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Inspiration

Arcane – TV Review

March 19, 2022 by hpholo Leave a Comment

OMG Y’ALL. THIS SHOW.

Jacob and I actually watched Arcane when it first aired back in November, as I’m an enormous fan of all things animation and most things League of Legends (except other players 🤣).

But I recently finished what is bound to be my first of many re-watches, and so am properly primed to fangirl all over it. 😄 (Grab some popcorn and maybe some other provisions, ‘cause I’m about to fangirl hard. 🍿)

Arcane Poster

Though Arcane is based around a cast of champions from League of Legends lore, it’s written in such a way as to be accessible to people who know nothing of the game. On its simplest level, it tells the story of two sets of characters, one from the privileged upper city of Piltover, one from the impoverished lower city, which hopes to separate into its own nation of Zaun. Separating both further, and yet bringing them into closer into conflict, is the emergence of hextech – magic harnessed through scientific processes – and a particular concentrated gem that could be disastrous in the wrong hands …

Admittedly, this description makes it sound rather bland, but the charm of Arcane is found not in its basic premise, but in the artful execution of that premise and the characters that do the executing.

AND Y’ALL. THE WRITING. While I fully admit I often speak in hyperbole, it is no exaggeration to say that Arcane is one of the single best-written TV shows I’ve ever watched, animated or otherwise. 😮 Every single beat of the story comes together like a perfectly-planned puzzle, and the cast of characters is so realistically defined that, even though most are derived from little more than cool artwork and some sound bites, all of them feel like living, breathing creations. Moreover, they’re all morally complex, to the point where Arcane fan groups frequently bubble with discussion of who the actual heroes and villains of the story are. For every moral point made in the story, there’s usually a parallel character making a contrarian point.

The story itself never takes a definite stand on those points, choosing to let the viewer decide, and in fact, given the intensely nuanced view the show provides of all its conflicts, that might be the ultimate point—that there is no right side or perfect solution, just the least destructive of a bunch of bad options.

Which is an unexpected and refreshingly mature theme for a show inspired by a bunch of heroes fighting over a glowing magic rock.

That maturity is another of the things that makes Arcane so surprising. Most adult-oriented animation aims to be as crass and edgy as possible, even when it’s smartly written, and while there is some definite adult content in the show (lots of blood and violence, barely censored nudity, and an artful but still conspicuous sex scene), Arcane’s maturity is found in its intelligence and themes.

I don’t think anyone—LoL fans included—went into Arcane expecting an emotionally exhausting exploration of the complex bonds of sisterhood, brotherhood, and the things that test them; the psychological effects of trauma; class struggle and the invisible things that contribute to it; the paradoxical decisions involved in being a parental figure; the socioeconomic implications of widespread drug use; and the challenges of mental illness and physical disability—but that’s exactly what we got.

All that, and an uproariously fun action fantasy with FOUR of the most kickass soundtracks to ever enter my earholes.

Honestly, I am slightly terrified for Season 2 because making something even on par with Season 1 is going to be a monumental task. 😬

And I haven’t even written about the art yet. Simply put, the show is gorgeous, and so immaculately detailed that, even months after its release, sharp-eyed fans are still finding subtle bits of foreshadowing, hidden character details, and potential hints of plot points to come. There’s not a single frame of this show that does not stand on its own as a legitimate piece of thoughtfully-composed art. The character designs are entrancing in their detail and distinction, and the depth to which both go. (If you look closely, you will see that the artists went as far as to give each character unique teeth. 😮)

Though to a lesser extent, this is true of even minor, background characters, and this is one of the things that makes the world itself feel dynamic and lived-in. Though we’re not privy to these minor characters’ stories, the careful, selective detail put into every aspect of the series’ design suggests that there are stories hidden, waiting to be found, and as a result, the world feels expansive even if we only see the overlapping stories that are relevant to the main characters.

