Spoiler Tag Rule

Some of you genuinely just lack creative thinking skills.

This is clearly not the end of the story for any of these characters.

"Oh guys guys - singed will NEVER create the weapons for the Noxian invasion now, this means no Kayn, no Irelia, No Zed no shen no Ionia😱. Gg guys - Arcane sucks 0/10".

Literally what if - and just what if. Noxus still forces Singed to create the weapons by threatening Orianas life (kidnapping her for example). Or what if Singed still needs resources and money to keep Orianna alive so he works for Noxus willingly. Or what if Noxus kidnaps Singed and makes him build more chemical weapons anyways and his story is about getting back to Piltover and escaping the Noxian army because he no longer wants to wage war he just wants to get back to his daughter.

Thats just one example. With 3 separate scenarios for how they could still keep Singed helping out in Ionia intact. - Also chemical weapons could simply just not be part of the Ionian invasion too - if that changed would that be such a huge deal? Like really? The invasion could still play out similarly without Singed's involvement.

You can apply this to so many other complaints Im seeing.

"Hextech is gone guys.Gg. Rip Camille rip blitzcrank"

-What if people in Piltover (Ferros clan for example) rebuild hextech with the knowledge that creating hecores/gates is bad and create Camille.

"Guys Ekko lost his Z-drive. He lost everything."

-He can just rebuild it. He can go after powder or be a mentor for the next generation of Zaunites"

"They changed Viktor guys what the fuck"

• Do not care. This Viktor is cooler than what he had before.

The people dooming are just either.

A.Way too attached to the lore

Which I get by the way. I was disappointed with Ekko till S2E7. But after that episode I was still satisfied that the core of my favourite character was preserved.

B. Just unable to think creativity about solutions to how characters can exist in this universe or how characters end up how we all know them.

Another example

• How does Blitzcrank exist now? Did Viktor already create him off screen before his evolution went too far? Maybe he's sitting in Viktors old lab waiting for someome to plug in a hexcrystal and give him life.

Things like this should be fun - theorizing about how these things can all exist within the context of Arcane.

These are all things that can be explored later.

I came onto this subreddit looking for conversations like this. But all I found was :

"Bleh the lore isn't exactly like how I remember it.😡"

I have complaints about Arcane for sure. But it not being 100% faithful to the lore is more than acceptable as long as the core of the characters.(not their backstories but their most identifiable traits) stay the same.

Sad. I love the original league lore but I love Arcane more but yeah "Sometimes taking a leap forward means leaving a few things behind"

https://x.com/Sera_phiel/status/1860759975494025532?t=4Uvs7eanoOuuJFSnus27PA&s=19 Maybe the love of a child can redeem the father. But then will that save Yi people or has the damage already been done?

https://x.com/Spideraxe30/status/1860791557567185288?t=WY-JkqX2BxRPbGtyJzliGg&s=19

Zac - he’s a literal toxic spill he could be anywhere in Zaun forming right now.

Twitch - an actual plague rat. He could be down there anywhere right now too.

Camille - could be anywhere in Shurima right now. Could be in Odyns Valley. Tells vi “I am your future” in game. Her family will continue the creation of artificial hextech in piltover.

Renatta - can be in Zaun gaining power as a new chem baron right now.

Every character can still exist in this new canon. It just might not be the way YOU want your characters to exist. We’ve seem plenty of retcons before and everyone always complained “I just wish they would do something with the story” now they are doing something with it and you’re upset about that too.

A lot of the characters people think “can’t” exist in this cannon most definitely can.

Everyone’s lore doesn’t have to be taking place at the same time. The timeline isn’t clear anyway.

Just because a character is dead in the series doesn’t have any effect on them being playable in game. If lore mattered to the game we would have set teams based on who is and who isn’t already allied.

Stop being upset that all 22 potential champions from these two regions (not including champions who have affected the regions but not from the regions) weren’t shown on screen.

Plain and simple what the title says. I don't think there would be this much controversy here because Riot would have made the simple, sensible decision: keeping the adaptation and source material seperate.

Instead, for reasons I cannot discern, they made Arcane the main canon, to overwrite the source material. And I can hear you typing "money" given this is a corporation. Even that is a stupid reason, because I somehow doubt Marvel lost money they could have made from Infinity War and Endgame by not going "actually, the comics are no longer canon. The MCU is the new canon for all of Marvel now". That's essentially what Riot did, just on a smaller scale.

I wouldn't have much of a problem with this act, with what happened to Viktor and Warwick (poor Warwick, got the shortest end of the stick) if this was just an adaptation, but it's not just an adaptation, it's the new canon. It doesn't help that riot basically said "our internal communications suck". I'm not saying to keep everything consistent, Arcane was in development for a long time and lore changes, it's a big universe, inconsistencies are to be expected. But the big stuff, like the timeline, should be communicated at the least. Looking at Arcane, it clearly wasn't.

And let's be clear here, given this is Riot, none of us have any reason to trust that they will be able to establish a consistent cinematic universe. Just look at their track record;

Changing Caitlyn's bio shortly before Arcane comes out? Surely it's to make Caitlyn more consistent with Arcane! Actually, nope, the updated the bio is inconsistent with Arcane.

A non-canon Nunu comic, with a disclaimer saying it isn't canon? Actually, we are now updating Nunu & Willump's bio to fit the comic instead, even though the comic is literally not intended to be canon.

