The delicate balance between the rich city of Piltover and the seedy underbelly of Zaun. Tensions between these city-states boil over with the creation of 'hextech', a way for any person to control magical energy in Piltover, and in Zaun, a new drug called 'shimmer' transforms humans into monsters. The rivalry between the cities splits families and friends as Arcane brings life to the relationships that shape some of League of Legends' famous champions including Vi, Jinx, Caitlyn, Jayce, Viktor, and Ekko.
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Within a week of its first three episodes dropping, Arcane had a 100% Tomatometer score and a 98% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, edging out Squid Game's numbers at the time and setting the record for Netflix's best-reviewed original series to that point.
Some details in Arcane don't line up perfectly with existing League of Legends lore, and creator Christian Linke has been upfront that these aren't meant as retcons. The team saw them as small adjustments made purely to serve the strongest possible story for the show, even if it meant bending a few established facts from the game.
The whole point of Hextech, as Jayce and Viktor originally envisioned it, was to let regular people without magical talent tap into arcane energy safely. It's the corruption and misuse of that idea, first through Shimmer and later through Viktor's own obsession, that turns a hopeful invention into the thing that nearly destroys both cities.
In the show's own lore, Zaun was originally just Piltover's undercity, a dumping ground for the fumes and waste the surface city didn't want. That founding imbalance, baked in from the start, is really what the entire Piltover-Zaun conflict across both seasons comes back to.
Rather than leaning into typical on-screen tropes for female characters, Arcane's writers deliberately shaped Vi and Caitlyn's dynamic around trust and vulnerability instead of spectacle. The show even avoids giving them an on-screen kiss for most of the run, letting small gestures like holding each other's faces carry the weight instead.
Silco isn't just a random crime boss, his entire arc, clawing his way up from nothing to eventually ruling over Zaun's underworld, is presented as a direct product of the neglect and desperation baked into Zaun's founding. He becomes exactly the kind of ruthless figure that a city built on being ignored ends up producing.
A number of the main cast members, including Ella Purnell and Hailee Steinfeld, have spoken about recording scenes together in the booth rather than each actor doing lines alone. That group approach is part of why sisters Vi and Jinx feel like they have real, lived-in chemistry rather than two separate performances stitched together.
Caitlyn's voice actor, Katie Leung, is probably best known to a lot of viewers as Cho Chang from the Harry Potter films. Arcane marked a proper return to a major franchise role for her after years working mostly in smaller British TV and theatre projects.
Jinx's voice actor Ella Purnell had already built a solid resume with Yellowjackets, Army of the Dead and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children before Arcane, and went on to headline Amazon's Fallout as Lucy MacLean not long after. Jinx is generally seen as the role that really put her on the map for mainstream audiences.
Katie Leung, who plays sharpshooter Caitlyn Kiramman, is probably still best recognised for playing Cho Chang across four Harry Potter films. Arcane gave her a proper lead role again after years spent mostly in smaller British TV and stage work.
