Arcane

phisey said:

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He wasn't the villain. He was the founding father of Zaun, and this was his story.

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Yeah I was astonished how sympathetic a character he was by the end when I started out despising him.

Kiroy said:

I was just about to say, the only negative of this show is riot is owned by tencent

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Might be slightly off-topic, but the Trump administration was well on its way to fixing that problem that via trade regulations. They would've forced Tencent to divest itself from Riot Games and Epic. Despite intense lobbying, the CFIUS was just about to make it happen, then Biden took office and Tencent was able to find some receptive ears in the new administration.

Now they're negotiating to keep their claws in the US game industry despite repeated privacy breaches and Chinese law requiring Tencent to share all its data with the PLA.

Hideo Kojima tweeted his praise for Arcane. True weebs are reaching for their pitchforks as we speak.

it gets better. By the end I really appreciated the fact that every single one of the characters is a character and not stupid cartoon archetypes doing by-the-numbers Plot Advancement.

I played enough League a long ass time ago to recognize most of the characters from the game and that's about it. Never touched Runeterra.

Don't feel like I missed anything important.

We need a sticky that says "Finish Episode 3" and "Knowing LoL Lore isn't needed and may even lessen a few plot twists".

Yep it was implied through their voice interactions in the game but it was just a theory until the show confirmed it.

Ekko actually calls her Powder ingame:

It's unsurprising that they never leaned too much into an overarching franchise lore because I think Arcane is just a culmination of the business strategy Riot's been perfecting all along: selling skins through heavily promoted events.

All the chart-topping KDA albums, the fake Sailor Moon event, the Cyberpunk event designed to coincide with Cyberpunk 2077's release, last year's entire Ruination crossover event, and now Arcane the TV Series, all of it is basically just the most recent and most ambitious expression of that core value proposition: get players invested in the characters so they spend five bucks on skins.

Whether or not it works is fascinating to me because not only does it apparently work (to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars) but I really have no idea why or how. I'm too boomer to move beyond seeing box sales as the main way video games should be monetized. Hell, I still feel slightly squicky about paying into subscriptions even after literal decades of mmos.

I enjoyed this, but I found myself really disliking Vi.

phisey said:

It's unsurprising that they never leaned too much into an overarching franchise lore because I think Arcane is just a culmination of the business strategy Riot's been perfecting all along: selling skins through heavily promoted events.

All the chart-topping KDA albums, the fake Sailor Moon event, the Cyberpunk event designed to coincide with Cyberpunk 2077's release, last year's entire Ruination crossover event, and now Arcane the TV Series, all of it is basically just the most recent and most ambitious expression of that core value proposition: get players invested in the characters so they spend five bucks on skins.

Whether or not it works is fascinating to me because not only does it apparently work (to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars) but I really have no idea why or how. I'm too boomer move beyond seeing box sales as the main way video games should be monetized. Hell, I still feel slightly squicky about paying into subscriptions ever after literal decades of mmos.

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Well if I'm playing Sona and she's greek asthetics using a harp, but there's a skin where she's heavy metal, I want that skin, that's badass.

It's also the Fortnite business model (plus battle pass). Seems much better than the usual gatcha or energy buying monestisation.

Well I mean, they had franchise lore. they just keep retconning it over and over.
as a hero battler, they don't go too deep at first directly.. its like a Streetfighter, etc. just some basic character setups.
Then they established the summoners rift, summoners. Which was a tribunal. take your arguments to the rift, to fight there in a controlled setting, so they don't fight wars, that could annihilate cities with super magic. even the void invasion was trapped in the rift.
then they started an ongoing story. Leblanc/jarvan, demacia/noxus assassinations. swain versus leblanc. and lots and lots of shipping. Cities established at this point, and regions. no map yet.

All that got retconned out. the summoners and the rift are non-canon now. They hired lore writers to set up a world, and started writing new backup stories. been going from there. And, again keep retconning characters backstories. some very heavily. Leona, sivir for example, massively changed. al the Mt. Targon stuff. major changes to Kayle/morgana. Soraka, warwick. leona's was changed like 3 times, as they changed targon lore, and introduced Diana. like, they had leonas story.. then when they introduced diana, they changed Leona's to fit in with Diana, and diana trying to kill Leona.... then they changed their minds on that, and now Diana is a good guy, and leona and diana are in lesbians and working together.

Timeline for alot of this. Arcane went into production when Jinx was created. So, yeah, the story must have been written back then.

Arcane itself, again changed lore. Camille as noted. the timeline for hextech. Vi being her name, when it was clearly a number. Vi's amnesia.
Its kindof interesting they didn't update the lore to match Arcane, in any of the background materials, until Arcane came out. When again.. Arcane was written 8 years ago.

If it was average or failed then it's just a show "based on characters from..." But when it succeeds they can adopt it into the larger franchise since it has become the most definitive canon spreading beyond the players for one game.