Miscellanea on Arcane

Writing up some thoughts on one of my favorite shows.

The first season of Arcane is undoubtedly one of the best seasons of any show I’ve watched. I forgot about Season 2 until a few weeks ago, but once I picked it up, I blitzed through it. Then, to try to understand why Season 2 felt so different, I immediately blitzed through Season 1 again. As an excuse to procrastinate on a big blog post I’ve been chipping away at for nearly a month now, I want to do two things here.

First, in my limited capability as someone with no expertise in development economics, I want to think through more concretely what it would take for pre-S2 Zaun to become great (generally wealthier, safer, higher QoL, all that jazz). Second, I want to dive into S2 itself, what I think was missing from S2 that S1 had, and how I think some of those issues could’ve been fixed if I had hundreds of millions of dollars and complete creative control.

This should be fairly obvious, but there are spoilers ahead for what I would argue is one of the best animated works of the 21st century (pre-S2). You’ve been warned.

Make Zaun Great

Notes: This video is the closest thing I’ve found to my perspective on Silco and will inform this part. I’ll also call the Undercity Zaun here for my convenience.

S1 Zaun is basically in a constant state of chaotic stagnation. The show suggests significant resource exploitation through the enforcers, but the city seems to effectively not be governed at all beyond that. The Piltovan council—the heads of the wealthiest Piltovan houses—is ostensibly in charge, but they have no incentives to care for Zaunites. The chembarons are the de facto rulers, and under Silco, the city is being flooded with Shimmer production to maintain control and create soldiers.

My hotter-than-I-thought-it-would-be take: Zaun becoming independent at the end of Season 1 (assuming Silco doesn’t die and Jinx doesn’t blow up the Piltovan council) would have been terrible. First off, I hope it’s fairly self-evident why it’s not ideal for a crime lord to rule a city. Even ignoring that, Silco’s vision for Zaun didn’t have room for much substantial improvement in any of the core structural issues beyond Piltovan oppression. Throughout the series, we see him glorifying the “inner monster,” chaos, instability, and destruction, and the somewhat stable and community-based environment that Xander was able to maintain in The Lanes for a while was completely disgusting to him. The two perfect symbols for the Zaun he wants to build are Jinx and Shimmer, which should be incredibly disturbing. There’s a reason that Silco’s flooding his supposedly beloved people with Shimmer. It’s highly negative on balance to have a society with easy access to Shimmer, but there’s nothing closer to the “inner monster” than what Shimmer brings out of you, and that inner monster is all that Silco values.

An independent Zaun under Silco maybe has moderate economic growth (the little I can tell about his future plans from his terms suggest that he at least knows that pure ideology isn’t enough to build a prosperous nation) but I think reforming most of the core issues in Zaun—being under the heels of Piltover is certainly not the only one of them¹—would be antithetical to his ideology.

Also, even assuming that we can trust Silco when he claims to be willing to end Shimmer production, what’s his plan for the people suffering from withdrawal? It’s hard for even really good economic reform to help when a fifth of the population are gang members and a third are addicted to Shimmer or experiencing extreme suffering due to withdrawal.

What Zaun needs (vaguely in order):

• Stable governance that’s preferably not under a crime lord.

• Regulation of Shimmer

  • At the very least, Shimmer production needs to be heavily ramped down. I’m not sure exactly what the mechanics of the drug are, so I can’t give a precise recommendation for what this looks like, but having some plan for dealing with withdrawal is key to any regulation. My inflated Fermi estimate would be that ~40% of Zaunites have used shimmer at least once and that ~20-30% of those who’ve used are severely addicted to a debilitating degree, but the show seems to suggest that these numbers are even higher.

• Export-driven growth

  • Zaun seems like it has the potential for being an industrial power house and at the technological cutting edge. Shimmer production originated in Zaun, and the capacity to mass-produce not only the drug itself but all the suits and other weaponry based around Shimmer warfare exists. Infrastructure for natural resource mining and heavy industry clearly exists as well. Although highly unethical, refined and less addictive versions of Shimmer for war purposes could be profitable exports as well. I think it’s highly possible for the new Zaunite governance to identify industries that it would excel at, develop those industries, and export to Piltover and other nations using the Hexgates.

• Better living conditions → for lowering crime and encouraging Piltovan investment

  • Better housing, public health, public safety, basic infrastructure

  • I think a lot of this will end up coming naturally out of general economic growth, and I don’t have enough expertise to be sure what the balance should be.

• Good institutions for companies to operate under

  • Clear rule of law, low crime, contract enforcement, property rights, intellectual property system, etc.

