Arcane and Anti-utopia

Anti-utopia: a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of utopianism or of some particular eutopia (The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited* LYMAN TOWER SARGEN)

Season 2 of Arcane, while problematic at times in its structure (something discussed in many other online reviews and essays) presents a well-formed anti-utopia. ‘Anti-utopia’ is often used interchangeably with ‘dystopia’, but here I’m using Lyman Sargen’s definition: anti-utopia is as a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended as contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of utopianism or of some other particular eutopia (Sargen, 9). This distinguishes it from a ‘dystopia’, often described as a society so oppressive that it is inconceivable, in a similar midst that utopia is described as so desirable in its perfection and harmony that it is considered unachievable. (This concept was first introduced and clearly defined by John Stuart Mill, in acknowledgement of Thomas More’s novel Utopia, a fictitious ‘ideal’ society.) 

Arcane’s Season 2 displays alternate universes in two ways, where each one serves as the antithetical foil to the other. The first alteration is more commonly talked about; the world which strays from the canon the audience is embedded in by having one of the lead protagonists of the show die at a time we recognise as the first episode of the first season. This single event set in motion a resolution to the divide of the upper-city (Piltover) and the undercity (referred to as ‘the nation of Zaun’ in the original timeline). Numerous reviewers and essayists have already criticised this take; it seems nonsensical that the death of a single child could ‘fix’ the years of oppression and neglect the people of the undercity have suffered. But this is a tangent and for the sake of this article, I want to discuss the second depiction of alternate universes displayed in the show.

Picture this: the world as you know it has ended. All around you lies rubble and odd, statue-esque figures that move eerily quickly. There is an absence of nature as you knew it in this place, the plant life that struggles through growth looks sickly, infected with bright colours like broken pixels, mutating their form. This is the reality Jayce becomes familiar with, trapped in this alternate world. He survives, climbing out of a pit in the before-under-city with a broken leg (a symbolic echoing of Victor’s climb from the poverty of the undercity to a career in Piltover) and sets out to discover what became of the world he now inhabits. He finds himself, (not figuratively) distorted into a statue similar to the ones haunting the abandoned and destroyed Piltover, clutching his hammer at the summit of what was once the council building. Whatever attempts were made by himself to alter the path of this world clearly failed.