How ‘Arcane’ Writer Amanda Overton Gets Character Choices to Feel Like a Punch in the Face
If you search YouTube for compilations from “Arcane,” the Netflix animated series by Riot Games and Studio Fortiche, it’s telling that one of the first to pop up is titled “Funny moments from ‘Arcane’ (to distract from the pain).”
There is a fair bit of pain — and only some of it has to do with all the punching and stabbing (both in the front and the back) as factions in the warring sister cities of Piltover and Zaun jockey for power and sundered sisters Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Jinx (Ella Purnell) try to survive and/or thrive and/or kill each other. Most of it is bound up in character longing, noble intentions missing the mark, or agonizingly bad timing keeping people apart. You know, the good stuff. Dramaturgically speaking, at least.
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The ambush at the memorial towards the end of “Heavy Is The Crown,” Episode 1 of Season 2, is a great example of how “Arcane” puts a bit of emotional Hextech inside its visual sledgehammer. Even before chem-baron Renni (Abigail Marlowe) attacks Jayce (Kevin Alejandro) and seemingly most of Piltover in the bargain, the episode’s writer, co-executive producer Amanda Overton, has built clear lines of interpersonal tension between the characters.
Caitlyn (Katie Leung) and Vi are in a strained place, with Vi unable to stomach joining Cait as an Enforcer; Mel (Toks Olagundoye) is barely holding the council together and yet needs to hold center stage; Jayce is still trying to be a man of progress for a city that’s more wrecked than ever. The action of fighting for their lives against shimmer-juiced-up mech mercenaries isn’t just about survival, it’s about visually resolving or exacerbating all those conflicts — and, in most cases, doing a bit of both.
Vi and Caitlyn start on opposite sides of the impromptu battlefield, and all of their action is about coming together with a lot of chaos and obstacles and giant knives in their way. Before Vi even knows she’s going to take up an enforcer’s badge, she’s integrated into the enforcers fighting back. Jayce is confronted with the consequences of his inventions and finds he cannot control them; it’s not even him wielding his Mercury Hammer. And Mel, bless her, is knocked aside, yet one more thing spinning out of the control she exercised so masterfully in Season 1. It is her mother, Ambessa (Ellen Thomas), who saves the day and gets the last shot of the sequence — dead center in the frame.
All of this intricate character architecture within an action sequence is intentional and has the dual utility of keeping us emotionally engaged amid the carnage and pushing our heroes towards bigger, defining decisions they probably would prefer not to make. That is what makes those decisions so painful (in the best way).
“My guiding light [was] trying to put our characters in positions that we don’t expect or that are different from what we saw in Season 1 and [having them ask] themselves what they would do in that scenario,” Overton told IndieWire. “Characters need to be doing the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. If they’re just doing the right things for the right reasons, they are boring; and if they’re doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons, you don’t identify with them.”
Overton and the “Arcane” writing team lay the emotional groundwork in the scripting and storyboarding phase, in close collaboration with the team at Fortiche; one of the joys of Season 2 was that, while it was written before Season 1 had been released, everyone already had a sense of the show’s aesthetic and the kind of visual impact “Arcane” can have.
“This is one of the synergies of storytelling that ‘Arcane’ gets to do so well. There’s so much told visually and it’s just stunning,” Overton said. “We find a way to dial that in with the writing and the directors and the storyboard artists to work together at every phase of the process to make sure the character beats show up in the action. You’re always learning something in those big setpieces about character.”
Overton credits the ability to work in that way in part to the show’s act-based structure. Like the sci-fi bear trap that is “Andor,” “Arcane” has very deliberate narrative steps, which means characters come to multiple, clearly different emotional places throughout the season in cycles that build and resolve, creating new problems for the next act to tackle.
“That [structure] allowed us to think of those three episodes as a whole and let us push the boundaries of structure in a way that let us try new things with the characters. One of the things about ‘Arcane’ is that no one on the creative team is ever satisfied. We’re always trying to push things further, to experiment with what we can do,” Overton said.
“Heavy Is the Crown” features several ways in which “Arcane” pushes things further in Season 2. There are, of course, visual sequences that are unbound from the show’s usual animation style. But Overton is also pushing the characters closer to the conflicts at their hearts. When Overton first came onto the project, one of the earliest things she suggested about Vi was that her parents needed to have been killed by enforcers.
“If she’s going to fall in love with an enforcer, eventually, that’s going to be the hardest obstacle for her to overcome. That was sort of the guiding light: How do they find respect for each other, with that between them? And in Season 1, even though Caitlyn had everything, she still chose to fight, which was not something Vi had ever experienced,” Overton said. “That’s something Vi could respect.”
But nothing can ever be timed perfectly on “Arcane.” Just as Vi and Caitlyn have come to care for each other, Jinx kills Caitlyn’s mother (hence the memorial), and a character who’s been so focused on fighting for justice in Season 1 now needs to be able to distinguish that from revenge.
“We were very much like, ‘Well, what happens when we start to blur the line with justice and revenge for her?’ We wanted to make her always try to analyze, ‘Which part of me is doing this for justice and which part is doing this for the wrong reasons?’” Overton said. Before anyone steps onto a battlefield, whether in Final Draft or in Blender, the “Arcane” writers’ room positions them to make choices that at least some part of them might hate.
“The joy of writing television is you get to put characters in a more extreme situation than we spend our everyday lives in. But you still identify with why they make those choices, because it’s for love, or for grief, or for guilt. You’re with those characters even in these fantastical worlds,” Overton said.
More than any epic set piece, pushing on those emotional limits is what makes a show like “Arcane” character-driven, grounded despite its fantastic setting, and relatable enough that lots and lots of people feel compelled to make CaitVi fan edits. The love story between Caitlyn and Vi is all the more powerful because it is this delicate thing that they both have to choose, again and again, over and above other things they care about if the relationship is going to survive.
“I think that love story between the two of them, in the way it unfolds, speaks to everything I wanted to see in the world that I didn’t think existed before, and it was such an honor to be able to bring that representation to other queer people,” Overton said.
As for how that love story and everything else in “Arcane” will play out over the show’s final two acts? The only thing viewers should expect is for the characters to continue to be challenged in unexpected and inventive ways.
“As a writer, you’re always trying to figure out what people expect and what is surprising. It’s always the balance of expectation and surprise,” Overton said. “We’re asking these questions that push characters to the furthest limits of who we think they are.”
“Arcane” is streaming on Netflix.
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