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How Games Make a World, with ‘Fallout’ and ‘Arcane’
70 Plays8 months ago
Jordan and Niv, in their second conversation about video games, discuss how the medium allows for total immersion (1:10) before discussing 'Fallout.' (12:30) They touch on character (21:40) and tone (39:59) before moving onto Netflix's 'Arcane.' (1:02:23) They discuss the modern transition of video game adaptations to film and television, and debate on how 'Arcane' fares, similarly in terms of complexity (01:14:03), how magic integrates into the world (01:24:01), how it succeeds in its ambitious endeavor (01:33:04). They touch on character development (01:51:44) in Season 2, or lack thereof, and how it connects to the rest of the TV landscape (02:03:25).
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Transcript
Introduction to Zeitgeist Podcast
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Speaker
you
00:00:13
Speaker
Happy 2025, everyone. This is Zeitgeist, the show where we talk about all the latest movie and TV while we listen to the latest music. My name is Jordan, and joining me, my partner in crime as always, Nev Elbaz. How you doing today, man?
00:00:30
Speaker
Pretty good, pretty good. Welcome to 2025, the years where all our dreams hopefully don't come up in flames.
2025 Entertainment Landscape
00:00:38
Speaker
So. hopefully come true you know we've had a a pretty rocky road starting things off especially out here in la i hope that all my fellow angelinos are safe we certainly have experienced a lot of turmoil but i don't think it's all for nothing it's a year hopefully of new beginnings everyone was saying last year survived till 25 and it's been would say a quieter year at the cinema so far a lot of smaller releases
00:01:06
Speaker
We have our first big release this weekend as of recording. The new Marvel
Video Games and World-Building
00:01:10
Speaker
movie is out. But in general, it's been a little bit of an interesting kind of road into the sphere of entertainment again.
00:01:19
Speaker
And today we're actually talking about one type of entertainment intersecting with another. This is a topic we've discussed before on a previous podcast. So this is part two of our video game discussion. Don't worry, you don't have to listen to part one to understand what we are talking about today. We may reference other podcasts throughout.
00:01:37
Speaker
We do invite you to, once you're finished listening to this one, to check out another one. I do understand that you probably ah are listening to this. This may be your first episode. except for a few of you guys who I do see listening throughout here, the US and beyond.
00:01:51
Speaker
But speaking of video games now, we're talking, I think, today about two video games that have a specific quality in mind. And that quality is world building. And I think what really makes both of these pieces of entertainment special, A, they are TV shows, so they have the longevity needed to be able to express their ideas.
00:02:11
Speaker
And we're talking, of course, about fallout and later in we are going to be talking about the netflix show arcane fallout is on amazon arcane is on netflix both seasons of arcane are now out fallout season one is out and ah season two has been renewed so that should come out sometime in the next three years yeah talk to me about your experience with video games catch everybody up you are a video game nerd what about video games interests you specifically in terms of its narrative engines Oh, my God.
Video Games as Artistic Medium
00:02:41
Speaker
I'm pretty sure I talked about this in our part one.
00:02:43
Speaker
But video games are what convinced me to become a writer, be honest, just because of the first of all, like like you said, world building, like being thrust into a um humongous world and and live through it, not in a span of two hours that movies sort of provide you or 10 hours like modern movies. sort of television series provide you in a season, but for a good 60 hours or even more that you can personally live in yourself and choose your sort of pace of going through said world.
00:03:13
Speaker
Like I remember when I was six years old, my dad bought me a PlayStation one as an apology for moving us to India because I moved when I was really young from my home country of Israel to Mumbai, India.
00:03:26
Speaker
And to help with that transition, he got me a PlayStation. And one of the first games I ever played on it was Final Fantasy seven, one of the most famous video games of all time. He didn't know that.
00:03:37
Speaker
I didn't really know that until I played it. It was a video game with such an expansive world with really deep characters with really important zeitgeist making sort of plot twists that still like stand the test of time today. I mean, shout out to you, Aerith.
00:03:52
Speaker
one of the most important video game characters of all time. and later on, when I was around 12, 13, I got a video game by the name of Knights of the Old Republic, which was a Star Wars game.
00:04:03
Speaker
And in that game, what made it really special is that you could sort of make your own story. Like each sort of big moment in the video game would provide you with a choice and whatever choice you wanted, it would shift the story. It would create a permutation, as we call it, and it would lead you to a different outcome.
00:04:18
Speaker
And it sort of allowed you truly to make a story that's specific to your own morality and your own choices. And just based on that alone, it made me fall in love with the power of storytelling, of it actually having an affecting power.
00:04:32
Speaker
And being able to play around with those permutations just really helped me understand the depth of what storytelling can do and how... you know amazing video games as a whole are not really this children's toy, as some people see it as, but it's just like film was a natural progression or evolution from theater.
00:04:51
Speaker
I believe that video games are a natural, like artistic evolution from films to now in our 21st century. Specifically with the new addition of lots of digital tools.
00:05:02
Speaker
I mean, there are learning engines that you can now put in place in video games, which have existed for decades, but they're becoming more and more sophisticated and with a better handle on how they can operate ethically.
00:05:18
Speaker
Of course, when I talk about learning engines, I'm talking about AI, which is very, very controversial right now, and largely because um venture capital is utilizing it inauthentically.
00:05:29
Speaker
and without moral repercussion. But when you have these tools, which are obviously morally neutral, utilized in a space where you can truly be able to interact, that's where I do think you'd be able to fully see the potentiation of these tools that are right now innocuous and mostly writing limericks for random guys in Ohio.
00:05:52
Speaker
This is not what these engines are really built for. I think there's true potentiation to actually be had in terms of how our technologies work with us. And video games are always going to be at the forefront of that.
00:06:06
Speaker
That's why when you get a laptop that has the highest end processing power ah possible, you don't call that a video rendering laptop. You don't call it a technological laptop. You call it a gaming laptop.
00:06:20
Speaker
And I think that's for a very important reason. ah You also touched on world building. This is something that is very essential to our conversation, which is that video games thrive in high concept environments. Today we're talking about two incredibly densely high concept stories, the first of which is Fallout. Fallout is a game that has lore ranging decades, right? Yeah, absolutely.
00:06:47
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When was the first time you played a Fallout game? Did you play the first one? I played the first one as an experience. It wasn't something I naturally veered into, but it's ironic because believe the first one was made by a company called Black Isle Studios and Interplay.
00:07:01
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And they're sort of the ones who were the original like role playing video game developers. So when I mentioned like Knights of the Old Republic, the people who created that were a company called Bioware and they were sort of a successor to Black Isles and Interplay because they're like the second or third generation of RPG developers.
00:07:21
Speaker
And basically, back in the day of Black Isles, they created Fallout, they created the original Baldur's Gate, another sort of zeitgeist, important Flashpoint video game that is really important right now with Baldur's Gate 3.
00:07:35
Speaker
But that's what I mean. They created essentially the bedrock of RPG storytelling and videoing. So I heard about
RPGs and Player Agency
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Speaker
it. I always did hear about it. But it was before my time, you know, like it was just a little bit older than I was.
00:07:48
Speaker
And I only started playing Fallout when it became Fallout 3, when it was bought, like the rights, the trademark was bought by Bethesda Studios.
00:08:00
Speaker
And they're the video game company that also makes Elder Scrolls. Another humongous RPG with a massive world and a lot of lore. Is that what you would call AAA game? Yeah, I mean, a AAA game is basically the same thing as of like a blockbuster for a movie. It's something that's just put in a lot of money, a lot of investment, and it essentially generates like huge expansive world. There are certain expectations when you're like, okay, I'm buying a AAA game.
00:08:26
Speaker
There needs to be spectacle. There needs to be a lot of features. And there needs to be sort of a lot of things that sustain sort of you playing that game for long term. For Elder Scrolls and Fallout, it was just content.
00:08:38
Speaker
It wasn't sort of multiplayer, at least back in the day, it wasn't multiplayer, which is like found in Call of Duty or loot boxes or but battle passes, really things that are in live service games or what we call live service games today.
00:08:51
Speaker
Back then, when it was just Fallout 3 Elder Scrolls, like Oblivion, and then Skyrim, it was just content. It was just huge worlds where you just had massive playgrounds and you sort of were able to do whatever you wanted. They were essentially the role-playing game versions of Grand Theft Auto.
00:09:10
Speaker
That's the best way I could describe it. And um not to jump forward too much, is League of Legends a live service game? I understand that that one falls into it. Yes, it is. It is. A totally different camp of understanding because I think of people who play League of Legends in the same realm as people who play other very, very popular games like fortnite is that sort of in the same realm is it battle royale style or does league of legends fall into a category a subcategory of a subcategory kind of thing i understand that it's not an rpg at all it actually created its own category back in the day again league was something that was my time and it was essentially revolutionize a genre called a moba
00:09:55
Speaker
which was a genre that was created from a mod, from just a mod from another famous video game called Warcraft 3, which was a strategy game. And basically in that mod, there was a game called Defense Against the Agents, where basically it was two teams that had to destroy each other's bases.
00:10:11
Speaker
And they were in control of of units, but they were in control of a single unit called a hero. And basically they had to help push the armies forward and back or defend and stuff like that. and eventually help each other to destroy the enemy base.
00:10:25
Speaker
That was the entire purpose of that genre. But again, because it was a mod, it eventually sort of transformed into a full fledged video game or video games. League of Legends being the biggest example, Dota 2 being the other huge example.
00:10:38
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of that genre, those video games became so important in sort of that timeframe of like late 2000, like early 2000s, 10s to now, because they essentially, they helped create the esports scene outside of games like Counter-Strike or Call of Duty.
00:10:56
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because it created sort of another mode of gameplay that people could watch and people were really interested in, because it felt high stakes. Those video games constantly feel high stakes because they're also team based.
00:11:07
Speaker
And so if anything, League of Legends is a video game, but it's ironically considered a video game, just like soccer is considered like a game. And it's frequently used in the arena of esports, I understand, too. Because esports is now its own category, and largely probably because of services, DOTAs, that allow for people to be able to engage online.
00:11:32
Speaker
MOBAs, yeah. Dota is a game that follows the MOBA genre and League of Legends is another game. Dota and LOL. So we have clearly two very different so vantage points in terms of how we experience these things. I actually get pretty motion sick playing a lot of three d games, which eliminates every single one of these pretty much.
00:11:54
Speaker
I can do, you know, Mario, old school, like in an ah arcade. i will often go to arcades if I want to play video games because I find that to be the easiest venue. There are a lot of wonderful arcade bars here in l LA. That's a wonderful place to hang out.
00:12:08
Speaker
But nonetheless, there's... The thing that I find really interesting that I wanted to touch on here is that in code, right, this is what video games are formatted on is code. You have rules and you have expectations and you have limits, right? And one of the cool things about a video game is that it is limited sort of scope of things that can feel unlimited.
Fallout's Adaptation to TV
00:12:30
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If you're in an open world game, you can do a lot of things, but these experiences are tied to something foundational in the product's core. And even if you had a large language model feeding you new experiences, that would still be operating under a specific code base.
00:12:47
Speaker
And what I think is really unique is that like code, you can also fork, right? So that's how you get, and this is the same, by the way, if you're using a book, an RPG book, and there's something very similar to what happened here.
00:13:00
Speaker
with warcraft right warcraft 3 i take it became a mmo called world of warcraft correct it did it did it became its own version of a life service game yes but i don't think a lot of people even know who play league considering that there are probably a lot of casual players that these two things are effectively sisters A lot of people do know in the tabletop RPG world that Pathfinder and the Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition are sisters, but a lot of Dungeons & Dragons users don't even know about Pathfinder. And what Dungeons & Dragons is, is it's the 4th edition, right? So it's sort of like the 4th version of a game, and the 3rd edition was a totally different format to the game.
00:13:45
Speaker
And if you played the third edition, when it moved to fourth edition, there were some very controversial changes in terms of the mechanics to streamline it for people who wanted to try it for the first time, which made it much easier when I wanted to play the game for the first time as someone who's never played any video games to understand the mechanics very, very quickly.
00:14:02
Speaker
But then you also have Pathfinder. Pathfinder is the third edition, and that's where people who really liked the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons, they could play that version.
00:14:14
Speaker
still in a new game that was still being updated. So two different companies are operating two different games, very similar to the occasion where you are modding a digital game and then turning it into something new.
00:14:27
Speaker
And that's really cool and one of the great foundational elements of anything involving a computer. It's not something that I think a lot of people consider when they're checking their Instagram or their Facebook or the idea of you can fork social media, but I'll tell you it is also possible.
00:14:42
Speaker
And I would look into things like Fetaverse if you were ever interested in stuff like that. But the core foundation really is, what I love about video games is that it is foundationally based on a series of rules and ethical codes regardless of what those ethical codes are. Some of the ethical codes are quite violent.
00:15:01
Speaker
But at the end of the day, you are a subject to the rules and the world of the game. And in the case of Fallout, that's something rather dire. Earlier, I mentioned Boulder's Gate. Boulder's Gate is an adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons.
00:15:16
Speaker
There has been a video game adaptation of Pathfinder. These are systems that are easily translated into video game form because they also follow similar rules, similar mechanics.
00:15:28
Speaker
And it's interesting because, again, that's a natural sort of like adaptation. But what's really ironic is that for a really long time, films and TV were not natural adaptations for video games and vice versa, because they usually stood against one another because one was sort of a shorter form than the other.
00:15:48
Speaker
Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, those kinds of table-top games, they can take a really long time to complete. So do video games. Movies, however, and TV shows, they are naturally shorter. So that was usually the big complaint about adapting TV and video games.
