 As a writer, there's a big difference between organically incorporating political and philosophical ideas into your settings, characters, and plots, while still telling a great story, and using your characters as a mouthpiece for whatever current year's struggle session your personal politics demands. Nobody wants to sit through a three hour lecture, let alone one that lasts for a whole season. But most movies and shows are improved when they blend strong themes and interesting ideas with compelling characters and exciting action. Politics is part of that, and I mean that's really what this series has always been about. Sadly, it feels like most of the writers and producers who create content for TV network streaming services and the major film studios have forgotten how to tell genuinely good stories, or maybe they've just forgotten why they should. Instead, they all seem to be engaged in some kind of a deathmatch to see who can cram the most obnoxiously woke PSAs into everything they do, regardless of whether or not it fits the characters established motivations or makes any sense at all. So when a new show comes out that doesn't feel like it's been written by people who think their job is to deliver self-righteous lessons to the unwashed masses, it's pretty refreshing. And that's why I wanted to talk about the Netflix original series Arkane. Despite the fact that its characters are extremely diverse, a decent amount of the action revolves around political and socio-economic conflict, and it features strong themes about the corrupting nature of political power, it never feels like any of those elements are just an excuse to scold the audience. This is your obligatory warning that there will be spoilers for Arkane throughout this video so if you haven't seen it, go give it a binge. Then come right back and join me as we explore Arkane's effective blend of politics, philosophy, and good storytelling on this episode of Out of Frame. Arkane is based on the multiplayer online battle arena game League of Legends from Riot Games that came out in 2009. I'm not a player or even really a gamer at all, but as far as I know, League of Legends doesn't have much of anything that resembles a story. But Arkane certainly does, and it's already proven to be popular enough with both critics and fans that it's been renewed for a second season. It's not a perfect show, but it balances plot, character, and message a lot better than most of the content being released these days, and I'm glad to see it succeeding. For those who need a refresher, it's set in the city state of Piltover, a gleaming bastion of innovation, progress, science, and technology, ruled by a benevolent council comprised of the city's titans of industry, trade, and academia. In short, it's a technological utopia governed entirely by experts. Only it's surrounded by sprawling underground slums called Zon, filled with the poor, the overlooked, and a lot of criminals. The whole undercity is awash in violence and drugs. So even from the first two episodes, it's clear that as perfect as Piltover appears to be on the surface, if you look at it more carefully, the city has massive social and economic problems, largely driven by its laws, policies, and political system. The series reinforces this divide by focusing its narrative attention on two main sets of characters. First, we have a pair of orphaned sisters, Vi and Powder, who lost their parents in a failed rebellion against the city years earlier and who now live in Zon, running with a gang of thieves. These two represent the undercity and the destitution that came from Zon's attempt at secession and its subsequent mistreatment by the political officials now in charge. The other set of characters we spend a lot of time with in the series are Jace, Victor, Mel, and Caitlin, all residents of Piltover and ultimately part of the elite ruling class. They start out mostly oblivious to what's going on outside the beautifully designed walls of the inner city, only to have to confront growing threats from Zon and come to terms with their city's role in perpetuating them. The show has all the elements that you might associate with modern woke television. The characters are all extremely racially and ethnically diverse. There are several prominent female characters in important positions of authority. Its core themes revolve around economic and social inequality. It humanizes criminals. So you'd think that the people giving it the biggest praise would be the same ones currently trying to de-platform Joe Rogan, except they're not. As far as I can tell, some of the show's most positive attention has actually come from the anti-woke crowd. We'll get into why I think that is a little later, but it's worth noting that in addition to all the elements I mentioned a second ago, Arcane also portrays police officers in a mostly positive light. It depicts drug use as devastating to society and offers no apologetics for the terrorist attacking Piltover, unlike some other recent shows that have not been quite as well received. In other words, its politics are actually kind of complex. That's a good thing. The whole world is complex. One of the problems with a lot of modern storytelling is how much it reduces reality and the incredibly wide range of cultural values, ideas and opinions, and personal preferences most people have into simplistic categories. I think what bothers a lot of people about woke movies and TV shows is how one-dimensional they always are. Characters are either self-righteous and completely correct about everything or they're embarrassingly on the wrong side