Thank you for voicing these critiques. I have seen soooooo many people decide to turn their brain off and look at the pretty colors for this season, disregarding the meticulous work that went into season 1. This season is just Rings of Power.
I think you’re likely right about the team loosing interest in Arcane and they wanted to move on to the other projects/series that’s planned for the league of legends universe. For me I do wish that Ambessa, the black rose, and Mel’s powers would’ve been deleted from s2 so the other characters arcs could have more time to breathe. Like Vi and Cait needed the most time imo but they were barely on the screen this season.
While your theory is impossible to prove, it makes a lot of sense. Even over the course of season 2 it feels like the writers lose interest in their main characters, Jinx and Vi. By the end of the season they are very much side characters with little influence on the plot, unlike season one where each decision they make, even though these decisions are for relatively small, personal reasons, are earth shaking in their repercussions for the city. While this is an ensemble cast, Jinx and Vi were always at the heart of the story in season 1. It doesn't feel right to wrap up what we were told was "their story" by sidelining them.
A few things to mentio here: 1) Don't use EFAP as a good example of critic for season 2. I've been more disappointed by their terrible civerage than the writting issues of the season. As a watcher of their channel aince 2018 I've never seen them making a worse review of a production. 2) Avoid words like "catastrophic" for it. This isn't Last of Us 2 or other cases where the story was destroyed by the sequel. I know EFAP love to use such terms but it ahows how theor perspective has been fucked through the coverage of so much trash they can't be objective when criticising a story that simply lacked the screentime to deleop more organically.
I also think season 2 was plot-driven rather character-driven. I just couldn’t understand Jinx in this season. Her actions didn’t align with her motivations or experiences from season 1. There's no way she'd have worked with Vi after that dinner scene. Powder died then, and I was expecting Jinx to be more like her video game counterpart. I'm also upset about the direction they took Caitlyn in. I think she would’ve been a great antagonist if she went all the way. After ep 3, I really thought she was going be dictator/tyrant-type character and would wage all-out war against the Undercity. That would be very interesting to see as Vi would stuck squarely in between Caitlyn and Jinx. The only thing redeeming this season for me is Victor, Jayce and Ekko's characters. I really enjoyed Victor's development, and Jayce's sacrifice. They took centre stage this season, rather then Jinx and Vi. But even then, some parts felt indulgent, almost fanfiction-y. Like the reunion between Jinx, Vi and Vander, Caitlyn and Vi's relationship depite how badly they fought, and even Ekko's alternate reality. They all felt too good and didn’t feel natural. I think the creators already had an ending in mind, and sacrificing character was the only way to get there. And they added these sweet moments to make up for it. If they wrote this based on characters rather than plot, I think the ending would be a lot different.
Ironically if they wrote it on characters, most of those "fanfic-y" moments would have worked out just fine if not better. Because there's a reason Ekko stopped punching Jinx on the bridge in Season 1. There's a reason Caitlin "folded" to Vi. But those reasons had to be cut out to make room for the pulp that nobody asked for.
That's the thing. Powder DIDN'T die even if Jinx wanted her to. Jinx is BOTH powder and jinx. They are the same person not that much of separate entities which is what Ekko and Vi realise in season 2. Her actions do definitely align with her motivation,experiences and character. It's not like Jinx would suddenly just stop loving Vi after she decided to make that decision. Things don't work like that. As for your point about many things being like fanfiction I mean it's 50/50. I don't see fanfiction being like that.
Exactly what I was thinking. Also too much magic and forced fan baiting. Season 1 was so simple but heavy, this season was too much forcing things and awful pacing
The quickest summation one can make is "Arcane Season 1 was Dragon Ball Z, and Season 2 was Kai." It is the fastest way to summarize how each act was a vignette separated by months if not years. But even worse than just simply being Kai is being Kai but introducing new plot elements. We didn't at all need the black roses, which takes the story's actual focus on Piltover/Zaun and sends it across the water to some other plot we don't even know about. Ambessa could have just as easily been a power-crazed tyrant WITHOUT it. Further, we don't even see an actual resolve TO Piltover/Zaun. The whole backbone of the show.
@@fettel1988 I agree the plot became convoluted with unnecessary story elements. In fact the whole Piltover/Zaun conflict is subverted in favor of the Ambessa/Victor plot line.
