"Arcane," Season 1: review

Pictured: Vi (dyed redhead, Hailee Steinfeld), Viktor (reading, Harry Lloyd), Caitlyn (long, dark-blue hair, Katie Leung), Powder/Jinx (steel-blue hair, Ella Purnell), Silco (red eye, Jason Spisak), Jayce (white suit and epaulets, Kevin Alejandro), Mel (upper right, Toks Olagundoye)

Not pictured: Vander (JB Blanc), Ekko (Reed Shannon), Heimerdinger (Mick Wingert), Sevika (Amira Vann), Ambessa (Ellen Thomas), Grayson (Shohreh Aghdashloo)

Fresh off watching the animated series "Blue Eye Samurai," I plunged into the 2021 animated world of "Arcane," also titled "Arcane: League of Legends" because it's based on the 2009 Riot Games video game League of Legends, which I've never played. Like "Blue Eye Samurai," "Arcane" is an international collaborative effort, but involving a different French animation studio: Fortiche. The series dropped with a surprising amount of acclaim, garnering high praise for its excellent animation and equally excellent writing. It boasts the voice talents of Hailee Steinfeld, Harry Lloyd, Katie Leung, Ella Purnell, Jason Spisak, Kevin Alejandro, Toks Olagundoye, JB Blanc, Reed Shannon, Mick Wingert, Amira Vann, Ellen Thomas, Shohreh Aghdashloo, and many others.

The story's main focus is on two sisters, Violet (Steinfeld) and Powder (Purnell), who later renames herself Jinx. The world the sisters live in is divided into two principal levels: Piltover, the upper region, where the rich and privileged live; and Zaun, the so-called "undercity," a place of poverty, violence, drug addiction, and near anarchy—an anarchy held at bay by the burly Vander (Blanc), the adoptive father of the two girls. 

When the story begins, Vi is a teenager, and Powder is not quite a tween, but the sisters work with two friends to steal and fence items from Piltover, pilfering goods and bringing them down to the undercity. During one such raid of the upper regions, the team sneaks into a scientist's residence and begins stealing items whose nature the kids don't understand. Powder happens upon a case filled with some sort of small, spherical crystals that seem to buzz with light and energy; she scoops them up and dumps them into a belt pouch but fails to close the pouch tightly; one crystal drops out without her noticing, slowly builds toward cataclysm, and causes a massive explosion that the team of thieves only barely manages to escape. The team splits up, with Powder holding on to the largest share of loot. City guards and a rival gang give chase; Powder ends up dropping the loot into the local river, and the group returns to the underworld of Zaun with nothing to show Vander, their nominal boss, for their trouble. 

Mylo (Yuri Lowenthal), another kid member of the group, complains that jobs go wrong whenever Powder is with them, and he calls her a "jinx." Vander is shown to have a tense agreement with the Piltover sheriff Grayson (Aghdashloo); Piltover and Zaun refrain from war largely because of this arrangement, but people both topside and in the undercity are unhappy with how things are: the eternal story of haves and have-nots. One of Vander's old brothers-in-arms, Silco, has plans to undermine Piltover, and he's been developing a chemical called The Shimmer, which causes anyone who drinks it to become a hulking, overpowered brute—a quick way to produce muscled henchmen. Meanwhile, in Piltover, scientist Jayce Talis (Alejandro) and his genius friend Viktor (Lloyd) are working on creating Hextech, a technology based on the combination of science and magic. The leaders of Piltover, especially diminutive founding member Professor Heimerdinger (Wingert), have grave misgivings about anything magic-related because of what might happen should magic fall into the wrong hands. (The series title "Arcane" refers to the arcane and unmanageable power of magic.) Jayce, though, recalls having been saved by a magic-wielder in his youth, and this makes him bullish about magic's potential to make lives better.

In a job that goes horribly wrong, Powder causes another explosion that accidentally kills their friends, Mylo and Claggor (Roger Craig Smith). Furious, Vi slaps Powder and walks away from her. Silco suddenly appears and begins to comfort the weeping Powder, but before Vi can turn back to retrieve Powder, she gets captured by a city guard and imprisoned. Vi spends years in confinement. This is when the story's true conflict begins: years later, Powder is now a full-on teen who calls herself Jinx; Vi has been languishing in prison. Jinx works for Silco now, with father-figure Vander having died years earlier. As Silco and Jinx continue to cause mayhem in Piltover, a Piltover enforcer named Caitlyn (Leung) is doing detective work on the side, and she eventually concludes that she needs the help of Vi to figure things out. Thus begins one of the more interesting relationships in the story: Vi and Cait are tense with each other at first, coming from opposite worlds as they do, but they come to trust and rely on each other, eventually ending up in a dynamic somewhere between sisters and lovers. From a distance, Jinx sees Vi and Cait hugging and, because Jinx has gone partially or wholly insane thanks to all of her childhood trauma, she irrationally thinks she's been replaced as a sister.

