for caitvi to be together makes me so sick.

Vi was arrested as a teen and abused regularly. The show never expands on Vi’s trauma.

Caitlyn who’s supposedly “one of the good ones” gassed people, almost shot a child, committed/enabled police brutality and hit Vi with her rifle.

If anything Caitlyn proved even more that Vi’s enmity towards enforcers was valid. They all really are just assholes in fancy uniforms.

I’ll forever loathe the writers for how much they downplay what Vi went through.

[localvillagecryptid]

"Jinx left so Vi wouldn't have to choose between them, she left so Vi could finally be happy"

Is anyone else bothered by the implication that a relatively NEW girlfriend would be capable of making someone just as if not MORE happy than healing their relationship with their sister, who they spent YEARS wanting to make up with?

Me personally, I can get over a bad breakup. But if either of my sisters DIED, or simply chose to actively walk out of my life forever, that would fucking break me. I would not, in fact, move on. And maybe it's different for you guys, but Vi consistently spent an entire season trying to find and make up with Jinx. I don't know what the hell happened in season 2, but her saying "the only thing that kept me going was the thought of getting back to you" about her 7-year prison sentence doesn't sound like "I'll be better off with this girl I've dated for a total of 2 weeks".

Why is there an immediate assumption that any romantic relationship holds just as much if not MORE weight than any platonic/familial one? I'm sorry but why is it even a contest? I'm fully convinced that in season 1, had Jinx not demanded Vi kill Caitlyn- aka take a life, ANY life- and instead asked for LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE, she'd have done it. Remember what she said? She said they could leave the entire city behind, just the two of them, and never come back. She was ready to leave their home, leave Caitlyn, leave all of it, for Jinx. Because at the end of the day, all she wanted was her sister back. But suddenly season 2 rolls around and it's "Caitlyn makes her happier." When? Where? How? I don't see any scenes of Caitlyn making Vi happy. Oh but she did hit her though, after getting upset that Vi didn't want her to shoot at a kid.

I'm sick of romantic relationships being taken as "naturally" being the priority. Maybe if you're married with kids or something, you'll prioritize your partner over your friends, sure (but if you have kids they still take priority over your partner IMO). But a 2-week-long situationship? I've known people who get ghosted after longer than that. Fucking be real with me.

I'm simply not convinced that Caitlyn should matter this much to Vi so quickly. It shouldn't even be a competition. I genuinely cannot imagine Vi, who's SOLE MOTIVATION in season 1 was Jinx, and who's SOLE MOTIVATION in EVERY UNIVERSE and TIMELINE was her FAMILY, would ever "move on" and "be happier" with any romantic partner. Callous as it may sound, she can always get another girlfriend. There's no replacing her sister.

[magneticflower]

Also, why was like 95% of S2's dialogue just so— weak?

Half the conversations felt vapid or unfulfilling because they never even really got to finish the conversation. It was mostly just a back and forth of jabs or one-liners and then nothing, and that really dampened the storytelling. We needed substance in these conversations, especially knowing this was the end and we didn't really get that.

We didn't even get the actual conversation between Jinx and Ekko which led to her not killing herself after we had to watch him try to save her from doing just that several times. We got the start of it and then we got a cut off I assume to be like 'well did he or didn't he' even though that was unnecessary because we knew he had to have been able to get through to her at that point. We deserved that conversation. They deserved to have that real conversation.

I will also go on record saying that the 'I am the dirt under your nails' line was actually a horrible thing to make Vi say. Vi, the one in season 1 that we hear say 'I grew up knowing I'm less than them,' equates herself to dirt under her Piltover girlfriend's nails? That's just crazy to do. That line is not cute (honestly, it's just bad in general. No one should equate themselves to dirt in comparison to their partner) when literally nothing has actually changed. Like, oh yeah, you gave one seat at the table to Zaun? Big deal, the rest of the council was scowling at Sevika the moment she walked in to the moment she sat down. Anyone that could have served as an ally on that council is gone/leaving (Jayce, Mel, etc), and so Sevika's hardly going to have a fair chance at getting much for Zaun.

I could go on about more but those ones stuck out the most for me at the moment. I am just frustrated because I watched scenes from s1 last night and in comparison to s2, it is like day and night when it comes to consistency in character and substance.

[ekkolocate]

It's not acknowledged enough in canon that shimmer is a life-saving medicine. Like how many lives have singed and silco saved by giving zaun access to medicine. Vi gets what I assume to be a lethal stab wound and is healed in minutes after just from a small vial. Shimmer is like any other medicine helpful in a dose but poison in another. I always see the rhetoric that silco spread a toxic drug through zaun, and while that's not wrong, it's also not right (honestly I dont think people give silco enough credit when it comes to his role as zauns leader). Zaunites are shown to be sickly, and I doubt piltovan doctors were willing to help zaunites, and there definitely aren't trained doctors in zaun, so shimmer and chems would be all they have. I wish we got a short story or something from the perspective of an average zaunite because we never really know what life is like for them and how much the oppression of zaun effects the average person.

[bumblebee-art-blog]

Arcane twt is so funny bc wdym this quote I made was so bad the op BLOCKED me over it lmao

Arcane stans are hilarious

For context, arcane twt is trying to ‘cancel’ an indie game called Dispatch for ‘plagiarizing’ Vi’s character design even tho the haircut and the jacket are not that original of a design

Casual Twitter shenanigans lmao