How 'Arcane: League of Legends' Breakdowns Our Myths Surrounding Violence
Image; esports
The RiotGames produced TV series Arcane: League of Legends is like watching a brilliant painting coming to life for six hours. Its artistic rendition of the hit game League of Legends, or LoL for short, is stunning. I found myself having to pause the screen on multiple occasions just to soak in all the details of the immersive world that series creators Christian Linke and Alex Yee (along with their very talented team) put together.
The series is not only visually impressive but has a compelling, and some would say controversial plot, about revolutionaries fighting against an oppressive society. The characters are truly multi-dimensional. I thought leads Hailee Steinfeld, and Ella Purnell did a great job making us believe the highs and lows that these characters experienced during their traumatic lives, which, given that they live within an apartheid society, are considerable. Seriously, hold onto your hats, folks, because this series is dramatic AF.
At this show's core is a discussion about revolutionary change and how it relates to violence. This subject doesn't come up much in media, especially not with the nuances that Arcane examines. In this article, we will delve into where this show reinforces preexisting media tropes on revolutionary figures and where it breaks new ground (spoiler alert, it does both).
The “bad” revolutionary trope
Arcane takes place in a steampunk city-state that is split between the upper-class Piltover, built on the ideas of technological innovation, and the destitute Zaun. The latter is an underground city that seems to make its living smuggling "illegal" goods and services into Piltover. Something that we have to keep in mind is that this is an apartheid state. Travel between these two areas is strictly limited across narrow bridges, and law enforcement has no problems going into Zaun and roughing up its ostensible citizenry. A key part of the plot is both protagonists and antagonists alike struggling against this oppressive system.
Normally when a similar situation is described in media, we have a distinction between the revolutionary that does things the "right way" and the one who goes "too far." For example, the Rebel Alliance in the Star Wars franchise is depicted as valuing life. It performs only tactical violence against Empire baddies who "deserve" it. Compare the rebels to radicals like Saw Gerrera, who are viewed as reckless and overly violent. As Senator Mom Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) describes to protagonist Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) in Rogue One (2016):
MON MOTHMA: Saw Gerrera’s an extremist. He’s been fighting on his own since he broke with the Rebellion. His militancy has caused the Alliance a great many problems. We have no choice now but to try to mend that broken trust.
These "bad" revolutionaries" are usually depicted as having the right objective, but their violent methods are too radical, often spiraling out of their control. Think of the character Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) in the film Black Panther (2018), whose mission to dismantle white supremacy is recognized as good. Yet, his grasp for power quickly has him trying to form an imperial empire of his own.
KILLMONGER: I know how colonizers think. So we’re gonna use their own strategy against them. We’re gonna send vibranium weapons out to our War Dogs. They’ll arm oppressed people all over the world, so they can finally rise up and kill those in power….The worlds gonna start over and this time we’re on top….The sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire.
Another example is the revolutionary Daisy Fitzroy (Kimberly Brooks) in the videogame Bioshock: Infinite (2013). She is the leader of a working-class, multicultural coalition called the Vox Populi. Fitzroy is portrayed as having a valid claim against the White Supremacist steampunk city of Columbia. However, this goal soon spirals into genocidal aspirations. "Cut 'em down, and they just grow back," Fitzroy says to the player as she holds a terrified white child in her arms, a gun by her side. "If you wanna get rid of the weed, you gotta pull it up from the root." Fitzroy becomes so hellbent on tearing everything down that she "twists" her original mission, making her revolutionaries the new villains in the game. The last battle the player has to fight is against the Vox Populi.
The lesson here appears to be that if you aren't careful with your violence, it can and will become worse than the terrible status quo you seek to supplant. Many times main characters in these series defeat the revolutionary antagonist, only to reset the status quo because radical change is depicted as going too far. This leads to a moral that discourages protagonists from seeking systemic change at all. The leads in Bioshock Infinite wipe White Supremacist Zachary Hale Comstock (Kiff VandenHeuvel) from the timeline, literally resetting everything to the base reality. T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) from Black Panther defeats Killmonger (with help from a white CIA agent played by Martin Freeman) only to implement incrementalist outreach programs that do nothing to challenge the system of White Supremacy outside of Wakanda.