@@RebelNormal It's not just that. It's a matter of confusing "Show, don't tell" as "Don't Show, and Don't Tell". I've seen more than enough media in my life to fill in the gaps myself, and while most things are answered if you pay close attention...fact of the matter is, everything is almost exclusively shown in a matter of "the beginning" and then "the end". It's why I equate the disparity of the seasons as being like DBZ Kai. Kai cuts all the "fat" out of Z and gives us the cliff notes version of the narrative. The problem is, seasoned consumers of media aren't drawn by flash, but substance. Something Season 1 of Arcane had in abundance. It's why most all of us cared.
I honestly think you're wrong about this. Having watched and rewatched both seasons 1 and 2 multiple times, I don't see some huge drop off in quality or efficiency of writing between the two seasons. The writing in Season 2 is still extremely tight and compact, and you can easily find interpretations that make sense of the story. I think the executives, well above the writing staff in authority, said, "Yeah, it's gonna be 2 seasons, period, end of story," and the writers had to try to compress at least a few extra episodes worth of content into just a second 9 episode season, when it would've been better served by being 12 or 15 episodes instead, if they were maintaining the pacing and writing density/efficiency of season 1. As a result, Season 2 is SO dense, and SO tightly written, that if you miss momentary details that just blaze on by, you can miss important details that flesh out the subtext of scenes and help a lot with understanding the flow of the story, and some things that really should've been shown are just implied and left to your imagination instead, which is literally implying a story instead of showing/telling it, and that's not okay. I honestly don't understand at all why you went on for half this video about the writing of season 2 not being as efficient, when if anything, the exact opposite problem is the case, it's SO efficient and so packed with detail that it's frankly too much to ask for people to keep up, especially on a first viewing. There may be an element of the writing team wanting to move on to other things, but given how much they've talked in interviews about various other scenes and things that they wanted to include but just simply ran out of time, I think it's far more likely they were being forced to work inside the constraints of the Riot executives, in which case they actually did a remarkable job within those circumstances. I think pretty much all the major criticisms of Arcane season 2 can be boiled down to 3 categories: Category 1: Critic simply doesn't understand or doesn't like the direction the characters went in, and can't accept that it didn't follow their preconceived notions of how they think it should go, despite the fact that the directions the characters did take are, for the most part, perfectly legitimate. There's a couple that are legitimately difficult to make any actual sense of, and may very well just plain not work right, but I've generally found that most of the character arcs in S2 that people complain about are simply a case where what they think the character arc should've been is either based on a misunderstanding or oversimplification of the initial character arc to begin with, and the show's take is actually by far more realistic and believable than the alternatives I've seen suggested. For just one example, the people who say "Oh, I was expecting after Season 1 Jinx would now be the big bad, and go completely crazy bomber like in original League Lore" are in my opinion actually demonstrating that they have far less understanding of and respect for Jinx and the issues, struggles, and mental state her character in Arcane is dealing with than the actual show-writers clearly do. Category 2: Critic complains about pacing. This is totally legitimate. Everyone is complaining about the pacing. The _writing team_ is not-so-subtly complaining about the pacing by repeatedly mentioning the runtime constraints that they had to work with. Most of the actual, objectively measurable problems with S2 can be boiled down to "I wish they'd actually shown 'X, Y and Z' on-screen instead of simply using details and subtext that people might easily miss in order to imply it, with varying degrees of success." Even the out of nowhere Maddie betrayal has some subtle hints pointing to it that people might miss on a first viewing, but that they might pick up on with a rewatch, even beyond just the obvious "professional entanglements" comment from Ambessa. Even so, that's definitely one of the clearest examples of the "They needed to show more of this on screen, rather than using nearly invisible details and subtext to foreshadow it that most people will miss, especially on a first viewing" issue. Category 3: Critic complains about lack of thematic focus. I haven't seen as much of people talking about this, but it is there. Why did the civil war in a divided city plot get essentially set aside, to be replaced and cheaply "resolved" by animated Avengers Age of Ultron? What was up with the Black Rose subplot basically in its entirety? Obviously, it's setup for future projects, but why did that need to be in an already overcrowded Arcane S2? Plus, there's just a couple of scenes, not