With A Vengeance: ‘Arcane’ Season 2

Heavy is the Crown For the last three or four years there haven’t been more anticipated animated entries than the Ghibli legacy project The Boy and The Heron (Oscar winner), Netflix’s Castlevania, Sony and Marvel’s epic Across The Spider-Verse (Oscar nominee), and this: a top-view RPG video game spin-off of League of Legends – Emmy nominated Arcane season two. Back on the animation block to bully everything moving, does Arcane have the juice to bring us back to its gigantic world and make sense of its many plot threads? More importantly, can it back up its multimillion-dollar spectacle with substance? Animation Byke! I’ve seen the first six of the nine episodes that make up this season, acts one and two if you will. Without giving any spoilers, this is some damn good animated programming. I say that in a year that gave us X-Men ’97, Twilight of The Gods, and a slew of great entries. What sets Arcane apart is the amount of meticulous detail etched into every frame. The world of Arcane is just a sliver of the universe that is League of Legends, the richness of the lore feels almost lived in because everything harkens back to something else that is grounded in something else. You’ll find momentary plot holes only to find them plugged later on so intentionally it feels like a ‘gotcha’. World-building on this scale requires so much time, effort, and continuity checking you have to wonder how in the hell folks at Riot Games, Fortiche Studios, and Netflix thought it was even possibl…