Kingcrusader
The King of the Crusades
- Location
- Tennessee
Huh. I didn't think of the show being separated into three arcs when I watched it. I saw it as a show with 9 episodes. I guess I don't remember it as much.
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Top Level Canon Reviews - relaunched!
- Thread starter Leila Hann
- Start date
- Review
IIRC there were backstories for character profiles in the game and a few ads implied a narrative, and a couple of comics, but they often more implied a backstory than told one, and Arcane took those for characters from the same area and told that part of the world's story. Like elements from a music video showing off how fun and zany their Harley Quinn knock-off was ended up being readapted in the show as part of her backstory that added a lot of depth to everything about her they had shown previously.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
My understanding is that LoL setting lore has evolved over time but it was never particularly compatible with game itself. One of the earlier versions had the PC supposed to be the Summoner to the playable Champions, making a LoL match sort of like a 5v5 version of Fate Stay Night, but summoners eventually got retcon'd out and with it any pretense of association between setting lore and game events.
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- Location
- Canada
Leila beng completlely ignorant of LoL is not a direction I was expecting this to go. Goes to show how even massive games have people who have never heard of them.
Jayce is a particularly odd character, I don't really know if you are supposed to like him or not, especially with how the crackdown on Zaun is partially driven by the desires of the higher ups to spare his bright future and find someone else to blame for the explosion. But the narrative of the bright kid pushing against the rules is so deeply ingrained, that it's hard not to feel sympathy for him despite all his negative qualities.
Jayce is a particularly odd character, I don't really know if you are supposed to like him or not, especially with how the crackdown on Zaun is partially driven by the desires of the higher ups to spare his bright future and find someone else to blame for the explosion. But the narrative of the bright kid pushing against the rules is so deeply ingrained, that it's hard not to feel sympathy for him despite all his negative qualities.
- Location
- Patriarchova
I'd heard of it. I just didn't know anything about it.
- Location
- London, England
They released the show in three blocks of three episodes each, and there is a timeskip between each block, so there's definitely an intended format at work here which I think works quite well.
And yeah when I watched Arcane I knew very little about League except for a few bits and pieces I'd randomly picked up through osmosis, and the show was very watchable despite that. The metaphorical unicorn of good video game adaptations.
Long story short, League's lore used to be "the game is a battleground where the Champions battle it out to gain glory and favor for their nations". The players, called summoners, were commanding the characters into battle on an even battleground as a sort of high-stakes international sport, kinda? But the great retcons came and went, and now the game (Summoner's Rift) is completely non-canon to the lore.
Kingcrusader
The King of the Crusades
- Location
- Tennessee
Would you say the same thing for the last of us? The live action adaptation?
I definitely, definitely would not lol, but the Last of Us also had the issue of being a movie they turned into a 12 hour game, so.
- Location
- Patriarchova
Sounds like "adaptation" might not be an accurate description, if the game and the story are that divorced.
Kingcrusader
The King of the Crusades
- Location
- Tennessee
Oh okay. I never played the game, so I wouldn't know how I would feel. I watched the show first, then saw a game movie of the game.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm not an expert on League lore but my understanding is that the story of Arcane is 99% original. There's some vague lore it adapted and the characters are not technically original but otherwise everything was decided by the show. It probably would be fair to say it's a de jure adaptation that's de facto OC.
Arcane is best understood as its own separate thing. For example, in the default League lore, Jayce is an uncomplicated asshole magitek Iron Man with very little of the depth displayed here.
- Location
- Canada
League's gameplay has nothing to do with League's actual story is the thing
It used to, originally the lore was that the MOBA gameplay represented an actual bloodsport/political combat arena thing where champions from all across the world would sign up to represent their home nation, and the matches would be used to determine conflicts over land disputes and trade deals and whatnot.
But years ago Riot threw out all the old lore and said "none of the MOBA stuff has anything to do with the lore anymore"
League lore and metaplot progression is now entirely found in character background blurbs, short stories and projects connected to the original game, which sometimes includes other games connected to League of Legends
but not the original MOBA gameplay itself
As far as lore and story is concerned the MOBA stuff is basically the equivalent of taking action figures of characters and mashing them against each other, it doesn't exist in universe
League lore has also gone over multiple retcons and rewrites over its lifespan
Owing to the fact that every time they design a new champion for people to buy they have to find a new spot to fit them in, come up with a new personal story and how this story interacts with all the existing personal stories etc.
It's like comic book characters. There are 168 champions as of time of writing.
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- Location
- London, England
Riot are apparently working on an MMO counterpart to League, which will presumably go into a lot more detail about the lore and setting, though it has apparently had a troubled development. So I guess with things like Arcane they're mostly working towards a kind of unified setting that features games, books, TV shows and merchandise? Rather than one particular element having primacy and then everything else being the expanded universe of that.
- Location
- Not your place of residence
So what you're saying is, they're really trying to be Blizzard.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
They don't call them that, but cyberbrains from Ghost in the Shell serve much the same purpose.
