Literally an apartheid state and we’re rooting for characters that are committed to “keeping it safe” (this means further militarizing the border between Piltover and the undercity and killing children on accident and feeling really bad about it). There’s plot elements that expose how bad Piltover is for undercity citizens, but that’s just the other half of both-sidesing the issue and calling it a cycle of violence. No, the REAL and IMMEDIATE threat is Silco, the guy actually committed to resistance against apartheid Piltover and even the Good and Right characters are opposed to him - to the point that they’re more willing to work with Piltover, the state that has been oppressing them their whole lives and which they constantly talk about how its oppressed them their whole lives, to take him down. There’s even the gem at the end where Piltover is on the verge of granting the undercity sovereignty and freedom to end the fighting, but then someone decides to fire a fucking rocket straight into the room this decision is being made in. It almost feels 1 for 1 equivalents being made to Israel and Palestine based on hasbara narratives.
I genuinely debated myself about posting, because it’s not that serious and I know Hexbear has made up its mind about this show and I don’t want everyone jumping down my throat, but I think people don’t give this show the nuance it actually has. Like I’m not trying to defend the show completely, there are for sure issues, but I mean at no point did I get the impression that we were supposed to root for Piltover. It’s made clear from the jump that the entire council is heavily corrupt, and that even someone idealistic like Jayce ultimately has no chance at really changing the system. On top of that, the show does go to lengths to humanize Silco throughout the show - if anything, that’s his whole character arc throughout Season 1, going from someone who is ready to spearhead a revolution at any cost to someone who feels like he has something to lose due to Jinx. I mean, the guy’s a drug baron and we start off with him murdering the main character’s father figure, but they do a lot throughout the season that by the end of it he comes across as a sympathetic character, which is the opposite direction that these things usually go with both-sidesing.
Which reminds me of the other thing that seems to get lost - I know we’re communists, we’re analysing it from a communist perspective, but the show at it’s core is moreso about family and trauma than it is about politics. The entire reason that a rocket gets shot at the negotiation table at the end of Season 1 has less to do with intracity politics and more to do with the breaking down of familial bonds, and then as an addendum that’s paralleled with the breaking down of peace relations. Again, there’s a lot of issues with Arcane, and I know a lot of issues have specifically been brought up about Season 2, but idk it feels like people are taking a surface level analysis and writing takes about an imagined anti-leftist reading, at least one much further than the politics actually presented.
Jinx wouldn’t have her trauma if Piltover wouldn’t wage hextech-based class war against Zaun. S2 makes it pretty clear that in a less repressive world, she could have just grown up to be Powder and live a mostly happy life even if there’s significant loss and grief in it. Psychology and politics cannot be seperate spheres when you live in a system that inflicts trauma on you and your people and takes away your ressources to deal with it.
I don’t entirely agree with this, especially for season 1. Stories tend to have more than one theme, and Arcane has both non-political ones and explicitly political ones. It’s more than just a backdrop to a story about family. The main conflict we’re present in the show is political in a very obvious way, and the show doesn’t hide it: plenty of runtime is used to show us characters discuss and ruminate about the the zaun and piltover situation and what they think should be done about it.
Part of the reason the end of season 2 felt disappointing imo, was that at some point they just completely gave up on those themes that HAD been a central part of the show. Nothing gets resolved and everything stays basically the same, no one in piltover has to take responsiblity for their actions, but it’s treated as a happy ending, which really gives the impression that piltover was who we were supposed to root for all along, even if it felt like that was mostly not the case in season 1.