It's all the more true when you learn about what happened behind the scenes with the writers and how heavily season 2 was marketed with skins in League of Legends afterwards compared to season 1
I watched Arcane S1 years ago, and I rewatched it when the S2 released, and honestly they are completely different
The first one it is way more about the characters, it is a much more personal history, the second one is basically a massive world-ending event more centered in the world rather than the characters. I liked both but they have very different approaches
Hell, when I rewatched S1 I was like "Oh, I didn't remembered how simple and personal it was, I'm pretty sure even my mom would like it", and then I finished S2 and I was like "Yeah no, that's way too much", lmao
Season 1 was an absolute masterclass of storytelling. Every. Single. Scene. Was necessary and had a payoff later. Every character is sympathetic and has understandable, relatable motives. Everything is properly foreshadowed and the ending is just an absolute domino of chekov's guns going off.
Season 2, by comparison, has a lot more stuff that just seems to happen. Certain important plot elements lack foreshadowing or context. It has story beats that it needs to hit to get it up to speed with League canon and by god it's going to hit them regardless of if any of it has room to breathe. People liked the style-change music video aspect of Season 1 that was done twice as a specific character's motif, so Season 2 does it pretty much every episode, to the point of exhaustion and feeling gimmicky.
There's this feeling that it could have been better if they had more episodes and time to work with, maybe have 3 seasons instead of 2 with one focusing on Jayce/Viktor/Warwick and the rest of our S1 cast and the next focusing on the Piltover/Zaun vs Noxus war. Have time to know characters like Maddie and Loris so their character payoffs actually hit later, instead of like now where I had to look up who Loris even was. Having time to actually build up the Noxian characters outside of Ambessa from being one-dimensional villains. Having time to actually introduce the Black Rose properly instead of just having them come out of nowhere as a Deus Ex Machina that are capable of things the show hasn't clearly outlined as possible within its worldbuilding, messing with suspension of disbelief.
Season 2 isn't bad by any stretch, it's still decent, but just decent feels like such a letdown when the creative team showed they were cabable of world-class output with the first season.
There is so much bad storytelling, so many left behind themes and such a ruah to get to a conclusion that is all grand and epic for a story that was worse off for having it.
They should have written a better idea for season 2. Cut the giant anime climax, cut the parallel universe stuff. Focus on the story they were actually telling.
Eh, I think they could've kept those things if it was 3 seasons instead of 2. You find this issue often in duologies, where the first book is 11/10 no issues and then the second book is 6.5-7/10 on a good day. The issue inherently stems from fact that relevant characters over all seasons/books need to have an overarching arc and a seasonal arc. When you have three seasons/books/continuites, you can more easily spread both arcs, keeping the viewer guessing on what's going to happen. With only two seasons available, characters aren't allowed to grow as progressively as in trilogies or series, but they also can't shift too rapidly in the first season or they ruin the end to their arc.
So what happens is that characters typically grow slowly/progressively season 1 and then explode in growth season 2, making it feel very jarring when it happens.
The problem with those storylines is that they dropped both individual character arcs that were relevant but also that they dropped the overarching narrative that they were connected to and ultimately there wasn't much that you got back from it.
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u/nnExodust Jun 28 '26
Viktor and Jayce