many, just a couple, where I had to ask myself, "Why are they spending extra screentime on _this_ thing when they could be using their already constrained time to focus on this _other_ thing instead, and nothing that actually progresses the story or characters would be lost?" I also see these complaints as legitimate. The season 2 finale doesn't completely lose focus on what makes the show great, the theme is never completely derailed and set aside, but it's derailed and diverted _enough_ that I was pretty numb to a decent portion of the final episode. The resolution between Jayce and Viktor was excellent in most if not all ways as far as I could see, a lot of the stuff between Vi and Jinx was great, though perhaps not quite _as_ great as the rest of the story between the sisters, seeing Ekko get his moment was freaking _awesome_ and totally deserved for him... but the big invasion of Noxus causing the reunification of the two cities... ...I did not care. That is not what I signed up for, and was a cheap resolution of the extremely grounded and complex conflict between Piltover and Zaun that was brilliantly fleshed out in season 1, which was also relegated to being more of a backdrop afterthought in season 2. That, more than anything else, is my greatest disappointment in Season 2. All that being said, though, I'd still personally rate Arcane Season 2 as an overall 8.5 out of 10, with everything up to the final 2 episodes being a 9 out of 10, and the last 2 being a 7 or 7.5 out of 10. Which is exceedingly disappointing when Season 1 was an 11/10 for me, but still an overall great showing that is better than most other shows that I've seen. When Season 2 is combined with Season 1, Arcane as a whole gets a 9.5 out of 10 from me. But that's just my opinion, and you're free to have yours as well.
I am currently rewatching season 2 to see if I am not insane as well. Act 1 was better written than I remembered from my first watch but Act 2 definitely felt rushed. I haven't completed Act 3 yet but I reach the same conclusion. They needed more time. The episodes needed to be longer. Act finales needed to be even longer than the other episodes. The new characters needed to ve fleshed out better and the transitions of the main characters needed more to feel organic. Important discussions were never made. Sevika never confronted Jinx for killing Silco and causing all this mes, Heimer and Jayce never mentioned Jayce betraying his master in season 1. Caitlyn betraying Ambessa causes a war but no one in Piltover blames her. We are missing connecting scenes and I think the show should have pushed for an extended edition. LotR is now the extended version. No one remembers the theatricals and I don't understand why they didn't try to go for this route. Make the Netflix version and release the Blue Ray in 6 months or something. I am more pissed off with the missing potential here because I really liked the season and the story. I just need to fill the blanks and have in my mind a more complete version that doesn't exist. At the very least they should release at some point the extended final episode because the demand for it is pretty big.
Considering what Jinx did at the end of season one, it's obvious why people assumed that she'd be the Big Bad of the second season. It's a logical next step for her character and is a bit closer to the LOL version.
@@prufan It is logical, until you stop and think about Jinx's actual deepest motivations, which to their credit, is what the Arcane writers did. She's always, ALWAYS, only been trying to help those she cares about, desperately clinging to them for love and approval. After season 1, Jinx fully believes that there is _no one left_ who cares about the real her, and is fully aware that it's _all her fault._ She lashes out against the Council in a fit of rage, and grief, and honoring her father's memory as much as she can, but after that... her primary motivator for doing anything, her loved ones, are either dead or unreachable, and it's her fault. Jayce was willing to throw himself from a building as a result of _far less_ emotional anguish, Jinx sinking into an apathetic despair makes _perfect_ sense, and is honestly something of a best-case scenario for her. Going cheerfully unhinged wildly active mad bomber in line with her original LoL portrayal is _possible,_ and maybe even somewhat plausible, but doesn't fit nearly as well with the character as portrayed in Season 1 as what they chose to do in Season 2 instead does, when you really stop and think about it.
I wish they continue story of arcane season 1 not this rubbish ambussa jayce vi. Jinx take over zaun broken jinx still broken and become conflict of piltover and zaune. What ever build from season 1 it all gone to bin. Arcane season 2 is just one cheap writing
Season 1 had some minor and major flaws as well. The issue for me is that many of the criticis that rip season 2 apart are completely blind to the issues of season 1 as if acknowledging the 5% that is bad means they are not allowed to like the 95% of it that is great.
Thank you for voicing these critiques. I have seen soooooo many people decide to turn their brain off and look at the pretty colors for this season, disregarding the meticulous work that went into season 1. This season is just Rings of Power.
That is a terrible comparison.