The most important and difficult part of this is achieving stable governance. In my opinion, this would need to either be an independent Zaun under non-criminal governance or a Zaun that is essentially a partially-autonomous zone within Piltover. The core issue is that Zaun needs governance that has a vested interest in bettering the lot of Zaunites, and no matter how many concessions can be made out of Piltovan leadership, that won’t be the case and eventually the reforms will break down.²

The only way that an independent Zaun ends up under stable and competent leadership is pure luck, so my ideal-but-somewhat-realistic scenario is that Pilvovan leadership is made to care enough about Zaun to set up a well-functioning semi-autonomous governance structure. My basic head-canon for how this comes about is that in the small pocket of time when Jayce, Mel, and Heimerdinger have a lot of political capital and are also somewhat sympathetic to Zaun, they should go along with the rest of the council to have enforcers march into Zaun and tear down the organized crime that is de facto ruling the city. In exchange, they get approval for semi-autonomous governance and aid.

I think the most humane way for this to occur is if some of the chembarons can be given incentives to either stay out of the fight or directly help put down the other factions. If Piltover can’t convince a sufficient number, then it might be better not to storm in at all due to the sheer scale of human suffering a full-scale war would be (Shimmer-drugged soldiers rampaging through enforcers would be enough argument for Piltover to in turn devastate Zaun with hextech).

Assuming that this new governance structure is set up successfully, there are a combination of other reforms I would suggest (either taken up by Piltover, the Zaunite government, or some combination of both):

• Increasing the flow between both city-states:

  • Allowing work and resident “visas”: I don’t know whether it is already allowed or normal for Zaunites to commute to and work in Piltover, but if it isn’t I think this would be important and mutually beneficial. Zaunites would be able to stay (at least temporarily) and commute daily to work in Piltover, and then be able to send some of that money back home, while Piltover would get more and cheaper labor directly in the city.

  • Better infrastructure for this flow (more bridges and elevators).

  • Using Piltovan troops to provide safety guarantees for Piltover companies to operate branches and factories in Zaun.

    • There could potentially be some special regions around the bridges that Piltover directly helps administer that would be made “nicer” and more palatable to Piltovans first. This is what Piltovans would interact with first when they interact with Zaun. I envision this as something like the Long Island City of Zaun. Queens isn’t a destitute wasteland by any means, but Long Island City is the most culturally relatable area to people who live in Manhattan.

• Start a WPA-style (but less wasteful and expansive) program to do critical infrastructure work: clean up air/water, build streets, bridges, renovate buildings, create parks, build schools, build hospitals. This should hopefully:

  • 1. provide more jobs for Zaunites

  • 2. decrease the costs for topside companies that want to do business in Zaun and tailor their commerce to Zaunite interests (rather than just operating factories there)

  • 3. serve as an act of goodwill after a destructive takeover that will hopefully lower crime rates as fewer people join anti-Piltover crusades due to resentment

  • 4. substantially improve QoL, which is a good in its own right

• Set up new Zaunite governance structures and institutions based on Piltovan institutional knowledge that promote science and commerce. Piltover is supposedly a beacon of science and commerce, and we’ve seen that even in a pretty hostile environment, Zaun has some promise in both. Piltover likely has good research, science, and legal institutions and Zaun can adopt the best parts of them to become a favorable environment for investment, science, and commerce.

• Start to turn Zaun into an export hub for anything innovation or industry based.

  • Pull a South Korea, have heavily government-backed industrialization and specialization in specific sectors (hextech products, clean chemtech, any other sort of manufacturing, etc).

• Redevelopment using street votes-like policies: There will need to be substantial redevelopment, but everyday Zaunites should be a part of that and be able to earn from it.

I think some of this can be financed by Piltover directly and the rest could be a low-interest loan. This would all be quite costly for Piltover (especially after the cost it would already take to storm in and set up the new governance structure in the first place), but I think that Jayce is the perfect figure for making this happen if he is sufficiently sympathetic to the people of Zaun. He’s incredibly idealistic and has a lot of political power through his monopoly on hextech R&D (that he doesn’t use effectively at all in the show). He could pressure the council to agree to these conditions in exchange for his agreement to a war.

Arcane Season 2

In my opinion, the art, music, and just sheer production of S2 were on an even higher level than S1, and the writing was good enough that it felt about 80% as good as S1 on my first watch. It was only after I started processing the season later that I became more disappointed. I think a common sentiment I agree with is that “the more you think about S1 the better it gets, but the more you think about S2 the worse it gets.”

