So while I'm trying to take a break from Arcane fandom after my disappointment with Season 2 I had this thought and it wouldn't be fair to deprive people of it.
When S2 Act 1 aired, there was a tweet I saw expressing concern about Caitlyn knowing the location of Ekko and the Firelights' tree haven and worrying if that might lead to trouble.
That was never going to happen. Caitlyn's Evil Turn was motivated entirely by wanting to go after Jinx.
Last time Caitlyn saw Ekko and Jinx together, Ekko was fighting Jinx off to give her and Vi time to escape.
So as far as Caitlyn knew, Jinx was not welcome at the Firelights' hideout, so it was never at risk from her - why would she bother looking at the one place she knew Jinx wouldn't be?
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So I was torn on whether or not to do this, as my internal debate was "is it worth it to dwell on the negatives" or do I want to ... not do that and try to focus on the positives. But I saw another Tumblr post talking about the same things I was feeling and it was very cathartic for me to see someone else thinking the same things I do, so I will commit this to pen and share it to the world in the hopes it shares the same healing.
So here's all my beef with Arcane Season 2, in one place for your location.
We needed a Season 3. It's already been confirmed Arcane gets the two seasons, then we go off to somewhere else. But the latter half of Season 2 had so many misfires. And this is all we get. If we had another season, there'd have been more room for error, and the errors we DO get wouldn't drag the whole experience down as much.
The alternate universe makes no damn sense if you think about it too hard. Okay, sure, maybe Powder doesn't become Jinx if Vi is too dead to abandon her, but how does that any of that make Silco NOT try to kill Vander? Silco wasn't mad Vander tried to kill him (mostly) - he was mad Vander tried to kill him, sure, but what really set him off was that Vander started making deals with Piltover.
"I hated you then. But you still had my respect. Until you started making peace with them." (or however it went)
Vi's emotional state is tied too much into Vander. When she realizes Warwick is Vander, she nearly completely lets go of her grudges against Jinx. But Jinx killed Caitlyn's mother and kidnapped Vi herself once - AND Jinx still killed Mylo and Claggor because she didn't listen to Vi. And Vi's breakdown crying fighting Vander in the finale makes her out to be such a codependent unstable person.
Fuck the Noxians. This was supposed to be Vi and Jinx and Zaun and Piltover's story. The story of Piltover versus Zaun. Instead we got an uplifting (read, centrist) story of Piltover and Zaun coming together against an external threat.
Sevika got sidelined. Yes, she got to be a Councilor in the end, but she had such chemistry with both Vi and Jinx, and more of this season, of this story, should have been how she interacted with both sisters.
Ambessa is a boring invincible villain, and everything Silco wasn't in Season 1. Silco got caught off-foot. People did things that surprised him. Vi being alive is a shock to him as much as it is to Jinx. Ambessa, meanwhile, the only 'setback' she receives is Vanderwick's rampage through the prison, and even that becomes a positive for her as she goes 'yo I want one of those.' She doesn't even raise an eyebrow about Mel's disappearance.
We should have gotten interactions between Ekko and Vi. It's all about Timebomb, but given how Ekko reacted to Jinx becoming Jinx, we ought to have seen how he reacted to knowing Vi signed up to be an Enforcer.
Caitlyn should have done something horrible on-screen. In Episode 8, Vi accuses her of listening to Ambessa, but all we actually see Caitlyn ... DO is sit angrily at a desk while the Noxians and Enforcers harass the people in Zaun. Something the Enforcers were ... already doing. She should have been the one who spotted that one Jinxer at that checkpoint, not Rictus.
Also fuck Rictus. We didn't come here for the Ambessa and Rictus show. We came here for Jinx and Vi and Caitlyn show. (And Jayce and Viktor, I guess).
Jinx should have been allowed to do her self-termination on her own. Keep in mind, in real life, it is ALWAYS correct to try and stop someone from un-aliving.
But in the context of the fate of a fictional character, given everything Jinx had been through, it made sense for her to blow herself up. All her life she's only ever wanted to be good for something, to be useful, to be loved, and she keeps messing up and hurting people - it would have been cathartic for her to finally hurt one last person - herself - and in so doing spare others from further pain.
Isha's storyline was tropey and uninspired. Isha herself is a darling, of course, but the way the narrative choice was "Jinx ends up adopting a child" in order to motivate her to come out of her hiding hole ... when Sevika was right there ... rubs me the wrong way. And it's not like Jinx hadn't suffered ENOUGH losses and grief! Oh wait! She totally did!