I think you’re likely right about the team loosing interest in Arcane and they wanted to move on to the other projects/series that’s planned for the league of legends universe. For me I do wish that Ambessa, the black rose, and Mel’s powers would’ve been deleted from s2 so the other characters arcs could have more time to breathe. Like Vi and Cait needed the most time imo but they were barely on the screen this season.
Ambessa should've been deleted from season 1
While your theory is impossible to prove, it makes a lot of sense. Even over the course of season 2 it feels like the writers lose interest in their main characters, Jinx and Vi. By the end of the season they are very much side characters with little influence on the plot, unlike season one where each decision they make, even though these decisions are for relatively small, personal reasons, are earth shaking in their repercussions for the city.
While this is an ensemble cast, Jinx and Vi were always at the heart of the story in season 1. It doesn't feel right to wrap up what we were told was "their story" by sidelining them.
A few things to mentio here:
1) Don't use EFAP as a good example of critic for season 2. I've been more disappointed by their terrible civerage than the writting issues of the season. As a watcher of their channel aince 2018 I've never seen them making a worse review of a production.
2) Avoid words like "catastrophic" for it. This isn't Last of Us 2 or other cases where the story was destroyed by the sequel. I know EFAP love to use such terms but it ahows how theor perspective has been fucked through the coverage of so much trash they can't be objective when criticising a story that simply lacked the screentime to deleop more organically.
I also think season 2 was plot-driven rather character-driven. I just couldn’t understand Jinx in this season. Her actions didn’t align with her motivations or experiences from season 1. There's no way she'd have worked with Vi after that dinner scene. Powder died then, and I was expecting Jinx to be more like her video game counterpart. I'm also upset about the direction they took Caitlyn in. I think she would’ve been a great antagonist if she went all the way. After ep 3, I really thought she was going be dictator/tyrant-type character and would wage all-out war against the Undercity. That would be very interesting to see as Vi would stuck squarely in between Caitlyn and Jinx. The only thing redeeming this season for me is Victor, Jayce and Ekko's characters. I really enjoyed Victor's development, and Jayce's sacrifice. They took centre stage this season, rather then Jinx and Vi. But even then, some parts felt indulgent, almost fanfiction-y. Like the reunion between Jinx, Vi and Vander, Caitlyn and Vi's relationship depite how badly they fought, and even Ekko's alternate reality. They all felt too good and didn’t feel natural. I think the creators already had an ending in mind, and sacrificing character was the only way to get there. And they added these sweet moments to make up for it. If they wrote this based on characters rather than plot, I think the ending would be a lot different.
Ironically if they wrote it on characters, most of those "fanfic-y" moments would have worked out just fine if not better. Because there's a reason Ekko stopped punching Jinx on the bridge in Season 1. There's a reason Caitlin "folded" to Vi. But those reasons had to be cut out to make room for the pulp that nobody asked for.
That's the thing.
Powder DIDN'T die even if Jinx wanted her to.
Jinx is BOTH powder and jinx.
They are the same person not that much of separate entities which is what Ekko and Vi realise in season 2.
Her actions do definitely align with her motivation,experiences and character.
It's not like Jinx would suddenly just stop loving Vi after she decided to make that decision.
Things don't work like that.
As for your point about many things being like fanfiction I mean it's 50/50.
I don't see fanfiction being like that.
Exactly what I was thinking. Also too much magic and forced fan baiting. Season 1 was so simple but heavy, this season was too much forcing things and awful pacing
Viktor character got butchered
The quickest summation one can make is "Arcane Season 1 was Dragon Ball Z, and Season 2 was Kai." It is the fastest way to summarize how each act was a vignette separated by months if not years.
But even worse than just simply being Kai is being Kai but introducing new plot elements. We didn't at all need the black roses, which takes the story's actual focus on Piltover/Zaun and sends it across the water to some other plot we don't even know about. Ambessa could have just as easily been a power-crazed tyrant WITHOUT it. Further, we don't even see an actual resolve TO Piltover/Zaun. The whole backbone of the show.
@@fettel1988 I agree the plot became convoluted with unnecessary story elements. In fact the whole Piltover/Zaun conflict is subverted in favor of the Ambessa/Victor plot line.
@@RebelNormal It's not just that. It's a matter of confusing "Show, don't tell" as "Don't Show, and Don't Tell".
