Arcane

The show details friction between the privileged innovators of a steampunk city and the impoverished slums underneath it.

The Netflix animated series Arcane stars characters from and is set in the world of popular video game League of Legends, but nonplayers needn't care: Almost nothing about the show attempts to mimic the game. That's its genius.

Rather than just gamer fan service, the show offers a gripping, lush nine-part epic tragic drama about the painful friction between the privileged innovators of steampunk city Piltover and the impoverished, alchemy-fueled slums underneath it. Heroes and villains abound on both sides, and a core subplot involves attempts by the underdwellers to liberate themselves from the rule of a city that doesn't seem terribly interested in their needs.

The series strives not to take sides; it focuses instead on who is harmed by the value judgments that feed this struggle, how the trauma affects them, and how irreconcilable attitudes draw to an inescapably violent climax.

The animation, meanwhile, is jaw-droppingly high-quality, mixing strong, stylized storytelling with surprisingly realistic movement and expression. Hollywood studio execs should study Arcane before attempting any more game adaptations.

Comments

[Joe Friday]

Gee, another dystopic vision of the future - how original and how appealing to the common doom and gloom outlook of humans.

The 1st "Blade Runner" was set in 2019, and big surprise, the real 2019 LA was both better than that movie fantasy and better than the year it was made - 1981. The newer version of a few years back? Well, it is set again in the future and big surprise- everything is bleaker than in the 1st one, though in reality, everything got better and continues on that trajectory.

[MP]

Do you really want to see a movie about the real 2019 LA?

[Overt]

This is an interesting take, other than being wrong at every point.

Arcane is not a "dystopic vision of the future". It is an alternate world, in the Steampunk (or arcanepunk) genre, not Cyberpunk. If you were to strain really hard, the show's city, Piltover would be described as a 1930s era New York, in an alternate history where arcane magic and alchemy drive industry rather than chemistry and physics.

[mad.casual]

About the best, most objective assessment I've seen about Arcane anywhere. Other than the above, I would say the artwork is exceptionally good.

Other than that, it's not even as good, in a cultural/historical sense, as The Matrix, let alone Blade Runner, and will almost certainly be regarded as such.

The motivations and plotlines are so subjective, muddled, and even nonsensical that lots of people are projecting their good intentions/impressions on it and telling their friends it's good. It's better in virtually every regard cinematic and thematic/political than the alleged Ghostbusters movie between Ghostbusters 2 and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but pretty on-par with other woke-message (but totally not! I swear!) movies that nobody watched and or have already forgotten.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Let me guess. All the good guys (and womynx) have blue or pink hair and nose rings, while all the bad guys wear suits with skinny ties.

[Overt]

See my note below. This is a good one. You are right that the girls have colored hair. But one is a tough boxer chick who drives her little sister insane- despite being a protagonist- and the other is...an insane younger sister who blows up buildings.

There really are no good guys in this series. And really only one bad guy.

[mad.casual]

Even better. The burgeoning young, but misunderstood female officer is standing in a group of six other officers when a bomb goes off in front of them and brings part of the building down. All the others die and Officer Mary Sue survives and recovers in short order without permanent disablement or disfigurement. She subsequently goes on to have an 'are they or aren't they' relationship with another female main character within minutes of her setting foot on the wrong side of the tracks and in complete reversal of her buttoned-down, no-nonsense persona prior to that time.

In case you're thinking "With all the wonderfully stupid woke cake and icing crammed into just one character nothing could possibly be missing!" you'd be wrong. The cherry turns out to be that her parents were stodgy, socially-conservative aristocrats.

And that's just one, fairly normal (if more fantastic than Captain Kirk could be considered normal) character.

[mad.casual]

And I should be clear about my assessment: I saw it on Netflix and 'Noped' away from it for weeks until The Critical Drinker recommended it. I watched an episode in and equivocated between 'Nope' and 'But The Drinker recommended it.' so I watched about 5 episodes in and was back to 'Nope' and done. I gave it a chance. I really did. But to say it's not trope-riddled SJW messaging is like denying the weapon disappears from the Guard's hand in The Last Jedi.

[Overt]

Overall, I was very pleased with Arcane. It was a good example of a film that was obviously written from Liberal values without being Woke- It focused on women characters, but they weren't Mary Sues (c.f. Captain Marvel). Men and women were all flawed, and battling with their own particular demons.