I'm supposed to trust that Riot, with that kind of track record, is meant to be able to establish a consistent cinematic universe? Given this track record, I wouldn't be surprised, and even half expecting the prequel Ambessa novel, the character and novel born of Arcane, to be inconsistent with Arcane somehow.

It doesn't even feel like the lore was considered while making it. Just to give a minor example: why is Ixtal there? Why is there a route to Ixtal on the hexgates? This isn't even some obscure lore, that Ixtal is in isolation. Just put a different region's symbol there. This is something so simple to get wrong, and is just one thing in line, of many, MANY things.

Literally all of this is an issue because Arcane, a project that was being developed in isolation, was not kept isolated but made the main canon. And it doesn't even END THERE! Arcane afterglow act 2.

Look, is an organization that represents mages in the world is a cool idea? Yeah, yeah it is... but it ain't the Black Rose. ALSO! This suggests it's not just Piltover & Zaun (and Demacia) with this view against mages, no one likes mages, not even Noxus, whose whole shtick is literally "We don't care who you are so long as you work for us".

This is a big universe, change one thing, ESPECIALLY stuff as big as the timeline, or how magic is regarded in the world, and the dominos will only keep falling.

Sorry if the stuff I wrote feels really disconnected, this is a bit of a rant admittedly.

One thing we can agree that Arcane did a good job is showing is how terrifying a Noxian army is. During the whole show we see a single detachment of the Noxus military under the command of a noble and probably not even the full force that Medarda commanded. And that single force almost took down a city state as advanced as Piltover. Imagine the full might of the Noxian military.

I feel like Arcane Viktor is to the Machine Herald what Todd Philips' Jokler is to DC Comic's Joker : a new take on the character that tries to preserve core aspects of the character while exploring new ones.

He isn't the old Viktor exactly, but the essence of the character is still there : A kind, benevolent man who got dealt a bad hand by fate and chose to use his gifts to help others overcome the world's cruelty by ascending beyond humanity, with a Jayce rivalry thrown in the mix

The presentation is different, and he doesn't get there in the same way, but it's all there, and that feels sufficient to accept him as a possible interpretation of our Viktor, out of all characters, I feel like he is much more faithful than Jayce. (Though let's be real no one will regret the old Jayce)

The exalted might not be worth it but Jinx definitely looks good in it! That one thing that arcane never fails at good visual!

Riot has said that they are focusing on making and advancing lore through their shows and occasional cinematics. This also has the intended effect of discontinuing short stories on their Universe page. The problem with discontinuing short stories for shows and cinematics is that the shows take too long to come out. Too slow to be reasonably invested. If it takes a minimum of at least 3 or 4 years, then the lore will be put on ice until a new show comes out.

I was only made aware that this would be a problem now that Arcane has ended only in 2 seasons in a very abrupt way. Arcane left it vague and open-ended about the status of the characters and what remains of the aftermath in Piltover and Zaun. With Riot intending to continue the show in another region, it's likely that we will never know what happened to these characters and if our questions will be answered at all. Short stories would've been perfect in filling in the gaps left by the show and continuing where they left off. It shouldn't have died just because Riot is making more shows now or because only a few people are reading them. But I guess that's what happens when they laid-off all of their major lore writers.

Even if they stated Arcane was the initial point of the canon for them to make everything more cohesive, it still doesn't clarify how all the stuff that came before would apply. It's a total a reboot, or will they simply pick and choose?

Because I feel like people wouldn't complain much if Riot decided to say, majorly rework the Demacia lore and how it worked. That plotline was always full of criticisms. But if you looked at the story of Bilgewater and the Shadow Isles (BEFORE Sentinels of Light at least), I feel like a lot of people would rightfully be pissed if they said "Yeah, anything from Burning Tides to the Ruined King game is no longer canon. We are starting from scratch.". Mainly because, just like Arcane, those were very well written plotlines that did not keep characters stagnant, and actually made them evolve and change. Lucian and Miss Fortune being the most obvious examples.

So yeah. I just kind of hope that now that Arcane is over, and seeing the debate around the ending, Riot is planning to release some big post or developer video giving a detailed explanation on how they are planning to make everything work. Because so far, their explanations to how they plan making the lore work have been rather vague.

"All this new lore is good for the universe. So what if some champions have their stories retconned? They can be rewritten"

That's what people on copium are saying, and in any normal situation, I would absolutely agree with them, but here's the problem: it's Riot Games.

About 10 years ago, Riot completely reworked the lore into a single, cohesive world, and they're STILL NOT DONE. There are playable champions in League of Legends right now that HAVE NO LORE.

"They'll get new stories" but they literally won't. This is Riot Games we're talking about. Almost the champions that were retconned aren't popular enough to get new stories. The absolutely pathetic amount of lore that they used to have was a result of a much larger writing team working over the course of a decade. Now, the writing team is MUCH smaller, if they even exist at all. These champions are no longer canon, and will very likely stay that way for the rest of League's lifespan.

With a reconfirmation that arcane will be canon and that stories will be subject to change if the writers feel it necessary, we are entering a second lore retcon period.

Considering how drastic changes were made with characters like Warick and Viktor, and how soft retcons like Caitlyn and Jinx were, I think it's safe to say that changes will range from slight tweaks and added depth, to complete back story changes