Speaking of dynamic, complex worlds and populations, one of my absolute favorite things about Arcane is its diversity—not merely its presence, but how it presents it. Arcane’s is a world populated by a wide and intermingling variety of races, cultures, sexualities, and characters with varying degrees of disability (both physical and mental)—and all of those things just exist in the world without special comment.

Though some of the characters are faced with challenges because of their traits, they’re never wholly defined by them. Even the iconic Jinx—who by the end of the series struggles with what is probably some combination of schizophrenia and PTSD—is not presented as The Insane Archetype so much as an orphan struggling to find a family after she loses hers in the most traumatic of ways. She’s a character before she’s a theme (though, admittedly, her mental state does contribute hugely to her own challenges, and her volatility shapes much of the central plot). Likewise, hexcore inventor Viktor has a conspicuous crippled leg and a physical condition that deteriorates as the show progresses, but this is never shown as an impediment to his accomplishments. In fact, it doesn’t even become a significant factor in his ambitions until a late-series reveal suddenly makes it very relevant to him—but even then he approaches it from the perspective of “How do I solve this problem so I can get on with the rest of my life?” Again, he’s a living character with complex ambitions and motivations, not a simple archetype.

Honestly, I could go on for pages and pages about the subtle, complex brilliance of every character in this show—and I haven’t even touched on their relationships—but I’m already getting into TL;DR territory. 😆 I did want to comment on one other character, though, as she’s the embodiment of how unconventional, creative, and thoughtful the characterization decisions are in this series.

In most other series, Ambessa Medarda would have been some generic-but-imposing seasoned soldier dude, powerfully present but ultimately unmemorable because we’ve already seen so many characters of the type. She definitely has a powerful presence—beheading a conquered political foe in one’s first scene will have that effect—but she’s also old enough to have graying hair, built like a tank, sexually assertive enough that one of her first actions when she shows up is to hire a hot boy toy to attend her, and not only that, but secure enough in her own body that she wields nudity not as a tool of seduction, but a weapon to disarm others. Her character alone inverts so many viewer expectations that she’s a marvel. (Seriously, how many female characters can you name in popular western media that get to be both old and badass? Or sexual for themselves rather than for a male protagonist’s gratification, and beyond that, in a way that is well aware of how uncomfortable it makes people AND EXPLOITS IT FOR STRATEGIC GAIN?)

Y’all, in the course of writing this, I think I just realized I’m an Ambessa fangirl.

Which, in retrospect, is not all that surprising because Jacob’s heard me fangirling over everyone else in the show since November. 🤣 But I digress.

I literally have one complaint about the entire show, and it is that Sky Young could have been put to better use. (To say more is to enter spoiler territory, but those who know, know. 😐)

Anyway, one final point:

My personal method of defining Truly Great Art is to consider not only how much I enjoyed experiencing it, but how much it makes me want to create. The best entertainment, in my opinion, inspires the people who encounter it to put their own creativity to productive use—and Arcane did that for me in quite an unexpected way.

I’ve always known that I wanted to be a writer, but early in my creative explorations, I was also heavily into art. In fact, my future career of choice in high school was in animation, to the point where I specifically took French as my foreign language with the intent of joining the French animation industry. (French animation tends to be more experimental and mature, and appealed to me more than American animation. Perhaps notably, the studio that produced Arcane—Fortiche—is French.)

Various things went awry in my first semester of college, though—the best of which was that I discovered the depth of my aptitude for writing, the worst of which was that my first art class made me hate drawing so much that I put away all my art supplies and never touched them again in any significant way.

Until I watched Arcane.

Something about the maturity of its story and the absolute gorgeousness of its art—not to mention that it was the kind of animation high school me wanted to produce—shot straight into my brain and rekindled a passion I thought I’d lost forever. I’m now drawing again for the first time in fifteen years, just for fun—and in the process I’m re-discovering how much drawing actually contributed to my early development as a writer. I notice details differently when I’m trying to render them in graphite, or ink, or digitally—and that in turn affects how I describe things on the page.