of some important social issue. There's nothing in between. Arcane avoids that trap. Characters are distinct and different and they're all a mix of good and bad. Even the worst characters have moments of humanity and the best still frequently make serious mistakes. People's ideologies and actions aren't all predestined to be good or bad based on whether or not they reflect the writer's own political beliefs. The story feels like an organic result of the world itself and the characters clearly established personalities and choices, which is how a good story should feel. That's a lot more than I expected from a show based on a video game. To be honest, I didn't particularly like Vi, Powder, or any of the members of their crew when they were first introduced in Episode 1. As far as I was concerned, they were a bunch of annoyingly entitled thieves, but I at least understood who they were and why they were doing what they did. They're street urchins breaking into an apartment because, well, that's how they survive. What they don't know is that the apartment belongs to Jace, who is a young Academy of Sciences student performing off-the-books experiments at home in an attempt to fuse technology with a mysterious magical power source. When Powder accidentally drops that power source on the ground, it explodes, setting up the primary mystery and core McGuffin for the whole series. In the next episode, we learn that Jace was keeping these dangerous orbs at his apartment instead of the university because his research was very much against the rules. When the theft brings his experiments to light, he's arrested, scolded by the head of the Academy, Professor Heimerdinger, hauled before the council and expelled. He also loses his patron, and since he's an orphan himself, Jace basically has nowhere else to go. But Professor Heimerdinger's research assistant Victor believes Jace is on to something, so he helps him steal back his notes and equipment and assist in building a prototype. It works. Despite protests from Heimerdinger, the experiment's success gets Jace reinstated at the Academy and lauded as the school's new golden boy. Truthfully, I wasn't even fully bought into the series at this point, but something happens at the end of the third episode that blows up everything we think we know about the direction the story is headed, setting Vi, Powder, Jace, and Victor on a new path that made me want to follow the show to the end. And I'm glad I did because each character slowly transforms over the course of the series in ways that are worth seriously thinking about well outside the context of animated fiction. Jace's change in particular is a masterclass in how to incorporate political themes into a story without ever making the audience cringe. A few years after Jace and Victor start working together, they've successfully created an entirely new technology, which Jace calls Hextech. It's powerful. They've harnessed magical energy to run all sorts of impressive machines, and Jace's success attracts the attention of one member of the city council, Mel. They form a relationship and soon enough, Jace is granted a new seat on the council himself. And this is where it all starts to get really interesting. Jace is still a young man and he has big dreams about the possibilities of Hextech beyond what he's already achieved. He's also an idealist. He wants to help people, particularly those in the working class and those like his own parents whose lives could have been saved if this technology had existed. He's developed magic-powered hammers and gauntlets intended for mining. He's imagined medical uses to save people with chronic illnesses like his friend and partner, Victor. And at first, he's dead set against using this technology as a weapon. All the while, his former mentor Heimerdinger advises patience and caution, but Jace's ambitions continue to grow. Patience is frustrating. Like a lot of young people, Jace wants to see change happen now. Emboldened by Mel, he sees his newfound political power as an opportunity to make a difference and decides to start by tackling the drug smuggling problem that's been spilling out from Zahn into Piltover. His impulsive actions in investigating questionable shipping records ruffles the feathers of powerful trading families. They've relied on the corruption of customs officials in order to bring in their preferred and technically illegal luxury goods for years. With the encouragement of other council members, it isn't long before Jace is cutting sweetheart deals and looking the other way right along with the rest of them. Looking the other way for smugglers may not seem like a big deal, and in the grand scheme of things, it's not. After all, free and open trade is good and enriches everybody's lives. But it's only Jace's first step on his journey towards the gross abuse of power that culminates in ousting head counselor and city founder Heimerdinger. And shortly after he takes control, Jace shuts down the borders of Piltover to people from Zahn, misuses his own technology and establishes martial law. This whole situation, though a little hyperbolic, is still remarkably true to real life. Imagine, a naive idealistic person correctly identifies real problems hurting real people. They want to help. Looking around for answers, they see the most expedient method is political power, so they grasp it. After all, if only the right people are in power, everything will work out fine. Only, it never really works out that way, does it? Other people's plans get in the way. They don't quite cooperate, and politics isn't very clean. The naive