rambling

If you introduce Arcane to somebody simply as a League of Legends series, you're doing something awfully wrong. Instead, tell them something along the lines of this: Arcane is a story of politics, of trauma, of love, of children who know everything about what it's like to grow up long before you're supposed to, of betrayal, of family. And maybe then you could tell them that it's about League of Legends.

There are a million things I love about Arcane: the art, the music, the characters, the dynamics between said characters, the little details that you never notice until your fifth watch, or until someone on the internet finds it for you. 

How could I put my thoughts on something as beautiful as this into words? It had knocked the wind out of me, I wasn't able to form a single coherent sentence about it within the first few hours after finishing it. I'd like to say that I got over that and just thought and thought and thought until I had words, but I didn't. Instead, I cried. I cried myself to sleep for two nights straight just thinking about this show. 

My first impression of Arcane, the one I had when I first saw the words "League of Legends" under the title, was pure doubt. I loved everything League of Legends-related except League itself, lore included, but I was still kind of skeptical. You can't blame me, there's a plethora of video game adaptations gone wrong, so my gut feeling was that maybe I should wait until the final reviews come in to save myself from hell if it ever ended up like shit. Like with everything else life has thrown my way, though, I didn't listen to my gut. So, I sighed to myself and pressed play.

If I could put my emotions throughout each episode in order, it wouldn't work, because it does too much work for everything to simply be reduced to one simple emotion for every forty minutes. What would work, however, is a couple hundred, maybe thousand words-long review of this monstrosity (I say this affectionately). 

Arcane took six years to create, and you can see it in every frame. The characterization in the show is the thing that keeps me captivated even weeks past the series' end. It's real, it's raw, and you can see it on every single character's face. And while a terrifying resemblance to reality isn't always what people want in entertainment—a form of media that most engage in to escape said reality—it does it wonderfully.

I sound like a broken record, so let's get more specific.

What a lot of people think when Arcane is brought up are Vi and Jinx's relationship. It's painful, it's heartbreaking. The first words that come to my mind when I think of these two are: why couldn't it have gone right?

In Arcane, everyone says the worst possible things at the worst possible times, and it just so happens that it affects these two the most. Vi tends to her sister with all the care she has in her, almost like a mother. Vi is only a teenager when their parents pass, leaving her to take care of Powder all on her own. Of course, there's Vander, but the man has so much to do that he's almost never there to fully take care of them. So, Vi, the eldest sister, becomes their mother. Instead of growing up with them, she raises them. But like all things that involve teenagers acting as parents, it goes wrong.

Vi wasn't ever mature enough to take care of a child like that. She was young, decisions clouded by her flawed image of reality, as all children do. So when everything goes wrong (see: Episode 3), she acts rashly.

When her fist lands onto Powder's face in the last few minutes of the third episode, she knows she's done something terribly wrong. And because she knows that her anger had led to it, she walks away from Powder to cool off. Powder, however, sees it differently. In her mind, Vi is running away from her; abandoning her, leaving her in the clutches of the enemy. Fear is all that's left in her veins as she screams her name, her full name. "Violet, please," she begs. "Vi! Vi, come back! Please come back! Please, Violet. I need you. Please!"

The next thing they both see is Silco walking closer and closer towards Powder, but before Vi can rush back to her sister, she's knocked unconscious.

So much of their conflict revolves around misunderstandings that it took everything within me to not scream and tell them exactly what they want to say to each other for them.

I didn't expect any of this when I pressed play. I expected something more light-hearted, given that the first thing I saw from this show was a clip of Vi and Caitlyn on TikTok, but when Vi pushed Jinx's gun away and firmly told her that she wouldn't leave her ever again, I saw it: this was going to tear me apart. 

And it did.

It took every single ounce of resolve that I had left in me to not cry at the ending, to not curl up and bawl over how every possible opportunity they had to fix things just got thrown in the garbage like non-recyclable trash. But unbeknownst to my poor broken soul, I'd already started crying long before that. I broke when Jinx pulled Caitlyn over to the table, her eyes dilating as she looked at Vi. Whether it was fear or love is something I don't think I'll ever know. And I broke at the torn look on Vi's face when Jinx had made her choose between her and Caitlyn, because I could hear a monologue in my head even with her silence. She couldn't kill Caitlyn, not when she's the first person she's ever genuinely trusted in a long, long time; not when she's just begun to let her through thick walls, letting Caitlyn see her in a way that's so vulnerable she almost feels naked; not when she was falling in love.

But Jinx doesn't see that.

What Jinx sees is a traitor, a class act who had abandoned her and replaced her with a monster. Jinx doesn't only hate Caitlyn because she sees her as her sister's replacement for her, Jinx hates Caitlyn because she's an enforcer, the very monster that haunted her in her nightmares. 

When the bullet lands on Silco, the pain stops flowing for a moment, and I freeze up. Both physically and emotionally.

He wasn't the father Jinx needed, nor was he ever a good one, but as Jinx sobbed, apologies leaving her tongue almost endlessly, the ice that had taken hold of me had melted, and I was crying again. When the life leaves Silco, I've accepted it by then. They couldn't fix this, not when Jinx just lost the only person that she genuinely believed could understand her, not when Jinx just lost another father.

When the music starts playing as Jinx shoots a rocket at the council, I've gone numb. I don't feel anything when Vi holds Caitlyn as they both scream in slow motion, nor do I feel anything when it cuts to the council, to Caitlyn's mother.

But what I hadn't felt anything for then, I quickly came to sob over in the evening.

I'd grown attached, is what I then realize. These characters had felt so real that I feared for my life if anything bad were to ever happen to them, which is a funny statement, because does anything ever happen to them that isn't bad?

When people ask me how Arcane was, I never answer. I tell them to go watch it for themselves, because that's the only way. I can't encompass how I felt about this show in such few words. It wouldn't come out right. I don't think I'll ever be rid of the immense pain this show has given me, and for now, it's perfectly fine.