Arcane is an animated series set in the world of the game League of Legends, and it is a story about two cities stacked on top of each other. Piltover is the rich city on the cliffs, the City of Progress. Zaun is the undercity beneath it: poor, choked with fumes and run by whoever holds its streets. Hextech is Piltover's invention, magic channelled through engineered crystals. Shimmer is Zaun's answer, a glowing purple drug that makes its users monstrously strong and slowly destroys them. Jinx and Vi are the two sisters caught between them.
The series ran for two seasons, in 2021 and 2024, and tells one complete story. Where it differs from the game's older lore, this says so. Every design on the Arcane shelf comes from it. Spoilers for both seasons below.
Piltover and Zaun: one city, two levels
In the show, Zaun is ruled in name by Piltover's council, yet left to fend for itself. Piltover sits on top, rich from trade and invention and governed by a council drawn from its leading families. Zaun grew in the levels below, among the chemical works, where the people who keep the city running breathe air thick with fumes. Up top, they call it the undercity.
The first episode opens just after Zaun has risen against Piltover and been beaten on the bridge between them. Vander, who led that uprising, finds two small girls whose parents died in it, Vi and Powder, and raises them as his own. He then makes peace with the Enforcers, Piltover's police, and keeps order in the lanes from his bar, the Last Drop.
His old partner Silco wanted the opposite: Zaun as a nation of its own, free of Piltover, by any means. Vander once tried to drown him. Silco survived, scarred, and came back armed with Shimmer, a new drug from the chemist Singed.
What Hextech is
Hextech is technology powered by magic. Its champion is Jayce Talis, a young Piltover scientist who wants anyone to be able to use magic, not only the few born to it. His partner is Viktor, a scientist from Zaun working as assistant to Heimerdinger, the long-lived yordle who sits on Piltover's council.
Together they find a way to bind magic to engraved runes, then a way to stabilise the volatile raw crystals into gemstones that can safely power a machine. The first great use is peaceful: the Hexgates, which send cargo ships across vast distances and make Piltover the centre of the world's trade. Jayce presents Hextech on Progress Day, the city's festival of invention.
Heimerdinger warns that it is too dangerous to hand to everyone, and the series proves him right. Hextech becomes Jayce's hammer and the Enforcers' weapons, and Viktor, ill and running out of time, turns to the Hexcore, a hextech heart that learns and changes. That path leads to the threat that ends the series. Hextech puts Vi on the back.
What Shimmer is, and Hextech vs Shimmer
Shimmer is a purple drug made in Zaun by Singed, the chemist who works for Silco. The show traces it back to a glowing purple flower that Singed found in Zaun's caves. A dose brings a surge of strength, speed and endurance. Take enough and the body swells and twists into something barely human. It is addictive and it kills.
Silco uses it two ways. Sold on the street, it pays for his rule of the undercity. Fed to his own fighters, it makes them stronger than anything Piltover sends down. Singed is not in it for the money: his work began as an attempt to cure his own dying daughter, Orianna, and his experiments go further than anyone guessed.
Hextech vs Shimmer is the show's central pairing. Both promise ordinary people more power than they were born with. Hextech is crystal and engineering, made in clean labs on the cliffs; Shimmer is chemistry and flesh, cooked in the dark below. Each city thinks its own is progress and the other's is a threat, and the war in the second season is fought with both.
Powder, Vi and how Jinx got her name
Vi is the elder sister, a fighter who settles things with her fists. Powder is the younger, a tinkerer whose inventions tend to explode. In the first episode their gang, Vi, Powder, Mylo and Claggor, robs a flat in Piltover that turns out to be Jayce's study, and the hextech crystals they carry home bring trouble down on the lanes.
Silco makes his move. Vander, wounded, takes Shimmer to save Vi from one of Silco's fighters, and Powder tries to save them all with a home-made bomb packed with the stolen crystals. She sends it into Silco's warehouse; it kills Mylo and Claggor, and Vander is left for dead. In shock, Vi turns on her sister and calls her a jinx. Silco finds Powder alone and takes her in; Vi ends up in Stillwater, Piltover's prison.
Years later Powder is Jinx, Silco's adopted daughter and his most dangerous weapon. Vi is let out by Caitlyn Kiramman, an Enforcer from one of Piltover's ruling families, to help her find Silco. The first season ends with Jinx shooting Silco dead in the heat of the moment and firing a rocket into the council chamber as it votes on Zaun's independence. Ashen Heart gathers that family on one print: Powder and Jinx, Vi, Vander and Silco.
The second season follows the war that rocket starts. Singed's work brings Vander back as Warwick, a wolf-like monster. In the last battle, Jinx throws herself at him to save Vi and falls with him, and the closing scenes hint that she survived.
On the shelf
Fishbones and the gauntlets
Jinx builds her own arsenal and names her favourites. Fishbones is her shark-mouthed rocket launcher; Pow-Pow is her minigun. Both names come from the game, where they make up her kit.
Vi fights with the Atlas Gauntlets, a pair of hextech fists made in Piltover: a Zaunite fighter wearing the upper city's best invention, which is the sisters' story in one picture. The Sisters print puts the two of them together.
Arcane vs League of Legends
League of Legends is a team battle game in which players pick characters called champions. Its world is Runeterra, and Piltover and Zaun are two of its regions. Arcane is the origin story of a handful of those champions: Jinx, Vi, Caitlyn, Jayce, Viktor, Ekko, Heimerdinger, Singed and Warwick. Two of the show's own characters, Ambessa and Mel, joined the game as champions around the second season. You do not need to have played the game to follow it.
The show fills in what the game left open. Earlier lore only hinted that Jinx and Vi were connected; the show makes them sisters and builds everything on it. It gives Warwick a past as Vander, and it turns Ekko, a boy from Vander's lanes, into the leader of the Firelights, a band of young Zaunites who fight Silco on their own terms. Where the two disagree, the show is the newer telling.
On the back of a tee
Both sisters, and the family they lost, are on the Arcane shelf, drawn from canon reference art. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why it works on the back: Arcane is painted in hard contrasts, Jinx's blue braids and pink against Zaun's green murk, Shimmer purple against Piltover gold, and a print in those colours reads from across a room.
Read next: The four nations, bending and the Avatar State explained (another divided world and a family split by it) and The Citadel, C-137 and Evil Morty: Rick and Morty explained.
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