It may have been quite a wait for fans of Arcane in between seasons, mostly due to difficulties from the COVID-19 pandemic, but the level of detail in animation and storytelling that earned the series an Emmy was not something that could be rushed. Showrunner Christian Linke says that even though the team was met with setbacks initially, there was still a drive to go into more “extremes” creatively for the final season.
Arcane focuses on the story between two sisters Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Jinx (Ella Purnell), who soon become embroiled in a conflict within their utopian society. Season 2 begins with the sisters on opposite sides of the conflict and, though other stories happen around them, Linke says the sisters’ relationship was always at the heart of the plot.
DEADLINE: Coming into season 2, knowing that this was going to be the last one, was there anything specific that you wanted to tell or enhance from the first season?
CHRISTIAN LINKE: Yeah, I think a lot of the character arcs that we set up, we felt like we needed to see the end of them. It’s really about the relationships between characters. You have the brotherhood between Viktor and Jayce and you have the sisterhood between Vi and Jinx. That’s really at the heart of it. There’s a lot of stories that are happening with different characters, but really at the heart, those were the most important ones.
The question since the very beginning was can Vi and Jinx ever be sisters again? For Jayce and Viktor, the question really was what happens when you lose sight of your dream and you get seduced by power and other people and what they’re trying to turn your dream into, and can you find your way back to that core dream? I think on the larger scale of the story, those were the ones we really had to dive into and answer.
DEADLINE: I know League of Legends is not generally known as a story-driven game, what was it about these specific characters that made you want to tell their story?
LINKE: Primarily, it starts with the gut feeling of Jinx and Vi are just fucking cool. They were just cool, there was attitude and they also weren’t the typical fantasy video game characters. There was just something else about them and I think they just added really interesting questions. As players, we played these characters for many years and always wondered what happened between them as sisters. That’s a great story to explore.
For Jayce and Viktor, there was always this question of what if these two people work together on this technology and they come from these different angles. One from a bit more utopian, like reach for the skies, which is Jayce. Like a brighter, better tomorrow. And Viktor is much more grounded around the fact that there are people like me who have broken bodies, broken souls, and we can fix them. It’s a different approach and when the technology becomes reality, you’re going to go in different ways. So, I think there was just always these differences that felt like it was a great promise for a story and that’s just what inspired us trying to explore it.
DEADLINE: What was the process of making the story accessible for people who have never played the game, while still keeping true to the characters that people know?
LINKE: On one hand there was the character story, which had to be universal. Just this question of these two sisters who need to overcome trauma before they can connect with anybody. Then comes the fighting and their abilities, as these are very capable, potent warriors, so we had to make sure that feels accurate to the players. When we think about in the game, if you play Vi and there’s a fight, you’re going in first and you’ll probably not make it out alive. Jinx needs to keep it distant. She always fights from afar, and if you ever get to her, she’s toast. But if she can keep the distance long enough, then she will absolutely wreck you. So, we know that from the meta and from the behavior of our players, and that’s what we also took into Arcane and really tried to make it so that this feels accurate. There were different levels of authenticity that we had to just respect to make sure we get it right.
DEADLINE: Can you talk a little bit about the style of animation for this season?
LINKE: I think so much of season one was just proving that we can do it. Season two, we had more confidence to say, okay, let’s go crazy. If we have an inspiration for doing something bold and different, let’s do it. Because season one, until it’s out, it’s just a theory. Are people going to like it? We don’t know.
Season two had bolder directions with some scenes and artistic directions that we probably just didn’t feel comfortable doing during season one, like what we did with Viktor toward the end of season two. It gets pretty surreal and abstract and impressionistic and it’s pushed pretty far. I think that came from a place of artistic inspiration that strays more. For sure with Warwick, we had some straight up horror in certain scenes, so I think going more into the extremes is something that we wanted to do.
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