00:16:05
Speaker
It was believed impossible for a very long time because every attempt to do so, it just scratched the surface of the massive world they were trying to portray. So that's why I think it's good that you brought up tabletop games because, again, different things adapt very differently from each other.
00:16:21
Speaker
Absolutely. And Fallout was originally a game that was meant to be played on a different rule set. So I talked about two rule sets already. One is closer to the Pathfinder rule set in terms of it being a little bit more rule intensive.
00:16:34
Speaker
And that is GURPS. GURPS is a as rule-intensive as you want it. It's effectively meant to be a fully modular role-play system, and Fallout is dramatically different from GURPS now.
00:16:45
Speaker
But the creator of GURPS, Steve Jackson, didn't like how violent the world of Fallout was. It's obviously a world of a lot of nihilism.
00:16:56
Speaker
I think it's kind of ironic looking at the landscape now because you can see a lot of sort of like joy and whimsy in the Fallout world, especially as portrayed in the TV show.
00:17:09
Speaker
But it was a story that effectively was shunted away from tabletop RPGs and thus turned into something entirely different and eventually became the video game that you toyed around with.
00:17:22
Speaker
So which Fallout game did you play first? I played Fallout 3. okay Because I remember I played Elder Scrolls Oblivion. That was like sort of my introduction to the Bethesda video games.
00:17:33
Speaker
And after that, I was I realized that, you know, there was another video game that came out around the same time and it was Fallout 3. So I played it. I didn't like it as much. I remember even thinking to myself, wow, I don't like this world as much as like the fantasy world that Elder Scrolls Oblivion sort of showed me.
00:17:50
Speaker
Because Fallout, as we talk about, is sort of like this apocalyptic sci-fi sort of world. But then I played a sequel that was developed by another studio called Obsidian, and it was called Fallout New Vegas.
00:18:01
Speaker
And I felt I really enjoyed that one because it felt like it actually went more into its RPG roots back in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, just with modern sort of systems that Fallout 3 showcased.
00:18:14
Speaker
And that, to me, made me really, really fall in love with the Fallout world and very happy that it was getting adapted into a TV show. I always thought after playing Fallout New Vegas specifically, that out of every video game out there, the best example of video game that could be adapted like well would have been Fallout because it was right for it.
00:18:35
Speaker
Let me explain the structure of the TV show to the uninitiated. And then we should talk about how the show has a congruency with New Vegas. So the structure of the show is three intertwining plots.
00:18:49
Speaker
You have Lucy Maximus and the ghoul. played by future White Lotus star. Walton Goggins. Walton. I was like, what's what's his name? It's a funny name, isn't it?
00:19:02
Speaker
Walton Goggins. Ella Purnell plays Lucy. You may know her from Yellow Jackets. And Maximus is an actor I'm not quite as familiar with. And his name is Aaron Moten.
00:19:15
Speaker
There are obviously a number of other People that you are you probably recognize if you've been watching Severance lately, you know, Zach Cherry, who plays a role. Kyle McLaughlin guest stars is a very important character. He, of course, from Twin Peaks, which is a show I think you and I are going to talk about later. now Oh, absolutely.
00:19:35
Speaker
And they whole point of the show is that you have these characters surviving in a world and these characters view survival in vastly different ways.
00:19:48
Speaker
You have three different types of people who represent three different societies. The ghouls for the ghoul. Maximus has the Brotherhood. And Lucy is a vault dweller.
00:20:02
Speaker
We begin by following Lucy in the vault. The drama kicks off when her father, Kyle McLaughlin, is kidnapped by a mysterious figure from outside the vault. So I assume that there is no direct comp to Lucy in the game New Vegas.
00:20:18
Speaker
she may be the playable character in some ways, but what type of congruencies? Is there a brotherhood? Is there ghouls of similar nature? It's funny because most of the time, most of the time in Fallout 3, Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and Fallout 4, not New Vegas, but all the other Fallouts, there is this idea that your main character is a vault dweller or someone who's connected to sort of like people from the vault.
00:20:46
Speaker
because they're uninitiated. Basically, they're sheltered people not ready for the world. And that's why they're sort of the perfect characters to start with as a player, because they are seeing the world outside of the vault for the first time. So basically, for those who haven't really seen fallout.
00:21:03
Speaker
People in the fallout world, there was an ah apocalyptic event. The world sort of suffered a nuclear holocaust and the people inside the vaults survived.
00:21:14
Speaker
They basically have lived under the vaults and their purpose is to re-civilize and repopulate the earth. But somewhere around those lines, they decided not to. There's a bunch of vault communities, but they have decided not to do that. They've decided to shelter and sort of be exclusive to themselves in these vaults.
00:21:32
Speaker
And every time a character ventures out, it's kind of like a taboo. They almost get exiled out of their communities because they do that because they choose the
Character Analysis in Fallout
00:21:40
Speaker
outside world, which is ah dangerous and contaminating because it's still a nuclear wasteland versus the safety and serenity and stability of a vault.
00:21:51
Speaker
So again, that has always been like a narrow through line and all video games, most of the video games in the Fallout universe. And I feel like Lucy just continuing that trend remains very, very true to the whole like bedrock that is Fallout.
00:22:06
Speaker
And that also creates a structural component of the game that drives our protagonist directly into what's called the hero's journey, right? The first couple steps of a hero's journey involve them being in a set of safety components.
00:22:21
Speaker
They are swaddled in their babe's cloth and... then they go out into the world right and so in this way we are as the playable characters and lucy thus is in that exact space and she is on a journey right she's on a journey for self-discovery but she's also on a journey to rescue her father and she meets a lot of interesting characters along the way Which is also a narrative through line.
00:22:50
Speaker
Like in the past couple of Fallout video games, you have to save a parent or a parent is saving a child. Okay. In Fallout 4 and in Fallout 3, that was a major plot line. I think that might be the only narrative congruency to something like Super Mario Brothers that we'll be able to talk about on this episode. So.
00:23:07
Speaker
i want to I want to tag that now. Fallout, if you if you put video games on a two-dimensional sort of spectrum of, like, one thing and another, you could put Mario on the one hand, you could put The Last of Us on the other hand, and Fallout would be right dead in the middle.
00:23:22
Speaker
Let's talk about Brotherhood. So here we're going to get into some actual world building. The Brotherhood is a unique characteristic of the Fallout world. I understand that they're a faction of some other various types of people, all who are kind of looking to preserve technology in this space.
00:23:41
Speaker
So we talked about the fact that it was post-apocalyptic, but we haven't really talked so much about the religious sanctity that technology provides in this post-apocalyptic world.
00:23:52
Speaker
Of course, one unique aspect of the world is that all of the technology is not iPhones, but the technology is from the 1960s, right? So because again, it hasn't been affected by sort of that nuclear discharge that affected essentially electricity. So radio, things like radio works in the post-apocalyptic world.
00:24:13
Speaker
That's why like old music constantly plays, because that's the only thing people can listen to that old music on like those gramophones records and stuff like that. It's interesting that you brought up the word faction, right?
00:24:26
Speaker
The Brotherhood from the very beginning of the Fallout universe, even though it's like this religious sort of militant party or faction in the Fallout world, they were consistently viewed as like the good guys, because they're usually the the faction you join to fight the big bad. whatever was like in Fallout 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, it starts to become questionable.
00:24:49
Speaker
Because again, usually in these kinds of video games, you can do a good playthrough or an evil playthrough in terms of morality. And usually when you do a good playthrough, it's with the Brotherhood of Steel faction because they are so self-righteous.
00:25:03
Speaker
But in Fallout 4, it started talking about like how the Brotherhood, even though they are good, they're sort of like lawful good and like in the Dungeons and Dragons rule.
00:25:14
Speaker
yeah Because they are actually like racist towards other sort of species in this world. They hunt down ghouls, they hunt down synthetics, these androids in Fallout 4.
00:25:25
Speaker
Anything that isn't human, they sort of hunt. Like super mutants and stuff like that. A concept that hasn't been yet introduced into the TV show. But basically anything that has been contaminated as well, they purge again because they sort of this religious militant thing.
00:25:40
Speaker
And that's why I really appreciate the show because it talks about that. It talks about how militant they are, how sort of fanatical they can be and how they're not actually that pure.
00:25:50
Speaker
And they're really representative of how In the video game, there are a bunch of factions you can join that you can align with and sort of shape your own story from the faction's point of view.
00:26:01
Speaker
And through Maximus, we get to see that sort of faction point of view. And also, it's important to mention that in those video games, you can build a team. You can find people in this world.
00:26:12
Speaker
And they can help you on your journey. They can become your friends. They can join up from you. And each one of them has their own sort of morality. They come from their own specific faction. They have their own mindset.
00:26:23
Speaker
And sort of sometimes their priorities don't mesh with your priorities. So they can actually turn against you if you do something that goes against their worldview. Maximus and the ghoul actually feel like classic companion characters because they're very dead set on how they see the world.
00:26:40
Speaker
They're willing to change based on how they interact with Lucy, who's our main protagonist or our main playable character, so to speak. But they are equally on a journey with her.
00:26:51
Speaker
But they're a little bit farther along than she is because they've actually lived in this post-apocalyptic world. She hasn't. She lived in a bubble. And that's a little different. We've been talking largely about prescriptive narrative engines like factions, but we haven't talked so much about the individual characters' motivations.
00:27:10
Speaker
And what is brilliant about these three characters is that they all have truly grounded emotional stakes. You know, Ella Purnell's character, Lucy, Her emotional center is that she is new to this world and that she wants to maintain some level of goodness. She believes truly in good.
00:27:30
Speaker
And Maximus, he's actually pretty much down the middle. He wants to be part of something. He wants to achieve. He wants to believe in a set of values.
00:27:43
Speaker
But he sees a world in which that is challenge. Early, early, early in the show, he is ostracized by the Brotherhood. In many ways, he's bullied, he's hazed.
00:27:54
Speaker
Now, it could be that that is part of the Brotherhood's whole deal. And I think that ah largely speaks to another element of the show in terms of the Brotherhood I'll talk about in a minute.
00:28:05
Speaker
But the way that Maximus internalizes that means that he is a person really in between two worlds. And that's a concept that I think remains true in a really lofty conceptual show like both Fallout and Arcane, which is someone who is trapped between two worlds and trapped between two really major ideas that they're struggling with throughout the show.
00:28:31
Speaker
And that's our Maximus. Then you have the ghoul who is totally nihilistic. Now, when I say totally nihilistic, that can also, in a lot of cases, be flat and affectational.
00:28:43
Speaker
But, of course, you have a true talent like Walton Goggins, someone who's been in the industry for decades and done everything from Tarantino to the most sort of, like, procedural stuff, like, justified.
00:28:58
Speaker
He's gone across the board. So you really have someone who knows what he's doing, and so you give him this really nuanced portrayal. He is not all far gone. He is still human under there.
00:29:11
Speaker
And what's unique about ghouls is that they are struggling for their humanity. And I'd love to talk about that in a minute, but before we do that, the Brotherhood. I touched on the fact that the Brotherhood is effectively a foil in this show for toxic masculinity.
Fallout's Cultural Commentary
00:29:24
Speaker
Which is, I think, really important to talk about, especially here in America, where you have a lot of these kinds of regressional gender dynamics. The Brotherhood is ah fraternity.
00:29:37
Speaker
There's no ifs, ands, or buts about that. And the characters, the fact that they engage in a particular section of... The RPG world, which really makes military sci-fi kind of a headpoint, I think speaks largely not only to the world of military sci-fi itself, but the people who engage in it.
00:29:59
Speaker
And I truly do think that a lot of the characters that you see in the Brotherhood, could be proxies for types of gamers too, types of people who engage in this content.
00:30:09
Speaker
And I do think that the show is, while also giving us strong narrative stakes, also interrogating what it means to actually play these games. And it's not necessarily in a way that moralizes violence in video games, but it's in a way that truly asks questions.
00:30:28
Speaker
And I think that's beautiful. And one of the huge, huge, huge pros for me when it comes to Fallout as a story as a whole. Well, some of the most biggest selling video games out there are Call of Duty and another game by name of Battlefield.
00:30:42
Speaker
Both games have you essentially be a soldier in the military. And again, like the whole like first person shooter aspect is one of the most appealing genre in the video game market.
00:30:53
Speaker
And again, it's purely under this like military mentality that it's fun. Or in another way, it's sort of selling the idea that military life can be fun. In fact, there have been like military programs that have attached themselves to these video games and are saying like, look, if you like this, then come serve your country.
00:31:12
Speaker
I mean, because they realize that it's like a good marketing sort of ploy for them. It's the same thing with like how Book of Mormon, when it was created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the people who created South Park, satirizing the Latter-day Saints Church, what they ended up doing was using that publicity to essentially market Mormonism because they were like, rather than go against the wave and criticize it, they should go into the wave and use it to sort of spread awareness about their religion.
00:31:40
Speaker
Same thing with video games. No press is bad press. Yeah, exactly. So that's what I mean. Like there is sort of this fratty culture but first person shooters, because it's also a very masculine sort of thing like traditional military is men.
00:31:56
Speaker
That's what this is. I mean, like we don't need to look further than looking at what tro is currently doing with the military and his sort of initiatives with the military. But at the same time, i mean, what's true about this whole market, the whole video game market, is that the majority of people who play it are young boys.
00:32:13
Speaker
Not all, obviously, because there are a lot of women who play video games. It doesn't necessarily mean that they only play video games that appeal traditionally to women. Games like Stardew Valley or other games of that nature or The Sims.
00:32:26
Speaker
Women play graphic games like Doom, Fallout and Call of Duty as well. Video games truly can be genderless. But it is true that the majority of market appeals to young boys.
