53 - Netflix's Arcane - Worldbuilding Analysis

B01_04 - WorldWIP - Arcane === Arcane surprised me. And why wouldn't it? A show set in a universe of a game. I don't play. No, thanks. But against all odds, I fell in love. What is it about that show that drew us all in. How did the worldbuilding nail it and where might it be improved? And most importantly, what can we learn from it? Let's talk about Arcane. Well, Hey, there. I'm James from the WorldCraft Club and I'll be walking you through this analysis and I have to be a little straightforward with you. This is a little bit new. We've not done something like this before, and we're going out on a limb here. You see, our name was in an accident world as in worldbuilding and craft is in the craft of writing. We want you to grow proficient, not just a developing settings, but in portraying them. To that end. We think analysis of great worldbuilding is critical. Enter world WIP. A type of episode based around analysis of existing IPs that seeks to break their worldbuilding down, both the work behind the scenes and the way those worlds are portrayed. And help you to better understand what made them work or where they could be improved. If you walk away from this thinking more deeply about worldbuilding, then we'll take the W. We hope you enjoy the following. Arcane is in my top five favorite TV shows forever. It had deep, intricate characters that were sympathetic and believable, a well paced and intriguing story and beautiful cinematography and art. The character expressions were so finely detailed. It tugged on our heart strings and caused us to inhabit the characters. It took me through the whole gamut of emotions, but in the end left me with so many questions, thoughts, theories, and ideas. I loved every minute of its nine episode run. There's a lot to love about it, but before we start diving into some worldbuilding analysis, let's talk through the story and primary beats of the show. But before it gets started with that in earnest. Let me just thank some folks that helped me think through this. There'll be linked in the show notes. Additionally, if you wanted to find them. Schnee from YouTube, does some incredible work diving into analysis on this show. There's also one about Arcane and micro expressions. That was really useful to me as I started thinking through this process and getting my head around what made Arcane so great. So while the ideas expressed here are my own, I definitely owe these creators for their inspiration. And, uh, one more thing. I'm going to be looking at the show only. I'm not looking to launch into a full critique of League of Legends lore. So if you came here for my take on that, you might be in the wrong place. I'm looking solely at Arcane as a show and how it developed the hallmarks of good worldbuilding within its nine episode run. I will be talking about League of Legends, but only in so much as it provides some context for the development of the show's lore. So let's break down the story. The primary thrust of Arcane is a burgeoning war between the gilded and technologically advanced city of Piltover and the chaotic and underserved city that exists in the fissures surrounding it. It's within those fissures, that many of the raw goods, that power Piltover's great inventions are extracted a great cost to the citizens of the Lanes. Which is the setting's under city. The story takes place at the cost of the technological leap in Piltover where a brilliant scientist has discovered how to harness magic using technology. Two characters. Jinx and VI are sisters that are thrown into the middle of the conflict on opposite sides. The show explores deep themes throughout: The cost of war, the dangers of unchecked technological progress, the pain of shattered families and how we process the growth and change of our dearest friends. This show has so many subplots that I won't try too hard to dive into them, but that's all for a basic overview. Also bit of a spoiler alert. I'm probably going to dive into some things. If you haven't seen the show might come as a surprise. So you may want to pause and watch the show before you finish this. The History. Now Arcane's worldbuilding has got a unique history, and I think it's worth exploring where the game's lore comes from. To give us context for how we can develop our own worlds from stuff we learned from it. Arcane is based on League of Legends by Riot Games. It had no business being as good as it did because most video game adaptations are destined for failure to some degree While they usually make their money back. They tend to suffer from weak plots and costs and in decision of whether they're going to confuse their current audience by packing in details, they don't have time to explain or piss off legacy fans by failing to grasp the nuances of in-game lore and major themes. The solution they tend to land on is making sure everyone is equally mad and disappointed. I have a theory about why it worked for this show, though. The gameplay doesn't really lend itself to a direct adaptation as it's essentially a multiplayer arena game with interesting settings that are not really explained at depth, but through interaction and artistic choices. There's no Nathan Drake to follow around treasure hunting or Doom Guy to build a shoot 'em up narrative around. There is an overarching story, but we only see that through narrow windows of character stories and arena descriptions. This means that rather than taking a scene for scene reshoot of the game, we're actually seeing something altogether different. I took some time to familiarize myself with the lore and I've got to say, I was really impressed. It seemed that large swaths of it were left intentionally blank and entire regions of the world were only barely touched on as an element of one character's bio or another. It leads to a world that is essentially a patchwork of snapshots that when viewed together give a coherent image of a whole, this leaves a lot of creative license for a creator to work