Arcane may be over, but it still lives in our hearts, especially because of some of the devastating deaths. Turns out, Riot was more than on board with Fortiche killing whoever it wanted to.
Big spoilers for Arcane below, so don’t read on unless you’ve finished the show.
“Riot embraced whatever story we wanted to tell with any of the characters,” Arcane writer Amanda Overton tells us. “We were like ‘Can we kill Jayce and Viktor?’ ‘Yes’. There were no limits to what we could do to make a good story, which was, in my opinion, absolutely the right choice for them to do, because we are adapting a game into a different medium, into television, and you want to be able to be free to make that version the best it can possibly be.”
League of Legends, the video game that Arcane is based on, has a deep and rich pool of lore for the Arcane writers to pull from, but it’s been refreshing to see the amount of creative freedom Riot has given them. The writers pick and choose what elements of the lore they want to stick to, and while it can make the canon a bit inconsistent, it makes for a better show. Sometimes sticking to the lore leads to interesting fan theories being confirmed, too.
“That support from [Riot’s] side really allowed us to make characters like this – complicated, interesting, dark, vulnerable – that had fates that we needed to decide what would be the most satisfying for the show, and not worry about what may or may not be interesting for a different medium,” Overton explains. She also tells us about how long they’ve had the show’s final moments planned out. “That Vi-Jinx scene, the very last scene between them, is nearly the same as when we wrote it six years ago.”
In an actual game of League of Legends, all the champions respawn and live to fight another day, but a television show needs stakes. We won’t care about deaths unless they’re permanent. I know we all want Jinx to be alive, and she could be if future League of Legends shows go the multiverse route, but it’s good to move on.
If you want to read more of our thoughts on the show, check out our Arcane season 2 review.