Yet More Arcane Meta aka YET MORE META ABOUT ARCANE
So one of the (many) things that makes “Arcane” such an extraordinary show is the degree to which it is very much a show about science.
And not just in the sense that there are characters who wear long white coats and pour multi-coloured/colourful chemicals into test tubes so that they can reverse the Polarity of the Artronic Flow in order to do time travel experiments upon crabs and crustaceans, but rather the way in which the show is about the process of trial and error and experimentation and staying up late at night to make breakthroughs with discoveries, also known as the Scineitfic Method.
Piltover itself is essentially one big science experiment in motion, since, as Heimerdinger says in ‘Some Mysteries are better left unsolved’, the city was built to escape the warmongering of mages and build a society built upon the idea of progress rather than the inborn talents of magecraft and magicalness/magical power. Sadly, of course, that is very much not what happened and Piltover instead became a merchant capitalist oligarchy ruled over by a council of powerful merchant princes like a mixture of Nantucket, New Orleans, Venice, and Disney World that also treated its neighbouring sister city of Zaun like an absolute trash bin. And this, in turn, drives the inhabitants of Zaun to conduct their own experiments in building new societies, whether it is Vander attempting to build a community out of the disparate elements of the Undercity or Silco with his Shimmer experiments in creating soldiers and warriors to fight back against Piltover/Topside or Ekko building a strong and thriving new community in the midst of all the suffering and chaos or Viktor eventually trying to build his own commune with much more disastruous and tragic results, of course. All of these people are essentially doing a miniature version of what Heimerdinger was doing when he founded Piltover all those years ago. That is, trying to create a new and peaceful society that will be free from the suffering of the outside world. And in the end, it is Ekko who succeeds in building a new and good society because of the long process of trial and error and experimentation that began with everyone’s favourite little Yordle and continued with a certain bartender of the Last Drop public house bar all those years ago (no wonder Heimerdinger bonds so well with Ekko and follows him all the way into another time). It is, again, much the same as to how scientific progress and social progress are both done in our own world are built on the metaphorical shoulders of those who came before, with Ekko being almost the Newton to Heimerdinger as Abd al-Rahman Mansur al-Khazini or the Charles Darwin to Heimerdinger as Amr al-Jahiz. It is all a never-ending cycle of innovation and improvement that has no real beginning and no real ending whatsoever.
Which is why I find certain interpretations of Season Two’s ending a little suspect, in all honesty. Too many people in the fandom seem to think we are supposed to see the conflict between Piltover and Zaun as permanently and peacefully resolved when it really is not. The Council scene clearly shows us that most of the new members of the said Council hold Sevika in sneering contempt (although I think she can handle it and will manage to be really successful, strong, and capable as a leader of these two cities, if you know what I mean) and only Shoola is really willing to stand up for her at the present moment. As Caitlyn tells us in the show’s final monologue, “We, whose decisions led us here, will carry them forever. Our only consolation that, with every loss, we found some good, some light, worth gaining, worth fighting for. And though we are doomed to revisit the error of our ways, spark ever more conflicts, our story isn’t over”.
@disregardcanon @dachi-chan25 @angrylesbianbutch @flaretheidiot
