Arcane Season 2 Was About Breaking The Cycle of Violence: It Failed

Image; Netflix

Arcane (2021–2024) is a show I admire a lot (you can see my glowing review of season one here).

For the uninitiated, it’s a steampunk fantasy series based on the arena battle game League of Legends. Forces across the techno-magical city of Piltover and its underbelly, Zaun, fight on behalf of various factions to see who comes out on top. We have a startling array of characters from noble houses to revolutionaries to underground crime syndicates.

The imagery of Arcane is dazzling, fast-paced, and consistently over the top. Sometimes, we start an episode with the flaming wreckage of the Piltover Council Chambers (see Heavy Is The Crown). Other times, the animation style switches to a series of stills that have an almost comic-book quality to them (episode three, Finally Got The Name Right).

Yet, while the first season was a, in my opinion, well-explored examination of the cycle of violence, the second season is a far less compelling, more saccharine examination of how to break said cycle.

A show that gives us the aesthetic of revolutionary change and little else.

The bad ways to break the cycle

Last season, the central tension was the cruel Zaunite Revolutionary and crimelord Silco (Jason Spisak) and his charge Jinx (Ella Purnell) fighting against the Piltover government for independence. Zaun is an apartheid state caught in a bitter war for self-determination against Piltover’s technocratic, commerce-driven leaders.

Season one ends with Jinx blowing up the Piltover council chambers mere moments before they vote in favor of Zaunite Independence. She is too resentful to give peace a chance, showing the viewer how this culture is stuck in a cycle of violence.

A huge question for season two is how to break that cycle — something we are shown in the fragile moments where this goal is achieved.

For example, in episode seven (Pretend Like It’s The First Time), we find ourselves in an alternative timeline, where the tragedies of season one more or less don’t happen, and we see a Zaun moving in a better direction. As the character Ekko (Reed Shannon) says of this timeline: “I used to dream the undercity could be like this.”

The show plays with the various structures and methods that could get Zaun and Piltover to this peace — its tension centered around these methods’ flaws and limitations.

In episode six (The Message Hidden Within the Pattern), we come across an almost utopian society in the underground, led by the scientist Viktor (Harry Lloyd), who has used the magic of Hextech to cure the glimmer addiction plaguing Zaun’s most disenfranchised. Viktor (whose eastern European-sounding name and totalizing equality alludes to the Soviet Union) wants to create a society free of division, and he’s not afraid to resort to violence to get there.

He ultimately becomes the primary antagonist — a man who creates a hive mind he calls the “Glorious Evolution” that is bent on removing all discord from the world by doing away with individuality entirely. In Viktor’s words: “Choice is false. It is how we clothe and forgive the baser instincts that spur us to division. Death, war, prejudice. Energy spent only to consume itself. But we can be of one mind (see episode 9, The Dirt Under Your Nails).”

Another character who tries to achieve a similar forced peace is General Ambessa Medarda (Ellen Thomas), who uses violence to create a sense of safety in Piltover. Her Noxus forces set up checkpoints as part of a brutal manhunt for Jinx that ends up oppressing many Zaunites. She is trying to create peace by enforcing conformity through violence, though admittedly not as totalizing as the erasure of identity proposed by Viktor.

Her violence is likewise framed antagonistically in the series — something we are meant to hate. As Jinx’s sister Vi (Hailee Steinfeld), one of our point of view characters, tells the Piltover noble Caitlyn Kiramman (Katie Leung), who allowed Ambessa’s Noxus forces to police the city: “How long were you saddled up with that shifty, self-serving war pig (Ambessa)? She oinked poison in your ear, and you just ate it.”

So, if Ambessa’s law and order mentality and Viktor’s totalizing conformity fail to achieve true peace (and I tend to agree that they do), what is this show’s solution?

And why do I walk away from this season so unsatisfied by it?