I've seen more than enough media in my life to fill in the gaps myself, and while most things are answered if you pay close attention...fact of the matter is, everything is almost exclusively shown in a matter of "the beginning" and then "the end".
It's why I equate the disparity of the seasons as being like DBZ Kai. Kai cuts all the "fat" out of Z and gives us the cliff notes version of the narrative. The problem is, seasoned consumers of media aren't drawn by flash, but substance. Something Season 1 of Arcane had in abundance. It's why most all of us cared.
I honestly think you're wrong about this. Having watched and rewatched both seasons 1 and 2 multiple times, I don't see some huge drop off in quality or efficiency of writing between the two seasons. The writing in Season 2 is still extremely tight and compact, and you can easily find interpretations that make sense of the story. I think the executives, well above the writing staff in authority, said, "Yeah, it's gonna be 2 seasons, period, end of story," and the writers had to try to compress at least a few extra episodes worth of content into just a second 9 episode season, when it would've been better served by being 12 or 15 episodes instead, if they were maintaining the pacing and writing density/efficiency of season 1. As a result, Season 2 is SO dense, and SO tightly written, that if you miss momentary details that just blaze on by, you can miss important details that flesh out the subtext of scenes and help a lot with understanding the flow of the story, and some things that really should've been shown are just implied and left to your imagination instead, which is literally implying a story instead of showing/telling it, and that's not okay. I honestly don't understand at all why you went on for half this video about the writing of season 2 not being as efficient, when if anything, the exact opposite problem is the case, it's SO efficient and so packed with detail that it's frankly too much to ask for people to keep up, especially on a first viewing. There may be an element of the writing team wanting to move on to other things, but given how much they've talked in interviews about various other scenes and things that they wanted to include but just simply ran out of time, I think it's far more likely they were being forced to work inside the constraints of the Riot executives, in which case they actually did a remarkable job within those circumstances. I think pretty much all the major criticisms of Arcane season 2 can be boiled down to 3 categories:
Category 1: Critic simply doesn't understand or doesn't like the direction the characters went in, and can't accept that it didn't follow their preconceived notions of how they think it should go, despite the fact that the directions the characters did take are, for the most part, perfectly legitimate. There's a couple that are legitimately difficult to make any actual sense of, and may very well just plain not work right, but I've generally found that most of the character arcs in S2 that people complain about are simply a case where what they think the character arc should've been is either based on a misunderstanding or oversimplification of the initial character arc to begin with, and the show's take is actually by far more realistic and believable than the alternatives I've seen suggested. For just one example, the people who say "Oh, I was expecting after Season 1 Jinx would now be the big bad, and go completely crazy bomber like in original League Lore" are in my opinion actually demonstrating that they have far less understanding of and respect for Jinx and the issues, struggles, and mental state her character in Arcane is dealing with than the actual show-writers clearly do.
Category 2: Critic complains about pacing. This is totally legitimate. Everyone is complaining about the pacing. The _writing team_ is not-so-subtly complaining about the pacing by repeatedly mentioning the runtime constraints that they had to work with. Most of the actual, objectively measurable problems with S2 can be boiled down to "I wish they'd actually shown 'X, Y and Z' on-screen instead of simply using details and subtext that people might easily miss in order to imply it, with varying degrees of success." Even the out of nowhere Maddie betrayal has some subtle hints pointing to it that people might miss on a first viewing, but that they might pick up on with a rewatch, even beyond just the obvious "professional entanglements" comment from Ambessa. Even so, that's definitely one of the clearest examples of the "They needed to show more of this on screen, rather than using nearly invisible details and subtext to foreshadow it that most people will miss, especially on a first viewing" issue.