00:32:39
Speaker
And that's just a normal feature of it because it attaches to a more especially first person shooters. They do appeal to this fratty sort of mentality where, you know, I'm just I'm going to play cod with the boys.
00:32:52
Speaker
I'm going to play some battlefield with the boys. on a Friday night. You know, that's what I think of because I was that boy. Every Friday, my friends would come over and we would have cod parties. There would be eight guys in my bedroom, all playing like a video game and not doing anything else.
00:33:08
Speaker
That's illuminating. I remember there was one girl at those parties, just one. And, you know, like, and it's because she was like into it. She was like into into playing with us.
00:33:19
Speaker
Be what you would call one of the boys. Sometimes chicks just want to hold a gun and go crazy, too. Yeah, because because we were like, OK, she is one of the boys. But at the same time, yeah she was a girl who liked video games.
00:33:31
Speaker
But that's what I mean. It's weird when you talk about this Friday thing because it is true. But at the same time, you know, I look like how video games have evolved. And even those video games that are traditionally like very male centric, they've become more expansive in the way that they sort of do representation.
00:33:50
Speaker
Even Call of Duty like allows you to play as a female character now versus just a male character. Back in the day, you could only play as a male and that was it. Now you can play as a female or a male. Finally, we have our female drone pilots. Let's go America!
00:34:06
Speaker
Let's go! and you have a bunch of games that do so much more for our presentation. Like in Baldur's Gate 3, you have such beautiful ways that you can represent and showcase yourself as a person.
00:34:19
Speaker
Whether it's like a dwarf or a drow, but also a non-binary drow or dwarf or a human or an orc. You know, like it provides you sort of these tools to be your most authentic self in a virtual world.
00:34:31
Speaker
And I feel like video games are moving in that direction because they realize that, again, this market is art at its very core. And video games are culture. Art is culture.
00:34:43
Speaker
This is the culture. People aren't watching movies in the same rate that they're playing video games. They just aren't. People play video games two, three times over people who go to the cinema on a yearly basis, which is unfortunate for me that I can't play very many of them because that would probably be a more fiduciarily sound way to run a podcast it is to talk about video games instead.
00:35:06
Speaker
So we're meeting in the middle here. But speaking of. Now, you talked about the way in which the Brotherhood uses, the creators, I should say, use the Brotherhood to express some new concepts, whether it be factions, moral gray.
00:35:23
Speaker
What about the ghouls? How do the ghouls evolve from Fallout 3 into 4, into whatever comes after? What is sort of the status of ghouls from the beginning, and how do they evolve?
00:35:35
Speaker
So it's interesting because there is the ghoul sort of race or a species, and then there's the character, the ghoul. That is a ghoul. That is his species. He's a ghoul. But I think he needs his own category to speak of because I think he also introduces something really important that we haven't touched on in this world.
00:35:52
Speaker
And also sort of how the creative team curated their vision around this character specifically. But let's start with your original question. What are the ghouls? What is this weird like species?
00:36:04
Speaker
They're basically like people who survived the nuclear bombing, the original nuclear bombing, and they became these undead husks.
00:36:15
Speaker
They're still alive. They look like zombies, essentially because their skin has been completely destroyed by the nuclear wasteland. and either their brains have become ghoulified, meaning their brain functions don't necessarily work. And they've essentially become what we know as as zombies, these mindless things that want to devour other things.
00:36:37
Speaker
uncontrollably but there are some ghouls that have retained their brain power and use sort of medicine to maintain that brain power and still function like human beings in terms of how they speak and how they interact with other people in this world but they're essentially they're not immortal because they can die but they can't die from age some of these ghouls have lived for essentially like over 100 And now speaking to the character of the ghoul, the character of the ghoul is really interesting because he is indicative of what sort of atmosphere Fallout essentially takes, which is sort of like a Western.
00:37:14
Speaker
That's the best way I can describe it. It's like a Western because the original Fallout took place in California. The second one also took place in California. The third one took place in Washington, D.C.
00:37:25
Speaker
New Vegas took place in Nevada and a bit of California. And then the fourth one took place in Boston. The reason number one and number two and New Vegas and this adaptation take place around the same areas is because the original sort of theme of Fallout was that you were exploring a new frontier, sort of like those old Westerns.
00:37:48
Speaker
And the ghoul fits a film icon, like an iconic film character known by just the man with no name, Sergio Leone's A Man With No Name, played by famously by Clint Eastwood.
00:38:00
Speaker
Right, so that's where the title kind of comes from. But this sort of figurehead character, a man who goes from town to town and cares for nothing and speaks a little and shoots faster than anyone else, this is a trait that's existed in Westerns since the beginning because a lot of times, to this day, we here we are, Oscar season 2025, we have a great man story.
00:38:26
Speaker
A story about a man who showed up in a new world And it took on a frontier. Brutalism. And the title is The Brutalist. You know, 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago, the same type of stories were being told.
00:38:39
Speaker
It's just a matter of what the character is. It was John Wayne for a number of years. And then ah when Clint Eastwood came on the scene, they made Fistful of Dollars. And it was a huge hit. And it was incredible. incredibly beautiful and pushed what cinema could be.
00:38:58
Speaker
And by the third movie, The Good, Bad and the Ugly, you had ah masterpiece. Yeah, the most iconic Western of all time, in my opinion. Absolutely. And a hands down a masterpiece.
00:39:09
Speaker
But speaking about like the successors, because that's what Fallout is above everything else. Fallout is just commentary on America. It is just a commentary on America. It's a satirical commentary ah about the United States.
00:39:22
Speaker
But the creative team around the TV adaptation of Fallout, the executive producers, the are the people who created another neo-futurist, almost satirical Western adaptation, little HBO show called Westworld, because the executive producers for Fallout are Jonathan Nolan and his wife, Lisa Joy, who co-created Westworld.
00:39:46
Speaker
So in a lot of ways, this feels like a spiritual successor, not just to the Western genre as a whole, but also to the TV show they created, which was Westworld.
00:39:56
Speaker
Which, from what I understood, kind of went off the rails.
Adaptation Challenges for Fallout
00:39:59
Speaker
And is now not on HBO anymore. I know for a while they... They got cancelled, yeah. Well, right, it got cancelled, but normally stuff just lives on HBO for forever.
00:40:10
Speaker
The Idol, which got cancelled and only ran for six episodes and was considered a failure in almost every capacity, that show is still just sitting on HBO. They took Westworld off the network and they put it on to be Yeah, which is a free streaming service where you can watch things like any TV movie you saw from the years 1980 to 1989. Any movie created by Roger Corman's New World Pictures and like a couple of Warner Brothers titles, including Westworld.
00:40:45
Speaker
So that is a bizarre choice on the David Zaslav front, but it also provides a unique opportunity for Jonathan Nolan to begin to continue to innovate because people aren't going to watch the old stuff anymore because they can't.
00:40:57
Speaker
Now, Nolan created another show for Amazon. He's one of these sort of like mega producer type TV creators in the same line as the guys who created Game of Thrones when they signed over to Netflix on this huge like multi-million dollar deal.
00:41:14
Speaker
where Nolan came to Amazon and created this show called The Peripheral. And I don't know if you watched much of The Peripheral. I watched a little bit of it. No, I haven't even heard of it. Well, hey, it stars a child actress moved to Chloe Grace Moretz.
00:41:31
Speaker
She is the star of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I'm looking at her... Yeah, she's famous. She was in Kick-Ass as well. Yeah, so she's done a lot of things. ah Yeah, I knew her from that one.
00:41:42
Speaker
But she starred in The Peripheral, and it is another similarly kind of sci-fi-oriented show, but in kind of the same realm as sort of metaverse concept.
00:41:53
Speaker
And it's based on a book written by the father of metaverse, William Gibson, who created the Neuromancer series, jumpstarted cyberpunk as a genre.
00:42:04
Speaker
And so there is this unique one-of-one world that they create. The only problem is is that in execution, I think that world is a little underwhelming relative to the budget. And it just never quite clicks into place.
00:42:21
Speaker
It's kind of got a little bit of a horror vibe. It has similar kind of thriller tendencies to another show they did Outer Range. But while I thought Outer Range was spectacular and gripping from the jump, the peripheral takes a little too long to really get in front of itself.
00:42:38
Speaker
And by the time it ends up actually gripping you, I think most people had already tuned out. So it was canceled after one season. And then they made Fallout. So it was kind of a big gamble because Fallout was a very expensive show.
00:42:50
Speaker
And Jonathan Nolan just made a show that people did not tune into. And Fallout is one of the most popular shows that has ever graced the Amazon Prime platform. It's a known IP. Not to say Westworld wasn't a known IP. It was. It was like a film before that. It was like a pretty important sci-fi film back in the day. But just the audience for Fallout is much larger because it's like one of the most famous video games out there.
00:43:15
Speaker
So there was sort of like this idea or hope that there was an audience built in And there was because we've talked about this before, that everything nowadays is an adaptation remake or sequel well i mean it seems like we're in for another year of a deluge of ip related storytelling in the movies and elsewhere well and this is i guess an adaptation luckily you know adaptations can be uh truly transformative now we've talked about all of the individual components of the show
00:43:47
Speaker
So really, I think we are left to talk about mainly the MacGuffin, which is an interesting bit of text, which is that the MacGuffin is a person. That is kind of a unique thing. And it's a particularly morbid thing because it ends up being, mild spoilers here, the head of one particular human being who is carried around from place to place to place.
00:44:10
Speaker
And I'll keep the identity of that person secret in case i we haven't had a spoiler tag on this section. But I think it does speak to largely the concept of the show, which is that it is grimdark to a point, but it's also a little silly. Jordan, what is a MacGuffin?
00:44:26
Speaker
Oh, MacGuffin. I think it's something we've explained on the show before. but But MacGuffin, just as a quick recap, a 101 lesson, MacGuffin refers to anything object. Think about the Infinity Gauntlet from Infinity Wars. It is an object of importance that everyone in the world wants.
00:44:43
Speaker
So anything in a Mission Impossible story that Ethan Hunt is trying to steal from the bad guys, that is a MacGuffin. Usually in the Mission Impossible world, it's a secret code or key.
00:44:55
Speaker
In the Marvel world, it's usually a magical item. In the case of Fallout, it is head. Because everybody wants that head. um Not a euphemism.
00:45:06
Speaker
Anyway... Yes. So that's what I mean. It is grim dark. But as we talked about, the atmosphere is just realistically ah nuclear fallout. People surviving in a very, very post-apocalyptic environment.
00:45:19
Speaker
But what's beautiful about it, and and this is true to also the video games, right? There is this sense of levity. There's a sense of satire, almost a sense of like this weird hopefulness.
00:45:30
Speaker
And that is, you know, utilized to a T with the character of Lucy, because, again, as you talked about, she's one of the few characters that isn't nihilistic in this world just because she's a fish out of water.
00:45:41
Speaker
But at the same time, her personality is that she does just say a lot of the times, okie dokie. You know, she very much is ready for anything. That's sort of who she is as a person and as a character.
00:45:53
Speaker
And it's very engrossing. It is just a very engrossing character trait because she is sort of constantly challenged to sort of surrender who she is and sort of understand that this world is just going to eat her up.
00:46:06
Speaker
And not only does she refuse, but she also manages to overcome a lot of the obstacles that are put in her way just by how intelligent and creative she is in terms of surviving this world.
00:46:18
Speaker
In fact, the fish out of water stuff is not a weakness for her. It's actually her greatest strength. And it's the thing that makes the show so engaging. When you have a program that has a lot of grimness, having levity gives it a balance.
00:46:33
Speaker
In the same way that if you have ah coffee beverage, right? Coffee is ah very acidic beverage, and the reason why people find it enjoyable is because the acid provides that levity, right? These things are natural. Same thing with chocolate, you know?
00:46:48
Speaker
So ah that balance in food, I think, is very similar to that balance in when we consume a piece of media. If something is too grim, if something has too much of a really, really hazardous tone, I find myself starting to tune out.
00:47:05
Speaker
I talked about this last year with The Last of Us. I didn't find The Last of Us to be particularly engaging because it was so, so, so dour. And I didn't find that the humor was something that I enjoyed as much. It was a little bit more in line with snark, which is, I think, distinct from silliness.
00:47:23
Speaker
And silliness is something that Fallout has in abundance, right? You Don't have to look anywhere, but what's staring you in the face, which is the 60s tunes, the jukebox soundtrack. This is a silly thing.
00:47:38
Speaker
And the idea that they've ported a Western and taken it and made it into something that we don't usually see before, the first reaction to most people is, whoa, this is a unique amalgamation.
00:47:51
Speaker
This is a little fun. This is a little silly. Now, when Fallout utilizes it, it knows what it's doing. And it does that so effectively. If you want to compare this to another huge amalgamation that people think is silly but is way too self-serious for its own good, you look at a major Oscar contender, Amelia Perez, which is currently in the limelight in the Oscar race.
00:48:13
Speaker
That show is or that movie it's on the Netflix streaming service. um It dropped on a random day and it is now sitting on Netflix and it has 10 Oscar nominations and 12.
00:48:26
Speaker
twelve I think everyone online I know does not like the movie. It's a case where this is a huge amalgamation of ideas. It is not, when you look at Fallout, as well explored. The ideas that you get in Fallout, you have the time to really explore them, and they take that time to do it. You see people slowly change throughout a season. I don't think Ella Purnell's character is done growing.
00:48:53
Speaker
I think Lucy has a lot more character to grow as the seasons move on. You look at a character, the lead from The Boys, who I've forgotten the name of,
00:49:04
Speaker
Jack Quaid's character, yeah. But yes, exactly. Jack Quaid. We'll call him Jack Quaid for the sake of argument here. Jack Quaid plays this lively young guy, and by the end of the first season, he's a little more dour.
