Spoilers

The conflict concludes…

So that’s it. Jinx and Vi are done. Two seasons of Arcane and I’m mourning. Mourning the end of the story, the prospect that I’m going to have to wait an unknown amount of time for another story in this world. I’m mourning a story that’s mature, complicated, dense and full of layers that need reflecting on (although the number of people who’ve not understood the narrative or who haven’t seen the through path has surprised me).

I’m mourning the art direction, the sumptuousness of the animation, the bravery to switch from one style to another for the sake of emotional delivery. I’m mourning the music both in its diegetic and non-diegetic forms because it always elevated the story.

Fortiche have delivered something extraordinary with Riot Games’ material. Which, when you think about the (lack of) success of video game to film screen adaptations, is quite some accomplishment. The trouble for me is that this show won’t make the studio money (indeed is hugely loss making, probably losing somewhere in the region of $200m) and that means this is likely a unique moment in visual media – that perfect story which will sit like an island no one else can reach.

Still, focusing on the accomplishment. I wrote about the first act of season 2 here. The rest of the season builds in surprising ways while still delivering us an earthquake of a finale. The three pairs of relationships – Vi/Jinx, Mel/Ambessa and Victor/Jayce – are all resolved leaving me emotionally bereft because each one has such depth and love and passion that their crescendos are earthquakes.

In among all of this there’s one character I want to talk about – Ekko. He is my favourite character in the whole series and has been since he first arrived because he is the one pure soul – the character who’s never lost sight of the preciousness of compassion and honesty and the extraordinary value of innocence. I don’t mean naivety here – innocence is not naivety.

Ekko gets an entire episode to himself and it’s some of the most powerful story telling because it sits within the wider whole seamlessly. His episode also serves to give us the true sense of what’s been lost, not just in the stakes facing our characters but in everything that’s brought them to this moment.

There’s a deep melancholy to Arcane, a sense that they’re skating on a ridge and on both sides the fall brings them to despair and there’s almost no chance they’ll survive without falling.

Ekko’s story reminds us that there is a way through no matter how difficult. With the others we sometimes see the loss but with Ekko we feel it and this poignancy delivers a grounding for everything else going on. Ekko is the lens through which the rest of the show comes into focus.

Ekko’s journey is one of losing hope and finding it again.

There’s a proverb, ‘hope deferred makes the heart grow sick’ and Arcane shows us the profundity of this truth. Because hope isn’t vague, it isn’t nebulous, not if it’s real. Actual hope is a concrete fixation on some circumstance or state of being that does not exist. Yet. Hope is about the yet, about the possibility of what might come to be. It isn’t weak or foolish but desperate and broken, holding onto an idea because reality says NO. Hope deferred is a dangerous beast because if reality denies us for too long we break and our hope becomes toxic, leaving us nothing more than husks whose view of a different world has been snapped like a twig.

Ekko’s hope is active. He fights for the things he wants and knows that it’s not the past, nor something he once had but something invisible, something only his mind and heart can imagine that he’s battling to make real.

His hope isn’t ‘I hope it doesn’t rain.’ It’s ‘I fight for a better world.’

The entire show revolves around him and his part in this story is vital because without Ekko we never really get to see what could be. Moments of happiness, community, joy and places where, for once, we don’t have to fight for a space to be who we are.

I’ve talked before about how Arcane understands Politics with a capital P. It understands the slow movement of power, how entire peoples come together even if each individual thinks they have their own reasons and have walked their own path to that moment.

It never shies away from the idea that even in extremis, some will choose to leave, choose to surrender, choose to collaborate rather than choose for those whose lives could be better.

Yet a story that focuses only on Politics could lose the individual, could regard them as cogs. Arcane tells its story through the hearts of its characters, through their relationships and friends and families and communities. It tells a story of loves trying to survive against all the odds – and it remembers here are different kinds of love and that each can bind us together for good.

Verdict: It is the best of soap opera, romance, drama, action and speculative fiction rolled into one.

10/10 and worth every penny they spent on it.

Stewart Hotston