with while still having enough solid content for another person's creative vision to key in. This flexibility meant that they could adapt their content perfectly to whatever medium they chose. I'm convinced League of Legends can make a great comic book, TV show, movie, whatever you want, because the game play doesn't start with any preconceptions. It doesn't have to be an action adventure because that's what Uncharted was. And if you want to make an action movie out of that, it's going to work, but a Film Noire might not fit. You could easily have created any show in any genre you wanted, as long as you respected the characters lore. And to some extent, the presented aesthetic of the game. It's a lot of bandwidth to work with. So there's some history on League of Legends and where Arcane draws it's lore from. Let's get to the analysis. Analysis. First, I'm going to give you an idea of how I'm going to assess this. I don't think it's that common for folks to look explicitly at worldbuilding or to establish its quality. I'm endeavoring to do that here. My goal is to foster conversations about worldbuilding and help us all get better at it. Part of that is critical analysis and learning how to spot. What's good about a setting what's bad about it and how we can learn from that. Seth, and I tend to view worldbuilding through the lens of the visitant that is to say, we measure the effectiveness of worldbuilding based on how someone exploring that world sees it. We think good worldbuilding is built off the back of three essential elements that build on top of one another. Immersion your sense of place. Wonder your excitement about what lies beyond that place and the possibilities of this setting. And participation a visitant's desire to directly interact with the setting. By my count, Arcane does all these things well, and we'll analyze the setting based on these elements and how the show performs them. Immersion. I think it's fair to say that when you're watching this show, you're immersed. A good portion of immersion is feeling like the setting continues when the main characters aren't there. Immersion we tend to find is about thematic consistency. A lot of work of immersion is done by the visitant. Essentially you lay out the vision and your audience builds out the rest. As long as they have clarity, they'll imagine the rest of the world surrounding your characters and plot. Arcane has this in spades, the level of detail and background content that takes place during the show gives you clarity. Locations, vary from Piltover's, golden streets and tall structures to the haphazard chaos of the under city. The color palette in each location, lets us know the situation with more sickly and darkened colors below and golds and bright fanfare above. The structures and the under city carry a bleak aesthetic to them and have uneven lines and show evidence of long use and botched repairs. But above Piltover shows, beautiful, clear, straight lines, organized city streets, that betrayed careful planning rather than unchecked sprawl. There are busy characters in the background, carrying out their daily lives, whether it's the prostitutes of the under city, who we catch a brief glimpse of an act one or the busy under city market from act two. We're also given glimpses of working technology simply going about its business and the day to day life at either location. The setting is alive with movement. We half expect to see the camera veer off at some point and follow some other character and we have no doubt that their stories would be just as interesting. We might wonder what they do at work, what their homes are like. If they take a train to work or maybe trade on the zeppelins flying to and fro. What's more, there are notable changes in the environment during a time jump that takes place in the show, a major theme of the show being the way technology alters and changes things. We see how Piltover dramatically shifts as far casting magic tech teleporters are created in the city above. and how newly developed drugs impact the city below. Above. We see an explosion of wealth and capacity, below we see people who ingeniously use the scraps of that technology to develop some of their own tools,But with this development come different sets of escalating problems and the show doesn't shy away from showing you them. This means that we're not just looking at changes in space and setting as we go through it, but actually changes across time as well. That seem realistic and grounded to the setting. Another thing Arcane excels at is its building a factions and divided interests. This is important because it contextualizes the characters motivations in the broader setting and gives a broad pool for them to swim in. When a character behaves a certain way, we understand why they might feel conflicted, which the show does a great job of showing what the after mentioned micro-expressions For example, Silco the chief antagonist and Vander a father figure in the first act, both have an allegiance to the same faction fundamentally, but have vastly different visions for how that faction can achieve its aims. Because the setting is so well-crafted and the conflict between Piltover and The Lanes, the under city is so well-established we find ourselves as a visitant understandably having sympathy for both. The city has a rich history and a clear set of conflicts, not just between characters, but within the setting as a whole, their introduction of the Firelighters who have interfered thus far in a few key events, just enough to keep them at the tip of our brains without diverting our attention from the story is highly stylized and gives us a clear vision of the group. You understand their constituent makeup containing even children and families. Being opposed to both Silco and his underworld faction, as well as Piltover his own brutish enforcers, this type of introduction, grants us incredible clarity without taking up too much time. This vision the different factions allows us to see not only