'Arcane' Season 1 - TV Series

This is an animated prequel to the "League of Legends" online game, available on Netflix.

Vi and Powder are two young sisters living in Zaun, which is the crime-ridden under-city below the city of Piltover. They were orphaned, but taken in by Vander - one of the leaders of the failed revolution that orphaned them. This follows them from when they were perhaps 10 and 15 to when they're in their late twenties. The series is nine episodes of 53 minutes each.

The artwork is ... breath-taking. Superb. Art Deco Steampunk, this series is a work of art in every frame. I probably couldn't have watched all of it just for that - but I might have tried. Really. However, the series also has good characters. I thought Silco (voiced by Jason Spisak) was probably the best: he's a horrible bastard and a drug dealer, but he's alarmingly understandable. He was also a leader of the revolution, who loves his "daughter" and his city and will do anything for either one of them ... no matter the cost to anyone else.

SPOILERS: and now I'd like to talk about a couple of problems, which really gets me into spoiler territory. The biggest, to me, is Powder/Jinx. I don't know "League of Legends" at all, and I don't care what they "need" her to turn out as. She's batshit crazy, basically the Joker. And just like the Joker, I fail to see any way she could have survived. She's a loose cannon, doing random dangerous shit all the time. And yet when it's convenient for the plot she's in exactly the right place at exactly the right time with exactly the piece of artillery that's needed. Her perfect placement every time is simply not consistent with the character.

A lesser gripe is that after watching seven and a half hours of the series, they offer no resolution - just make things worse as a cliffhanger for the next season. Have I mentioned how much I hate cliffhangers? This qualifies as a "lesser gripe" because I was kind of expecting it. Doesn't mean I'm going to come back for the next season. The series was good, but not good enough to get away with pissing me off that much.