00:49:16
Speaker
Huey. Huey. And by the, you know, second, third, fourth season, this guy starts to resemble... the people around him more and more and more and more.
00:49:27
Speaker
I anticipate that's going to be the case with Lucy. But that being said, it's a joy to be able to see what of her true self, what of her humanity remains. You know what I mean? It reminds me of, you know, I'm a Midwestern boy living in LA. was watching Love is Blind the other day and I was like, all these people are so lovely. I wonder why.
00:49:46
Speaker
Well, they're all from the same part of the world as I am. They're all from the Midwest. They're all Minnesotan. I think that even Lucy, down four five seasons battling ghouls and whoever else, she's going to retain a lot of that joy and levity, and it's going to make the show that much better for it. You know, having that fish out of water, it's important to never quite lose that element of them being out of touch. That's what made the show Schitt's Creek so fun throughout all of its seasons, is that the characters still feel a little out of place.
00:50:20
Speaker
even as they have found themselves integrated into the town. So let's talk about like the idea of adaptation for a second, because we've talked about in part one, the adaptation of The Last of Us into the small screen, you know, and I remember saying that what I really loved about it was the fact that it was adapted accurately, meaning it took the video game and adapted the full story very, very accurately.
00:50:45
Speaker
But it did something a little bit different in the sense that while it didn't change anything, it added things. It added more scenes. It added more sort of background. It added more context to this already existing world that it was adapting.
00:50:59
Speaker
And that was what was really beautiful about The Last of Us, because rather than take away or change, they just expanded. And I thought, again, that was one of the best way to adapt a video game.
00:51:09
Speaker
Fallout does something entirely different, which is they don't take away, they don't change, and they don't really add either. But what they do is follow up. And that's the interesting thing about Fallout that's very different from any other adaptation I've seen in terms of like video games, is that Fallout is canonical sequel to the video game, meaning the TV show is an actual sequel to the video game.
00:51:34
Speaker
Like things that have happened in the video games, you know, you realize if you've played the video games and then you watch Fallout, you're like, OK, this is where these characters ended up. This is how like this town ended up from the 50 years prior of what happened in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.
00:51:49
Speaker
Like the next location that they're going to in season two a Fallout, the TV show is going to be New Vegas. New Vegas was a major location and the video game Fallout New Vegas.
00:52:02
Speaker
And for all intents and purposes, we're going to see like how that world, specifically that New Vegas location has changed because we're going to watch a TV show.
00:52:13
Speaker
Again, that to me is wild that they had sort of the guts to be like, all right, we're keeping this canon to our video game. But rather than adapt an old video game and adapt it sort of accurately towards that, no, we're just going to continue on, follow it up with an entirely new story, entirely new characters, but still keep it intrinsically connected to what we built before.
00:52:37
Speaker
And again, that's just another great way of adapting a video game, in my opinion. That is a great point, and that honestly speaks to exactly what I was just talking about, too. I think that that is a great marriage of a lot of ideas.
00:52:51
Speaker
You have a new world of media, right? I've already talked about the fact that we are in a landscape where cinema is a totally different platform than
Value of Video Game IPs in Media
00:53:01
Speaker
it previously was. These tech companies are now operating services that were previously operated by TV networks, right? So we're consuming our media in an absolutely fundamentally different way.
00:53:13
Speaker
And the structure of those pieces of media could not be more different in the case of the Oscar movies, in the case of anything. When you have eight totally new way of consuming media, you also have new opportunities and congruencies that were previously unaccessible.
00:53:30
Speaker
Even if you were an old-timey studio like Universal, we talked about this last year, I found that the Super Mario Bros. movie was a huge success. And not just me, but many, many, many people. It made a billion dollars. It was a very successful movie.
00:53:44
Speaker
And it's because it understood its congruencies. The movie version of Five Nights at Freddy's, a hugely popular video game, did incredible. incredibly great finances relative to its budget. That is because it has a level congruency to its original source material that the fans appreciate.
00:54:05
Speaker
We are in a world where there are as many misses as there are hits, even still. I think that you can see it in the realm of Disney, specifically when they attempt to create new Star Wars content to see, do you guys like this?
00:54:20
Speaker
And largely the fans go, and I'm not watching it. Like, most Star Wars fans are no longer consuming the very expensive TV programs that Disney is churning out.
00:54:30
Speaker
That's just a fact, regardless of their quality. I think Andor is incredible. I understand, Niv, you've barely watched any of it. You are like most people. Most people never saw it. And that being said, Star Wars is my favorite franchise and favorite IP. So there you go.
00:54:45
Speaker
And I'm not even watching a lot of that IP. I haven't watched Skeleton Crew. haven't watched Andor. And I haven't watched Acolyte. I haven't watched any of those things. What's crazy is I tuned in for Skeleton Crew and I found it to be a dearth of imagination.
00:55:00
Speaker
Something that, as we talk about Arcane in a second, I have many critiques of that show. Don't get me wrong. A dearth of imagination is not one of them. It is an absolute honeypot of imaginative ideas. It is something that could have been turned into a video game before. As far as I'm concerned, because it is so massive in its ideas and so wide in its scope and such a unique piece of media that we've never seen before and still yet congruent to an IP.
00:55:36
Speaker
It has it both. And so that is the opportunities that we have here as creators. You, Niv, as a writer, you know, i am a multi-hyphenate, an actor predominantly,
00:55:47
Speaker
ice cream chef on occasion but nonetheless it is an absolutely incredible opportunity to see these new pieces of media and i will tell you right now fallout is one of the highlight points of last year we are now speaking of this show ah about a year after it came out and i think it's still important to talk about in relativity to the zeitgeist because it is a major budget show that worked amazon has a couple of them They're still churning out. They've got another season of Rings of Power coming. They've got the Wheel of Time show coming.
00:56:18
Speaker
These shows are not working the same way that Fallout is. And it is a master class in how you execute on these ideas. And it shows that you have to have something and you have to engineer something... with the idea that this is providing value to consumers. This is providing value to an existing world.
00:56:40
Speaker
This is an additive structural component. This is not optional. This is not a footnote. This is essential to your understanding of the world. And that is something that rings a power seems to falter on pretty often.
00:56:54
Speaker
Relative to its quality, it's something that the Star Wars shows don't do relative to their quality, and it's something that the Marvel shows largely have not done relative to any of their quality. We talked about Deadpool and Wolverine. I think it worked on a lot of fronts.
00:57:11
Speaker
Nonetheless, the reason why that provided value is because there is a specific audience of people that grew up watching a specific type of movie where they wanted to see their favorite character, Wolverine, back on the screen. And that's why it made a billion dollars, right?
00:57:27
Speaker
And with Fallout, you have identified... This is something that people have been thirsting for. In a second, we'll talk about Arcane. It is clear that people were looking for this show.
00:57:38
Speaker
Now, in the words of the late David Lynch, it is not something that I think millions on millions of people wanted, but dozens on dozens of people wanted, which is fine, but it doesn't, I think, take away from its quality.
00:57:52
Speaker
Well said. Well, so I talked about how I enjoyed the Fallout universe. I mean, it was very close to being in my top five of the year. I really, really enjoyed it as a program, especially in a year that had some pretty kind of major lows.
00:58:08
Speaker
It was a show that really brought a lot of energy as a new program. I mean, a lot of shows just kind of were in Transitionary seasons, whether it was Hacks, which we've talked about on the show before, a great program in its prime, Only Murders in the Building, a show we've talked about as well, another great show in its prime. The Bear, another great show in its prime, had a couple of just kind of dips in their storytelling.
00:58:32
Speaker
And Fallout, head out the gate strong, and I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. Where is Fallout relative to you in terms of what you saw last year? I mean, we saw some great stuff. We talked about Shogun. That was probably one of my tops of the year. Where is Fallout living in relativity to other stuff? Did you see anything that amounted to its quality last year?
00:58:51
Speaker
I mean, that's the interesting thing because like I can appreciate Fallout for being like a strong adaptation. like It is like an objectively strong video game adaptation. And I do like it in the sense that seeing Ella Purnell, and who will talk about it again very shortly, is such a powerhouse and deserving of all the credit she's been getting lately.
00:59:11
Speaker
And sort of just being able to see that world be brought to life on television. I will always appreciate what Fallout is doing to both the video game world and the television world now, and what Jonathan Nolan has been doing for a very long time now.
00:59:25
Speaker
But to me, I just felt like it was good that it was not particularly like incredible or amazing just because i am so tied to it because I'm just kind of like, well, I've played the video game.
00:59:36
Speaker
The video games are just naturally
Arcane's Success in Adaptation
00:59:38
Speaker
a lot deeper than the TV show because you get to play Lucy. You get to be Lucy. You don't have to just see Lucy, be separate from a character that you can't be.
00:59:47
Speaker
And for me, there were other shows that were just designed to be shows rather than adaptations that I just naturally connected with more. But because I know Arcane is going to be like a massive conversation point, one of which was Arcane. Arcane has always been, even though it was this year, but Arcane actually is probably in one of my top lists, both season one and season two.
01:00:10
Speaker
But I think that what I can say is that it doesn't matter if it's an ah adaptation, a remake or a sequel or something wholly original. It doesn't matter. To me, what's important, the only question I really ask is, is it meaningful?
01:00:24
Speaker
And is it good? And if it can answer both those questions, honestly, truthfully and well, then that's all that matters. There you go. Well, I will say that I think Fallout hits that on every single cylinder.
01:00:35
Speaker
Lovely show. And every episode is streaming. If you are a subscriber to Amazon, you can watch it right now. I understand that it's one of those services that you have to get on for a whole year.
01:00:46
Speaker
So it might not be something that you want to support, especially if you are in... solidarity with a certain union strike going on right now but not necessarily supporting the people at amazon but nonetheless giving them a thumbs up for doing good work on the content side and maybe fallout will have a dvd box that you can rent from your local library at some point soon so that being said we are going to take a quick break to listen to some music and then i think it is about time we get into in full spoiler we will be talking about arcane stay tuned
01:01:27
Speaker
Hi there, listener. I know you are not hearing music right now. That's because we actually do a legal form of music streaming that you can find exclusively on our homepage, which is Mixcloud. So if you are interested in listening to a playlist that I personally curate for every single episode, then I would highly recommend you take a trip to Mixcloud and finish the episode starting exactly here where you left off and listen to that playlist and then dive into the second half.
01:01:54
Speaker
That said, if you choose not to do so, here's the second half right now. And we're back. Hope you guys enjoyed that interlude. If you're listening on Mixcloud, if you haven't listened on Mixcloud, you probably heard some ad that just told you to go listen to us on Mixcloud. So I hope you do that.
01:02:11
Speaker
In range of Arcane, before we dive all the way in. In our previous video game adaptation episode, which is currently live, you can listen to it on wherever you listen to podcasts, although Mixcloud is a great place to do it.
01:02:23
Speaker
You probably heard our history of video game adaptations. What we're talking about today is contemporaneous because that's what we do. So when we are talking about the contemporary system of video games, we can look back about 10 years and we'll see a major title shift.
01:02:39
Speaker
When we start looking at what was released in 2015, there were almost no video game adaptations all. Crazy to think now, because if you look at what does numbers, what is a value add for most studios, video game adaptations are doing just as well as any superhero movie.
01:03:00
Speaker
You can budget on a similar range and get a similar return on investment. Whether it be a TV show as well. Maybe Arcane aside. That being said, the Resident Evil movie, 2016, looking 10 years ago, final movie came out.
01:03:13
Speaker
And you had a series of flops as well. Did you see Assassin's Creed or Warcraft? These are two huge games that had these major budget adaptations.
01:03:25
Speaker
and well-known directors spearheading these projects. And both flopped, both critically and commercially sort of flopped. Ironically speaking, Warcraft was the better example between the two. And in fact, the better example for a very long time because it was high-level project It actually was the highest grossing video game adaptation of all time. It grossed at that time, at least grossed over 400 million dollars.
01:03:50
Speaker
But it was still a commercial failure because its budget was so big, meaning it didn't break even. And that's why there was never like a sequel developed. And it was considered like a failure because it was also a critical failure in terms of.
01:04:01
Speaker
how critics viewed it. That was sort of like the industry's one last push to try to make video games into movies for a very, very long time. They sort of gave up on that until now, until recently with the Super Mario Bros and another huge, which was a commercial hit, not so much a critical hit, but a commercial hit.
01:04:22
Speaker
But also there was another example of how video game movies can be a commercial and critical nightmare with Borderlands, which we wanted to to do a whole episode about, but then chose not to.
01:04:34
Speaker
Oh, no, you wanted to do an episode about. Let's be clear. You wanted to do the episode and then I had to watch that movie. Yeah. see And then we never talked about it. and We never talked about it.
01:04:45
Speaker
I don't think Borderlands was an awful movie by any means, but I do think that it is a very good movie to watch on cable on Tuesday if you are sick with something that's going to knock you out for about half of the movie.
01:04:59
Speaker
So that's what I mean. In 2016, Warcraft happened. It didn't do well. Again, it convinced the industry not to necessarily do films based off of video games anymore, at least for not a very long time.
01:05:11
Speaker
And what ended up happening is the industry sort of shifted. Specifically, Netflix took a chance. They were like, all right, films don't work. Video game films don't work. What can work? So they were like, all right, these worlds are really big.
01:05:23
Speaker
So it should be done on the small screen. It should be done in a television series. And they were like, OK, but live action has limitations. So let's try animation instead.
01:05:35
Speaker
And what ended up happening is that Netflix didn't release one. They didn't release not one, not two, but three really critically acclaimed video game adaptations that were animated.