where points of friction between those factions might exist. But points of potential alliance and cooperation, as you see different individuals within those factions grapple with the situations in which they find themselves. This is particularly highlighted as Heimerdinger, a scientist from Piltover finds himself in the Firelighters hide out learning about them and growing impressed with their unadulterated spirit of invention, curiosity, and innovation. It exists in such an unlikely place. And he's fascinated by it. The setup of the factions is what enables this moment to take place. Factions are incredible because they give a backdrop for individual characters to stand in contrast to. Weirdly, arranging characters, into clear factional alignments. It gives more room for them to shine instead of less. This is immersion. The sense of place, the grounded feeling of coherence. There are some places where I think the show suffered though. We're told little about how these places work. Piltover appears to be a coastal city, but the under city is a literal fissure in the ground filled with noxious gases, serving a mine that will never see this must mean that it's below sea level. This may be curious about the layout of the city, but we never see a map. I found myself wanting to see a bigger picture of the surrounding city. I felt a need for more context for what I was seeing as my compass was a little spun. Another item is the races. There are some fascinating races that we only catch a glimpse of in the show an entirely synthetic race. For example, that appears in the Piltover council. I want to know more about them. They're clearly prominent in the city as they have a seat in the government, and yet I'm left almost frustratingly in the dark. In essence, the show is tightly contained and driven heavily by story and character. We generally have a good sense of place. But I wish they'd been able to linger on some of the world a little more in their passage to give me a sense of the settings breadth to more deeply ground me in the world. This criticism is minor though. And I hesitate to deliver it to some extent because the show otherwise did an excellent job. And I'm not certain, I necessarily want the camera to draw too far from the unfolding story. So take this with an appropriate grain of salt. Wonder. Let's talk about, wonder for a second. Wonder exists in some tension with immersion. Emerging is all about finding yourself in a place, but wonder is more about letting your mind wander and embrace possibilities. It seems to me that wonder is a delicate balance. On the one hand, you need to leave a lot of room. I'm a huge advocate of leaving spaces in your world, intentionally blank so that the visitant can consider possibilities. I'm definitely a minimalist in this regard. But that said there's also an argument to be made that we ought to also give folks enough content to key into, I think, where Arcane excelled was in its tight efficient storytelling, but I think this might have stymied some of my ability to experience wonder in the setting. Wonder is what makes worldbuilding truly effective. And Arcane delivers this too, but only in measured narrow dosessince wonder is about the broader world, rather than simply the setting we're seeing. It's notable that Arcane rarely leaves Piltover's boundaries. We don't see a ton of the outside world. To be fair. There's enough interesting things going on in our primary setting that we don't really need to see a whole lot more. That said, we're given just enough to understand and follow the plot. There are magicians who make use of magical stones. We know they have a dangerous history, but where did the stones come from? What are the dangers of such magic? We're given only hints. There are times where we travel and see some other places in flashbacks we're given to understand that there's a war beyond Piltover's, golden manors, but we're not given a lot of information about it. Again. Only so much as the direct characters are involved. There's a sense in which the show's refusal to shift camera too far from its primary characters cause some issues for me and my sense of wonder. I'll admit that after seeing the show, I gave little thought to its expansive possibilities, but rather my attention was focused on what's next for the characters that I'd grown to love. Some highlights concerning the show and its ability to affect wonder where the following. We're given little clarity on how magic is used and why its power is feared by many. We certainly see it running awry. And at some junctures, but I wish we'd been given more clarity on this or more hints of magic, dark portents for Piltover. The incidents were where magic causes harm seemed to be more related to accidents on a small scale, rather than a mystical corrupting influences Heimerdinger seems to imply. I talked a little bit about races before. There are several races that exist in Piltover and the surrounding under city. We see them from time to time and they occasionally have influence on the story, but I feel like we do not get enough time with them to fully grapple with their place in the setting. I wish that the show had offered a little bit more time to focus on these and give us something to key into to expand our own minds and our own thought process on the setting. Now, for a show that has such a solid sense of immersion, and for all intents and purposes _looks_ like it has deep and compelling lore. We're just not told a whole lot. I went diving into wikis to try and read up on the show, but there were countless, "this article is incomplete" sections. A lot of it seemed cobbled together from the bios of the games, dozens of champions, as I alluded to before. In terms of lore and worldbuilding the League of Legends canon is just a little weird. It's wrapped up in these bio's and there are dozens of them essentially, while there is a main narrative at play through the game it's given in tiny little self-contained doses about each character. This differs from