It's no great surprise that an animation costing a whopping $250m for two short seasons is ending before it gets to a third, but that doesn't make it any less of a shame. Arcane is a wonderful series, obviously beautiful but also deeply earnest. This show is unafraid to feel things, and feel them hard.
I've watched the first six of the final nine episodes coming to Netflix over the next few weeks. They pick up in the immediate moments of the season one finale, where series antihero Jinx, née Powder, has blown a whacking great hole right at the heart of Piltover's ruling council chambers. The first few episodes follow the lead characters – those who survived – literally and metaphorically picking up the pieces of that climactic incident, as both Piltover and the neighbouring undercity of Zaun suffer parallel power vacuums in the fallout.
There are strikingly obvious (albeit given the lengthy development, probably coincidental) real-world parallels here. A prosperous, technologically and economically advanced society and its oppressed neighbour; a terror attack; the response. Arcane pokes and prods at this subject, a little line here or there – "why is peace always the reason given for violence?" – before receding to something broader.
Among those big themes, however, Arcane threads the same frantically emotional personal dramas it set in motion with season one. Vi and Caitlyn's forbidden, Romeo and Juliet romance goes beyond its initial happy-ish ending to the place .