01:05:47
Speaker
And it started in 2017 with Castlevania. That was sort of the real precursor. It didn't convince the industry, but at least it sparked the interest that there were like, OK, this is not so bad.
01:05:57
Speaker
Castlevania, like the animated series on Netflix, did a well enough job to at least be like, all right, this could be done this way. The industry can make video game adaptations into a television show.
01:06:09
Speaker
And then Arcane happened. Arcane happened the first season and it completely proved the system. It really, really showed that this can be done and it can be done not just well, but masterfully.
01:06:21
Speaker
Because Arkane, what Arkane did is that it took the video game adaptation and it didn't just do, you know, critically well, but it also did so critically well that it was award worthy for the Emmy Awards, for the Emmy Awards, for any kind of thing.
01:06:37
Speaker
And it became sort of this cultural landmark. because it really ushered in this new renaissance for video game adaptations. I can honestly say that without Arkane, The Last of Us wouldn't be a thing.
01:06:51
Speaker
Fallout wouldn't be a thing, meaning the live action shows wouldn't have as much of a solid ground to stand on if Arkane didn't happen first. That's how strong it has. yeah When did you see the first episode of Arcane?
01:07:03
Speaker
Oh my God, the minute it came out. When was that? Been a whole minute. It was in 2021, right after the first Castlevania ended, like the first series of Castlevania ended.
01:07:15
Speaker
Netflix was intelligent about it. They were like, okay, Castlevania has ended. Let's move on to our next video game project, which was Arcane. And after that, Cyberpunk Edgerunners came out, like after Arkane, which is another high level sort of video game adaptation based on the world of cyberpunk, which is both a tabletop game and a video game that was created by Projekt Red, the same video game company that made The Witcher series.
01:07:40
Speaker
So, yeah, you have this thing called Arcane, which was an animated series based off of the League of Legends world that we talked about in the first half of the pod. But it also had like pretty decent stars in it.
01:07:54
Speaker
Haley Steinfeld, who's been, you know, Kate Bishop in the Hawkeye series, who's starred in the movie Bumblebee, who started her career playing ah alongside Jeff Bridges and True Grit.
01:08:05
Speaker
Yep. And she has made music. She is, i think, a full fledged American superstar in many ways. She plays Gwen Stacy and into the Spider-Verse and all that.
01:08:16
Speaker
She's such like an important actress and she's like a good voice actress as well. Yeah. So like she was a real star power and she plays one of the main characters in the show. She plays Vi or Violet.
01:08:28
Speaker
And her sister is the other main character of the show played by really the face of video game adaptations lately. Ella Purnell, the same person who played Lucy and the show Fallout.
01:08:41
Speaker
And in fact, it's been so apparent that she's been portraying like video game characters lately. that she even said in a recent interview that she's going to calm down with signing up for video game adaptations because she doesn't want to be the face of them.
01:08:55
Speaker
She doesn't want to be shoehorned into a particular role for her whole career. i totally feel her there. But that's a great place to start. If you start in cult, you can build to prestige. That happened with Jamie Lee Curtis. You know, she won the Oscar. How did she start? She started as number one scream queen of the 80s.
01:09:13
Speaker
And so, yeah, it makes sense. And Purnell is so adept at doing both voice and physical acting. I am very much there for her. I also think that Regardless of my own bias, which is definitely going to be a part of it, regardless, is that I think that the TikTokers speak and they say, or at least the people on my algorithm, all of the cosplayers love Jinx, love the design of the character, love what she does, love the particular attitude she has.
01:09:43
Speaker
That speaks volumes. Jinx, to be clear, the character portrayed by Ella Purnell. Yes, her character. So two lead characters, their sisters, Jinx and also known as Powder, and her sister Vi, who is known as Violet, but also is called Vi, presumably because she has a tattoo on her face that reads Sixth.
01:10:04
Speaker
It's also a shortened name. So yeah, it's so let a little bit more. Yeah. In any case, these two characters lead the show. There are a wide, wide cast of characters, a huge ensemble.
01:10:19
Speaker
This show i definitely, I think, pays a lot of tribute to anime of similar scale. It definitely feels like a big expansive concept-driven piece of media like I would compare it to something like Fate. You and I watched Fate. That definitely has a lot of big concepts, but unique, I would say.
01:10:43
Speaker
Very, very concept-driven. It definitely pays a lot of homage to pieces of media like fritz long's metropolis the undercity and piltover play sort of as two mirror worlds and then in the second season we are introduced more formally to a place that is hinted in flashback called noxus there's a different country yeah which is a little bit less of a concrete world, but a totally separate space to Piltover and what is called Zahn or the Undercity.
01:11:17
Speaker
And so those two different elements interplay. And you said, yes, Noxus is a different country. I'll get to that. I think that the actual territorial sort of idea of space gets very lost.
01:11:30
Speaker
in the world of Arcane Season 2, but that I think we can talk about it in a second, because I really want to establish what these places are and what they mean. What's interesting about Zaun is, first of all, it's where our two main characters are from.
01:11:44
Speaker
It's also a city that is fighting for its own autonomy. It's a place that has been subjugated as a as a location, very similar to in Metropolis.
01:11:57
Speaker
And real-world events, uh-huh. And, yeah, hearkens to a lot of things that we see in our world today. So, it has prescience. But that said, it is also a a world of kind of ghoulish characters. So, you get the fun designs. and You get a lot of different factions. Various people vying for control.
01:12:21
Speaker
a character who acts as both a villain and somewhat of an anti-hero. silco ends up taking over the undercity mid-season and season one and then moving to season two we have an entirely different villain which i'll talk about it in a second i think that might be more in our spoiler conversation but so you have these two different areas piltover and zon zon has silco jinx and the character of avai and there's the piltover over city there you have heimerdinger one of the coolest looking characters in my opinion i love a character that looks a little bit like a muppet you have jace the inventor and his friend victor you have i mean again there's a lot of characters to follow in the show i had to take very very detailed notes in order to be able to name these people And usually like we want to like add the voice actor and next to these character like call outs because we're just let's give credence to the voice actors. But I feel like Jordan is right.
01:13:24
Speaker
The cast is so expansive that I very much am like the two core ones are obviously ah Steinfeld and Ella Purnell. But the thing I will say about it is that it's so expansive because, again, this is an adaptation of a preconceived world or universe because that's what the League of Legends universe is, a universe.
01:13:43
Speaker
Like, it spans an entire continent. Whereas Fallout has its lore condensed essentially into California and in other places as well, like Boston and in Washington, D.C., primarily in the United States.
01:13:56
Speaker
League of Legends is literally about a continent with different various different countries, cultures, and and different things.
Arcane's Complex Narrative
01:14:03
Speaker
And Arcane focuses on one specific, not even country, really, it's city-state.
01:14:09
Speaker
Piltover very much like operates how Venice operated when it was like a city-state hundreds and hundreds of years ago, where it was an autonomous city-state that was very rich. It was very much built off of trade, and that's how it sort of retained its autonomy.
01:14:23
Speaker
But Zahn, you know, is sort of like the undercity, as Jordan has called it. It is the poor area of the city that wants autonomy because they're just kind of like, look, we are so different culturally and in terms of technology and we are being oppressed.
01:14:37
Speaker
So we want autonomy. We want independence. And that's what this is, even though the show can be high concept because it's like adapting all sorts of different lores and cultures and trying to condense that into a two season show.
01:14:50
Speaker
The reason it works, the reason the show works is because it takes like a very basic storyline structure, which is it adapts a tale of the two cities because it's basically showing how these two worlds collide with each other into sort of a civil war.
01:15:06
Speaker
And it does a good job at being like, look, no character in the show is actually evil. They're all fighting for what they think is right. And that's what makes the show almost Shakespearean in a way and why it's so critically acclaimed, because every single character in this wide, expansive cast has depth.
01:15:24
Speaker
They all have a particular type of ambition. Now, you've already said a few things that I disagree with. One, that every character in the show has depth. We simply don't have the time. It's a show that has 40-minute episodes and two seasons.
01:15:37
Speaker
To give every character depth would take seven. yet It is a show that is very weirdly paced. Season two is. It is broken up into acts.
01:15:48
Speaker
I had issues with the pacing in season one, too. Disagree. But that's my own personal opinion. Yeah. the fact of the matter is it's broken up into acts which is a true saving grace that allows you to mentally construct what the show is actually doing the act breaks are not always super neat i always find that the first act of season one and two both really stand on their own and then act two and three act as conjoined pieces i think largely due to the fact that you need some kind of narrative
01:16:22
Speaker
upscale and you need to feel like things are going somewhere you can't just have it stilted in the second act that said season two does have i think a time jump between acts two and three so you do feel it a little bit more Well, it kind of does. does and it doesn't. It's like really You find our main characters in a different place.
01:16:39
Speaker
I desperately don't want to have to argue about the plot mechanics just yet. Because I can talk about some really cool stuff, but I'm not going to go there unless we do a spoiler warning. Before we go there, it is important to say that the reason I think season one, season one in particular, for those who haven't seen Arcane, is actually really well paced. And this is my argument. I know Jordan might disagree with me.
01:17:03
Speaker
But the reason I say it is because it does something quite unique. Each act, usually in a show or in a story, there is one main character, right? Just like in Fallout, we can argue that Lucy was the main character of that show, even though it had a major focus on two other characters, the ghoul and Maximus.
01:17:20
Speaker
But the thing about Arcane is that it does generally have like one main character. One could argue that it is Vi. But what's really interesting about the three acts in Arcane season one is that each act actually focuses on like one of the secondary characters and talks about their journey through those three episodes each act because each act is broken up in three episodes.
01:17:42
Speaker
And if you notice it, like the first act is focused on the character Jace and his journey to become the scientist he becomes, like the leader he becomes in Piltover. And act two, it talks about like the police officer Caitlin and her journey to become like the officer she's meant to be, like the character she's meant to be.
01:18:00
Speaker
And then lastly, it talks about Jinx and the person she ends up becoming. So it's really interesting that in each actor is sort of that condensed hero's journey for each of them.
01:18:12
Speaker
But throughout the entire season, it's still Vi's journey into being like that main character. And that's why I think that in terms of structure, it's actually doing something that is of a high level technique in storytelling.
01:18:26
Speaker
And it doesn't get enough credit for it until right now, because I'm saying it. So I'm going to put a spoiler warning for about 30 seconds in. So if you are doing the dishes while listening to the podcast, finish up your dish and then you can turn this off because I'm going to respond to you and then we can start to get into spoilers.
01:18:45
Speaker
What I will say is that I want to be generous about Arcane because it is such a unique piece of media. Nothing has done this thing before that I've seen. I don't know how it relates specifically to characters and factions in the League of Legends universe. I understand that you're less in depth on League of Legends as you are to Fallout. Is that true?
01:19:08
Speaker
but That's not true. I actually know quite a bit. Yeah. Do you play League of Legends as much as you do Fallout? I do. But it's interesting because League of Legends, Fallout has its own story. You experience the story, right? You actually go through like a campaign and you experience it because that's the whole point of the game.
01:19:24
Speaker
You experience the story. In League of Legends, the story is secondary. It's optional. The whole point of the game is that it's a sport. Yeah, the whole point of the game is that you play with other people and you play against each other and sort of like you play in these worlds that are just kind of like, okay, these are connected to the lore at large.
01:19:43
Speaker
But in order to understand the lore at large, you need to read like character bios, you need to read comics that are based on it, or Wikipedia pages that have been compiled to explain these lores.
01:19:54
Speaker
They aren't set up for you naturally, because they're treated as something optional. And in the mind of Riot Games, the people who've developed League of Legends, they were like, okay, how can we do this?
01:20:05
Speaker
How can we feed our audience this in a more natural way? They were like, okay, we cannot really do that through our video game, but let's do it through a TV show called Arcane. So the character designs are the things that we're pulling from more than like actual plot points? not plot points because there are certain plot points that are translated but they're just like loose the fact that vi and jinx are sisters oh got it so vi and jinx exist in the yeah pre-arcane world they are characters they are heroes you can play as in league of legends okay cool because again the same as heimerdinger same as caitlin and jace you can be heimerdinger and like fight people yeah yeah oh that's fun
01:20:45
Speaker
But for example, Silco is not. Silco is not a character in League of Legends. He was a character created for Arcane. What's interesting about the adaptation that Arcane does with League of Legends, it's actually more similar to what The Last of Us did.
01:20:59
Speaker
It takes something and then it expands. So there are plot points like, again, Vi and Jinx are sisters in the video game. We know that because they hint about it to each other in the video game when they encounter each other.
01:21:11
Speaker
But we don't get their history. We don't understand like how they grew up, where they grew up. We just know that they are sisters and now they have sort of turned against each other.
01:21:22
Speaker
That journey gets portrayed because they take like a simple line and then use it to to generate everything they have in Arcane. And they do that with a lot of different characters that they draw from League of Legends.
01:21:35
Speaker
Awesome. So to everybody who hasn't seen it, go boot up your Netflix. It's costing $2 a month more now in the US. So get some use out of it and come back for a spoiler conversation, which begins now.
01:21:46
Speaker
So yes, we talked a little bit about it. We actually... Almost hit spoilers there where we talked about the fact that, um which is a principal part of the show, but ends at the end of Act 1, Season 1, which is that Vi and Jinx begin as sisters and then are pulled apart, right? That is the narrative engine of this program, despite everything else that happens in the show.
01:22:09
Speaker
There is a core program to the show, which is that Vi and Jinx are sisters. They live in the Undercity. They have a parental figure. And then that parental figure is killed.