most games you'll encounter. We don't have a main narrative to follow, and this was something I alluded to before, and I think it has a little bit of impact on wonder. Essentially the game is just a strategic multiplayer game. There's not so much one story as a patchwork of stories that add up into the world. And none of those stories necessarily have to run to completion due to the nature of the game. So we're given a lot of loose ends. This leaves, tons of room to work with. I'll throw some links in the show notes with some great YouTubers who are doing pretty expansive work on the lore of the series. But with the show's tight focus, I think it was sometimes really hard to feel like there was a bigger and broader world out there and they didn't tap into some of this rich lore, a almost feel like they could've gotten away with adding more episodes and giving us just a little bit more time to just sort of grapple with the world and the setting and the impact of some of these different characters and races that we're seeing, particularly races like Heimerdinger. Where he's incredibly old. We got to see a lot of his immortality and how that impacts the setting, but we weren't given much more beyond that. I kind of want to know more about his race, what they're like, where they're from. I think a little bit of a touch on that and a bit more history flashbacks, or some sort of exposition might've actually been really useful on this part. Just to give us a sense of where these characters come from. And I would have happily have seen the show extended a little bit longer to give little, uh, threads for us to pull on and experience some more wonder. Uh, participation. This is the last and probably the trickiest to grapple with. What Seth and I contend is that the tippy top of the worldbuilding pyramid, the crown jewel of powerful worldbuilding is participation. Participation is about the audience, finding themselves in the world where immersion is about being lost in the story. And is about consistency. Wonder has more to do with possibilities of a setting. Participation's a little more personal. It's about wishing to inhabit and step into a setting yourself. Which means that folks must identify with what they're seeing on the screen. We think a lot of this has to do with tropes and core themes. Usually you'll get folks dressing up as the main character from a series, but how often do people dress up as folks who are just around in a given setting? On this note, let's talk a little bit about factions. The reason why you might see a person doing a Harry Potter cosplay as a nameless Hufflepuff is because they see themselves as a Hufflepuff. They took the online test and now find themselves wanting to inhabit the setting. In that role. They see themselves as loyal and hardworking. They see a Hufflepuff when they look in the mirror. Are there parallels to this kind of thing in Arcane? The interesting thing is that this operates in some tension with immersion. We're not just saying that you need to find yourself in the world, but that the world or fictional setting needs to be able to find itself in you. I think this is a fascinating thing and feeds into some of the other issues that I have with the worldbuilding in Arcane, the laser focus on the story and clarity of vision for the setting. Almost stop it short when it comes to wonder and participation. Where I can see someone cosplaying Jinx, Vi, Vander, or Silco, I can't really see someone just finding a nameless element of the setting of wanting to emulate it. This is something of a problem with fostering participation. The arcane infused steam punk aesthetic is somewhat generic. Someone isn't likely to see a person dressed in this fashion and say, "right! You're a fire lighter from Arcane. Aren't you?" While there's something to be said for the costumes and design in the show. I think it would be hard to take it to the next level and expand on my own stories, whether through my experiments with this costuming or fan fiction. If it wasn't directly surrounding one of the main characters, this is because the shows tight focus and the generic nature of the genre that was chosen for. It. In short, the immersion storytelling are top notch, but I think sometimes wonder and participation are the cost of this. Conclusions and application. So how do we do this? And what do we take away from Arcane? Because now we've taken the time to analyze the show fully. We need to talk about what we can take away from the series. How can we adapt what we're seeing into something we're making? Arcane had the advantage of being based on a game where a central story was not the focus leaving room for the show, runners to work on an expansive vision. The Game also included a clear sense of the aesthetic and vision, which gave appropriate constraints to the shows lore. It's a perfect storm for worldbuilding strong central theme, clear boundaries when establishing our own settings. I think we can take it this way. Keep your setting open enough from multiple types of story to be told by holding your worldbuilding in an open hand. Operate in tension with this by having a strong sense of the themes and boundaries that you're working in. Another element that I think caused the show to suffer in some ways was that it worked off the steam punk arcane aesthetic, which is popular, but also generic. It'd be hard to identify with the show. Without your love of the show being mistaken for any other generic setting. What we might extract from this is to lean into the distinctives of your setting. Don't be afraid to break out of the mold and try some unique visual cues or something else that might cause your worldbuilding to stand apart from other offerings in your genre. Their factions were top notch and gave tons of room for breathtaking character development. I remember how powerfully these factions were used. I'm just as excited about the continuing development of the factions going forward. As I am about individual characters, the key advice here