And just like, no — we see how this trend in media is a problem, right? When all systemic reform is depicted as spiraling into chaos and authoritarianism, it makes fighting for any change in the real world next to impossible.
Breaking the trope…maybe
In Arcane, we at first seem to have this well-worn distinction between the "good" and the "bad" revolutionary. On the one hand, there is the character Vi (Hailee Steinfeld), one of the leads of the series, who is fighting to stop a brewing Civil War. She is a disgruntled Zaunite from the seedy "Lanes" who dislikes the more radical revolutionary Silco (Jason Spisak). Her adoptive father Vander (JB Blanc) tried and failed to uphold an uneasy truce with this world's version of a police force, which are called enforcers, and she rightly blames the show's revolutionary villain for his death. She even teams up with members of Piltover's elite so that she can dismantle Silco's operations.
On the other hand, you have Silco, a kingpin of the undercity who is coded as "evil." He raises Vi's younger sister Powder (Ella Purnell) when Vi goes to prison and doesn't do a good job. Despite having clear love for her, he repeatedly gaslights Powder, who also goes by the name of Jinx, and appears to worsen her mental issues (i.e., she is struggling with an intense form of PTSD and possibly even schizophrenia). Silco also lives in a dark nautical lair, visuals that are often linked in contemporary media to villainy. While the magical Hextech technology of the Piltovers is a divine blue, his main weapon, Shimmer, is a sinister, dark purple.
Silco is not afraid to hurt people on either side of the Zaun-Piltover divide. His revolutionary philosophy is that there is a base amount of violence necessary for change. A major plot point involves him releasing a drug called Shimmer into the undercity that allows users to essentially Hulk-out (and not in a good way). Shimmer is a substance that makes users who abuse it psychologically and physiologically dependent. Silco may have aspirations for Zaun's independence in using it, but ultimately this weapon serves as a detriment to the people of the undercity.
With all this in mind, I was ready to chalk this show up to being like all the other properties out there depicting revolutionary figures as inherently going "too far." Yet, something interesting happens in the series' midpoint that had me question this initial assessment: one of the main characters — an enforcer from Piltover named Caitlyn Kiramman (Katie Leung)— goes to the undercity and realizes that her worldview has led to this abysmal situation. Caitlyn shifts her perspective from not understanding how Piltover makes the undercity a living hell to thinking that Piltover's leadership has led to the growing civil war unfolding. The status quo is rightly depicted as unacceptable. At one point, Caitlyn remarks to her mother:
CAITLYN: You know what else reflects on the council? Its citizens living on the streets. Being poisoned. Having to choose between a kingpin who wants to exploit them and a government that doesn't give a shit.
You could interpret this as both sides (i.e., Silco and the Piltover elite) being equally awful, but there are multiple scenes where the hypocrisy and cruelty of Piltover society are highlighted for the viewer. When a Piltover Councilmember, Jayce Talis (Kevin Alejandro), for example, threatens to send Vi to prison, she scolds him for not understanding the cruelty underlying that threat. "So you just wave an arm, have someone dragged off, don't bother to find out what it does to someone being stuffed in a stone box for weeks, or months, or even years?"
As this scene clarifies, the Piltover elite is more than willing to punish those beneath them with disproportionate amounts of violence. If Silco is a monster (and it's hard not to argue that he is), it's because Piltover created an atmosphere where only the most ruthless in the undercity could survive (so sort of like Tinder). A peaceful way forward was not possible because Piltover violently suppressed all mobilization in the Lanes.
It also bears mentioning that Silco's philosophy is somewhat validated in the narrative. He threatens war against Piltover unless he achieves concessions and the Council appears to acquiesce to his demands for independence. "Get me Jinx, and I'll give you your nation of Zaun," Councillor Talis remarks, preferring to scapegoat this one character than to unleash a war between the two cities.
Here the show seems to imply that you do need a base level of violence to create change. Only the prospect of potential violence brought this councilor to the negotiating table in the first place — a refreshing message given the inclination from most media to portray all revolutionary forays into violence as ultimately self-defeating. Everything looks like we are on our way to an uneasy peace between these two city-states. That is until Silco's adopted daughter Jinx fires a devastating Hextech energy blast that seems to destroy the Council's chambers.