idealist makes it into the halls of power only to discover that they didn't actually understand how any of this works. They didn't expect the go along to get along reality of back room deals and questionable morality. So now, they're faced with a choice. Do they hold fast to their own sense of right and wrong, but risk being unable to accomplish anything? Or do they embrace the reality of the status quo, tacitly approving of its methods and morals, to hopefully accomplish at least something of what they originally wanted? Do they choose ineffectiveness or become part of the problem? Of course, in the real world, it's not quite as binary as that, but it is the unfortunate reality in American politics, and everywhere else, that if you want to win, you have to play ball. And the more power is concentrated at the political level, the more outside and inside interest will seek to control its levers. That's the core nature of power, and Jay spends most of our cane not quite realizing what he's gotten himself into. The problem in Piltover and the problem facing the real world is not that the wrong people instead of the right people are in charge. The problem is that too much control over everyone's lives has been ceded to the government across the board. And whenever that power is exercised through the use of the only tool government has, coercive force, it cannot take into account the near infinite and highly nuanced wants and needs of every person it's affecting. Instead of eliminating strife and discord, it increases it. People who used to be friends, happy to live side by side in spite of different opinions and values, become enemies, battling each other over whose team will dominate the other in the winner take all game of politics. This tribal animosity usually leads people to grant even more power to the government, and it uses that power to squash dissent, perpetuating the cycle of polarization, insubility, and violence. The only way out of this cycle is through decentralization. One massive, all-powerful government cannot rule over a society with a diverse multitude of different cultures and values. State officials shouldn't be trying to control the lives of other people, especially the ones they don't know or understand. Localized communities need to be allowed to govern themselves. Thankfully, Jace does figure it out. It's incredibly tragic that it took the death of a child for Jace to finally get this idea, but at least he eventually did. That's more than I can say for most people in real world politics. Every day, especially recently, we are told from all sides that the world is terrifying, unsafe, and uncertain. Then we're told that the only solution is to let people who know better take care of us, powerful elites, and politically appointed experts. The people who believe this are half right. The world is unsafe. It is scary and uncertain. It's good to gather facts. It's good to learn as much as we can about the world. It's good to make decisions based on the highest quality information we can. But the expert that really matters when it comes to making decisions that affect your own life is you. At the end of the day, even the smartest person in the world is not capable of knowing what's best for hundreds of millions of individuals. Technocrats like Heimerdinger, Jace, and Mel, experts and academics who have found themselves in elite positions of power, really don't want this to be true. They often can't stand when people are allowed to make decisions that they don't agree with. But to quote the great thinker Thomas Sowell, freedom ultimately means the right of other people to do things that you do not approve of. If we're serious about healing the political divides that are tearing apart friendships, relationships, and even families, forcing compliance with the way things are isn't going to accomplish it. Silencing voices that you don't like or erasing parts of history that make you uncomfortable isn't going to accomplish it. Bullying and demeaning people who don't agree with you isn't going to accomplish it. All of those things only drive us further apart. Arcane didn't need to scold me or anybody else into seeing some of these lessons. It just needed to tell a good story. And since it doesn't go out of its way to insult its audience, people who might disagree on a ton of other stuff may find some common ground with this show. Who knows? What I do know is that we need what Piltover needs, less of a distant and out-of-touch government deciding what everybody can and cannot peacefully and consensually do, and more freedom to choose what's best for ourselves. We need fewer fights and more conversations, and that simply cannot happen by force. I was expecting, and what's great is that the show had so many other interesting elements and themes that you might have got something totally different out of it. What did you think? Leave a comment and let's talk about it. And if you want even more interesting conversation about philosophy in pop culture, check out our weekly Behind The Scenes podcast. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever else you listen. Leave us a like and a review on your preferred app if you want to help us grow. And if you love Out of Frame, please consider a monthly contribution on Patreon or Subscribestar. Supporters get a private channel on Discord, free swag, and access to other cool stuff. This episode was made possible in part thanks to our supporters, especially our associate producers. So to Connor McGowan, Richard Lawrence, Matt Tabor, and Dan, thank you. 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