Category 3: Critic complains about lack of thematic focus. I haven't seen as much of people talking about this, but it is there. Why did the civil war in a divided city plot get essentially set aside, to be replaced and cheaply "resolved" by animated Avengers Age of Ultron? What was up with the Black Rose subplot basically in its entirety? Obviously, it's setup for future projects, but why did that need to be in an already overcrowded Arcane S2? Plus, there's just a couple of scenes, not many, just a couple, where I had to ask myself, "Why are they spending extra screentime on _this_ thing when they could be using their already constrained time to focus on this _other_ thing instead, and nothing that actually progresses the story or characters would be lost?" I also see these complaints as legitimate. The season 2 finale doesn't completely lose focus on what makes the show great, the theme is never completely derailed and set aside, but it's derailed and diverted _enough_ that I was pretty numb to a decent portion of the final episode. The resolution between Jayce and Viktor was excellent in most if not all ways as far as I could see, a lot of the stuff between Vi and Jinx was great, though perhaps not quite _as_ great as the rest of the story between the sisters, seeing Ekko get his moment was freaking _awesome_ and totally deserved for him... but the big invasion of Noxus causing the reunification of the two cities... ...I did not care. That is not what I signed up for, and was a cheap resolution of the extremely grounded and complex conflict between Piltover and Zaun that was brilliantly fleshed out in season 1, which was also relegated to being more of a backdrop afterthought in season 2. That, more than anything else, is my greatest disappointment in Season 2.
All that being said, though, I'd still personally rate Arcane Season 2 as an overall 8.5 out of 10, with everything up to the final 2 episodes being a 9 out of 10, and the last 2 being a 7 or 7.5 out of 10. Which is exceedingly disappointing when Season 1 was an 11/10 for me, but still an overall great showing that is better than most other shows that I've seen. When Season 2 is combined with Season 1, Arcane as a whole gets a 9.5 out of 10 from me. But that's just my opinion, and you're free to have yours as well.
I am currently rewatching season 2 to see if I am not insane as well. Act 1 was better written than I remembered from my first watch but Act 2 definitely felt rushed. I haven't completed Act 3 yet but I reach the same conclusion. They needed more time. The episodes needed to be longer. Act finales needed to be even longer than the other episodes. The new characters needed to ve fleshed out better and the transitions of the main characters needed more to feel organic. Important discussions were never made. Sevika never confronted Jinx for killing Silco and causing all this mes, Heimer and Jayce never mentioned Jayce betraying his master in season 1. Caitlyn betraying Ambessa causes a war but no one in Piltover blames her. We are missing connecting scenes and I think the show should have pushed for an extended edition. LotR is now the extended version. No one remembers the theatricals and I don't understand why they didn't try to go for this route. Make the Netflix version and release the Blue Ray in 6 months or something. I am more pissed off with the missing potential here because I really liked the season and the story. I just need to fill the blanks and have in my mind a more complete version that doesn't exist. At the very least they should release at some point the extended final episode because the demand for it is pretty big.
Considering what Jinx did at the end of season one, it's obvious why people assumed that she'd be the Big Bad of the second season. It's a logical next step for her character and is a bit closer to the LOL version.
@@prufan It is logical, until you stop and think about Jinx's actual deepest motivations, which to their credit, is what the Arcane writers did. She's always, ALWAYS, only been trying to help those she cares about, desperately clinging to them for love and approval. After season 1, Jinx fully believes that there is _no one left_ who cares about the real her, and is fully aware that it's _all her fault._ She lashes out against the Council in a fit of rage, and grief, and honoring her father's memory as much as she can, but after that... her primary motivator for doing anything, her loved ones, are either dead or unreachable, and it's her fault. Jayce was willing to throw himself from a building as a result of _far less_ emotional anguish, Jinx sinking into an apathetic despair makes _perfect_ sense, and is honestly something of a best-case scenario for her. Going cheerfully unhinged wildly active mad bomber in line with her original LoL portrayal is _possible,_ and maybe even somewhat plausible, but doesn't fit nearly as well with the character as portrayed in Season 1 as what they chose to do in Season 2 instead does, when you really stop and think about it.
I wish they continue story of arcane season 1 not this rubbish ambussa jayce vi. Jinx take over zaun broken jinx still broken and become conflict of piltover and zaune. What ever build from season 1 it all gone to bin. Arcane season 2 is just one cheap writing
i understand the complaints from the pacing and story drive about season 2. but i loved it anyway so i dont really care about minor flaws
@pluhsino We all have things we can admit have flaws but enjoy anyway.
@@RebelNormal yeah that's what i meant. not every show is perfect and i prefer to look at the positives more than the negatives
Season 1 had some minor and major flaws as well. The issue for me is that many of the criticis that rip season 2 apart are completely blind to the issues of season 1 as if acknowledging the 5% that is bad means they are not allowed to like the 95% of it that is great.