The root issue, in my opinion, is that the season feels rushed, and I think most of the other issues that people have with this season stem from this root issue. It feels less like a complete and self-contained story than a mostly-filled-out outline. Even the general story as is, but stretched out over 2 or 3 more episodes with time to explore character growth and tie together character arcs would’ve improved the quality drastically.

Other issues I had:

• Season 1 felt like a story that was foremost about Vi and Jinx/Powder. Zaun-Piltover relations were the context to that, and Jayce and Viktor were contributors to the Vi-Jinx/Powder story through their contributions to Zaun-Piltover relations. In the background, there was the sense that there was something cool and slightly mysterious going on that hinted at a bigger story in the future, but at its heart, the season was a tight character-driven narrative about two sisters being pushed to lines we didn’t know if they would cross, to the backdrop of a new technological era and how it shapes the conflict between two near-warring cities. Act 1 of Season 2 still tried to be foremost about Vi and Jinx/Powder for a bit but quickly stopped trying.³ Their overall relationship arc didn’t live up to the potential that Season 1 was setting up.
  
  Season 2 in general shifted from feeling character-driven to feeling plot-driven. One of the beauties of Season 1 was that the plot progression mostly felt like it was the authentic actions and reactions of different characters to each other and the situations they were in, but in S2 I often felt like things were happening “because the plot demands it.” This general issue is also caused by the root issue of poor pacing. Characters didn’t have enough time to have fleshed out arcs, so their actions often didn’t make sense in the context of their well-developed S1 selves.⁴

• The resolution of the Piltover-Zaun conflict was handled atrociously. I hate the “we’re enemies that have long-running bad blood between us, but we’ll come together to fight a mutual enemy and all will be happily ever after afterwards” trope. I’m obviously exaggerating, but it’s still directionally accurate. Beyond the issue of pacing, I think something else the writers might have struggled with is simply not knowing how exactly to resolve that conflict satisfyingly by the end of the season (Vi and Jinx’s relationship also has a similar issue).

• What happened to the whole hextech weaponization plot? We definitely see hextech being used destructively in S2 by both cities against each other, but it’s not at the scale that it could be. This should be a big part of the narrative tension for Viktor and Jayce this season.

• Caitlyn-adjacent quibbles

  • I was told that Caitlyn was depressed after her mom’s death, and her actions definitely made it seem like she was depressed, but I didn’t feel her depression in the same way that I felt for Vi and Jinx in S1. Again, with how packed the season was, there wasn’t enough screentime to dive into her mental state.

  • Why is one of the first steps in Caitlyn’s path downwards chemical warfare?⁵ Especially in the context of the fact that her mom put in so much effort into improving the air quality in Zaun, I feel like there was the potential for a very moving plot where Caitlyn genuinely tries her best not to use the Grey, but as she becomes alienated from everyone else, she feels forced to use it. This further distances her from Vi, antagonizes Zaunites, and desecrates her mother’s legacy.

  • What happened to Caitlyn and Jayce’s friendship? There was one good scene of the two of them in S2.

  • I feel like the popularity of the romance between Caitlyn and Vi in Season 1 made the writers feel like they had to make them get together by the end when they didn’t. It shouldn’t be as easy as it is for Caitlyn and Vi to forgive each other and move on, and their relationship generally didn’t feel deserved in S2.

  • The chase after Jinx was rushed and poorly explored. There should’ve been numerous close encounters, failed raids, other battles, etc.

    • Why do the other people on the squad accept Vi—a Zaunite who seems to have shown up out of nowhere—right away? They’re enforcers who’ve been trained to hate Zaunites their entire lives, and we haven’t seen any evidence for a change in sentiment in the rest of Piltovan society. This removes a lot of the potential for tension and progression (or regression) in the Caitlyn-Vi relationship.

To give S2 a little more time to breathe and explore the story that S1 set up, I think that what roughly corresponds to Act 3 should’ve been a separate season, and S2 should’ve stuck to continuing to explore the Vi-Jinx and Piltover-Zaun conflicts. Season 3 could’ve been the big fate-of-the-universe^TM season with conflicts from the earlier seasons affecting how things shake out. How do Piltover and Zaun manage to come together? What bargains, consequences, concessions, and deals are made? What are the consequences of Piltover’s treatment of Zaun?⁶

If I were operating without the constraint of League lore I would:

• Increase the focus on Caitlyn’s grief and trauma about her mother’s death and explore it in the way that Vi and Jinx’s pain was explored in Season 1. A part of the issue here might be that I wasn’t naturally very sympathetic to Caitlyn’s mother, and that can be fixed relatively easily by going back to S1 and adding scenes that show her genuinely caring for Jayce, having banter with Jayce and Caitlyn, caring and advocating for the people of Zaun, and hinting toward the fact that she helped remove the Grey. I want to feel a lot more when Caitlyn’s mom died, both because of her death itself and also because of how it affects Caitlyn.