And if we had to put up with all this nonsense ... could we at least have gotten the uncensored version of Caitlyn and Vi's sex scene?
Making Arcane canon is also dumb for League of Legends what with the whole "Vi is not an Enforcer by the end" and "Caitlyn LOSES a freaking eye." Because that's a cool thing for a What If in a multi-versal storytelling. It's a little hard to buy into that as the Raw, Default Canon.
And look ... I think Arcane Season 1 was a perfect story. It was always going to be a tough act to follow. My first reaction when Season 2 was announced was dread and apprehension, because there didn't seem to be anywhere they could go that didn't make the whole thing worse - it should have been just the Season One and Done. And you know what? I was very right!
Also: this is way more subjective but I didn't think the songs were as good as in Season 1. Wasteland just doesn't hit as hard as What Could Have Been IMO.
The problem is that in aggregate, our favorites' stories is about someone else. Vi's story is about Caitlyn and Vander. Jinx's story is about Isha. Ekko's story is about Jinx.
And that's doubly annoying when coming out of Season 1, some of my biggest wonders were what Vi and Jinx looked like when they had to self-actualize and become their own persons. Jinx removed Silco and (tried to) remove any chance of recouncilng with Vi. Vi was told in no uncertain terms Powder was gone. So without Powder for Vi to fixate on rescuing, or Silco for Jinx to want to impress … who were they, deep down?
Season 2 took this question and dodged it entirely by giving them both new characters to be dependent on - Vander and Isha.
In Season 1, when Vi said "someday this city" would respect her and Powder, I assumed that was ironic foreshadowing for how Powder would become Jinx and Vi would become an Enforcer - that they'd get that respect, but they both abandon what was originally important to them in the process. That … sort of happend with Jinx, but not with Vi.
And like I said before this wouldn't sting so bad if Riot would just adopt a Comics/Multiverse approach. If this was just ONE Jinx and Vi story, and if we didn't like it, hey, maybe that new marvel tie-in "Jinx and Vi: First Blood" or whatever coming out in May will be more our cup of tea. But no. We don't get that. One Runeterra, right? Everything in the same canon forever.
I guess what I wanted out of Season 2 was for Vi's story of monstrousness to go with Jinx's in Season 1. 1 is the story of Powder becoming Jinx. 2 should have been the story of Vi, the street orphan, becoming Vi, the Enforcer, and how she lost her way becoming what Piltover needed to fight against Jinx. Instead, what happens is that she does one stint and then goes off to get drunk when her girlfriend has a hissy fit.
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So I was torn on whether or not to do this, as my internal debate was "is it worth it to dwell on the negatives" or do I want to ... not do that and try to focus on the positives. But I saw another Tumblr post talking about the same things I was feeling and it was very cathartic for me to see someone else thinking the same things I do, so I will commit this to pen and share it to the world in the hopes it shares the same healing.
So here's all my beef with Arcane Season 2, in one place for your location.
We needed a Season 3. It's already been confirmed Arcane gets the two seasons, then we go off to somewhere else. But the latter half of Season 2 had so many misfires. And this is all we get. If we had another season, there'd have been more room for error, and the errors we DO get wouldn't drag the whole experience down as much.
The alternate universe makes no damn sense if you think about it too hard. Okay, sure, maybe Powder doesn't become Jinx if Vi is too dead to abandon her, but how does that any of that make Silco NOT try to kill Vander? Silco wasn't mad Vander tried to kill him (mostly) - he was mad Vander tried to kill him, sure, but what really set him off was that Vander started making deals with Piltover.
"I hated you then. But you still had my respect. Until you started making peace with them." (or however it went)
Vi's emotional state is tied too much into Vander. When she realizes Warwick is Vander, she nearly completely lets go of her grudges against Jinx. But Jinx killed Caitlyn's mother and kidnapped Vi herself once - AND Jinx still killed Mylo and Claggor because she didn't listen to Vi. And Vi's breakdown crying fighting Vander in the finale makes her out to be such a codependent unstable person.
Fuck the Noxians. This was supposed to be Vi and Jinx and Zaun and Piltover's story. The story of Piltover versus Zaun. Instead we got an uplifting (read, centrist) story of Piltover and Zaun coming together against an external threat.
Sevika got sidelined. Yes, she got to be a Councilor in the end, but she had such chemistry with both Vi and Jinx, and more of this season, of this story, should have been how she interacted with both sisters.
