I Feel Weird About Arcane S2 Because ….. It'd Be Rad If Arcane Was Super Leftist Or W/e, But I Never

I feel weird about Arcane S2 because ….. It'd be rad if Arcane was super leftist or w/e, but I never expected it to be. And I was happy with that! I always expected Arcane to continue having its “X-men level” of political takes— “both sides are at fault and we need to come together and have compassion." I don't need a leftist moral political justification to enjoy a fun fantasy story.

But season 2 really did surprise me? by swerving off and being like “actually the political oppression storyline Does Not Matter, never mattered, and won’t even get a resolution— not even a conservative or centrist resolution?” XD

They don't even resolve the political storyline with the classic X-men “both sides are suffering, why cant we get along" type of ending; instead they just abandon it completely. By the last four episodes the show is all about fighting random Evil Outsiders and Magic Robots from the League of Legends Cinematic Universe to advertise upcoming League skins and spin-offs, while the plot about the warring political factions gets completely dropped without any resolution beyond Vague Implications.

I guess my take is that, unlike a lot of people, I was never expecting Arcane to be any more politically radical than an x-men movie— and I still enjoyed it a lot!

But I was expecting it to care about the storyline it had set up? And I was genuinely surprised by how little it did.

In hindsight it now feels odd how much time they spent emphasizing the characters experiencing police brutality and political divides and riots and violence at border crossings and class disparity and being crippled by pollution, because now we know none of this was ever going anywhere? XD

My surprise was not that all that politically loaded imagery was building up to a centrist message about how there are good people on both sides and we need to reach across the aisle. Because that’s always how I thought it would end, and that’s Fine for a fun fantasy show? But I was surprised to realize that none of the imagery was ever intended to be building up to anything, not even a general centrist message about reaching across the aisle. It was using political imagery in a hollow way, without intent, for Shock Value, for the Aesthetic.

the actual story is just a generic comic book fight between humans who want people to live vs robots who want to kill everything; everything else is just there to dress that up.