Caitlyn being part of the 40% of cops was unexpected but also excellent writing

Ella Purnell sells even the clunkiest of lines and makes them sound perfect, she runs circles around the rest of Arcane's main cast as far as voice acting talent goes and, considering how great everybody else is, that's saying something

Jinx's character animation is brilliant, but the voice acting is what brings it all together

I have so many thoughts about Arcane but the first one is, “damn, these facial rigs are fucking incredible”

Seriously, the way these characters emote, and how Fortiche isn’t afraid to make them look a little ugly at times… it’s really special

Hey! I’ll try and answer all of that in order.

1. Arcane is incredible, and the proof that the folks over at Fortiche are just the best at that kind of thing in this industry. I could gush about its sense of visual storytelling, the brilliant art direction, stellar character animation and facial rigs for hours, and I have. The character writing works fantastically too. It was my favourite animated show of 2021, despite Imagine Dragons and the somewhat weak political commentary, which should tell you just how good I think it is.

2. If by “popular” you mean stuff like Sailor Moon or CCS or Precure or even Madoka despite all its frustrating flaws, nah, I rather like most mainstream Magical Girls shows, or at least there’s something to enjoy about them even when they’re not great.

Now, when it comes to the overwhelming majority of “dark and edgy” magical girl shows which tend to have more niche audiences, they tend to be poorly written and directed. See, I’m not radically opposed to the concept, you just have to pull it off competently. Sailor Moon did “dark magical girl” stuff rather well in its time.

The thing is, all the slew of dark magical girl shows that came after Madoka are varying degrees of bad-to-dogshit, with sprinkles of nonce-pandering thrown in there. Yes, this include YYWYDA which was never good no matter what people will try to tell you.

Also, the Fate spin-off about Illya is one the most repulsive things I was unfortunate to lay my eyes upon. It’s just vile. Don’t watch it. It’s not even bad in an interesting way.

3. It certainly would have been an interesting angle although I’m not convinced the writers would have pulled it off. You would have to start foreshadowing that the silly little man is not the big player he thinks he is early on, which the show simply didn’t do. Whatever happened behind the scenes, the Mayura from season 3 is framed very differently from the scary powerful villain of the season 2 finale. Now what I am quasi certain would have worked is a greater emphasis on the fact that Mayura and HM’s relationship is kind of meant to mirror LB and CN’s in a deformed way, and “Ladybug” (the episode) sort of hinted at that and did so competently.

4. I’m generally not a fan of music shows aimed at kids, because the music aspect, though the central conceit, tends to be very weak from the moment you know anything about music and have listened to any kind of “real” music ever, and with a title like this, I just avoided Lolirock entirely. The character design and colours never looked too great to me either. Should I give it another chance? I know that Étienne Guignard worked on it, and I always like his work, but also, so did That Guy.

Arcane has the best non-comedic ugly crying in any 3DCG production I've ever seen, and I'm a sucker for ugly crying

Into the Spider-Verse is a close second. I look forward to the day regular 3DCG TV animation is able to match that quality.

Oh hey, it’s the first part of that Piltover’s Finest thing I’ve been working on for ages!

It picks up right where the show left us, and everything hurts but they’re trying their best to keep it together (they’re not very good at it).

Till Death by Japanese Breakfast is the quintessential Piltover’s Finest song.

No I won’t elaborate on that.

Ella Purnell’s performance as Jinx is simply something else. The entire voice cast is excellent, but she is just perfect.