Arcane ★☆☆☆☆

This is an exceptionally pretty show. I will give it that. But it failed to grab me at any point. It feels like it is expecting you to come in invested in these characters already. It does very little to establish them or get you to like them at all before all the bad stuff starts happening that you are clearly meant to care about but I never really did. I found it hard to get a grasp on them or why they are making the decisions they are either.

I had hoped maybe the second series could improve on the first but it doubles down on every single bad impulse. It piles one more characters with the barest hint of motivation for any of them and everyone continues to make sudden, inexplicable shifts in motivation and alliance and the consequences of what anyone is doing is constantly vague. At one point a character trails off while saying “If he gets to the hexgate…” and I begged out loud for him to finish that sentence because I had no idea what the results of that would be.

Action also stops bothering being in any way coherent in the second series, with the show more concerned with making music videos than maintaining any sense of space or physical reality in most fights.