• The hunt for Jinx:

  • Have Caitlyn and Vi be 1.1-1.3x further in their relationship than they are before they go off on the hunt for Jinx to balance out the fact that they likely won’t be together at the end (and to make that fact more heart-wrenching).

  • Have Vi’s decision to become an enforcer be more meaningful instead of using a cheap plot device to have her make this massive decision (or she can just be part of the mission without being an enforcer).

  • Have the hunt take longer and introduce more conflict and tension between Caitlyn and Vi, Vi and the rest of the team, and Caitlyn and the rest of the team.

    • Show Caitlyn continuing to get more ruthless.

      • I think a few good points of tension can be when the team starts sending people to prison with a wave of a hand in a way that leaves a bad taste in Vi’s mouth.

    • Build up to the big Vi-Jinx fight better throughout this long hunt. Vi should be making the decision that she’s willing to kill Jinx despite memories of Powder, and I think a few flashbacks or quick memory montages of happier times could’ve made her coming to terms with the fact that she needs to kill her own sister much more moving.

• Dictator Caitlyn:

  • I love the concept, but I thought it came a little out of left field. It would’ve been nice to have seen more buildup towards this by exploring interactions between Ambessa and Caitlyn before the hunt.

  • I think the fight between Vi and Caitlyn after the failed confrontation with Jinx should’ve played out slightly differently, and the two of them should still be together through the beginnings of Caitlyn’s dictator arc.

    • Instead of using a music video to superficially cover it, I would go deeper on Caitlyn enforcing martial law. Vi consistently tries to convince her to pull her punches, and Caitlyn’s actions should be reasonable enough at first to not seem like too far of a jump from the character we know from S1, but she should still clearly be haunted by her mother’s death.

This is about how far I can get. I have enough of an understanding of the characters, themes, and tone of the show to project out the direction of the path the story would’ve taken if it had more room, but I’m not sure how to start tying it up. Here are some rough ideas:

• Jinx still becomes the big symbol of Zaun.

  • Vi and/or Caitlyn kill her and that makes tensions even worse?

• Something prompts Caitlyn to start using the Grey, really crack down, etc.

• Pessimistic ending:

  • Piltover and Zaun don’t really manage to fix their issues, Jinx and/or Vi end up dead because of the other, Caitlyn is a guilt-ridden dictator, Jayce and Viktor look on in horror and try their best to help as Piltover and Zaun rip each other apart. In the end, despite all the hope, idealism, and effort, it was all basically pointless.

    • This would be a very Joe Abercrombie version of Arcane.

• More optimistic ending:

  • I’m honestly not too sure here. I think that there is potential for Vi and Jinx to find peace together eventually, but I certainly don’t think they can by the end of this new version of S2. The tensions between Piltover and Zaun are also too high for me to be able to see any meaningful way that things can end on a positive note so soon.

With some changes to Viktor and Jayce’s arcs, I think I would personally end the show here.

If I instead wanted to stay faithful to the big high-fantasy plots from S2 Act 3, I would have the core Jayce, Heimerdinger, Ekko, and Viktor plots from S2 shifted almost completely to S3 (I want all of these characters to be able to act and react to the core S2 plot), and explore those plots in tandem with the fallout of the ending of S2. I would’ve also likely made some tweaks to Viktor’s main motivations. I’ve always found the “hero turns villain to deliver utopia in an evil way, but realizes that the costs are too great because it causes us to lose our humanity” trope kind of annoying, and would’ve liked to see him go dark for some other reason. A potentially compelling story is that he simply goes dark because of the physical pain as he gets closer to death⁷ and the emotional pain from seeing his life’s work being used by both cities to terrorize each other in S2.

A major part of the last two acts would be about the struggle to get Piltover and Zaun to work together, and the real consequences of the tensions between them. Zaunites certainly wouldn’t have agreed to help with Caitlyn in charge, and I would’ve liked to have seen Caitlyn being deposed for the sake of cooperation (maybe this can introduce some major tension into Jayce and Caitlyn’s friendship if he’s the one who pushes to remove her). The masterpiece that is episode 7 of Season 2 might have even more meaning in this context. In having hope from seeing how good things can be, Ekko could become the key figure in really helping the Zaun-Piltover coalition get off the ground.

