There’s never been a series quite like Arcane, and there might never be again. Based on League of Legends, a wildly successful video game and esports giant with the most generic name imaginable, Arcane: League of Legends is the most expensive animated series ever produced at a total of $250 million. The first nine-episode season took six years to make; the second, an additional three. Visually, its only peer are Sony the Spider-Verse films. Dramatically, its only peer is Game of Thrones. And, tragically, it’s too good to last.

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Arcane is a fantasy drama set in a world divided between haves and have-nots. Sisters Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Jinx (Ella Purnell) have found themselves on opposing sides of a conflict between the gleaming technocratic city of Piltover and the impoverished and chaotic undercity, Zaul. While this may sound like the setup for a facile class war parable, Arcane endows both sisters and both worlds with a novelist’s complexity. Vi is an emotionally wounded warrior who wants to do what’s right but is driven almost entirely by guilt and self-loathing. Abandoned by her big sister as a girl, Jinx was taken in by a gang lord and mastered violence and destruction as a form of play and as a means of winning the approval of her mentor as well as soothing the pain of........

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