Arcane showrunner Christian Linke has responded to fan feedback on the beloved Netflix series’ second season, and specifically the suggestion its final episodes speed through their story too quickly.
The excellent League of Legends spin-off has now finished its run on Netflix after two highly-acclaimed seasons of eye-popping animation. (There are no spoilers here, if you haven’t yet finished.)
But while still highly-regarded, a common theme among fan responses has been that Arcane’s second and, sadly, final season simply had an enormous amount of story to tell in order to finish up its various plotlines – and not always enough time to do it complete justice.
“Some theories here a bit too far out there,” Linke said, writing on the Arcane reddit. “No, we didn’t ask Fortiche to produce a 1h30 final episode. It’s quite the opposite, our scripts are always shorter than what Fortiche ends up proposing in the story board phase. We wanna let them get inspired and roam free so we can then reel it in while also allowing for the magical moments to find themselves.
“It’s a tight creative collaboration, not some sort of ‘alright vendor company, do your work, achieve the impossible, but do it quickly!’ I consider many of the people at Fortiche to be some of my closest friends. I find it disappointing that people suggest these things.
“No, we didn’t get ‘corporate greed’ pressure or anything,” Linke continued. “However, yes, there are always constraints, both in budget and time. That’s part of our job as creatives, to work within those constraints. Constraints are NORMAL, and they were always generous, and I always had final say on anything creative. But they do exist. They also existed during Season 1.”
Arcane has made headlines for reportedly being the most expensive animated TV series of all time in terms of how much money is spent on each 25-minute episode. Linke said he’d of course wanted more time still, but that his team and animation studio Fortiche had been extremely lucky as-is.
“It would have been great to have more time to work on this second season, or extra time to add to the episodes, but we didn’t have it. For a number of reasons. Budget being one. We have been EXTREMELY lucky to get these absolutely insane budgets from Riot to produce Arcane. We all feel incredibly lucky. NOBODY ELSE gets these types of budgets. Please don’t forget that.
“Time being the other constraint. There’s a release window that a massive amount of people work towards, not just at Fortiche, but also at Riot on different games, at Netflix, brand partners. Even key talent that works on the show that, simply put, is getting tired cranking away at this incredibly long season and project over multiple years. Don’t forget that at the end of the day, this is just a collective of human beings, of people.
“I would assume that there is no other TV show that has taken as long as Arcane to produce two seasons, without any pauses. Arcane is unrivaled in sheer scope of high fidelity animation. I don’t wanna use any of these things as an excuse, but, yeah… this work demands a lot on a human level.
“Our Season 2 is amazing. We have made you feel more than you’ve ever felt when watching animated characters,” he concluded. “It’s not perfect. You don’t take these types of hefty swings and expect that everything wraps up perfectly with a neat bow tie. It grows and evolves in its own way, and it becomes what it becomes.”
With Arcane’s story now concluded, the same team is now working to expand the show’s world with three more stories set in other areas of the League of Legends universe.
Last month, Link confirmed these locations would include Noxus, home to Arcane’s Mel Meldarda, plus Demacia and Ionia. There’s no word yet on when these stories might debut.
“Some iffy pacing moments aside, Arcane’s second and final season truly puts the money on screen,” our Chris Tapsell wrote in Eurogamer’s Arcane season two review. “This is a striking, emotionally wrought, hard-punching climax.”