If Jinx doesn’t end up dead by the end of S2, I think that S3 can also be when Vi and Jinx start to heal and maybe grow back together in some ways, but I would’ve kept Vander dead and found a more natural method of reconciliation. I think an important aspect of this relationship that S2 captured relatively well is the sense that something important is always missing and that too much has happened for them to act like they did in S1 Act 1.

1. Quick rant about one of my few gripes with S1: for the fact that the Zaun-Piltover conflict is essentially a character in its own right during S1, the relationship doesn’t seem to be very well thought out beyond the fact that this class struggle exists. At times it feels common and at others it feels rare for Piltovan enforcers to be in Zaun. Why is Piltovan presence in Zaun so weak (why is the Piltovan council letting a bunch of gangs openly disrupt their business; you’d think it’d be bad for business at least?). There also isn’t much in the show that suggests that the reason for Zaun’s poverty is Piltovan exploitation; there’s a lot of Piltovan brutality shown but not much else. What initiated these tensions? What are the structural causes of the resentment?

2. The only way to ensure the council has an interest in Zaun’s success is for the current councillors to voluntarily reduce their own power, which I don’t see happening. I don’t think they would be willing to have even a single Zaunite on the council, and even then, I doubt a non-majority would change anything.

3. If the writers had Season 2 planned by the time of the writing of Season 1, I think they should have built towards that more in S1. The core of the narrative tension could have been structured around Jayce and Viktor and the development of hextech, with Vi and Jinx/Powder being important side characters. There should have been more political scenes, more on the diffusion of hextech in Piltovan society, more to help the audience grow to care for and understand these characters deeper, more on the initial difficulties of developing hextech, and a more fleshed-out conflict around Heimerdinger’s resistance to hextech. I think that would’ve made the story that Season 2 tells much more compelling, but also would’ve made Season 1 less so.

4. More on why Season 1 and Season 2 felt so different: I largely agree with the criticisms and takes here. Most decisions, actions, and moments in Season 1 felt like they had an impact on almost every one of the other characters. There were 3-4 major plotlines, but they tied closer together throughout the season until they were all deeply connected by the climax. Everything came down to one final moment that every major character had shaped in some way. That simply wasn’t the case in season 2.

I also want to emphasize the section on trope-breaking in the video. The scene where Powder tries to help rescue everyone at the end of Act 1 is something we think we’ve seen hundreds of times before. She’s the little kid who just wants to prove herself because everyone looks down on her and doesn’t consider her capable enough to help them. She’s just failed and now when everyone goes off to do the big important thing without her, so she’s going to fix everything by taking what she learnt from her past failure. My brain keyed into that trope the instant I started seeing some of the telltale signs, and projected the rest of the episode out for me. Then something funny happened. She failed. And not only did she fail, she ruined everything irreversibly. That was the moment I started to understand what a masterpiece that season would be. 5 episodes later, during Jinx’s tea party scene, I had absolutely no idea what would happen by the end of that episode because there was no pattern I had to compare the scene to. That, and the fact that everyone’s storylines were so obviously connected to this pivotal moment, made it even more emotionally stressful (in a good way) to watch. It took me hours just to process that final episode.

I had no equivalent in Season 2. By the end of Act 2 and partway through Act 3, I had a strong general sense of what would happen that only got clearer the closer I got to the finale. This all ties back to my central gripe about pacing, and how there was so little time to explore character arcs and major decisions that the plot felt more dictated by the whims of the writers than the actions of the characters.

Also, in my opinion, there simply aren’t any scenes in S2 as good as the following:
- Jinx lighting the flare
- Vi and Powder at the end of S1 Act 3
- Silco’s “Is there anything so undoing as a daughter” and his death

5. To be fair, I agree with this Reddit post that this wasn’t as bad as people make it out to be, but I think that could be easily remedied by just making the Grey more harmful in-story.

6. Maybe a specific Zaunite faction decides not to join the fight, and that indirectly leads to the deaths of thousands of Piltovans. The guilt for this is something that Caitlyn has to live with for the rest of her life.

7. If you’ve read Joe Abercrombie’s insanely good Age of Madness trilogy, I envision this plays out in a similar way to another cripple (unnamed to avoid spoilers) who loses his idealism and goes dark due to pain and emptiness. If you haven’t read Age of Madness and have no idea what I’m talking about, you’re wasting time you should be reading Joe Abercrombie on this silly little blog post.