Ambessa is a boring invincible villain, and everything Silco wasn't in Season 1. Silco got caught off-foot. People did things that surprised him. Vi being alive is a shock to him as much as it is to Jinx. Ambessa, meanwhile, the only 'setback' she receives is Vanderwick's rampage through the prison, and even that becomes a positive for her as she goes 'yo I want one of those.' She doesn't even raise an eyebrow about Mel's disappearance.
We should have gotten interactions between Ekko and Vi. It's all about Timebomb, but given how Ekko reacted to Jinx becoming Jinx, we ought to have seen how he reacted to knowing Vi signed up to be an Enforcer.
Caitlyn should have done something horrible on-screen. In Episode 8, Vi accuses her of listening to Ambessa, but all we actually see Caitlyn ... DO is sit angrily at a desk while the Noxians and Enforcers harass the people in Zaun. Something the Enforcers were ... already doing. She should have been the one who spotted that one Jinxer at that checkpoint, not Rictus.
Also fuck Rictus. We didn't come here for the Ambessa and Rictus show. We came here for Jinx and Vi and Caitlyn show. (And Jayce and Viktor, I guess).
Jinx should have been allowed to do her self-termination on her own. Keep in mind, in real life, it is ALWAYS correct to try and stop someone from un-aliving.
But in the context of the fate of a fictional character, given everything Jinx had been through, it made sense for her to blow herself up. All her life she's only ever wanted to be good for something, to be useful, to be loved, and she keeps messing up and hurting people - it would have been cathartic for her to finally hurt one last person - herself - and in so doing spare others from further pain.
Isha's storyline was tropey and uninspired. Isha herself is a darling, of course, but the way the narrative choice was "Jinx ends up adopting a child" in order to motivate her to come out of her hiding hole ... when Sevika was right there ... rubs me the wrong way. And it's not like Jinx hadn't suffered ENOUGH losses and grief! Oh wait! She totally did!
And if we had to put up with all this nonsense ... could we at least have gotten the uncensored version of Caitlyn and Vi's sex scene?
Making Arcane canon is also dumb for League of Legends what with the whole "Vi is not an Enforcer by the end" and "Caitlyn LOSES a freaking eye." Because that's a cool thing for a What If in a multi-versal storytelling. It's a little hard to buy into that as the Raw, Default Canon.
And look ... I think Arcane Season 1 was a perfect story. It was always going to be a tough act to follow. My first reaction when Season 2 was announced was dread and apprehension, because there didn't seem to be anywhere they could go that didn't make the whole thing worse - it should have been just the Season One and Done. And you know what? I was very right!
Also: this is way more subjective but I didn't think the songs were as good as in Season 1. Wasteland just doesn't hit as hard as What Could Have Been IMO.
So we're getting teasers for the best show adapted from a MOBA that you can watch on Netflix getting its second season and a release date of November 24. Just today we got a little teaser clip so here's my hopes and dreams and fears for Arcane Season 2.
HOPES
Vander being Warwick.
Caitlyn and Vi relationship
A logical progression for how Vi turns from where she was at the start of Arcane into how she is in League in a way that's missing from her compared to most of the other characters. You can watch Arcane and imagine how Jinx in Arcane changes into Jinx in League of Legends, or how Caitlyn does or Viktor does - you might have to make some inference and assumptions, but the arc is trackable in way that is just … not with Vi. How does someone hurt by Piltover's systems so much became a person who works for those systems? Someone who fights because she has to into someone who revels in violence and power? From a loving sister whose every motivation is reuniting with her sister to an Enforcer who just beats people up?
The flashback they've mentioned in interviews of Ekko trying to rescue Powder from Silco because that seems like a formative experience for how their relationship is in the modern day.
My girls Renata Glasc and Seraphine, even if it justs cameos.
OPTIONAL: Vi and Jinx teaming up to fight or subdue Warwick and this allowing them to heal their trauma by proxy (but propbably too optimistic for this series).
Exploration of Vi and Caitlyn's relationship. Ideally with kissing and or even sex. Just something that makes it unambigously clear they are gay in a way that bigots can't point to and say "It's ambigious!!!!"
More story with Sevika. I saw a theory floated online that Sevika was concieved of as way to give Vi a big fight at the end without her fighting Jinx because the writers decided their relationship wasn't quite at the point where she and Jinx would have this all-out, dragout, knock-down brawl, and I'd be really sad if they spent as much time allowing Sevika to exist and to serve as a rival to Vi only for them to dump her in a closet or kill her off cheaply as the story zeros in on how Vi and Jinx become mortal enemies.
