{"id":1500667,"date":"2021-11-26T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-26T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.polygon.com\/reviews\/22800666\/arcane-season-1-review"},"modified":"2021-11-26T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2021-11-26T14:00:00","slug":"arcane-is-great-tv-even-if-you-dont-care-about-league-of-legends","status":"publish","type":"station","link":"https:\/\/platogaming.com\/plato-data\/arcane-is-great-tv-even-if-you-dont-care-about-league-of-legends\/","title":{"rendered":"Arcane is great TV even if you don\u2019t care about League of Legends"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
I can\u2019t overstate my disinterest in playing League of Legends<\/em><\/a>. As far as hobbies go, it seems far too stressful, and I do not have five friends. I will probably never play League of Legends<\/em>, and that\u2019s OK. However Arcane<\/em>: League of Legends<\/em>, the animated series that just wrapped its first season on Netflix? Devoured it in a weekend, and you should too.<\/p>\n Ahead of Arcane<\/em>\u2019s premiere, our premiere review noted<\/a> that it is, essentially, extremely good YA fiction. This is the perfect way to approach the show. Like so much of YA fiction, Arcane<\/em> is a story about very hot people wrecking their relationships and their own lives in ways that feel hopelessly inevitable. What makes it so compelling over the course of its now complete first season is that its characters and their passions \u2014 for each other, for fulfillment, for revenge \u2014 are what everything else stems from. It\u2019s not a show that\u2019s particularly concerned with world-building by way of exposition, the way so much fantasy is. Rather, it shows characters building the world \u2014 and breaking it.<\/p>\n Relationships drive everything in Arcane<\/em>. It\u2019s first and primarily about sisters Vi (Hailee Steinfeld<\/a>) and Powder (Ella Purnell), who, across a trio of three-episode acts, grow up together as sisters orphaned by war, are separated as young adults, and become bitter, perhaps irrevocable adversaries as they enter adulthood and Powder, under the sway of a cunning slumlord, becomes the mad genius killing machine Jinx. (A lady Joker, if you will.)<\/p>\n Around them, the world changes. While Vi and Powder are denizens of \u201cThe Undercity,\u201d they\u2019re also painfully aware of their monied counterparts in Piltover, the \u201cCity of Progress\u201d where the show\u2019s other<\/em> central pair<\/a> live: Jayce (Kevin Alejandro) and Viktor (Harry Lloyd), two idealistic scientists who find each other in a moment of darkness and together, lead Piltover to even greater heights thanks to their invention of \u201cHextech\u201d (i.e., magic, but also technology).<\/p>\n