#2014 me is giggling and moving their feet rn

[bluedandylyon]

I'm conflicted - ARCANE SPOILERS !

On one hand - the 2 expectations I had going into szn 2 were cativi kissing and the full appearance of Warwick - which I knew both were going to happen anyway. I love Arcane bc of what LoL (unfortunately) means to me, and the fact that I've shipped Caitvi since 2014, but I never adored the show bc it just brought me so much pain that I couldn't rewatch it often and brainrot the way I have with She-Ra for example. Visually it's the most beautiful and thoughtful piece of art I have ever watched, but in terms of the story... At some point it just starts feeling like torture porn when shit keeps going horribly sideways with no breaks. So I kept my expectations low.

I initially loved season 2, but by the end of Act 2 I just realized it was impossible to have a satisfying ending to all the shit they introduced. They flew too close to the sun. Season 1 was already BLOATED by the ensemble, but it was character-driven and the pacing was good enough. But now that I have sat a day with season 2 I just feel like they went full spectacle and forgot the grounding power their characters had in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, again, the visuals were INSANE this season. The explorations of different mediums like watercolor, charcoal, utilizing different frames per second blew my lil animation-loving mind. And Fortiche has absolutely perfected the art of "show, don't tell". But the writers were too greedy. This is a show that started as a class critique, an exploration of power corrupting ideals, a tale of two sisters whose circumstances forced them apart and an exploration of the mental toll that leaves them with. We end with an abstract, surrealist take on how love is the root of twisted emotions and how in the search for it, we can lose our humanity in the process.

Which sounds great right? But... those are two different things, two different thesis statements. And two different thesis statements require different characters to carry the message. So in the end, the sisters we started with get completely sidelined for two different characters. Which again, would not be a bad thing unless this is the story we started with, but it ends up feeling disjointed and unsatisfying. Add the torture porn season 1 was already gratuitous with, and you end up deeply unsatisfied if you cared about any of the main characters from season 1.

Gone are the themes from season 1 and so the main character's arcs are cut before they properly finish, because we have moved on to new, shinier themes now! It feels like introspective emotional peaks and lows were spedrun in order to get more scenes of action-packed suffering and spectacle in. There is no room to breathe. When a show gets terrified of "filler", it cuts essential character moments as a consequence.

The more I sit with it, the more disappointed I feel. I had low expectations, but then Act 1 and the beginning of Act 2 gave me hope. I get that Arcane was EXPENSIVE and they probably didn't have the budget to animate more, but then they should've taken that into account when they decided to further bloat the already insane ensemble of characters and plot threads.

Again, I just feel really conflicted.