Turns out the Arcane creative team always had the go ahead to kill any fan-favourite League of Legends characters it wanted: 'Riot embraced whatever story we wanted to tell with any of the characters'
I've aimed to write this article without spoilers for Arcane season two, but I do make vague reference to some of its events—if you want to be completely unspoiled, don't read on!
As someone with a passable knowledge of League of Legends lore, when I first started watching Arcane, I didn't think it would have much in the way of surprises. Sure, we'd get more of a window into these characters' backstory than ever before, but it was all just heading in the direction of the status quo in LoL and its various spin-offs, right?
Yeah… no. If anyone was still harbouring that belief by the end of season one, season two will certainly have sunk it, with its wild changes to a few key characters and handful of emotional deaths. In fact, the opposite has proven to be true—the canon of the show has overridden the canon of the games in many instances now, with season two in particular heralding a controversial redesign of champion Viktor from cyborg supervillain into magical prophet.
As it turns out, all bets were off right from the start, with Riot granting the creative team huge freedom over the story—and even allowing them to kill off anyone they liked. That's according to Amanda Overton, who wrote on the first season and returned as an executive story editor on the second.
«Riot embraced whatever story we wanted to tell with any of the characters,» she told our good friends over at GamesRadar+. «We were like 'Can we kill Jayce and Viktor?' 'Yes'. There were no limits to what we could do to make a good story, which was, in my opinion, absolutely the right choice for them to do, because we are adapting a game into a different medium, into television, and you want to be able to be free to make that version the best it can possibly be.»
Though longtime fans may resent some of the changes made as a result, it's hard to argue with the results—the show has been an enormous hit, and a large part of that is the depth invested in the characters.
«That support from [Riot's] side really
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