01:22:22
Speaker
And killed kind of by situation that Silco builds. So you can kind of say that Silco kills him. But in many ways, it is blamed on Jinx. And that is the main event of the show that really causes everything to go sideways. In some way, you could call it the Spider-Verse term, canon event.
01:22:42
Speaker
which we get a little bit of hints of later in the season two bit. What was that called? The alternate world. Two alternate worlds. There were two of them at the same time.
01:22:55
Speaker
The main alternate world. There was a B plot. I know what you mean. We can talk about that B-plot if you really want. I don't know if we need to get into that much spoiler here. So you talked about Act 1 Season 1 being Jace's plot.
01:23:08
Speaker
I think that's ridiculous. It's very clear to me that this establishes the show as Jinx and Powder and Vi's story. And then in Act 2, Powder becomes Jinx.
01:23:21
Speaker
So that is obviously the main plot that gets us through the entirety of the show, but it's also the thing that mattered to me most. The B-plot with Jace felt secondary until he actually has a level of power himself, which happens in Act 2.
01:23:36
Speaker
Now, Jace is a character I find moderately interesting. Makes me wonder if maybe Jace needed to be his own show. I don't necessarily think that his inclusion, particularly throughout the later parts of Act 2, is, strictly speaking, even remotely tethered to what I believe the emotional core of the show is. I think the show largely gets away from its emotional core.
01:24:01
Speaker
strictly speaking in terms of the fact that it's about two sisters who were split apart and how in the world are they going to be able to reconcile themselves right if they reconcile themselves the show is over that is how i viewed the show that's how i read the engine of the program now the program itself seems to also be interested in the title which is fair and the title of the show is arcane so jace is interested in hextech and the arcane magic talk to me about your kind of experience watching the Hextech stuff is this something that's portrayed in League of Legends is this particular stuff is there nuance and color to Hextech do they have those little glowing balls talk to me about just like we did last time how it existed in the world previously how do we build upon it in this show and what meaning does Hextech now have with the Arcane project the art form the full meal that Arcane serves you
01:24:58
Speaker
So arcane is just another word for magic. It's using magic, right? That's the basic way of of explaining it. And magic in the world of League of Legends in this universe is viewed very differently depending on the culture or country that you're in.
01:25:13
Speaker
In some countries, like a country like Demacia, which is considered like another very similar to the Brotherhood of Steel from Fallout, where it's like very self-righteous. Right. militant? They're kind of militant, but they're more self-righteous. Noxus, for example, which is a country that's very heavily featured in Arcane, is very militant, but in a very different way.
01:25:33
Speaker
Authoritarian militant versus Holy Roman Empire type thing. Yeah, yeah, sort of that. More self-righteous militant. Got it. Demacia views magic so poorly that they actually imprison people born with magic.
01:25:47
Speaker
Whereas Noxus, they don't fear it. They actually use and sort of nurture. People with magical abilities, but again, for military. Two different opposing views on the same group of people.
01:26:00
Speaker
What Piltover does is combine technology with magic to create Hextech. At least that's what Jace platforms on. Heimerdinger, who's like the leader of Piltover in that first section of the story, is against using Hextech because he has lived a very long life.
01:26:20
Speaker
He's a species called a yordle, and a yordle lives far longer than a human does. So he's seen how magic has been used regularly. to essentially create an arms race. And he's very much afraid that that's what's going to happen with Piltover.
01:26:35
Speaker
He ends up being right. And that's actually what I appreciate about Jace's story, because... You're right that the story is about ultimately sister versus sister.
01:26:46
Speaker
But what the sisters do, very much like in Metropolis and Expressionism, they symbolize something much larger than themselves. Whereas Jinx very much symbolizes war, essentially get what you want through war.
01:27:02
Speaker
Vi very much symbolizes get what you want through peace. Because she's very much like been just as oppressed as Jinx has, but she finds herself aligned with the upper city, the people with privilege, because she's actually interested in bridging the gap and making peace where Jinx is more interested in sowing chaos.
01:27:22
Speaker
And what's interesting is that I disagree with you. I think Jace is actually a really interesting character because he represents someone enamored by this establishment and be able to rise up that ranks.
01:27:36
Speaker
He basically like represents like a modern day bureaucrat in a lot of ways, very much turned into a politician. He's Elon Musk. Kind of. Yeah, he is kind of like Elon Musk, just like Elon Musk very much built his platform on saving the earth and being very energy and environmentally conscious.
01:28:03
Speaker
And now he has a giant hammer and he's taking it to our government. Just like Jace takes his hammer. But that's what I mean. Jace sort of does the same thing. He gets corrupted by the system.
01:28:16
Speaker
Even though he's a genuinely good human being, he very much is like, all right, yeah in order to survive in this world of politics, I have to do things that I'm not comfortable with. And that is interesting. That in itself is a very Shakespearean sort of deep,
01:28:33
Speaker
conflict that he goes through and it affects not only himself but everyone around him it's global yeah you actually touched on him and that brings us to yet another character we haven't touched on goodness gracious can we touch on all of them i don't know yeah mel One of my favorites of the show.
01:28:50
Speaker
Um, one of my, oh, oh, anyone who's watched the show probably knows where I'm going with this. Biggest grievances about season two is that they put Mel in a little box and they don't let her out for a whole act.
01:29:06
Speaker
And that drove me crazy because she was one of the great parts about Jace's arc, right? Because Jace in all of act one, it's mainly him and his buddy Victor, and they're trying to tinker with Hextech.
01:29:21
Speaker
And then in act two, he and Victor start to have their own character arcs. And we see that Victor, there is some flashback where you get to see Victor, and how he has lived his life and why he is interested in stuff like Hextech.
01:29:36
Speaker
And he has some run-ins with the villain Silco, which is really cool. I confused it. Act one was Jinx's storyline. You're right, because she becomes Jinx.
01:29:47
Speaker
Act two was Jace's storyline because he becomes a politician. And then act three was Caitlin's storyline because she becomes the police officer. You're right. I confused it a bit. Yeah, I think that's fair.
01:29:58
Speaker
It's been a minute since I've seen the first season. So that does make sense. Okay. And I just came out fresh. So these are my fresh takes too. which means they might be a little hot. Now, the big thing about Jace is that he and Mel, Mel is a new character that's introduced.
01:30:15
Speaker
That's another thing. They love to like throw little characters in. That's why these act breaks keep you sane because otherwise you think, okay, this is a TV show. All of our characters are going to be introduced.
01:30:26
Speaker
In the first three episodes. That makes sense. Not an arcane. Arcane does not play by the rules of traditional television ever. You could say a lot of things about it. It will never play by those rules. So it introduces tons of characters that are essential to plot in act two and late into act two and act three.
01:30:44
Speaker
because mel's mother ambessa is the villain of season two we can say now and she doesn't even reveal herself as such to me anyway i had no idea she was going to be the villain all of act one of season two and then all of a sudden now noxus is this big problem the show is throwing a lot of things at you at once this is one of my main critiques but it's also it's like if i said i hate blue cheese because it's funky Okay, I guess then maybe it's not for me.
01:31:12
Speaker
Because Arcane is about density of ideas. It is a show that rewards you better, I think, on your second watch than your first. It is a show that has a lot of ambitions.
01:31:24
Speaker
It has a lot of thoughts. You mentioned German Expressionism, the idea that people represent ideas. Every person in this show represents a different idea. There are like how many important people in this show, which means there are that many ideas in the show. It's true.
01:31:41
Speaker
It's a full house. It's a big, big, big idea show. It feels like the two seasons... speak to each other, they create one whole piece. It is and entire art form.
01:31:55
Speaker
I was looking at both sort of the Wikipedia pages of Arcane and Fallout, and what's interesting is that there was like an entire conversation about Arcane's budget because it was $250 million, dollars one of the most expensive television series ever produced.
01:32:14
Speaker
And it looks it. Very beautifully, it looks it. but If you look at Fallout's Wikipedia page, it doesn't mention the budget. But if you look at Arkane's Wikipedia page, it does.
01:32:27
Speaker
And rarely and TV shows do you see the budget listed because it fluctuates. But here it was so sort of astronomical and crazy that they were like, okay, it felt needed to add this context
01:32:46
Speaker
in a very front-ended way of like, this was expensive. This is one of the most expensive art forms that was ever made to a medium that usually doesn't get pumped that much money.
01:33:00
Speaker
So we have to give a credence.
Arcane's Ambitious Storytelling
01:33:04
Speaker
But also, what does that value give you? i mean, you listen to the dialogue of the show and people tend to speak in a very elevated form. And hey, I mean, you and I aren't talking like we would talk off mic. We're talking in a more elevated tone, but we're also in a specific environment where we're making analyses, right?
01:33:23
Speaker
I think a lot of the people in the show have this very verbose way of speaking, which does not always feel supernatural. And it is a little tough for me on the ears sometimes, but it also means that it makes it very easy to dub.
01:33:37
Speaker
And this show has been dubbed in pretty much every language that is spoken on a major continent. Yeah. It is a show that can be watched worldwide. It is a show that appeals to a worldwide audience because it is so high concept.
01:33:51
Speaker
It's also a genre that is not seen in other mediums, really in the same like art form. I mean, you have fan drawings of steampunk, but steampunk is not the industry that cyberpunk is.
01:34:10
Speaker
Steampunk is, I would say, a relatively small one, and yet it has its diehard fans. People love steampunk, and for years, there have been very, very few examples of high-budget steampunk fans.
01:34:27
Speaker
fantasy period and i would say arcane is the seminal steampunk story as much as i think that it goes a little off the handle here you can call it a swing and a miss i think that that might be reductive when you call something a swing and a miss it's like did they swing did people like it then i guess it's fine not everyone liked the movie babylon no one went to go see it in theaters But it it does have a cult following. Most of these things that we initially looked at as a culture and said, meh, I could do without it.
01:35:02
Speaker
They have its fans. Twin Peaks didn't make it past season two. And yet now there's Twin Peaks The Return. I want to talk about Twin Peaks with you here because season two takes a very esoteric approach. yeah Much like Lynch's Twin Peaks The Return, which I thought of instantly when watching it. And I know you did as well.
01:35:20
Speaker
And I think it's also a good time to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of that esotericism in more depth. And I want to give you the floor because you found that such a bold, profound experience before I crap all over it.
01:35:35
Speaker
I'm kidding. I'm going to try to hold myself back a little bit on that. I do think that this stuff is beautiful. Now, did we need the three minutes in front of all three of those Act 1 episodes in Season 2?
01:35:48
Speaker
I think it was a waste of time. Like I said, there's only 40 minutes, and there's a dozen characters you have to track in order to really understand the show. So maybe not. But was it pretty?
01:35:59
Speaker
Yeah. So, sorry. I'm already doing it. Esotericism. I'm finished. Well, I will say that I did prefer season one because it felt more grounded.
01:36:10
Speaker
It felt very much grounded into the idea of like, this is literally a tale of the two cities, a tale of two sort of types of people, societies living in the same area and sharing it and also wanting self-determination from it. And there is a sense of one is privileged and one is oppressed.
01:36:25
Speaker
You know, it just felt very real. And it was grounded by a bunch of characters trying to make their way into the world. But it wasn't just Vi and Jinx. It was Jason Mel, even Victor, Heimerdinger.
01:36:38
Speaker
Everybody had their own journey into self-determination, which made it really beautiful. And it made it really heart-wrenching when those characters started to be in conflict with each other, because like all great stories, you start getting confused about who is right, because they're all right and they're all wrong in their own way.
01:37:00
Speaker
And it's just a point of preference. And that's what makes ah really nice, deep and complicated character. When you start questioning your own sort of top processes and your own sort of viewpoint when they share theirs.
01:37:15
Speaker
But season two, ah season one again, I have to give credit for because in my opinion, it was actually really beautifully paced. It was really intelligently paced. Season two, it felt like, all right, we're moving into this. We're going to do everything we can, everything we've dreamed of, and we're just going to make it the biggest thing we possibly can.
01:37:36
Speaker
But for me, because they did that, the pacing was all over the place. So it felt like two seasons in one. Because again, I felt like the final confrontation, especially like act three, like how we got to act three was kind of insane. I was like, I feel like I miss an entire, maybe three acts to get to this.
01:37:57
Speaker
Because i felt things missing, connective tissues between the characters, because I was not confused how the characters got there. I just wished I had more time with the characters before they got to that esoteric outcome, as you like to call it.
01:38:10
Speaker
Because it was huge. It became like galactic. That's the best way you can describe it. I don't think you have to hedge that. It literally becomes galactic. It has people's faces. Yeah. Locating themselves around a galaxy.
01:38:24
Speaker
When I talk about Twin Peaks, The Return as a comp. This is quite literal. Floating faces on screen. I think what's interesting, the connective tissue there between that groundedness and esotericness, again, it goes back to the original plot point of the show.
01:38:41
Speaker
It's marrying technology and magic. Magic is something esoteric. versus technology is something that's more grounded. And that was the whole like marriage of the show about how you combine something that is uncontrollable and make it controllable.
01:38:56
Speaker
And that's not just with Hextech. That's also about Jinx as a character and Vi as a character. How do you take something that is anarchy and give it peace? There is a lot of different ways to view it and how layered everything is with each other, not just with character, but with world, right?
01:39:15
Speaker
But you're right that it does, it becomes so big that it becomes almost unwieldy. And in some ways it does become unwieldy. I think that it does stick the landing, but it crashes on the way to stick that landing because i can genuinely tell you that when I get to the final scenes of Arcane in season two, I feel quite content.
01:39:38
Speaker
I still am like, this is a good show. Not just a good show, it's a great show because where the characters end up Makes sense. But 10 minutes before when everything was going crazy in that final battle, because things just go crazy because every single character becomes in contact with each other and in conflict.
