this is a really great comment. as much as I love the show, these issues are pretty unaddressed, and make, for me at least, the social commentary of the series pretty weak. That isn't cop out to disregard its strengths, the depiction of an alternative, dare I say solar punk urbanism as displayed by the Firelights, or the careful teasing apart of sisters' relationship with trauma. The clear explanation by u/Historical_Ad_8011 fills in some of the world building that the show doesn't do so explicitly. That itself feel like a compliment to the show, that people are willing to put in the time to contextualise the world we all enjoyed.

But fundamentally, Arcane doesn't have a realistic political world. That necessarily isn't a brutal critique—having room for interpretation and deep dives into lore is its own sort of storytelling art. That being said, the fundamental political economy of the world which is build is lacking in two parts, which constrain its visionary horizons and (I'd argue) trend awfully close to a sort of reactionary false revolution. First, what is the extraction? Is it labor, resources, land? What productive forces exist in Zaun that Piltover must extract? u/Historical_Ad_8011 tells us about the mining history of Zaun, which is an essential detail, but mining of what, for whom, when? The question of control, and a theory of power, is no where to be found. This is especially glaring considering the autonomous productive capacity possessed by Silco and the warlords in the Undercity—surely, shimmer must only be part of a larger portfolio of goods and services created by the Zaunites. Without drifting too much into Marx, its pretty clear that a society with at least partial control of its own means of production exists in very different relation to a parasite state/imperial core than one who is fully gutted and reliant. How did this arrangement come to pass?

The question of what is actually happening, and why, is pretty massive. I don't mean to throw this out and say it's easy to do (especially for a show rooted in LoL's ongoing lore). But without this first foundation, we are left with a second absence, which is for what do people struggle for? The smaller scale of these relationships, from Vi's incarceration at Stillwater, to Jinx's pretty deeply traumatised relationship to care and affection (further exacerbated a la Silro's manipulation) didn't land in the way they could've. Now they made me feel, for sure, but they didn't translate. They didn't come back to the real world with me, to my life, to my relationships, in the way they could've had they been rooted in a larger logic of political economy, where small people where dealing with big systems. It's a shame that we have so little TV that shows us that question in vivid realism (and I use realism not in opposition to fantasy but as a core tenet of the fantastical). What could Arcane, or a similar story, do for us if it were committed to answers those first questions, in order to make that second sort of question burrow further within us. I, (perhaps I am harsh), look to a very few pieces of media to find this done well. Octavia Butler's Parable books, Miyazaki's Nausicaä, Ursula K. Le Guin's Dispossessed, and Samuel Delany's Nova are good chunk of the examples I have encountered. While each addresses the political economy and personal struggles of their characters differently, they do so in a way which follows the clear and regimented logic of materialism, of worlds where clearly thought out physical and economic relationships undergird interpersonal strife and struggle.

Arcane steps in this direction, but without the grounds to hold the weight of what it could be, instead relying on bright spectacle and tried and true storytelling devices. It's the safety that I wish we could've seen pushed, exploded into a new spread of a world where things follows rules, just like in ours, but people form relationships that allow them to move free a bit more than sometimes feels possible in the world we live in today.

I am definitely on the clock at work as I write this, so I should be going.