The plot is ostensibly Liberal- about the class struggles between Elites and the Populace. But rather than your typical Hollywood trope of "Rich people are evil, and the poor are noble", nobody can be pigeon-holed in this series. Probably the most "Villain" like, and ruthless is on the side of the poor. Meanwhile the Rich aren't overtly evil, they are just too busy dealing with global politics to bother figuring out that the slums are being taken over by a ruthless drug lord who is fostering the divisions in the streets.

Indeed, the Elite vs Populace is just an echo of a more primal theme. This is a character-driven story about power dynamics in a relationship. Whether you are talking about a ruling class and a populace, big-brother and little-brother, big-sister and little-sister, drug-lord and slums, Ruling-queen vs Idealistic-Daughter- there is a common theme of the powerful being forced to make tough decisions, and the less powerful often paying the price, even if the decision was "right". This generally perpetuates divides that create cycles of violence.

On top of that, the production value of this series is fucking insane. Imagine Dragons did the opening theme, and Sting does an end song that was custom designed to highlight and accentuate the primary relationship between two sisters. This may not be Sting's best performance, but it captures this series perfectly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1klbTzBQpk

Too often, a spin off from video games is just a money grab- they use the name recognition from the game as a vessel for empty schlock with no point of view. But this series returned my faith in these sorts of projects. It showed that you can use name recognition to launch something different, and even risky.

Overt Approves.

[Stuck in California]

Serious question.

If it has nothing to do with a video game, why is it using characters and set in the world of a video game?

I... don't understand.

[mad.casual]

Because it's about a video game and social justice but they want to pretend it's not about a video game so the social justice message has gravitas and pretend it is about a video game because then it's not serious in pushing any given social justice message.

I expound further below but I'm pretty sure one picture can tell you everything you need to know.

[mad.casual]

The show details friction between the privileged innovators of a steampunk city and the impoverished slums underneath it.

Incorrect. The show details friction between privileged teen girls' conceptions of the world and reality. Nobody in Undercity (the slums of Piltover, brilliant right?) is depicted dying of starvation or disease or exposure or gets worked to death. Everybody in the poor part of town is depicted as fit, well-muscled, well-fed, or both. The only people not depicted as such are drug addicts (libertarian narrative-busting FTW, right?). The overwhelming majority are depicted sitting around in bars, gambling, playing games, or stealing. The 'oppressors' aren't depicted oppressing anyone until a building blows up and, even then, they aren't depicted as brownshirts gallivanting through the streets beating up Jews for being Jewish in public or running the homeless off the street so the wealthy don't have to see them, they're depicted as small teams using non-lethal force as part of interrogation tactics. Moreover, the 'elites' and the poor don't appear to be, in any way empirically divided. Indeed three of the elite characters weren't definitively elite at the beginning or prior to the story and all three became elite by different means. Two of them arguably just walked into their elite status. One of them explicitly from Undercity.

And foresaking the game to make a great show would be genius except the show actually hews pretty carefully to game mechanics. Henchman line up to get beat down by protagonists in a manner that makes kung fu films look organic and, by anime standards, is just retarded. Major protagonists and antagonists are generally equally matched regardless of any actual size, skill, or age because you can't have anyone's favorite character be more OP than the others, that would spoil the game. Whenever there is a mismatch, the main character literally picks up an item and, in some cases no way familiar to them or technological or magical, it makes them more powerful. But, again, only decisively more powerful than nameless henchmen but only marginally more powerful than their opponent. Like watching Rocky fight Drago and lose until the 4th round where, putting on Appollo's shoes, he's able to beat Drago after another 11 rounds.

Lest there be any argument about the shows brilliance, multiple explosives go off within arms reach of main characters multiple times without killing any of the main characters. And, to be clear, not "nobody dies when the grenade goes off" but, in writing that makes Star Trek's red shirts look well-written, the bomb goes off, brings down a portion of the building and kills a half dozen nameless people *except* the main character, who's back on her feet, without a limp or a scar, in weeks if not days.

For anyone who hasn't seen and may be confused about the utter stupidity and wokeness of this show, here's an exceedingly faithful depiction of one of the main character's mother. For anyone who has seen and is confused about the utter stupidity and wokeness of the show, all I can say is the show is abjectly, shot-through "Why can't wealthy people just give more of their wealth to the poor?" tripe. The best parts of the show are the parts where the wealthy are effectively ignoring the plight of the poor (and still raining prosperity down on them).

[bocsci2018]

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