Outside of Arcane, all I really know about League of Legends is that it's a game of the sort I don't like to play (online multiplayer versus) that everyone I know who's tried to play didn't like.
A recurring refrain that I hear when it comes to Arcane has been "Great show! Don't play the game."
The Fallout series would like a word.
Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm one of those people who tried League maybe once, a decade or so ago, and bounced off of it super hard. I never really got any understanding of how it really worked, and I got treated to the stereotypical League experience of getting told to get out of the game if I didn't know what I was doing.
Ironically, this was also a very Blizzard thing: The experience of other players telling you that if you're not doing your best, then you're garbage and you should feel bad for "wasting everyone else's time". 'Being bad' at the game is considered rude to other players, and yet these same players will not lift a hand to help new players learn the ropes and become better at it.
The only things I know about League besides that experience are two music videos... and Arcane. And frankly, I would prefer to keep it that way. I'm fine with it being the reverse experience of most videogame adaptations.
Ironically, this was also a very Blizzard thing: The experience of other players telling you that if you're not doing your best, then you're garbage and you should feel bad for "wasting everyone else's time". 'Being bad' at the game is considered rude to other players, and yet these same players will not lift a hand to help new players learn the ropes and become better at it.
The only things I know about League besides that experience are two music videos... and Arcane. And frankly, I would prefer to keep it that way. I'm fine with it being the reverse experience of most videogame adaptations.
Kingcrusader
The King of the Crusades
- Location
- Tennessee
Basically leauge is a game that I will never understand, okay.
Wish there would be more seasons of arcane than anything else. I wonder what they will.make next.
Wish there would be more seasons of arcane than anything else. I wonder what they will.make next.
I think the characteristic feature of the cortical stack is that they aren't hardwired. Cyberbrains can be swapped between sleeves, but they can't (at least for normal users) be forked, overwritten, cut-and-pasted, or otherwise treated as a type of fancy bootable drive. Which is important for 'one of my forks was murdered' type stories.
There will be a second season to finish the story, then they will probably make a new series featuring a different part of the setting.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
I tried it when it first came out and it was moderately fun. Not my kind of thing but not bad.
But then I stopped playing for a few months and basically it's impossible to get into for people who haven't been playing continuously now.
I watched an episode and a half of Arcane some years ago, after seeing a bunch of people squeeing about it on Tumblr.
I actually didn't like the art very much? They did a lot of things very well, and I wish I had the vocabulary to pinpoint what, but the overall impression I got was kind of... ungrounded. Like they had a bunch of neat sets but little to no idea of how they connected, and the character models were differentiated from the backgrounds in a way that gave the latter an uncanny-valley effect. Outlines would've helped, I think.
(Stuff like the random extra bolt on Vander's belt buckle furthered that impression, because it seemed to be ruining the symmetry/clarity-of-function just to make it more Interestingᵀᴹ.)
Also, Vi and Powder's facial art - uniquely in the core cast - kept giving me 'abuse survivor and also gay' vibes, which in context of their previously established cop-and-supervillain versions appearing to have been a popular ship, seemed kinda creepy.
So when Episode 2 dropped the high-stakes high-tension plotline in favor of Jace's meeting with city council, to hear incredibly thoughtless cliches about the kind of incredibly systematic magic that produces video game combat spells somehow not already being a science, I quit.
That said, I'm very happy to hear it gets better again. Silco sounds like a great character.
I actually didn't like the art very much? They did a lot of things very well, and I wish I had the vocabulary to pinpoint what, but the overall impression I got was kind of... ungrounded. Like they had a bunch of neat sets but little to no idea of how they connected, and the character models were differentiated from the backgrounds in a way that gave the latter an uncanny-valley effect. Outlines would've helped, I think.
(Stuff like the random extra bolt on Vander's belt buckle furthered that impression, because it seemed to be ruining the symmetry/clarity-of-function just to make it more Interestingᵀᴹ.)
Also, Vi and Powder's facial art - uniquely in the core cast - kept giving me 'abuse survivor and also gay' vibes, which in context of their previously established cop-and-supervillain versions appearing to have been a popular ship, seemed kinda creepy.
So when Episode 2 dropped the high-stakes high-tension plotline in favor of Jace's meeting with city council, to hear incredibly thoughtless cliches about the kind of incredibly systematic magic that produces video game combat spells somehow not already being a science, I quit.
That said, I'm very happy to hear it gets better again. Silco sounds like a great character.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
Season 2 is out quite soon, I believe. The trailer dropped a couple weeks ago.
They can do most of that? Memory is extremely vulnerable to being tampered with in GITS. In the original manga and the 1995 film, a hacker tricks a garbage truck driver into being his patsy for hacking someone's brain by making him think that he's doing the hacking to spy on his cheating wife. The garbage truck driver has never been married and the photo he carries around that he thinks is his wife is actually a picture of a dog.
They're rarely forked, however. The process, called "ghost dubbing," damages the original.