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Arcane documentary covers making of LoL Netflix series

Arcane, a spin-off animated series based on the League of Legends universe, has become widely popular — and this featurette offers exciting insight

arcane

We still have a while to go until the Arcane season 2 release date, the animated series based in the League of Legends universe. But fans of the Netflix series needn’t worry, as the streaming service is set to release a five-part featurette documentary detailing the making-of the first season of the hit series.

League of Legends (LoL) is a multiplayer, online battle arena game inspired by Defense of the Agents: a custom mod made for fantasy game Warcraft III. Since its release in 2009, complex lore has been built around the game, which led to the development of Arcane as a standalone, spin-off series that digs deeper into some of the storytelling around LoL.

Both LoL and Arcane were created by Christian Linke and Alex Yee, who work for game development studio Riot Games. In a trailer for the new featurette, which is entitled Arcane: Bridging the Rift, Linke and Yee explain how they reached out to French animation studio Fortiche in order to expand the rich lore and universe of LoL, which led to their collaboration on season 1 of Arcane.

Fortiche had worked on content for LoL before, with examples including short introduction videos for champions and playable characters like Jinx and Ekko. From there, they developed a recognisable art and animation style that became the basis for Arcane.

Amongst other things, season 1 follows the conflict between sisters Jinx (voiced by Ella Purnell) and Vi (Hailee Steinfield). Set in the world of Runeterra, Jinx and Vi find themselves on opposite sides and with different allegiances as they clash over how the rich and powerful in Piltover are pushing poorer residents into the slums of Zaun. Along the way, these Arcane characters find friends and enemies in several LoL champions, including Ekko (voiced by Reed Shannon).

The first part of Bridging the Rift drops on YouTube on August 4, while season 1 of Arcane is available to stream on Netflix.