01:39:57
Speaker
And it becomes, again, galactic to the point where you're just kind of like, I'm exhausted. I'm genuinely exhausted by just viewing all of this to the point where I'm like, I wish this was not shoved down my throat, but instead...
01:40:14
Speaker
done so at a pace that was more acceptable. Because in my opinion, and I believe in your opinion as well, yeah it was too much. It was too much even though it was right. It was too much even though it was right.
01:40:25
Speaker
Well, let's talk about a mechanical plot point that I do think is important to discuss and I do think is somewhat of a betrayal from season one into season two. And what I'm talking about is a specific character that returns, returns supposedly from the dead.
01:40:40
Speaker
We had a very clear, very tried and true moment where a parental figure, a figure who tells our characters how to live their lives. He is a warm force in a cold world.
01:40:54
Speaker
Vander. is killed. He is injected with this crazy making serum, and then that's where he goes. He goes off by the wayside, and we presume him dead.
01:41:05
Speaker
Rightfully so. I think that the show could have gone on to bigger and better things. Instead, they do resurrect him. They say, oh yes, he in fact is not only not dead, but he has now become a different character, who I believe is a PC on the League of Legends world, Warwick.
01:41:23
Speaker
Yes, yes. He's a hero called Warwick. He's a character you can play as. And that's the thing I agree with you. Vander, in a lot of ways, Vander's death specifically because he raised both Vi and Jinx as children as sort of like their father. He isn't their actual father. He's their adoptive father.
01:41:40
Speaker
His death serves as the catalyst to the entire show. That is what separates Vi and Jinx from each other. So his death is not just like a death. But again, it's the entire sort of vehicle to the show. It's what pushes the characters to what they become.
01:41:56
Speaker
And you're right, him coming back has some interesting meaning behind it because it's what brings the girls back together because they were in conflict with each other up to that point until they had to work together to find him and help him. And they stick together because of that experience.
01:42:12
Speaker
So in that way, I do disagree with you because, again, it stays true to the storytelling structure that it was built off of. But what's ironic is I'm glad you brought up the entire idea of Warwick.
01:42:24
Speaker
Because it felt like the League of Legends people were like, okay, we need to make Vander. And there is actually, like, in the video game itself, a few voice lines that refer to Warwick when he speaks to Vi as if they know each other from the past. And Warwick doesn't remember it. So, again, it was built in. That one line was built in, and they built off that line, like they did with Vi and Jinx being sisters.
01:42:49
Speaker
But Warwick... In the video game is a werewolf. He's kind of like a werewolf chimera monster thing. He is like an experiment that's gone awfully wrong.
01:43:00
Speaker
Like he's made into like this weird monster with like a foxtail. And he he looks like a wolf with like these big sort of canisters on his back again, because he was made into a monster. He's a person that was made into a monster, like a Frankenstein type monster.
01:43:16
Speaker
And here they don't really do that. They kind of do it, but not really. It's like a really weird thing. And so you have it where fans of the video game are like, that's not Warwick. That's like a weird interpretation of Warwick.
01:43:30
Speaker
And they're also just kind of like, OK, if you're not going to go fully on this concept of him being turned from a human into this mindless monster that is very much dangerous in the video game.
01:43:41
Speaker
Why aren't you doing that then? Why aren't you giving it the actual adaptation it deserves? So I feel like coming in from the video game sense, I agree with that. I agree with that. They could have done more with Warwick's character and Vander's character in relation, but they just chose not to because they were like, okay, Vander's one single purpose here was to separate the girls and also bring them back together.
01:44:04
Speaker
And that's where I feel they failed him as a character, because they could have done much more with him when they brought him back. Absolutely. Now, that also, I think, goes into a larger kind of mechanical issue I have with the show. Before I get into something that I think far more subjective, which is that a show...
01:44:23
Speaker
in its most effective form, really does have a job to do in terms of how it disperses information. It must tell you the information, which Arcane does most of the time.
01:44:34
Speaker
It pays off the information, which Arcane has to do and does best. I would say efficiently, if not always successfully. And it does also have to remind you of what that information is. It has to build it up.
01:44:48
Speaker
It has to set it up. And that is a lot of the work of narrative, right? To effectively do that. I've read your scripts, s Niv. I do believe they do that pretty effectively. And so it surprises me that you do not recognize how infrequently...
01:45:03
Speaker
This show ignores that whole conceit of narrative storytelling. It does not hold the audience along for the journey.
01:45:16
Speaker
It simply drops a piece of information and then picks it back up as it's needed. That's it. Now, how they utilize that information is totally down. to the artists, right? And they obviously take full advantage of that to the point where they turn Victor into Space Jesus and then Space Jesus into Fascist Space Jesus. I don't know if they always need to do that. I don't think they have to make him into Ultron.
01:45:43
Speaker
It's not necessarily the most engaging way to approach a messianic figure of magic. In my opinion, I thought that the cult in season two was plenty interesting in its own right.
01:45:57
Speaker
And then they just sort of blow it up and they do a whole different thing because they want to do this like Marvel style battle. I think a lot of season two has a lot more action. And I think the action incredible.
01:46:09
Speaker
going to be good for most of the audience, so I can't knock it, but I will say it just means that it's going to have these sequences that feel very disconnected to the artistry because the action is shot like you're watching a movie, whereas the artistic moments...
01:46:27
Speaker
feel more homogenous to the show as a whole, right? And so the moments where there are heads floating in space, whether or not that's set up correctly, you could argue. But the fact the matter is, it's very interesting, it's unique, and it's very in line with what the show wanted to do.
01:46:43
Speaker
So I'm not going to knock that as much as saying that it just, the alignment is my issue. It's not that they chose one thing or they chose another. I have a lot of space for the avant-garde.
01:46:56
Speaker
It's a matter of being able to execute that correctly. When David Lynch set up Twin Peaks The Return, he mandated be 18 hour-long episodes. That is because he knew that even though he had made several seasons to, in fact...
01:47:14
Speaker
seasons of television that he still needed to take the time to set up this very unusual and esoteric idea. And even in that, not everything worked 100% effectively, right?
01:47:28
Speaker
But I think it worked more effectively because it had the strength of that time It knew how to set up and pay things off. It understood it needed to do that at a scale in which we could digest it.
01:47:42
Speaker
And furthermore, Twin Peaks is about the evil that men do. That is a very simple one thesis. It is the entirety of the thesis of Twin Peaks.
01:47:54
Speaker
With all of the dancing dwarves... It is, or little people, I'm sorry to the little people community for that mishap. They still boil it down to a very simple premise.
01:48:06
Speaker
And Arcane is about identity. It is about fate. It is about politics. I could probably more readily find a list of things that Arcane is not about.
01:48:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's true. It is a lot about a lot of things. Look, the way I can describe it is that Arcane is actually like it can be very maximalist in the way it presents things. It can be really in your face with the way it presents things, especially like its themes and its messaging.
01:48:33
Speaker
But it can also be very beautifully subtle. There's a lot of things that if you look at certain like episodes and the way it does foreshadowing, it's actually quite brilliant. There's a lot of like little, little things that if you rewatch the show, like it's a show that almost demands that you rewatch it in a lot of ways.
01:48:51
Speaker
That's how I said at the very beginning. It is a show that does not do itself justice on the first watch. I 100% agree. Yeah. And that's what I mean, like the whole Space Jesus thing. As a person who plays the video game, I get where that's coming from because Victor in particular in the video game as a hero character, he's a villain. He's like Jace's arch nemesis in the video game.
01:49:12
Speaker
So they had to get to that sort of plot point eventually. There have been like YouTube videos like talking about the very subtle sort of foreshadowing of him becoming like Space Jesus and evil Space Jesus.
01:49:26
Speaker
be because like it is built into the fabric of the show. You're right that it could have been more in your face or more importantly, it could have been more paced out in order for it to be successful.
01:49:37
Speaker
Because like you, I agree him being like normal cult Jesus, what I call cult Jesus was plenty interesting enough for me. It didn't need to be pushed as far as it eventually went on to.
01:49:51
Speaker
But as you said, they were really interested in colliding everybody's worlds, and they needed to account for Victor as well because he had become such an important character. And more importantly, he became the character to really, again, if we're talking about German expressionism, he symbolized how you can't control magic.
01:50:09
Speaker
It's not something that you can control. Versus Jace was like, no, you should control it, not just control it, you should end it. In a lot of ways, Jace and Victor operate the same way as Vi and Jinx.
01:50:24
Speaker
Because whereas Vi and Jinx operate on like that micro level of like, hey, this story is about our conflict, anarchy versus peace. Jace and Victor talk about that maximalist macro idea.
01:50:39
Speaker
which is essentially control versus freedom. Because again, it has to do with this whole idea of magic and technology. So again, those themes are still not just parallel and connected to each other.
01:50:52
Speaker
It's like a weird thing. They're both parallel, but they're also very much connected to each other. It's just very much like what Shrek says in the movie Shrek, the most famous line he says, onions.
01:51:02
Speaker
Onions have layers. This show, sorry. And this show, Arcane, just has a ton of layers to it. And you really need to peel back all of them to appreciate all of them.
01:51:14
Speaker
I love that you made the comparison to onions because I get the pivot of all time, which is that like an onion, this show loves to make you cry. it really does. Boom. Okay. Talking about how angsty this show is. I have one last grievance, which is that the show is incredibly angsty.
01:51:38
Speaker
yeah Now, you and I were talking, not to meta in the RPG world, you call this metagaming,
Arcane's Character Development
01:51:44
Speaker
meta podcast. You asked me once when I was starting season two, you were like, wow, if you don't like the angstiness of season one, you're really not going to like this moment in season two. I honestly could not tell. It's all very angsty to me.
01:51:56
Speaker
Which moment are you specifically thinking of? If that's like the angsty apex, let's talk about these specific moments. When Vi becomes goth. Oh, I loved Goth Vi. So camp. I love Goth Vi too. Yeah, but it was like insane. is It was like the apex.
01:52:14
Speaker
It was like the ape. When she becomes a boxer, that is where I was, if you remember earlier in the podcast, we were talking about how, and I say you, meaning both of you, you in the audience, you You remember how I was not going to get into special details about how it felt like a time jump from two to three?
01:52:33
Speaker
She dyes her hair black and starts boxing. That had to have taken the space of at least a month or more. Yeah, it's been a month. It's had to have been a minute. She went from being pretty normal to being like very different. And that could have been three months.
01:52:49
Speaker
It could have been... A month, it could have been six weeks. I don't really know how these things work, but I understand that it's probably been a significant enough amount of time that people have changed and developed, right?
01:53:01
Speaker
Someone started a cult. Someone got into boxing. There's a lot of varied ideas on the show, as I've mentioned. I loved when Vi was boxing. I thought that was awesome. I did not love how Kate punched Vi in the face and then they still ended up together.
01:53:16
Speaker
That, I think, promotes domestic violence. And here on Zeitgeist, I want to take a stand against that. Oh my god. Sorry for laughing about that. I'm just... No, it's silly, but it's actually very serious. And I think it's a little too passe with the way that they integrate violence relative to the emotional center of the show, which is ultimately very sort of sentimental. And it's talking about how love conquers all.
01:53:41
Speaker
And I do truly think that, especially someone who's pretty critical on police, the way that they take on Kate in those last couple moments, it's pretty uncritical of the fact that she is ah pretty violent fascist cop.
01:53:55
Speaker
Well, because she becomes that, right? Katie Long, who portrays Caitlin, we barely get to talk about Caitlin, even though she's one of the most important characters in the show. She comes from a very powerful family in Piltover and like the privileged end of that city.
01:54:11
Speaker
And she becomes a cop. When her mother dies in the second season, she gets enamored by this Noxus general called Ambessa, portrayed by Ellen Thomas.
01:54:23
Speaker
And she sort of s seduces her into becoming sort of this fascist dictator because she's like, look, the only way you can... Make sure there is order in your city as if you make it happen.
01:54:35
Speaker
And Caitlyn takes sort of like that leadership role because Jace sort of gives up in season two. Like, it's interesting because Jace is very much the big taker of power in season one, and he just relinquishes it throughout most of season two.
01:54:49
Speaker
And then also disappears. And disappears. Yeah. A lot of the main players disappear. It's not just Mel. It's Jace. It's Heimerdinger. It's Reed Shannon's Echo, who's a character that we also haven't talked about.
01:55:01
Speaker
Who's one of the most important characters in the show. In probably two episodes of the show. But two very, very important episodes. Yeah. That's what I love about this show is that you can say that each character is important in their own moment.
01:55:15
Speaker
which is very rare in a lot of different types of storytelling in terms of like full scale, full depth and scale. But that's what I mean. you have these characters that are heroes in one area of the story, but then they become villainous or, you know, they take a completely different turn.
01:55:33
Speaker
And that's personally what I love. I really love the fact that each character changes, not just arbitrarily, but because the story actually convincingly says, okay these are real people who go through real obstacles.
01:55:48
Speaker
And these obstacles really challenge them. Sort of like Lucy. Lucy has a better pace in Fallout. But here, as you said, there is a bit of time jumps that very much affect the characters.
01:56:01
Speaker
And the characters also find themselves in different worlds entirely that completely turn their worlds off their access. Jace in particular has like a really interesting journey in season two.
01:56:13
Speaker
because he is very much isolated. He's very much and his own sci-fi nightmare in a lot of ways. And Echo and Heimerdinger essentially go into what I call a good version of their world.