Naturally, one of the first pieces I produced was fanart of my favorite Arcane character, so enjoy some Viktor:

Viktor Inks

(By the way, if you want to see more of my art, I post it over on Deviant Art and Instagram.)

All this to say, Arcane is one of those shows that left an indelible impression on me. It is a masterpiece in every way, and an inspiration in just as many, and I am glad to live in the same era as it.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: Action, animation review, Arcane, Arcane League of Legends, Art, Fantasy, Fortiche, Fortiche Prod, Hexcore, Hextech, Inspiration, league of legends, Magic, Netflix, Review, Reviews, TV Review

Everything I Am I Owe to Bad Movies

March 22, 2018 by hpholo 2 Comments

The #1 question readers ask authors is “What inspires you to write?” Many authors have deep answers like “intellectual curiosity” or “the ability to create my own reality,” but mine’s nothing of the sort.

My greatest inspiration is bad movies.

I enjoy good entertainment, too, of course, but looking back on my life as a writer, I realize that my emergent interest in writing coincided with my discovery of several not-so-classic bits of media, and once my interest in writing was established, similar media propelled my writing interests forward.
Good movies inspired me, too, but the thing about good movies is that they tend to be, for the most part, complete. They’ll always have some flaws, but generally their worlds will be refined, their plots will come together nicely, or you at least leave them satisfied with the adventure you just took while watching.
This isn’t the case with bad movies. Bad movies are defined by their flaws, whether it’s terrible acting, slapdash worldbuilding, lazy characterization, or plot holes galore – but some of these movies have just enough good in them to snag the viewer’s attention, and that is where my interests caught.
When I was starting out as a writer, I didn’t see “plot holes.” I saw “parts of the story that the movie didn’t have time to flesh out.” I made up my own explanations. These explanations became fanfiction. Soon after writing a few early fanfics I realized I could overlap ideas to create my own worlds, and the more bad movies I watched, the more plot holes I explored, and the more ideas I had.

The flaws in bad movies, then, became a playground for my imagination.

Because of that, even when sitting in a crowded theatre, I’m never watching the same movie as everyone else. Terrible movies continue to drive my writing to this day.
But without these initial gems (rocks? gravel?), I’d never have become a writer. To that effect, here are the terrible pieces of entertainment to which I owe the formation of my entire creative being.

Samurai Pizza Cats

Technically it’s not a movie, but it’s pivotal, so we have to start here.
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Only the most awesome 0.001% of the Internet has even heard of this show, and it’s probably made up of people from the other percentages who love mediocre animation, the most eye-rolling of dad jokes, and who grew up watching this mess during its brief appearance on ‘90s TV.
Samurai Pizza Cats is a show set in Little Tokyo, where the population is anthropomorphic animals who are also sometimes robots and the main characters are pizza delivery cats by day, sentai by night or whenever the Big Cheese (He’s a big mouse) and his lackey ninja crows (The leader is named Bad Bird) get up to mischief.
It’s one of those anime where the translators saw the original Japanese script, went “PBBBT!” and decided to just write whatever came to mind, no matter how outdated or cringingly awful the humor was. It’s why we have the Big Cheese (who was a fox in the original Japanese), as well as an old crow named Jerry Atric and a dog named Al Dente (for no particular reason except that it was a pun). The very theme song sounds like the performer got himself drunk and just sang the first pizza-related puns to come to mind while inexplicably channeling the B-52s.

And O LORT did 4th Grade me devour it.
My first pieces of real writing were, no lie, Samurai Pizza Cats fanfic. I even attempted to write a musical at some point but stopped because, even in my ill-advised elementary school days, I knew the world did not deserve an atrocity of that scale. (Also I have no idea how to write music.)
Soon after that, Warner Brothers released Cats Don’t Dance – which is a fantastic movie and thus has no place on this list, but kicked my cat-based writing fling into a full-on hobby. For the next several years, I spent all of recess and free time exploring my fictional world of my Wild Cats – a bunch of anthropomorphic cats who…well, actually I can’t remember what they did because high school me burned all the old manuscripts out of embarrassment. But I bet it was incredible.
And that interest still sticks with me today, albeit in a different form. Although I’m far from a furry, I do enjoy writing talking animal characters and building complex cultures around them – something that surfaces quite prominently in the dogmen and Brunl (bear) cultures in The Wizard’s Way (and is explored in even more depth in the upcoming The Wizard’s Circus).

