The much-anticipated prequel series to the beyond-popular League of Legends multiplayer battle arena game is nigh! As part of its fun but miserably named Tudum event, Netflix has released an all-new trailer for Arcane, the animated TV series which will chronicle the origins of fan-favourite Champions Jinx and Vi — and what happened to turn the sisters into such foes.
While Jinx is known in the game for being a Joker-esque agent of chaos, as we can see in the trailer and according to League of Legends’ canon, she wasn’t always that way. From her official biography: “While most look at Jinx and see only a mad woman wielding an array of dangerous weapons, a few remember her as a relatively innocent girl from Zaun — a tinkerer with big ideas who never quite fit in. No one knows for certain what happened to turn that sweet young child into a wildcard, infamous for her wanton acts of destruction.”
Vi’s origin has been equally mysterious: “Vi remembers little of her childhood in Zaun, and what she does remember, she wishes she didn’t. … None of the old-timers from her youth could tell her anything of her parents. Most assumed they had died in one of the industrial accidents that were, sadly, all too common in the undercity. Though she had ended up in the crumbling Hope House orphanage, a notoriously mad sump-scrapper claimed to have found her adrift in a bassinet large enough for two in the ruins of a collapsed chem-lab.”
There doesn’t seem much to be connecting the two according to the current canon, other than Jinx constantly targets the Piltover city enforcer Vi during her various crimes, heists, and acts of destruction. But clearly, their origins are tied deeply together, through both good times and (very, very) bad times, and Arcane looks like it’s going to explore that and more. Arcane stars Hailee Steinfeld as Vi, Ella Purnell as Jinx, Kevin Alejandro as Jayce, Katie Leung as Caitlyn, Jason Spisak as Silco, Toks Olagundoye as Mel, JB Blanc as Vander, and Harry Lloyd as Viktor, and will premiere November 6 on Netflix.