The response to one major character arc from the first act of Arcane’s latest season is drawing mixed reactions, especially from fans who aren’t up-to-date on their League of Legends lore, but the show’s creators understand.
This article contains spoilers for Arcane Season 2.
As Riot began to tease the second season of its animated show, players began to notice that Vi – the long-imprisoned street rat who many saw as a symbol of the show’s undercity – appeared to have joined the Enforcers, an oppressive police force. Unfortunately for those newer fans, League of Legends players had limited sympathy – after all, both Vi and Caitlyn have been positioned as law enforcement since their inception a decade before Arcane ever existed.
With the first three episodes of Arcane now released as part of the Arcane Season 2 release schedule, Vi wrestles repeatedly with her new role. Caitlyn, on the other hand, does not – driven by grief, she not only begins to lose herself in pursuit of Jinx, but is willing to aid Ambessa in placing Piltover under martial law. It’s a rapid descent towards brutality for a character who largely appeared as a voice of reason in Season 1, and that’s proving difficult for the community to wrap itself around at this early point in the season.
That difficulty is something that co-creator Christian Linke shares. Speaking to GamesRadar+, Linke – who helped create both Vi and Caitlyn more than ten years ago alongside Arcane’s other showrunner, Alex Yee – admits that “there’s a global perspective” to the characters’ roles as cops “that is difficult for me to take into consideration.”
“I live in Los Angeles now,” Linke explains. “It is commonly understood that there is a lot of fucked up behavior by American police. I was born and raised in Germany, where there’s a very different perception and understanding in society of law enforcement. The trust in the institution is much more shaken in America. There’s something about that where there’s just different perspectives on what that even means and how people see that.”
For Yee, there’s a feeling that “I don’t really feel like I can blame people” for having strong feelings about these character arcs. “There are things that have happened with characters that I didn’t have a hand in, but I do feel like I’m on the team of people that did that,” he explains. “So I don’t necessarily feel like we were handed something that we had to live with per se. A lot of it felt like it was just sort of following through on a thing we started.”