Quest for Camelot

If Samurai Pizza Cats was my gateway drug to writing, Quest for Camelot was the bag of [insert drug of choice here] in which I planted my face, heart, and soul, and let’s face it, never really came up for air.

Quest for Camelot is a miracle of a movie in that it has an A-List cast (including Cary Elwes and Gary Oldman); top tier musicians of its time (Celine Dion and Andrea Frickin’ Bocelli); and came from Warner Animation in between two of the greatest modern animated films (The Iron Giant and Cats Don’t Dance)…and yet somehow ended up one of the worst big budget animated films ever made.
The Nostalgia Critic has already covered everything that makes it terrible, and Jacob could barely make it through that. It is literally so terrible that Jacob has promised to watch it with me only as a landmark anniversary present.

I came upon Quest for Camelot in a roundabout way, finding the movie novelization on my 5th Grade English teacher’s shelf and picking it up because I’d read anything that had to do with Arthurian legends. Though the book was a pretty standard medieval fantasy – Tomboyish girl who wants to become a knight goes on a quest to save Excalibur – it had many details that snagged my attention more so than other fantasies I was reading at the time. First, one of the main characters is blind and yet, despite this seeming flaw, an essential and active contributor to the protagonist’s quest. Second, he has a falcon companion, which is just badass. And third, its heroine was a female adventurer, and in a lot of the books I was reading at the time, this wasn’t the case. All this to say, I was a hardcore Quest for Camelot fan before my parents even took me to see the movie. After the movie, I was 3000% a fan and writing tons of fantasy inspired by its world.
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Which is why I was bewildered when I watched it again as an adult and realized that it is, in fact, a dumpster fire of a movie. XD I vividly remember being excited to show it to my cool college friends…who not even halfway through went WHAT IS THIS HP I CAN’T EVEN. This in the days before it was fashionable for millennials to lack the ability to EVEN. This from a crowd that had regular Mystery Science Theatre 3000 movie nights. It’s that bad.
Warner Brothers tried SO HARD with this movie, but at some point, all their grand plans went to hell and gave us okay-hand-drawn-animation-to-atrocious-CG-animation, a sense of humor that doesn’t know if it wants to stay in its world or go full Looney Tunes (There are ACME references), and a plot that craps on every single bit of potential presented by its Arthurian world. King Arthur is only in the movie long enough to be voiced by a James Bond actor pretending to be Sean Connery (perhaps a First Knight reference, but let the complexity of that irony sink in), before his arm is broken when a griffin snaps Excalibur off the back of his seat – not even in a battle, not even out of his hands. He tells his peeps to find Merlin and go after Excalibur, at which point Merlin’s like “Hm, I’m just gonna send this falcon to protect the sword. He’s got this.” And so it’s up to Kayley, the aforementioned tomboy farm girl, and Garrett, the aforementioned blind dude, to save the sword. Because everyone more qualified – like, I don’t know, actual knights – is too indisposed by, I don’t know, listening to King Arthur’s terrible accent. Or maybe hypnotized by bad guy Ruber’s eyebrows.
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(For real, I am pretty sure his eyebrows had their own animator.)
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(And maybe he had his own choreographer for this jam.)
ruberjammin
(Ok, for real, I’m done now.)
I could go on about the obvious villain, his nonsensically complicated plot to take over Camelot, the fact that he uses a magic (ACME!) potion to turn his underlings into half-weapon people as if maces for hands are somehow more practical than, I don’t know, hands for hands. Not to mention the one rooster he turns into a half-axe like really, dude, what’s a rooster going to do with an axe face?
Even so, 5th graders don’t think about those kinds of things when they watch movies, so Quest for Camelot snatched my interest away from talking cats and poured it all into medieval adventures. Most of my stories through junior high were medieval fantasies featuring kick-butt girl protagonists, falcons and hot blind hermits, and again, some of those elements surface in The Wizard’s Way. Chaucey’s pal Ellid totally has a sassy griffin companion because of Ruber’s griffin minion, and the medieval aesthetic that pops up in certain areas of Aurica (the Queen’s Guard wearing ceremonial armor, for example) is a definite holdover from my medieval fantasy days.