01:56:26
Speaker
a more stable version of the world. And they have to sort of reconcile with being like, this is not our world. We need to go back and we need to fix our world rather than stay in this better world. Again, interesting stories, interesting B-flots, but you're right that they veer off so much that you're just kind of like, wow,
01:56:46
Speaker
Like, we've gone into a completely different show now. When are we back? That was most of Act 2, in case the followers aren't looking at the Wikipedia page. Yeah, most of Act 2 of Season 2. We were talking about Season 2. What I'm referring to is that most followers are probably not watching the Wikipedia pages as they listen to us.
01:57:04
Speaker
So I'll kind of give that designation here.
Arcane's World-Building Comparisons
01:57:06
Speaker
Act 2 has Mel, who is trapped inside the Black Rose coffin of... magic or something.
01:57:14
Speaker
Unclear what the Black Rose even is, to be honest. You have Mbessa and Caitlyn coming together, right? But they come together and then they fall apart. They come together again. the show kind of starts to loop around itself at a certain point and you don't really have like a keen sense of are they actually gonna be friends again or have we been like taken on this journey for nothing and of course they do all the predictable end points by the end you actually get all of the catharsis that you were looking for it's just not in the way you expected well it's interesting because again like the character of ambessa who truly becomes like the main villain of the show in season two you know she very much like operates like a yago she experienced sort of character where she's using everybody towards her own advantage and
01:58:00
Speaker
And then when it's understood that she's the true villain of the story, all the characters, all the main heroes that were bickering against each other come together to go against her. Everyone but Victor, because Victor is the only one that truly aligns with Ambessa.
01:58:15
Speaker
Mel, who's Mbesta's daughter, played by Toks Alagandai. She's one of the more interesting characters, as you say, because she starts as a very ordinary character, but then she almost becomes like a Mary Sue by the end of it, you know? She has like a really weird progression in the show that I'm not fully on board with, but...
01:58:34
Speaker
She does portray like a more, i don't know, interesting characteristic because again, both Ambessa and Mel come from a different country called Noxus. And the Black Rose is an organization from Noxus.
01:58:48
Speaker
It's like an organization of witches and wizards, basically like militant magic. And You learn from them that Mel's mother, Ambessa, is a wanted criminal from their organization, and they wanted to capture her.
01:59:02
Speaker
And that Ambessa literally ran away to Piltover to find something that could fight them back. And it was Hextech. So again, very complicated lore when it comes down to it that's being drawn from.
01:59:17
Speaker
Because ultimately, it's a constant reminder that the world of League of Legends in Arcane is much larger than just like the steampunk city called Piltover.
01:59:29
Speaker
It's also one of the nicer things about it because it reminds you of how organic this world really is. It's how when you watch like Lord the Rings or even Star Wars, those kinds of films or IPs where you're just realizing like, wow, this universe is so expansive.
01:59:46
Speaker
That every time you learn something new about it, it's interesting. It doesn't feel like it's being shoved down your throat. There's new and cool stuff in every corner. And that's one of the really major high points of Arcane is that it gets to explore this sandbox.
02:00:00
Speaker
But more than that, because again, what did we talk about at the beginning of this pod? That one of the reasons why video game adaptations failed in movies is because they didn't do the one thing video games did really well, which was world build.
02:00:14
Speaker
Like they didn't have enough time to do that. But the reason why the small screen, when creatives started adapting video games into television series, the reason why it was finally successful is because they finally had time to world build.
02:00:30
Speaker
The reason Arcane serves as such a flashpoint to that is because it takes that innovation and uses it to its full extent. Now, the worlds of season one, I think to me, feel very clear and distinct and novel.
02:00:46
Speaker
You have this very simple premise, Tale of Two Cities, Metropolis. It's two separate areas with very identifiable elements to them. Now, obviously, season two speeds up a little bit. We've talked about that.
02:00:59
Speaker
Additionally, there is the issue where they've put themselves in a bit of a corner in many reasons that we've already talked about, including the adjustment of Vander as a character and the Mary Sue aspect. always jesus But furthermore, one of the key points of the show is that you not only fall in love with the characters, but you fall in love with the spaces.
02:01:19
Speaker
And we are deprived of one of the major spaces of Piltover that we were used to in Season 1. That area is gone. And we do not get a I think, adequate replacement for it in Season 2.
02:01:33
Speaker
And instead, we are thrown in a lot of different directions, and because when the end of a Season 1 ends in this, like, big explosion that takes down the palace effectively, it means that now all of these characters are in a lot of different spaces, analogous to Piltover, though not always in Piltover at all, that you really don't have a clear idea of space.
02:01:55
Speaker
And I didn't even really get a sense that Noxus was even that far away in season two. In season one, it seemed like it was ages away from Piltover, but... In season two, I couldn't even really tell you what was where, because also you had the additional element of these like artistic flourishes where you weren't always, it was like a comic book panel.
02:02:17
Speaker
You weren't always seeing the background. You were seeing the artistic expression of the character's inner life. That's one of the great things about animation. It also means that it deprives us of one of the things that makes Arcane really interesting.
02:02:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned the whole like thing of Noxus being a different country altogether and it feeling very present. And it's because, again, Mbessa, who's like this Noxian general, had three battalions with her in Piltover.
02:02:45
Speaker
So it very much felt like they were invading, but it wasn't the country invading. It was just Mbessa invading with her own personal army. And you're also right in the sense that there were adjacent worlds.
02:02:58
Speaker
There was like our main timeline that we were looking at and also... the important Echo episode of the season. It felt like we've talked about the fact that our zeitgeist surrounds the multiverse now in so many different ways. Like that's sort of the narrative engine of every major project that has been going on. And it was kickstarted by essentially Rick and Morty and pushed to a crazy T by Marvel.
Arcane's Impact on Culture
02:03:25
Speaker
Even Arkane can't escape it because they literally did a multiverse act. Act 2 season 2 is literally about their version of the multiverse. Arcane does, I can even say this is a plus towards Arcane versus a minus.
02:03:40
Speaker
Arcane just does a really good job at both revolutionizing our zeitgeist, but also staying true to the zeitgeist that we're going through. Because it knows what it's talking about. It knows about like, it's the politics that we're going through.
02:03:54
Speaker
and it knows even the artistic mentality we're going through and what affects us as a society right now. And a big portion of it is the multiverse. I will say that episode, the multiverse episode.
02:04:08
Speaker
Great story. Good beginning, middle and end. One of the best. But bad serialization because we had so few moments to be able to track these characters. Again, it's like when you have this big of a scope, you really have to kind pare it down a little bit.
02:04:24
Speaker
And Arcane didn't. care for that at all that whole ideology was not present in the show i watched they were like we're gonna do a multiverse episode we're gonna have a bunch of stuff that happens in space it's going to just be what they want it to be they're like we have one season they knew they had a two season deal and they saw what season one was doing, and they were like, we are not getting a season three.
02:04:54
Speaker
We are going to make sure that we have everything we need in this second season. I think that's smart. I think they know that they are working for, at the end of the day, Netflix. And Netflix is not in the business of renewing shows.
02:05:07
Speaker
Period. Actually, I disagree because there was a conversation with Netflix and Riot to do a season three. It's just that Fortiche the creatives at Fortiche were just like, no, that's not our plan.
02:05:20
Speaker
It ended up being too expensive. The entire production together was $250 million. dollars And if we're talking about adaptation, right? If you're adapting like a major product,
02:05:31
Speaker
Because that's what these things are. Both Fallout and League of Legends are product, right? There is this idea that if you watch it, it needs to have returns to its main product. So the idea is if you watch the show, you are pushed to play the video game.
02:05:48
Speaker
And that worked with Fallout. That very much worked with Fallout. And it kind of worked with League of Legends, but not really, because the difference between Fallout and League of Legends is that when you play Fallout, you need to buy a whole $60 worth of content, usually.
02:06:04
Speaker
But with League of Legends, the game is free, but there are micro-transactions you can do to buy like visuals and different things to attach to your characters. Those are not free.
02:06:17
Speaker
But the experience of just playing is free. Riot told themselves that if the show is successful, then people will buy more cosmetics when they play the video game. And they even made skins.
02:06:31
Speaker
that are connected to to the show for their characters. So they try to market it very much like alongside each other, but it wasn't successful. So what they did is like, okay, let's push it further with season two.
02:06:45
Speaker
Let's make our actual like storyline, like the actual canon story we're telling in our video game, and align it with Arcane, meaning Arcane has become like the canon story of the League of Legends universe. Before it was like, oh, you know, it's like a story set in this universe. No, now they completely reformatted it and being like, this is the direction we're taking.
02:07:06
Speaker
Every time we release a new character, ah will be related to the world that Arcane presented. and that's what I mean. And Bessa and Mel, after season two was released, they were both released as characters in the video game.
02:07:21
Speaker
because they're just kind of like, okay, we need to converge this to get the best return we can. And to finish this point, the new season of the video game, because in video games you have seasons as well, like thematic ah things essentially, where you focus on like sort of this theme.
02:07:40
Speaker
The theme of League of Legends this period of the year is called Noxus. And they came out with like an animated trailer that Fortiche did in the style of Arcane, with Mel being the main character of that trailer.
02:07:54
Speaker
But what was really funny was by the end of it, there was actually like a scene between two characters talking to each other about like future events. And it very much felt like a small teaser, not just for the future of the video game League of Legends, but it also felt like very much a strong teaser to a future TV adaptation, another TV adaptation in that universe similar to Arcane.
02:08:21
Speaker
and I don't really understand how the specific narrative of Arcane might follow, but I mean, considering how Mel was sort of uninitiated for most of the season in the politics that went on beyond her confronting her mother by the end, which was, I think, very satisfying.
02:08:40
Speaker
There's certainly a lot of sort of narrative endpoints that I'm like, oh yeah, that was cool. That was a very cool moment. Broadly speaking, there are a lot of very cool moments in the show. I just don't know if they all necessarily cohere together.
02:08:52
Speaker
But that's okay. It is an absolute marvel that this show took place. And I would watch Arcane a dozen more times before you could drag me into the theater to watch a certain Captain America movie that came out this weekend.
02:09:07
Speaker
So, that being said, if, you know, we are talking about Zeitgeist, like, this is a key example of not necessarily what is the Zeitgeist, Because is, you know, moderately effective. Riot Games said it did what it needed to do for us.
02:09:23
Speaker
It worked for us financially. We're happy with it. Could be the Zeitgeist and probably what will be a huge cult classic. Is this going to make waves in the League community right away?
02:09:35
Speaker
Maybe not. But will every person who joins League of Legends in 10 years... go to Netflix and be like, I'm watch the League of Legends TV show and boot it up and be immersed in this world and find a lot of joy in seeing these characters brought to life?
02:09:54
Speaker
Absolutely. Will they care if some of the individual elements of the show get a little too big for their britches? No, they will not. They will not care. i am a stuffy old man.
02:10:06
Speaker
That is who I am. 16 year olds, the angsty people that I think this show is built for. And I don't say that in a way that is like paternal and diminishing things for teenagers are broadly speaking good. Star Wars, I think, is built for teenagers.
02:10:23
Speaker
Teenagers are important benchmarks in what is good, truly good blockbuster and high concept because a lot of teenagers can pour themselves into great, great stuff. And Arcane is...
02:10:39
Speaker
of that ilk in many ways, especially in terms of invention. I hope to see more stuff like this from Netflix. They have been taking broad swings like this. Arcane just came out. It doesn't seem like they're holding off on doing this kind of stuff. They just threw another billion dollars in their content spend. So I think they could probably afford ah couple million dollars on something like this again. Blue-Eyed Samurai,
02:11:04
Speaker
A similar digital animation. Very good. I think much, much, much more concrete. Also based in history, so maybe that's just going to be something that I find more engaging. i'm Very excited for season two of Blue-Ed Samurai.
02:11:18
Speaker
And if this the first time that you've listened to this podcast, feel free to check that out in just a second. Niv, do you any closing thoughts on Arcane, Fallout, and what you're looking for in ah future adaptations or future seasons?
02:11:32
Speaker
Jordan went on an entire i rant that, you know, these kind of shows, specifically like Arcane Dead, Inc. really attracts like teenagers, specifically teenage boys. i think video games and just like the video game industry as a whole have become what they've always meant to be, which is art.
02:11:49
Speaker
People are at least like noticing what they are, which is an artist genderless because that's what the greatest art is. And generationalists. Exactly. Like it affects everyone, no matter the age or no matter who they are.
02:12:00
Speaker
And I think Arcane and Fallout do a really good job at that because they talk about things much larger than what they're trying to tell. And they do that well. They're kind of like onions. They have a lot of different layers to them.
02:12:13
Speaker
And more importantly, when it comes to like the idea of adaptation, i think you should always stay true to what you're adapting, but not be afraid to either expand on it or to follow up.
02:12:26
Speaker
Because again, you can't recreate the wheel. You can only improve on it. And that, my friends, is like this. And with that note, Niv and i are going to get out of your swamp.
02:12:40
Speaker
Thank you so much for tuning in, listening to this episode. Hopefully this is one of many. If not, feel free to share this link. Look up Fediverse and find your platform of choice. I'm currently on blue sky kaboomviper.com you can find me there i usually tweet some pretty unhinged stuff there but less unhinged than this podcast that's for sure you get my buttoned up version as buttoned up as i can get so when we are looking forward hopefully we're going to be bringing a lot more content this year we had a little bit of a lapse but we're back and we covered the most important things in terms of tv and film of the last year for the most part
02:13:22
Speaker
So nothing really missing as of yet. We'll definitely have a lot of really cool content coming your way. So with that note, do stay tuned. I'm Jordan Conrad. I'm Neville Boz.
02:13:34
Speaker
And we are signing off. Thank you for listening. Thank you for telling everybody about us. Thank you for listening on Mixcloud. And we'll see again soon.