#especially as it derailed the (much more interesting) Jinx arc I thought we were going to get

[coraniaid]

In a better world -- a world where Riot Games were happy to spend millions more dollars on a third season of Arcane, and also to spend some of that money on hiring more talented writers -- Season 2 would actually properly commit to Caitlyn's descent into evil. (Well, relative descent: she was already a cop after all.)

She shouldn't have just been a passive puppet or an innocent naif being led astray by the bad Noxians. She should have actively been involved in setting up all the detention camps and checkpoints in Zaun, and in crushing internal dissent from people loyal to the surviving Council members and empowering her own loyalists in Piltover. That's the direction she seemed to be heading in at the end of Act 1, and then she just ... didn't. She thought better of it when the cameras weren't on her, I guess. There's nothing wrong with having a timeskip between Act 1 and Act 2, but there is something wrong if all the interesting character development happens implicitly during this timeskip.

And equally we should have seen much more of Sevika trying to mold Jinx into a figurehead to rally Zaun behind. (More of Sevika generally, to be honest. Does she ever even learn that Jinx is the one who killed Silco?) We should have actually seen Vi struggling to cope in a world without the support of either Cait or her sister, instead of her just being passed from one to the other as the plot required. (The prison sex scene in Act 3 is fun, but the context and pacing around it is ridiculous. And I think that's just emblematic of Vi's arc all season: she's part of Cait's story, and part of Jinx's story, but the show doesn't do anything like enough to make those two versions of Vi consistent from one scene to the other.)

In this reimagined Season 2, Act 1 could have stayed mostly the same, but Act 2 should have lasted longer and gone further, replacing almost all of canon Act 3. I'd spend more time on Jinx's jailbreak sequence, cut the Singed/Warwick/Vander stuff until much later -- I think Jinx finding out more about Silco and Vander's past is fine, but I wish it didn't dominate her arc this season quite so much -- and have Vi and Jinx reunite at Viktor's camp later for some other reason. Maybe give Lest an expanded role as representative of some kind of underground opposition to Caitlyn's rule in Piltover in Mel's absence. And then, rather than Cait switching sides again the minute her ex calls her cupcake, why not have her react to finding out that Viktor is harboring Jinx -- the woman who killed her mother, remember? -- and ordering the camp stormed to capture her? She's a military dictator: we can surely at least let her be responsible for some dead children.

Then, with the penultimate episode showing things at their bleakest, with Vi and Cait and Jinx all at violent cross-purposes, with Viktor possibly dead and Jayce and Ekko and Heimerdinger all still unaccounted for, we can have the last episode be ... more or less the exact canon episode 7 we got. That episode was the best of the season, and would have been a great place for a season-ending cliffhanger too (with Ekko not knowing how bleak the world he was fighting to return to had become).

All the other stuff the season was trying to cram in -- Vi and Jinx learning their father was (sort of) still alive and reuniting again; Singed suddenly having a role in the story beyond 'hangs around with Silco looking sinister sometimes'; Mel being abducted and (somehow) learning magic; the (presumbly much more interesting to people who actually care about LoL lore) stuff about the Black Rose; Ambessa launching a coup of her own and trying to take over Piltover by force; whatever was going on with Viktor's visions of Skye and his grand plan to 'evolve' humanity into an army of mindless zomies --could have happened in a putative Season 3.

A Season 3 which I wouldn't have watched, because all that stuff is pretty silly.