Atlantis: The Lost Empire


[Insert sound of all steampunkers clutching their pearls]
Admittedly, it pains me to consider Atlantis a bad movie, given the place it holds in the hearts of dual Disney and steampunk fans (myself included), and given that we rarely get animated steampunk movies at all, much less ones that are that pretty.
When it comes down to it, however, Atlantis is a film fraught with flaws. Much of this seems due to the fact that it changed identities halfway through production, which never seems to end well for movies. (Apparently it was going to be a monster movie in an early stage, before it became more focused on the city of Atlantis itself.) Even so, a change in focus is no excuse for the undeveloped characters, predictable plot twists, and convenient-for-the-moment plot details that don’t make any sense in a larger context. (Like, how can the Atlanteans speak modern languages without having been exposed to the development of those languages, and why do they know all those languages BUT NOT REMEMBER HOW TO READ THEIR OWN NATIVE LANGUAGE. 😐 Why entrust the health of an entire expedition to a cook who doesn’t understand the four basic food groups? How on earth could a 16-year-old be the most experienced mechanic Whitmore could find?)
The logic of the movie’s world-building is terrible.
However – and it’s a big HOWEVER – its individual pieces had the makings of something great, and this is why Atlantis still holds onto its place in my heart with giant crabby Leviathan claws.
Much as with Quest for Camelot, the details that grabbed me with Atlantis were the ones I wasn’t seeing in other stories at the time. The hero of the movie is not a conventional adventurer, but a weedy little linguist of all things.
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Its princess was not a porcelain doll trapped in a castle, but a warrior (uncommon in animated films at the time) who was more concerned with helping her people than being the hero’s girl (though the end of the movie suggests they ended up together). Really, all of its women were quite capable on their own.
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Most notable for me was its effortlessly diverse cast, all characterized with little nuggets of backstory that made them just interesting enough…but then, disappointingly, didn’t develop any of that. Atlantis could have approached being a masterpiece if it had dedicated just a little more meaningful screen time to Audrey, Sweet, Moliere, and Vinny (and solved its world-building problems).
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But I guess that’s what fanfiction’s for. Likewise, because of those flaws, my imagination ran wild to fill in the gaps, or at the very least play with the movie’s ideas. One of my heroes in an as-yet-unfinished novel was a linguist (albeit a buff linguist who goes on an intergalactic adventure), and again, echoes of Atlantis permeate The Wizard’s Way. Atlantis was the movie that made me want to write a steampunk novel; Chaucey’s last name is Thatcher as a reference to Milo Thatch (Thatcher being an early-production name); the magic mineral clarien is blue because of Atlantis’ magic crystals (though the magic works quite differently); and the central characters are diverse, well, mainly because the real world is diverse, but also because Atlantis planted in my head a notably diverse cast with whom I wanted to spend more time.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of other awful entertainments that drove my writing. Perhaps one day I’ll write about my Digimon/Titan A.E.-inspired world from junior high, or my Monster Rancher/Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog saga. (Hey, there were a lot of monster shows back then.)
Until then, readers, what are your guilty pleasure movies/TV shows? 😀
***
Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: Animated Movies, Animation, Anime, Atlantis, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Bad Movies, Fantasy, Inspiration, Quest for Camelot, Samurai Pizza Cats, Steampunk, TV Animation, Writing, Writing Techniques

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