#that being said i did go through viktor's lore and honestly the lol machine herald is way more interesting that s2

[oneshotprincess]

1. i wasn't familiar with league lore when i started watching arcane and frankly i don't care to be. i'm judging the show based only on what it managed to communicate to me.

a non-exhaustive list of questions it didn't answer for non-lol fans: what the arcane is (an extra-dimension beyond runeterra? a natural force like gravity?), what are runes, what do combining runes accomplish, why are some people mages, how are mages treated in runeterra, what was piltover's history with magic, is ekko's theory about the arcane extracting a price correct, the hexcore's unclear influence on viktor, etc etc etc. all of which i believe could have been pretty organically revealed if they weren't speed-running through 4 plots in season 2

if it's a show that needed homework done before watching, i didn't realize when i started watching. and honestly, i believe the onus is on the adaptation to explain the rules of the world they're adapting or make it clear that the adaptation is not for non-fans.

2. that being said i was talking about the applicability to our own reality. magic doesn't actually exist but science analogous to magic does. the conversation in s1 between heimerdinger and jayce and viktor where they talk about fast-tracking progress to help people now versus being cautious while the underprivileged suffer has a lot of poignant similarities to our reality and i expected a nuanced follow through between them. i'm simply expressing my disappointment that any such nuance was thrown aside for a generic 'magic bad and corrupts' plotline, even if it is presumably lol lore-accurate.

one more thing i definitely dislike about arcane is how...weirdly anti-science it is. maybe it attempted to be talking about the ethical decisions that are involved in scientific progress but instead...

tell me why a disabled man's pursuit to alleviate his suffering is treated as going against the very nature of the universe when his disability is hardly 'natural' (if such a thing exists) but rather caused by the machinations of the upper class of the society he lives. a society that has created many more disabled children and orphans just by how it functions. but ohhhhh magic science bad...don't mess with the order of nature...