Silco's strategy may have led to concessions, but it also led to his undoing.
Violence is complicated
Jinx's destruction of the Council's chambers creates an interesting tension, where we are left questioning everything about the narrative. This action, which comes in the very last minutes of the last episode, made me deeply torn about this series. Everyone was so close to achieving peace, and it all burned down in blue flames.
Some might walk away with a "violence always begets violence" lesson — an easily available moral given how prominent it appears in our culture — but after much thought, I think that reading would be superficial. Without Silco's initial violence, no one would have been prompted to reassess their worldviews and offer up concessions. Caitlyn would have never ventured into the Lanes to investigate, Councillor Talis would not have attempted negotiations, and the apartheid state of Piltover would have remained unchanged.
The main characters are also very violent themselves. Vi perpetuates violence as a solution throughout the narrative. She even pushes for a raid on one of Silco's factories that leads to a child's death, yet she is never coded as evil. Her violence is almost always framed as justified in self-defense, or at the very least, understandable given her perspective.
The situation is slightly more nuanced than violence being always coded as bad and seems to be more about condemning continuous militarization, especially from the oppressor. There is a scene where councilor Mel Medarda (Toks Olagundoye) talks about weaponizing the Hextech technology to defend Piltover against the undercity, and her mother, a warlord, replies: "weapons can't be unmade, and they are always used." Her argument being that militarization prompts escalation.
From this perspective, Piltover's development and weaponization of Hextech, in many ways, forced the undercity to build up their arms so they wouldn't be left behind. Silco's side may have been brutal, but the upper city laid out the material conditions for that brutality. And yet, unlike the people of Piltover, his actions were theoretically to achieve freedom from oppression, something he was very close to achieving.
You don't walk away liking Silco, but you do end up mourning his and the Council's failure to achieve peace. Before the Hextech energy beam destroyed the Council's chambers, it looks like they would have voted Yes to Zaun independence. The Sting/Ray Chen song What Could Have Been plays in the background, and the main character looks on in stunned terror as this chance for peace goes up in smoke.
We understand then that Jinx is too far gone with hurt to ever forgive Piltover. The haunting lyrics "I want you to hurt like you hurt me today, and I want you to lose like I lose when I play" remind the viewer that she is trapped in a cycle of violence perpetrated for decades by the upper class of Piltover. The Council may have decided to "do better" in these closing moments, but it hurt people like Jinx for years before then, and that violence, more than anything else, is what truly sabotaged the peace here.
Piltover's militarization — not just with Hextech, but with enforcers on the Lanes to keep the poor in their place — prompted escalation.
Conclusion
This nuance on the ripple effects of violence in Arcane is refreshing for how rare it is in media. For far too long, we have had a very simplistic perspective regarding revolutions: either violence is coded as always bad, and the narrative sweeps the violence of the status quo under the rug, or it's naively portrayed as good. Spend enough time in leftist circles, and you will come across people justifying pretty much everything under the banner of revolution, treating it like you would a math equation: X amount of violence + revolution =systemic reform?
But violence, and consequently revolution, is neither good nor bad. It's a tool, and a messy one at that, that can create unforeseen consequences. In real life, the difference between "good" and "bad" violence is difficult to determine at the moment of its use, and even in retrospect, as anyone following the debate over "collateral damage" can attest to. Every year the US fires plenty of missiles at allegedly "bad" people. Yet even if we were to accept those aims as justified, many civilians who are supposedly not the targets of said violence are killed during these attacks. It's a messy situation all around.
The complicated nature of violence doesn't mean we shouldn't try to mitigate it. I believe we have a moral imperative to do so. Yet, when we offhandedly make sweeping statements about its inherent rightness or wrongness, it has the consequence of potentially worsening the violence around us. We end up either ignoring the violence that already exists through complicity or, we do not put into place procedures to mitigate harm because we are certain that we are in the right.
Arcane is willing to have a complicated conversation on where revolutionary violence can lead — both its positives and negatives. While the show is far from perfect, I am glad at least one mainstream property is trying to talk about it in a way that far more popular shows often fail to do (looking at you, Game of Thrones).
And that makes Arcane the kind of show worth binging in my book.