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thomaslastlast
Reviews
Arcane: League of Legends (2021)
Riot Games the Movie Company
Arcane was a very well written show. I came in with relatively tempered expectations, as Riot is generally a video game company, even if they have been able to branch out much more recently. However, this show did more than meet my expectations. As someone who read League of Legends lore (although I hadn't gotten to Piltover/Zaun), the lore consistently has good stories, but nothing nearly as in depth and as touching as Arcane. They would be exciting and action filled stories, but they didn't have the same profundity. Arcane did basically everything well, including story/plot, music, animation, characters, and world building. Overall, I would rate it a 9/10 because of how good the show was as a whole.
The story/plot is pretty well written. It details the struggle between a rich city and a poor city, which is a relatively common story concept. It doesn't actually do much with this though, and the actual Piltover/Zaun conflict is mostly undeveloped, outside of what happens to the characters themselves. However, the story behind the characters is the core of the story. The plot works in conjunction with the characters to make the viewer care. Additionally, while a lot of the story is taken from League lore, it still went much further and fleshed out exactly why (for example) Jinx and Vi are the way they are. It also goes much darker than I expected it to, and did so in a pretty good way, with both Jinx and Jayce/Viktor.
The music is pretty good as well. Most of the scenes with music video-like sequences were pretty exciting and well written. My one major issue with the music was during the scene when Jinx and Ekko fight. They somehow decide that they're going to put hype music over two childhood friends fighting to the death, because that sounds like great fun. It's not a hype moment; it's a tragic moment, but somehow is not framed that way at all. Apparently a lot of 10 IQ people really liked that scene, but it's okay for them to just be wrong. The stopwatch also didn't make a lot of sense without the context of League. Overall, the soundtrack was exceptional. Enemy was a bit overrated though, but that's just my personal taste in music.
The animation was insanely good. It featured very detailed and good art, but in a very unique style. As someone who typically likes anime style art, and doesn't like western cartoon style art, this style was really detailed and "realistic", but also fit well as an animated film. I hope Riot is able to maintain this quality as they continue the show.
The characters were the most important part of the show. Basically every single character was really well written and had great dynamics. They all made sense as characters, and everybody was written to be a person, not just a black and white identity. I especially liked Heimerdinger, Jinx, Silco, Ambessa, Viktor, and Vander. It was really nice to see characters not become stereotypical nothings; Mel turned out to be an authentic person and not just manipulating Jayce, Silco genuinely cared about Jinx (even if he didn't care about anyone else), and Heimerdinger showed a lot of introspection after being useless the entire beginning. The characters also had pretty good interactions (although I thought Vi/Cait was boring and mega forced). Jayce was pretty dumb throughout the show but I guess he might do better in the future. Singed hopefully also appears more because he was great when he did.
The world building was pretty good. It takes a lot from the world Riot has already developed through lore, but hopefully it continues to get expanded on. Piltover/Zaun was a pretty easy place to start, and I hope that the rest of the universe can continue to be expanded on. Hopefully the world plays a bigger role in future series.
However, one of my issues with the show is that it doesn't do anything truly special. It does everything well, and provides a good story, but it is a bit generic. It uses a bunch of simple tricks to seem more deep (eg the Jayce/Viktor mirroring), but it ends up feeling a bit simplistic. It uses a lot of common tropes/character cutouts like the cities, illicit leaders, shady politicians, discovery of new technology, and friends turned enemies, but it doesn't go any further and do something new with it. It basically follows where you would expect. The pacing was also sometimes a bit fast, and felt a bit rushed. I think that movies have the tools to do so much more, but Arcane did not achieve that.
Overall, Arcane was really good and it's great that Riot can do such a good job on a product that shows off League to a non League viewerbase. It wasn't perfect but it was still very good, and it still has a lot of time to further develop as a series.
Selling Sunset (2019)
Who Cares About Anything?
Reality TV Shows are just boring. Literally nobody did anything in the entire show that made me care about them. Like if the characters weren't all trashy people, I might care a bit more. All of them combined had the brain cells of an average high schooler, and they acted like that too. I can't believe these braindead apes actually make money too. Half of the show was stupid catfights (mostly related to Christine), and I could not care less. 2/10 because the houses looked really cool, but that was basically the only redeeming part of the show. Boring plot, boring characters, boring everything zzz.
Single's Inferno (2021)
Korean Shows are Better than American Ones
Single's Inferno was an okay show. It was entertaining and well produced. The characters were kinda boring and flat, since literally like all of them only cared about looks and nothing else. The characters were quite attractive though, and the show was well planned, with the how the events and competitions were structed.
I hate insanely superficial characters, which they basically all were. Jiyeon was a neuroscience student at UToronto (at age 25 somehow), but literally nobody cared and her only quality that mattered was that she was hot.
The casting desk was a bit annoying sometimes with their commentary (although they did make it more entertaining at times), and the dub was pretty horrendous.
Overall, a decently entertaining trashy show, but it was still entertaining.