I’m not a League of Legends player, not by a long shot. I played a couple rounds of DOTA with some friends several years ago and was very much a liability to my team. Figuring I wasn’t much for it, I never got into MOBAs when they became a big thing, checking out neither DOTA2 nor the incredibly popular and notoriously toxic League of Legends when they came out. When Arcane was released, I wasn’t initially interested — why would I care about an animated show based on League, a game I couldn’t be bothered about?
Word of its brilliant animation and plotting soon spread though and I did decide to check it out. And the rumors were true: the show is excellent. So good that I briefly wondered if maybe I should get into League — before remembering that League was, well, League and I am nowhere near competitive enough for it. Nonetheless, Arcane’s first season was awesome and ended on a wild cliffhanger that I waited three years to see resolved — along with all the other plots.
The second season comes out swinging. Over its nine episodes, the show continues plot lines, introduces wrinkles, and offers closure and catharsis for its threads. It fires on all cylinders as it hurtles into its finale with a climax that serves all its disparate storylines while managing to not lose any of the idiosyncrasies that made each compelling in the first place. Then it passes, the story ends, the conflict is resolved, but there’s still this nagging feeling that there’s more. That these characters aren’t quite done yet; that the day has been saved from this threat, but tensions still simmer. That’s there’s still more.
And then the credits roll.
And I love that that’s how it leaves us.
Endings are hard. How do you wrap up a story, especially one as epic and wide-ranging as Arcane? How do you bring the journey of nine-odd characters to a definite, satisfying end? Arcane avoids that definite conclusion in favor of focusing on concluding this central conflict while leaving the doors wide open. The threat at hand has been overcome, but there’s this lingering feeling that there’s more still yet to come. Even though we defeated the final boss, things are hardly over yet.
Arcane’s ending (which I’m being deliberately vague about), reminded me a lot of the endings to many Final Fantasy games. When Sephiroth is defeated in VII the planet is saved, but we don’t know where it leaves the main characters (least not until Advent Children came out). In XVI the world is saved, but Clive and Joshua are missing and the kingdoms of Valistheaare left to rebuild into an unknown new. You get the feeling that these characters have gone on a journey and though there’s more to come, this story is over.
Vitally, in these games — as with Arcane — we don’t really need a sequel. We’ve spent enough time exploring the world of these characters that we can guess and imagine what might come next, even if we can’t really know for certain. But we do know that there are more stories to be told and more questions to be answered. Vi, Jinx, Ekko, Cait, and the others have finished this story and will begin a new one we won’t be privy to. It’s a fantastic choice for an ending, offering a conclusion without trying to tie a bow on a messy story. More than anything, though, it leaves me wanting more, more of these characters and their adventures. But not quite enough for me to get into League.
Essays, Not Rants! 