ARCANE Season 2 - Annecy Festival 2024 Poster

arcane and shattered glass 🤔🤔 from visual depiction of jinx's fractured mind to impact of her action on other people

Viktor in the bottom left

I AM DEAD I AM DESEASED MY HEART BEAT TOO FAST AND EXPLODED ARGHTFTFVOVFVVCTUUHUH

HOLY-

HOLD THE FREAKING PHONE THAT IS JINX’S BOMB

A nightmarish augmentation. Brace yourself for Arcane Season 2, coming this November.

So Bryn made a good point over on Twitter, and uh. Yeah.

2024 is the year we will have Caitvi back and we will finally have the caitvi kiss (I hope)

So, considering what's going on with Riot right now, do you think Arcane Season 2 got caught up in all of this restructuring?

Yes and no. Arcane season 2 is part of the reason for the restructuring.

As I understand it, internally at Riot, after Arcane was a huge (and more importantly: prestigious!) success, the decision was made to basically hand the entirety of the game's lore and story over to the Entertainment division within Riot. These are the people in large part responsible for projects like Arcane, K/DA, Heartsteel, that animated series China got, all that sort of thing.

The writers at Riot were basically told to flat out stop producing new content and lore for the game - that's why there's BEEN no new story content for League for over a year - because everything was going to be consolidated under the Entertainment division from now on. This is why Riot started talking about "One Runeterra" and "Arcane is going to be canon" and so on.

The success of Arcane convinced executives that what League of Legends needs is a singular cohesive brand with its most successful public property leading the charge, Arcane is going to be the gateway drug, the hook on the end of the line that brings new players and new paying customers into the exciting world of the League of Legends multimedia IP universe!

Nevermind that Arcane's story and worldbuilding is fundamentally incompatible with >checks notes< the overwhelming majority of Runeterra as it exists and enormous compromises would have to be made to either the world of Runeterra or Arcane itself to make it work. Arcane is the big shiny prestigious mainstream Emmy-award winning project that every executive wants to put their name next to, and like companies Pivoting To Video in 2015 because Facebook showed them inflated viewership stats, Riot Games is Pivoting To Arcane. It's better than them pivoting to crypto and NFTs, at least, although I know for a fact that high ranking people at Riot tried to make that happen too.

Now, the primary cause for all of these games industry layoffs is that interest rates aren't zero anymore. Borrowing money isn't free, the curve of constant growth has ever so slightly slowed, taking on debt is becoming a little tiny bit more risky than it was previously, and corporations are responding to this with massive rounds of layoffs and constriction to show "financial responsibility" and prove to shareholders that they are prioritizing core growth strategies and blah blah blah etc. They're also trying to kneecap the growing labor movement in the games industry and exert downwards pressure on wages, but the interest rates seem to have been the main thing.

In Riot's particular case, a secondary reason is they want to pivot the focus of the company to support their One Runeterra pipe dream, so a lot of the people who got fired at Riot are writers, artists, creative leads and sometimes extremely senior and successful staff who are now surplus to requirements. This is also why Riot shut down Riot Forge in the same round of layoffs - can't have a bunch of talented indie devs going off making video games that don't adhere to the new One Runeterra policy. What if someone played Mageseeker and got confused how there can be mages all over Demacia but somehow there are no mages in Arcane's Piltover and Zaun. That's a plot hole! People write snarky articles about that sort of thing. It turns off new consumers! What if Cinema Sins makes a video making fun of it?!?

So yeah. A bunch of cocaine-addled fame hungry executive vultures at Riot are absolutely gagging on their own d*cks to put their name next to Arcane related projects, and since they were going to be screwing hundreds of people out of their careers, healthcare, and in some cases their fucking visa status anyway, it seems to have presented a nice opportunity to clear the board for their latest Visionary Scheme for the company IP.

That is as I understand the situation, anyway. I'm a bitter old man and most of what I hear is second hand and anonymous gossip through my social networks, take what I say with a grain of salt, but I've followed this company for (oh god) twelve years now and I have developed a tragically keen understanding of how its executive class operates.

OKAY NETFLIX DON'T BE BRAINDEAD NOW.

WE GONNA GET ARCANE SEASON 2

WE GONNA GET CASTLEVANIA NOCTURNE: SEASON 2

WE'RE GETTING INVINCIBLE SEASON 2

DON'T BE FUCKING DAFT. ANNOUNCE BLUE-EYE SAMURAI RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

MIZU'S OFF TO LONDON. I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS. SKEFFINGTON. ROUTLEY. COME ON. COME ON NETFLIX. DON'T BE PUSSIES.

“HER NAME IS JINX!”

Silco is definitely gonna be a new hallucination next season.

Counting the days until season 2 🫠

ARCANE Season 2 - coming November 2024

i will become insufferable once arcane season 2 gets released

Jinx’s Self Awareness

One thing that I love about Jinx, is how self aware she is about her being damaged. How she has stopped being the sweet baby sister Vi used to know her as. How she knows that the reason she and Ekko are now enemies not just because she chose Silco over their friendship, but how she willing killed and tortured countless of people, something he nor Vi wouldn’t believe Powder would EVER do.

“I thought, maybe you could love me like you used to. Even though I am.. different.”

And it’s like she is ashamed of this fact. Deep down she hates that she has become the very person Vi has come to fear and Ekko to despise. And she wants to go back to the “better days” , when before she believed she fucked things up for everyone. But she can’t help being Jinx because this is how she grew up as after all these years. How the person who truly understood her trauma expects her to be. And to be who they loved her as is too painful for her and the guilt would swallow her entirely.

the ONLY thing i want from arcane season 2 is more ekko. just look at him!!!!!!!