I went into the final act of Arcane season 2 with a knot in my stomach. I’d waited three years for this finale, only for the first couple reaction posts I saw after the last episode dropped to be variations on the theme of ‘what was that?’ Having spoken to showrunner Christian Linke barely a day earlier about how difficult it can be to bring a show like this to a satisfying conclusion, I feared the worst. But when I actually watched the episodes myself, I loved them. And when I went back to see what those posts were all about, it turned out they hinged almost entirely on continuity concerns.
This article contains spoilers for the finale of Arcane season 2.
Last year, Riot confirmed that Arcane is official League of Legends canon, pledging to gradually undo “inconsistencies that have woven their way into the storytelling and worldbuilding of Runeterra.” To be fair, the finale of Arcane certainly offers up some of those inconsistencies with League of Legends. The fates of several characters that are alive and unharmed in the main game are a matter for some debate. Caitlyn’s injuries have likely cut her sharpshooter career pretty short; Heimerdinger was vaporized in an alternate dimension at worst and teleported to a different pocket dimension at best; Jayce and Viktor were scattered throughout the timeline; while Jinx and Vander are MIA.
Only Vi and Ekko remain definitively alive and unscathed, but perhaps the most egregious diversion from LoL canon belongs to Ambessa. Introduced to League of Legends just before Arcane season 2 aired, the character is already dead. As a Noxian, there’s some speculation that her peoples’ powerful attachment to various forms of necromancy could mean her story isn’t over yet, but there’s a sentiment among some sections of the community that her introduction to LoL was a waste of time – why would you want to play as a character that’s already dead in the canon?
A rolling golem
It’s not an opinion I agree with – Ambessa’s backstory is already well fleshed-out, within and without the show. But root a little deeper into that feeling, and you’ll find a whole ream of fans struggling to find their faves in the canon. Perhaps chief among them is Blitzcrank, a massive metal golem originally created to help with Zaun’s toxic waste problem. In the official lore, the inert husk of one of these golems was uncovered by Viktor, who used Hextech to augment the automaton into an intelligent ally. In Arcane, that doesn’t happen, and the result is that some players feel Blitzcrank has been written out of the canon. If his creator got atomized before he could ever put his great golem together, surely there’s no way Blitzcrank can exist within that canon?
No-one else has been unwritten quite as egregiously as Blitzcrank, but there’s a whole suite of characters that don’t have a home within Arcane. Officially, the cities of Piltover and Zaun are home to 22 in-game characters, only ten of whom appear in the show. A couple more are the subjects of easter eggs or fan theories, but even some of the game’s most totemic figures are missing. The least charitable reading of their absence – one that I’ve seen repeated multiple times since the final dropped – is that those characters have been written out of League of Legends canon. If they’re not on-screen, living and breathing, the sentiment appears to be that they might as well not exist anymore. It’s an argument I’ve got no time for.
When I started playing League of Legends, the titular league was essentially the United Nations, with judicial ‘summoners’ possessing its representatives so they could settle political grudge matches. Any in-game storytelling was handled not by beautiful animated shows or even by fancy trailers, but mostly by an in-universe newspaper. Since then, lore has been rebooted and rewritten multiple times, but I bring up these poorly-aged, long-since retconned narrative tools to highlight the fact that it’s been a decade or more since the League of Legends was a physical entity that required each of its characters to occupy the same space and time. The modern game owes more to Super Smash Bros than international relations – characters are plucked from their continuities, their exact relationship to one another often reliant on nebulous timelines or overarching sentiments. Most of the time, the ‘canon’ version of a given character is replaced by one taken from a parallel universe. The in-game cosmetics of Jinx alone cast her as an anime girl, a Guardian of the Galaxy, an apocalypse fighter, a different anime girl, and a waitress in a cosplay cafe.
The whimsy attached to some of that storytelling is a big reason why some of those characters didn’t appear in Arcane. If Viktor had suddenly revealed that he’d been building a big sentient robot throughout act 2, it would have felt just as anachronistic as if Jinx had rocked up in her Star Guardian uniform at the end of episode 9 – or if Twitch, a gross, crossbow-wielding rat, or Seraphine, a glossy, Swift-style popstar, had shown up to defend Piltover. That’s to say nothing of characters who are broadly understood to exist further up or down the timeline than these versions of Jinx and Vi, or to even touch on how a narrative that even its creator admits struggled with feeling rushed would deal with introductions to another dozen or more characters.
There are a whole bunch of ways to explain why certain characters were acknowledged and others not, why particular moments in their stories were highlighted, invented, or ignored. But at the end of all of it, the only real important answer to any question about why Arcane made certain decisions about League of Legends canon is ‘because it made a good show’. As a 13-year veteran of the game, I’ve seen the lore chopped and changed more times than I could possibly count, and as the end of all that, I got to watch Arcane, an acclaimed, beloved, astonishingly beautiful series that has raised bars not just for video game adaptations, but for serialized, mature animation everywhere. To be presented with that multi-year, hundred million dollar investment, and to step away from it complaining that there weren’t more easter eggs is the peak of banality, and it’s a criticism I hope Riot and Fortiche don’t spend a moment entertaining.
Now that it’s all over, check out our Arcane season 2 review.