#it is truly the wild west out there right now for Arcane leaks so please be careful

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

How to tell Arcane leaks apart from trailers and teasers

There are NO LEAKS in this post, so please read.

In summary: to identify leaks, look out for 1): watermarks, 2): unfinished animation rendering, and 3): poor image and video quality.

Tumblr isn't too bad right now, but Twitter is rife with clips and screenshots of the leaks, and YouTube has full uploaded leaked clips. These leaks show up on YouTube if you even search just "Arcane" or "Arcane season 2."

Here is a list of legitimate trailers and teasers posted by Netflix and Riot. These are not leaks and the clips and gifsets about them on Tumblr are from legitimate sources:

Season 2 first look

Season 2 teaser (short)

Ekko and Heimerdinger sneak peek

Season 2 teaser trailer

Jinx and Sevika sneak peek

There's some confusion in the tag about what constitutes a leak and what is simply a trailer or a teaser shared legitimately by Netflix and/or Riot. This is understandable because the first 5 episodes of season 2 leaked at the same time that Netflix and Riot were accelerating season 2's marketing.

Most people in the fandom do not want to be spoiled at all, and so are not excited about the leaks. Most people don't want clips, screengrabs, or even vague allusions to the leaks in the Arcane tag. They most certainly do not want spoilers sent to their inboxes, either. (DO NOT DO THIS. Don't be that person either on anon or off. Goodness gracious.)

Still, there is always going to be someone who posts the leaks in the fandom tags. However, there are many more people who make gifs and posts about the legitimate season 2 teasers and trailers. There are still almost 3 months until the first episodes drop, so we will be dealing with dodging these leaks for a long while.

Here's how to tell what's a leak and what isn't:

1): Watermarks

From what I've put together, someone at one of the dubbing studios leaked the first 5 episodes of Arcane season 2. In their entirety. However, these leaks were not production ready. The leaks are also completely watermarked and have a big running timestamp ticking throughout the run of all of the episodes.

This is difficult to visualize beyond what little Riot shared about the production of season 1 in Bridging the Rift. So I will post a NON-SPOILER screengrab of the title card of one of the leaks I took (just a few seconds before I realized I was looking at a leaked episode).

Below is a screenshot I took of nothing more than the Arcane title card from the season 2 title sequence. This is not a spoiler! Please use this example to help you tell a legitimate teaser from a leak:

Can you imagine watching 5 EPISODES of Arcane with these watermarks all over every single frame??? I'm begging you, do not subject yourself to watching Arcane in this manner, no matter how bad you want to know what happens in season 2.

These watermarks are practically impossible to remove, especially from every single frame. So any visuals you see that look clean, production-ready, and gorgeous from season 2 are definitely from trailers or teasers, not from leaks.

Here's a screengrab from the recent sneak peek posted by Netflix/Riot for comparison:

No watermarks, the animation is finished, the video quality is high. This is a legitimate teaser and not a leak.

2): Unfinished animation render

You don't need the full finished painterly animation from Fortiche to complete a dub. You just need basic character models and their movements, along with the finished script.

Much of the leaks are just this: the full complete scenes from every episode, character models are moving as they will in the final edit, the episodes' composition is complete, but the animation is unfinished and doesn't have the final painterly polish yet.

Below is a NON-SPOILER screengrab from Riot/Fortiche showing the animation process. This screenshot is from season 1 episode 5 during Vi and Sevika's first fight and shows the stage of completeness of the animation that most of the leaks show:

Notice that the scene is comprehensible, but the lighting effects and painting-like style of Fortiche is missing. It looks... okay, but unfinished-looking compared to what we know Arcane looks like. A big chunk of the 5 leaked season 2 episodes look like this.

Here's the final render of this scene for comparison:

However, I will say that I accidentally watched the first few seconds of the leaked season 2 episode 1 before it registered in my brain that I was watching a leak. There were watermarks like in my first point above, but for this particular scene, the animation was finished, and it seems like the sound mixing was finished too.

So it is possible that there are leaks floating around with gorgeous finished-looking animation. So look out for watermarks no matter what, and also -

3.): Poor image and video quality

When people say that the leaks are "potato quality," they mean it. On top of the watermarks and big timestamp across the runtime of all the 5 leaked episodes, the video quality is also pretty bad, certainly less than 360p.

The legitimate teasers and trailers and screenshots released by Netflix and Riot are all of very high video quality.

A note on early leaks

There are some leaks from earlier this year pertaining to Vi and Caitlyn's story that came from the Annecy Animation Festival Arcane panel. These leaks weren't treated as seriously because no full clips leaked, and they were mainly high-level summaries of season 2 plot points.

Those leaks are now difficult to tell apart from text posts about these new complete episode leaks. There are a lot of text posts out there about Vi and Caitlyn's story in particular as well as extremely spoilery text posts about certain characters who were in the Council tower at the end of season 1 episode 9.

There isn't much we can do about text posts

In the end, Tumblr has been pretty okay with keeping visuals from leaks out of the tag. I still see a potato-quality screenshot from the leaks every now and then. But most pervasive is people talking about spoilers from the leaks in text posts. These posts are tagged with the fandom tags and spoilers are only tagged sometimes.

Often, if the person is only vaguely alluding to the spoilers, they won't tag spoilers at all because they think being vague is enough. It usually isn't, because the post is still alluding to events outside of season 1 and the teasers/trailers.

The only thing we can do to completely avoid these posts is to not only block "spoiler" or "leak" related tags, but to avoid and block the Arcane fandom tags altogether, which is a shame.

Please, if you're someone who saw the leaks and wants to post about them, all I can ask is to at least tag your spoilers: "arcane spoilers", "arcane season 2 spoilers", "arcane s2 spoilers", "arcane leaks", or even just "spoiler", "spoilers", or "leaks" is better than nothing.

Even better would be to simply avoid using the word Arcane in the post and not tag the post with any fandom tags at all, keeping the post relegated to your blog with as little context as possible. This includes avoiding using the correctly-spelled character names in the post as well. Until the episodes drop in November, this is the most polite way I can think of to talk about the leaks and spoilers on your blog.