Movies & TVLeague of LegendsTurns out the Arcane creative team always had the go ahead to kill any fan-favourite League of Legends characters it wanted: ‘Riot embraced whatever story we wanted to tell with any of the characters’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Movies & TVLeague of LegendsTurns out the Arcane creative team always had the go ahead to kill any fan-favourite League of Legends characters it wanted: ‘Riot embraced whatever story we wanted to tell with any of the characters’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Netflix)
I’ve aimed to write this article without spoilers for Arcane season two, but I do make vague reference to some of its events—if you want to be completely unspoiled, don’t read on!
As someone with a passable knowledge of League of Legends lore, when I first started watching Arcane, I didn’t think it would have much in the way of surprises. Sure, we’d get more of a window into these characters’ backstory than ever before, but it was all just heading in the direction of the status quo in LoL and its various spin-offs, right?
As it turns out, all bets were off right from the start, with Riot granting the creative team huge freedom over the story—and even allowing them to kill off anyone they liked. That’s according to Amanda Overton, who wrote on the first season and returned as an executive story editor on the second.
“Riot embraced whatever story we wanted to tell with any of the characters,” she toldour good friends over at GamesRadar+. “We were like ‘Can we kill Jayce and Viktor?’ ‘Yes’. There were no limits to what we could do to make a good story, which was, in my opinion, absolutely the right choice for them to do, because we are adapting a game into a different medium, into television, and you want to be able to be free to make that version the best it can possibly be.”
(Image credit: Netflix)
Though longtime fans may resent some of the changes made as a result, it’s hard to argue with the results—the show has been an enormous hit, and a large part of that is the depth invested in the characters.
“That support from [Riot’s] side really allowed us to make characters like this—complicated, interesting, dark, vulnerable—that had fates that we needed to decide what would be the most satisfying for the show, and not worry about what may or may not be interesting for a different medium,” she says.
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And apparently it was always the plan for that to reflect back into the game itself.Overton points tohow “mobile, and moving, and changeable” League of Legends is as a key difference between Arcane and other videogame adaptations.
“It’s updating all the time, it changes, it’s a very nimble, changing game. And so there isn’t a lot of opportunity to have an adaptation of a game to then also be able to change the game or adapt the game. The Last of Us can’t do that, The Witcher can’t do that. Any game adaptation that we’ve seen recently doesn’t have that relationship with League that Arcane does.”
(Image credit: Netflix)
Given that the story of Arcane, right up to the end of season two, was apparently planned as early assix years ago, that means Viktor’s League of Legends redesign has likely been on the agenda for almost as long, as well as the various major transformations and deaths in the show.
On the other hand… how many of those fates do we actually think will stick anyway? Particularly when it comes to deaths, it seemed to me that for almost all of them, the door was left wide open for the character to return (or revert) if Riot ever needs them again.
Still, it’s certainly interesting to see a TV show leading the way so strongly for a connected videogame universe. I don’t know if I’m entirely convinced that the company is successfully uniting all of its canon yet,as it promised last year, but it’s certainly being bold with it, no matter how many Viktor mains it upsets along the way.
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Most Popular
Today’s Wordle answer for Saturday, January 11
The Last of Us season 2 trailer is a brief look at a story you should probably just play yourself in April
Lords of the Fallen publisher embraces fear of the DEI boogeyman, says it will not include ‘any social or political agendas’ in its games
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says tech leaders are ‘pretending to be Republicans’ to gain favor with Trump, skirt antitrust laws, and ultimately ‘rip off consumers and crush competitors’
If you’re trying to convince me your ‘companionship’ robot is ‘lifelike’, maybe don’t rip her face off in the demo video
Square Enix launches new anti-harassment policy to protect its employees and partners from abusive fans
The Sims begins its 25th anniversary celebration next week with a Behind The Sims episode of news and announcements
Path of Exile 2 numberlord spends 16 straight days killing rare monsters to prove that a stat that makes loot better makes better loot
Palestinian developer raises more than $200,000 to make Dreams on a Pillow, a game about the horrors of the 1948 Nakba
Piranha Games will lay off employees after Mechwarrior 5: Clans ‘performed below projections’
Marvel Rivals’ latest update quietly killed the game’s burgeoning mod scene
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