would be to carefully consider the conflicts in your settings and the factions that will develop around those potential conflicts. Remember that a faction doesn't have to be a family. They might not even like each other, but they do have to have a shared goal. Take the time on them and it'll pay off as air characters, navigate them. This creates realistic social dynamics and helps people understand character motivations and reasoning. The last element, as a note on craft here would be to take your time. Arcane was a tightly told story and heavily character focused. I almost wished at times that they pumped the brakes and given us more sweeping vistas of the city or taken time to let us. Take in a location a little bit. Take it in a little more depth, even between the show's efficiency and focus. I feel like some of the worldbuilding was lost and therefore my wonder and participation and the expectation was hurt a little bit. So what's my conclusion? I'll go ahead and say it again. This story surprised me. I loved every moment of the world and the setting, and I'm excited to see what they do in season two. The main criticism that I can deliver is something that I'm not even sure really counts as one. I wanted even more of it. The story was so tightly told the narrative, giving you just what you needed without an ounce more that I was left hungry to see what the world was like. This occasionally led to me losing my bearings about how the narrative fit into the larger world and setting even about Piltover and Zaun themselves, which is locally the exact same setting we're given. Which is why I'm hesitant to even refer to this as a criticism, wanting more of something is no condemnation of its quality with season two, coming down the pike, I'm excited to see more of Runeterra, the broader setting. To learn more about Merada's wars and conquests, where was Silco smuggling, shimmer to and a million other unanswered questions. Now I opened this analysis to our discord server, doing one of our weekly meetups. You should totally join by the way, link in the show notes. And I had some great feedback on some of these criticisms, thoughts and ideas. Seal stash hosted the black dragon dungeon company podcast link in the show notes raised a pretty good point when I shared some of my thoughts on arcane. His question related to the format of the show. I was stunned that I'd missed this one as it's a central theme that we often discuss when speaking about worldbuilding. What is your setting trying to do. This is partly tied to genre, but it's important to note that arcane is a highly character driven story. So the worldbuilding elements that are focused on are character based worldbuilding elements that seek to give us deep context with the characters and their environment, rather than a broad Vista of the surrounding world. This for me, dovetails nicely into a critique that I sometimes hear of talking. He wrote a lot. And I mean a lot. The entire breadth of the Lord of the rings clocks in at about 480,000 words to essentially tell the story of a bunch of people walking to a mountain. This isn't so much a criticism of his work, but rather a point of analysis on the objectives he was trying to achieve. His broader work was about inspiring wonder and myth. His goal was not a tightly formatted piece of character driven fiction, but rather to plant seeds of a broader and much deeper world in which characters were only playing a minor part. This means that some folks find his work inaccessible or dry to read where others see a sweeping epic. As Worldbuilder's we often take the latter view that sweeping sense of wondrous exploration in a world that moves in breeze with, or without us resonates deeply. But maybe that feeling in itself is more genre than quality. Talking one set, and this story may be apocryphal. That he wisely started his worldbuilding with a map. It's interesting to me that when we look at Tolkien's world, we see a map that has been annotated and explored with mysteries and broad portents. Whereas with arcane, the work was derived from. Character bios. So we get a lot of character and not a lot of broader world. I'll confess that lacking the broader context hurt my immersion to a lesser degree. When I had a hard time imagining how the world sort of fit together. I'll say that I still wish the show had invested some time in exploring the setting and providing that context. I moderate it now with this though. The worldbuilding here has it, where it counts in its factions and relationships and the way that it deals with the change of time. In some ways, the scope of Arcane is in the way it deals with time more than space. We may not get a broad map that provides context. Where's Noxos? How's the war going? Et cetera, et cetera. But we do get a sense of how time shapes the environment in Piltover. And more importantly, how it's shaping the different characters that we're seeing throughout the shows runtime. This temporal aspect of worldbuilding is really important and feeds well into the overall goals of the story. It was a definite area of focus for the show runners. And it's definitely worth some more consideration. I mean, at least a blogger too. And with that. I'll close my commentary If you found this useful, please consider subscribing and even better. If you want to give us a five stars on your preferred reviewing app, please go ahead and do that. If not, and we have yet to, wow, you. Please send us an email. The link is in the show notes, and we'd love to hear from you. Any feedback is gratefully received. This show also proudly operates without any form of advertisement. But if you do want to support the show, check out The Worldbuilder's Journal. It's a really neat product that Seth and I have been working on for the last while or so that we think will really help you take your worldbuilding to the next level, a link for that also in the show notes. This has been the WorldCraft Club podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Catch you next time