I’ll be finishing season 3 of Vox Machina and catching up on Dan Da Dan.

Finished Arcane Season 2 last night and boy do I have thoughts. There are some very minor spoilers here.

Still great and I especially loved Jayce and Victor this season, but it had serious pacing issues, especially the third act. A bunch of the character arcs suffer because of this with Vi in particular. I get the arc they were going for with her but the execution makes her feel incredibly reactive and more of a plot device for other characters. Jinx is my favourite character and I think she suffers a little bit as well, especially in the final episode where I would have a liked to see her processing Ekko’s words to her a little more rather than just the flash forward into the battle, leaving it to us to retroactively figure out the character development. But overall her story was better handled than Vi. I also feel like the whole Zaun vs. Piltover dynamic and conflict that was so important was kind of unsatisfyingly hand waved away in the final act.

On the other hand the animation quality took an even higher step up and I loved the music montages (I know some people hated them but they really worked for me). The dialogue and character voices were excellent alongside the phenomenal voice acting. The themes about humanity’s duality regarding things like love, sacrifice, and family leading to violence, war and death was beautifully portrayed. And I especially loved what Arcane said about forgiveness and identity.

Overall I’m not sure how you fix the pacing issues outside of spreading it across a third season. Still, a top tier show that I will recommend to everyone going forward.

Season 1: 9.5/10

Season 2: 8/10