The trap of forgiveness

In season two, there are fleeting moments of resistance against these forces: the street activism of the Zaunite underground; the anarchistic, nonviolent revolutionaries of Ekko’s Firelights, who provide aid to those hurt by Piltover crackdowns; the “change-it-from-the-inside” mentality Vi attempts when she temporarily becomes an enforcer (i.e., Piltover’s police force); and many more.

However, the two common enemies we cited in the previous section — i.e., Ambessa and Viktor — are ultimately what causes Piltover’s border checkpoints to be dismantled and its discrimination against Zaunites to be paused. As Ambessa and Viktor join up to attack the city, the Piltover elite abandons their efforts to crack down on the underground and asks for Zaun’s aid instead. In the words of councilor Jayce Talis (Kevin Alejandro):

“This isn't a fight for ideals or territory. It's a fight for humanity itself. I’m asking…no, begging you, every one of you, topside and bottom, to aid us in this coming war. And it will be a war. Now, this isn't a fair request, but it is our only hope. The forces against us are too great. We need every hand we can get.”

It is this call to set aside resentments so that both sides can join in a common purpose, which is framed as the way for the city to achieve true peace. The thing both Piltover and Zaun need to do, the show argues, is forgive each other so that they can focus on the more significant threat.

We see this call for forgiveness in the alternative timeline, too. In one touching scene, Ekko meets this timeline’s version of Silco, the pro-Zaun revolutionary who started many of the events in season one. Ekko asks Silco how he was able to set aside his animosities. Silco replies with a call to squash resentment: “The greatest thing we can do in life is find the power to forgive.”

While I am not against the idea of forgiveness, I find this framing of both sides needing to unite to achieve peace disturbing as it ignores the power dynamics at play. The two sides here were not equal. Most Zaunite revolutionaries, with maybe the exception of Ekko’s Firelights, were undoubtedly violent, but it was often a violence in reaction to Piltover’s apartheid. Piltover leaders, not the people of Zaun, put into place legal and material barriers that forced most Zaunites into squalor.

Even if legal emancipation holds (a big if) once the threat of Ambessa and Viktor passes, it does not undo the generations of economic and political inequality that such apartheid would have created. While removing legal discrimination may be a necessary first step, so too is the redistribution that would inevitability have to occur after. If ongoing reparations and attempts to dismantle Piltover’s unequal systems are not made, things will quickly settle back into a similar status quo.

We see this in our world with countries such as the United States, which had active apartheid against Black Americans for many years. Similar (though not exactly identical) to Zaunites, Black Americans were barred from many aspects of modern life — a fact that is so ingrained in my people’s history that it should hardly need reinforcing.

Yet even after legal rights were granted to Black Americans in the form of voting, education integration, and more, it did not undo material inequality. There is currently a substantial divide between Black and white Americans in nearly every indicator, from retirement to healthcare to debt to housing, and it’s because we never truly addressed the material disparity our system created, instead letting it erode into the chasm it is today.

While some argue that all we must do to solve such problems is set aside our animosities and come together — in other words, to stop being so divided by race and other such identities — without a plan to address such material divides, these inequalities will persist.

Whether we are talking about the country of America or the magical city of Piltover, systemic discrimination is not solved by mere words.

An arcane conclusion

From my perspective, this show’s perspective on undoing systemic discrimination is intellectually lazy. The entire second season engages in a conversation on bridging divides, and rather than diving into the complexities that uphold such inequalities, we get a rather simplistic message of “we’re all in this together.”

Don’t get me wrong; common problems always emerge: Enemies start wars, natural disasters level communities, and climates shift. Circumstances do force people to temporarily come together and put aside their differences, but in my lifetime, I have rarely seen such events lead to a permanent realignment. We tend to return to the status quo the day after disaster ends. It rarely matters if the unfairness baked into those arrangements long precedes such crises; when a fire, hurricane, war, or some other such disaster abates, people are expected to go back to paying their rents, honoring their debts, and returning to work.

The cruelty of such arrangements be damned.

It’s this reality that made this show’s message of unity so frustrating and honestly patronizing. Arcane tried to show us how to end the cycle of violence and instead gave us appealing pleasantries and nothing more.