Thread by @rdonoghue

So I finished up watching Arcane, and I enjoyed it, but I'm really annoyed that I didn't recognize that Kevin Alejandro was voicing Jace. Having just been delighted by his acting (and directing!) in the final season of Lucifer, that was kind of cool.

Confession: I was a little let down by the super punching. It was fun, no question, but at no point did the fights manage to pass the quality of the bridge fight in ep 3, which was brutal and magnificent.

Also, I am much more forgiving of hoverboards by virtue of being delighted across the board(ha ha) with Echo and his spotlight episode. All in all, the tertiary threads (Viktor, Echo, Heidigger) were where the real story strength came through.

I am a firm believer in genre tropes, plot armor, named characters and so on, but there is a necessity to give those things at least a *patina* of credibility, and Arcane didn't really try. Deadliness of explosions was almost a running joke.

There's also some bias because WOW do I dislike the Joker superpower set, because it allows very lazy writing under the auspices of "There's no need to explain anything, they're so unpredictable!" and it just grates on me.

I remain glad that I went in ignorant, if only so I did not get the laundry list of who and who doesn't have permanent plot armor. It introduced a touch more uncertainty, which the plot badly needed.

I *did* like a lot to the worldbuilding (because it was mostly implicit) and I'm aways a fan of setting where weird power stuff comes from *somewhere*, and it leaned that way.

I don't deduct any points for this, because lord knows this is a problem in most settings, but it's always hard to walk the line between progress/science/power coming out of groups rather than out of lone heroic/villainous geniuses.

Lone geniuses are WAY easier to write & play. If other people could replicate their success, then the story might need to go elsewhere!

It's a crutch. A kind of toxic crutch, but also a fairly ubiquitous one.

Aside from poisoning how we look at things like collaboration, it has a bad habit of watering down a setting. There is a difference between "we are watching these characters" and "anyone but these characters will be ineffective and interchangeably useless"

Once that becomes the dynamic, the setting falls flat, because it doesn't *react* to anything (except when the plot demands it).

As an example, it was *really neat* when they introduced the idea that there were other crime bosses than Silco. Suggested a much more complex world!

But then revealed they were just there so Silco had people to Darth Vader around.

This is similar to the 'Never have an "address the council" scene unless you actually care about the politics' rule.

Don't give other characters power in setting if it's just a sham setup to allow your fav to show them up.

It cheapens everything.

And it's a bummer, because when you have a council of baddies, it's implicit that they all *would* kill each other, if they had the chance, so what keep things interesting is the question of why they haven't.

If the answer is "because EvilGuy hasn't felt like it", that's blah.

I mean, feel free to have a council of toadies who know their job is to suck up and take care of petty bullshit or get force choked. That's a great model! Tons of fun. But doing both at once invites a lot of trouble.

It can work if the toadies are badasses and in conflict with EACH OTHER, but are all sucking up to the bog bad because he's in another weight class, but that's a very specific sort of solution.

Anyway, Episode 3 ends up being my overall favorite in terms of visuals and badassery, with Episode 7 getting honorable mention because of all the Echo stuff which is just that amazing.

Honest to God, if the camera had just dropped the A and B plots to continue to follow Echo & Heidegger, this would probably have ended up as one of my favorite shows of all time.

And, man, THAT is a seed for a game right there. Keep all your steampunk and giant fists and drug monsters and all of that but then say "right here, we are building something, and we will fight for it" and GOD DAMN if I wouldn't play that.