Jinx hallucinating Silco the way she does Mylo and Claggor.
FEARS
Timebomb or Ekko becoming Jinx's boyfriend, and espcially not any sort of arc where Ekko's love redeems or reforms Jinx in any way
Orianna being Singed's daughter. At first I liked this idea by after a blog-post by Orianna super-fan (here) I'm off it.
Jinx getting a boyfriend at all, really. Her story has enough drama without a shoe-horned romance plot!
Caitlyn and Vi being queer-baited and doing lots of yearning looks that look good in an AMV but not actually progressing their relationship in any meaningful way.
Vi getting amnesia. In at least some versions of League story (and League of Legends has a … let's say loose relationship with things like canon and continuity), Vi's League story involves her losing her memories before mysteriously re-appearing as a Piltover Enforcer. This is an example of a broader trend of League of Legends' approach to storytelling that makes a lot of things ambigious or mysterious (cough, so they can make it up later or change their minds). But Vi losing her memories in Arcane would be such a lazy cheap way to effectively give her an identity death in order to force her to fit into the contour of League Vi without doing any of the character building or dramatic work to explore or explain how someone goes from poor orphan to collared criminal to an Enforcer and I just really hope they don't do it!
Skye taunting Viktor in the form of hallucinations that egg him on towards his eventually fall and turn to robotic villainy. Not that it wouldn't be in-keeping with the series as it stands (both Vi and Jinx see people who aren't there), but Skye being oblierated was such an obvious fridging-manpain moment that I don't want to be reminded about it, and I've never really watched the reboot of Battlestar Galactica until it was doing re-runs on streaming but there's a character in there whose whole thing is being a hot sexy succubus projected into someone's mind (and remember that's a sci-fi story) and it was so stupid and tropey that I just don't want to see anything similiar. This may not be Arcane's fault but man. I don't want them to go there!
Likewise on the note of Sevika, I don't want to see her just unceremoniously killed off in the first three episodes just to make room for the Jinx/Vi rivalry.
Some sort of redemption for Jinx that involves her dying or sacrificing herself. It's 2023! 2024 when this comes out! Support women's wrongs! If you ARE going to let her have a redemption, don't take the coward's way out!
AMBIVALENT
Viktor completing his transformation from sickly man seeking cure for his ilnness to a robotic terrorist who thinks everybody should become a robot.
Shimmer being linked to the Void. This is a theory I've see floated around due to some visuals in the scene where Viktor introduces Shimmer to the Hexcore. I don't really care if this pans out or not.
Some people might want to
Whether Cassandra dies. It'd be strange for her to die but Jayce and Viktor to survive (and you know those two will because they are Named Characters) but for Cassandra to die in the same room. It'd provive angst and tension between Caitlyn, Jinx and Vi, sure, but Caitlyn already has reason enough to want to arrest Jinx even if her own mother doesn't die directly from the missile.
Whether Camille shows up. Given the focus on conflict between Piltover and Zaun, it's a logical step to have the walking embodiment of Piltover's oppression show up, but I don't feel like she needs to be present.
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broke: Boromir was corrupted by the ring because he was weak of heart
woke: Boromir was corrupted because his heart was full. full of love for his brother, for Gondor, for Minas Tirith. Does that make his heart weak? Does a heart motivated by passions and the desire to help others make it weak? Is it wrong and evil to be weak? friendly reminder, the way Sauron deceived Boromir was not by promising him wealth, nor power, nor his own safety- he thought he would be strong enough to defend a whole city and defeat Sauron. Boromir had a heart that was neither weak nor strong, but both at the same time- his heart was full.
Who’s reading comprehension is SO BAD that they read about the tragedy of Boromir giving into the temptation of the Ring and they thought “Ah, Boromir is weak of heart and easily swayed and Inferior”, and not the intended “Boromir was corrupted by the Ring because that is how the Ring works - by subverting and corrupting good souls.”
It's hilarious to me when people complain about AO3 and its policies, and what they allow on the site - but it's ESPECIALLY funny when people complain like "Why can't the freaks make their own site and just go there?"
Sweetie... AO3 is the site for that. Y'all invaded our space.
Wattpad and FFN still exist. Go there. They're as shitty and G-rated as you want. You can't have the luxuries that AO3 offers if you're gonna be a little bitch about its policies. Imagine walking into a strip club and complaining about the alcohol and naked ladies when there's a god damn Dennys next door you could have gone to. Christ.
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