You would be forgiven if you had not yet heard of Arcane, the Netflix animated series that premiered in November this year. And even if you did notice it on your Netflix homepage, where it ranked No. 1 on the Netflix Top 10 and quietly maintained a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, you may have dismissed it.
The decision to watch Arcane comes with hurdles. It’s an adult animated drama, which is still an oxymoron to some people. (“You’re recommending another cartoon?” I was asked at the dog park yesterday.) Worse, its story is based on the universe of the online multiplayer video game League of Legends, a game you may not care about or have even heard of. But ignoring Arcane would be a mistake, and recommending it is a gift.
Arcane is—and I do not say this lightly—perfect.
The story is set in Piltover, within a world with both humans and weird anthropomorphic creatures—come back, stick with me here—where inequality has fractured the city into two parts: the people who live above ground and enjoy the spoils of wealth, and the undercity of the poor. But the heart of the story is the relationship between two orphan sisters, Vi and Powder, and their group of friends.
Arcane is a bit of a slow burn at first, just given the weirdness of its world, which will seem confusing to anyone like me who is unfamiliar with League of Legends. While the setting feels inaccessible in the beginning, though, Vi and Powder’s relationship will carry you as the world builds around them. You don’t need to understand the fantasy world to attach to its central conflict: Vi and Powder live in a cruel place where all they have is each other and a few friends, except big-sister Vi is a capable survivor who keeps everyone safe, while little-sister Powder is a screw up.
It can be tricky to recommend anything described as a “slow burn,” as the gradual narrative incline can make it hard to tell when someone should decide to keep watching or jump ship. Typically, you just feel lost and a little bored for a while, and then suddenly you care a lot more than you realized. With Arcane, though, I can make it simple: You need to watch through Episode 3.
If you haven’t bought in by the end of Episode 3, then you won’t like Arcane and it’s not for you. But you will want to keep going. I promise you. I dare you to watch through Episode 3 and just … stop watching. Maybe you could, but then I would wonder if you’re just a bag of meat, devoid of human emotion.
The series is broken into three acts, with three episodes each, making the nine total episodes feel almost like a movie trilogy. Let me tell you exactly how you’ll feel through the first act:
Episode 1: This is weird.
Episode 2: Okay, it’s fine, but Jordan exaggerated.
Episode 3: I will never emotionally recover from this.
Everything about Arcane is the best of what I could hope for from it. The animation is beautiful; the show has been called the “most stunning piece of animation since Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” The characters are wonderfully diverse, inviting you to see your own experiences reflected in a multitude of ways. The fights are amazing. The music is dope. But most of all, the writing is structurally perfect, telling a story that’s compelling in its sincerity and brave in its willingness to be weird. It made me happy, sad, hopeful, depressed, excited, and numb throughout its short season—sometimes all in a single episode. I'm almost angry at how flawless I think it is.
After Arcane’s first season, time will tell if it can continue to grow its world and end as well as it began. But if you want a series with a high ceiling, Arcane is mixtape Wayne in 2009. It’s Mike Tyson after the Lou Savarese fight. If you’ve ever trusted me before—and I’ve given you good reason to trust me—you should trust me now. It could be one of the best animated dramas ever. It’s already one of the best in a very long time.
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Thank you to every hilarious reader who emailed me with the subject line “fuck off” after last week’s analysis of Succession. My favorite message came from Tait, who started by telling me that they preordered my book because “although it was instructed, the half-Canadian in me still felt sending a subject line of ‘fuck off’ to a stranger deeply rude.”
Thanks for preordering; you can tell me to fuck off anytime.
This week’s giveaway is the award-winning best seller Circe, by Madeline Miller. It’s a wonderful adaptation of Greek mythology, and my pick is inspired by the fact that I watched Hadestown on Broadway this week—coincidentally the same week I was watching Arcane—and just lost my shit from so much goodness. If you’re interested in the book, send me a short email telling me what movie you’re most looking forward to watching this month, Christmas-related or not, and I’ll send the book to the first person who hits my inbox. You can reach me at humansbeing@theatlantic.com, or find me on Twitter @JordanMCalhoun. In the meantime, I’ll fuck off until next week.
39 days until Saga returns.