I haven't even touched on all of the political intrigue that drives the Piltover plot forward, nor have I mentioned the character of Ekko, a childhood friend of Vi and Powder who grows up to be a seasoned leader and fighter in his own right. Ekko knows all about Jinx's mental breakdown, and he tells Vi that he thinks Jinx is, by this point, irredeemable. Vi, for her part, wants to try to save Jinx from herself, and to rescue Jinx from her dependence on Silco. Silco has become Jinx's new father figure, and on some level, he truly does care for her, but Silco is himself too broken and toxic to be a decent father for Jinx. "Arcane" is a complex story, what with its multiple subplots involving Hextech, politics, terminal illness (Viktor), rich/poor conflict, friendship, sisterhood, romantic relationships, family expectations, and a host of other issues. The whole thing is a big, happy mess, but with well-written characters and some truly stunning animation—at a level that makes "Blue Eye Samurai" look simple.

And yet, I didn't find the overall story as engaging as that of "Blue Eye Samurai." I'm still trying to figure out what exactly the problem is. Part of it may be an instinctive aversion to certain animé-style graphics. This is an aesthetic that usually involves, say, girls (and/or guys) with spiky hair wearing tight clothes and way-oversized boots (or souped-up Hextech combat gauntlets, in Vi's case). I've never been a fan of this aesthetic, but "Arcane" is based on a video game that was itself inspired by animé sensibilities.

Another problem has to be Jinx herself: as portrayed in the series (I have no idea how she is in the video game), Jinx really is a source of strife, chaos, and misery. Whether her intentions are good or bad, everything she does ends with someone getting hurt or killed. She truly is bad luck for all around her (even, ultimately, for her benefactor Silco). I thought young Powder was too whiny and weepy, and the more mature Jinx was too unhinged. The moment when Powder throws herself into Silco's arms and declares that Vi is no longer her sister (this is right after Vi slaps and abandons her) feels too abrupt, like when Anakin Skywalker suddenly falls to his knees and pledges himself to the teachings of Darth Sidious. However you slice it, Powder/Jinx is an annoying character, and despite so many fawning videos on YouTube exploring the complexities of her insanity and her volatile relationships with those around her, I found I couldn't connect with Jinx in any meaningful way. 

Yet another problem, strangely enough, comes from the relationship between the animation and the story. There's a scene at the end of the final episode of Season 1 in which a character launches a massively powerful weapon at Piltover's castle/fortress, where the city council meets. The animation, at that moment, makes it look as though the person launching the weapon gets vaporized during the launch, which would be a startlingly sudden end for an important main character. I'm pretty sure that Season 2 will reveal that this character has survived, but the animation seems to indicate otherwise, and that's frustrating. Come to think of it, many characters survive explosions in this story; only building collapses or bullets seem reliably to kill people.

I also felt that some of the show's most crucial concepts weren't dealt with very clearly: The Shimmer, for example, gets used by a terminally ill Viktor—along with Hextech—to restore some strength to his body. Together, The Shimmer and Hextech convert him at least partially into something like an android, taking over his leg and, I think, part of his torso. Why does this happen? Why those body parts? No idea. The volatile crystals powering the Hextech devices aren't very thoroughly explained; we see one device that behaves like a Rubik's Cube, facets twisting and turning in different directions as the device floats in a glow of energy. "Arcane" isn't joking about the arcane nature of magic: the magic itself is left frustratingly opaque. By the end of Season 1, all we really know is that the eldritch crystals function as energy sources that can power machines as well as portal technology that allows international trade to happen via teleportation. A basic story imperative, when magic is involved, is to lay out the magic's ground rules. This makes things both comprehensible and consistent. But "Arcane" doesn't bother to flesh out its central concept; it merely gives us a fancy light show.

Piltover and Zaun, too, aren't that well explained, either: they're apparently part of a much larger world, with rival countries like Noxia, ruled by the muscular Ambessa Medarda (Thomas). And this is a world that casually includes races that are either aliens or fantastical creatures. Is this world part of a galaxy of worlds? Is it part of a multiverse? The world-building here feels woefully incomplete, but maybe that's something that later seasons will clear up, or maybe the answers I seek lie in the video game.

To be clear, I have nothing but respect for what the writers and animators have done. I can see why there's been so much nerd commentary about the series, from both gamers and non-gamers. There's undeniably a lot to talk about in terms of the series's awesome visuals, complex characters, and interwoven story elements. But all of that said, I still wasn't as gripped by this story as I was by "Blue Eye Samurai." I'll be happy to watch Season 2 of "Arcane" whenever it comes out (Season 1 apparently took six years to produce, with later seasons to appear faster), but I don't yet know whether this is a show I'll be interested in all the way to the end.

Ultimately, "Arcane" gets my recommendation, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I might not be the series's target demographic.