#2 - ABOUT ARCANE

Officially titled as Arcane: League of Legends, Arcane is an adult animated action adventure streaming TV show created by Christian Link & Alex Yee. It's produced by the French animation studio Fortiche under the supervision of Riot Games, an American video game developer and publisher and e-sports tournament organizer. It first released in November 2021 and it has been confirmed by Riot Games and Netflix that a second season is in production.

Netflix and Riot Games logos

The series is set in Piltover, a city of progress and science with a dark side, an adjoining district known as Zaun, where poverty, crime and anarchy reign supreme. Vi and Powder were born here, two sisters who were orphaned by the conflicts between the two parts of the city. The story begins when Vi’s four-member-group enters the wealthy neighborhoods to rob a workshop full of cutting-edge technology. However, something goes wrong and an explosion occurs. The consequences of this accident will fuel the conflict between the two neighborhoods, with the sisters in the eye of the storm. At the same time, the controversy over the development of Hextech technology, both revolutionary and dangerous, will break out in Piltover.

This first season of Arcane tells us how this chaos called Jinx arose. It's the story of two sisters and how the circumstances in which they had to be raised and the misfortunes they suffered shattered them to such an extent that one of them ended up losing all sense of innocence and goodness of his childhood. However, history would not be so rich in content without the context in which it takes place: the enmity between Piltover and Zaun. The series portrays these two worlds as completely opposite, but both with light and shadow. Piltover reigns in peace, prosperity and order, but it is a classist and elitist society where moral hypocrisy is the order of the day. In Zaun poverty, violence and criminality are the norm, but its inhabitants dream of a better life and continue to use their ingenuity, their tenacity and the camaraderie that unites them.

The series devotes a lot of time, more than perhaps we would expect in a story based on a pure action video game, to shape these two worlds and develop the political and social conflict that corrodes them. We see it in the political intrigues of the Piltover government and in the attempts to develop the Hextech technology, with the ethical dilemmas that stem from it. Also in the functioning of the mafias of Zaun and in the expansion of the illegal market of the drug Shimmer, with its terrible consequences for the population.