It has a 9/10 rating on IMDB and 100% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes (93% from audiences). One only has to watch a single episode of Arcane to understand the hype surrounding the adult animated series. It is not only visually stunning, but the story it tells is profound and emotional, full of rich and layered characters that call into question traditional hero/villain archetypes. Co-created by Christian Linke and Alex Yee of Riot Games, Arcane takes place in the League of Legends universe and its original run was supposed to be just one season. Expanded to two in order to properly flush out the various character arcs and storylines, the series’ 18 episodes center around two cities (Piltover and Zaun), two sisters (Vi and Powder), and the brewing war between them.

Executive story editor, writer and co-producer Amanda Overton is a co-writer on every episode of the series. Her credits to date include Severance, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, The 100 and Motherland: Fort Salem. As an avid video game player, her involvement in Arcane is especially close to her heart. We spoke about the show and its groundbreaking nature, not only through its levelling up of the animated series genre, but in the voice it gives to traditionally underrepresented characters. 

Tell me how you became involved with Arcane and about working with Christian and Alex on this project.

I got a job interview! My agents said there were opportunities for a new animated series and they thought I’d be perfect for it. I love video games.

I went to the Riot campus, and what was really cool about my interview was that it started by watching the pilot. They had already produced it and let me watch it. It’s a little bit different from the one that finally aired; we ended up making some structural changes once we had a clearer vision for the season and the series.

But when I saw the pilot, I thought, “Wow,” It was beautiful, interesting, and fun. I think for me, the most shocking thing about it was that they were going to make an adult animated show about adult champions from this game for adults. But they were going to have the first three episodes be about the kids – it was the idea of the origin story.

I had worked on a lot of shows where we did something called “spoon-fed flashbacks,” which is where you come up with the present-day story and then you create flashbacks that best serve that present-day plot. But here, we got to just do the whole backstory first, really get people immersed in what it was like to live the lives of these characters, and after that, step into the adult characters. It was such a bold decision and I thought, “I have to work on this show.”

At this point, Christian and Alex already had some of the big beats of the story mapped out. In the first week of being in the room, they pitched us what they thought this first season was. I raised my hand and said, “Don’t fire me, but I think we have to change the pilot.” So we started digging into what the backstories of these champions could be. I wanted to start telling the story of these two sisters who are torn apart by two cities at war from the very first scene of the show.

Were you already familiar with the League of Legends universe? Did you have to do any research into that world to prepare for this project?

I am a huge video game person and I play a lot of RPGs (role play games). I’ve been playing Legend of Zelda since I was a child. I really love the Mass Effect series and games like Assassin’s Creed, a lot of the big video game titles. But I had never played League of Legends before and so I spent a lot of the first weeks diving into everything there was about the characters online that was part of the lore already. But I think the good thing about my perspective on the series was that I could represent the audience from the outside.

What would an audience member who wasn’t familiar with League or these characters look like? And how could we convince them to also watch the show? What stories could we tell that would be interesting to both hardcore Elite fans and people like me who had never played League before?

Alex and Christian have been at the company since there were forty people there. Christian did a lot of the music and Alex helped create a lot of those original champions. So if I ever had a lore question, I had two experts there to help me.

What are some of the challenges of working in animation? What do you love about it?

I think the biggest challenge about working in animation – and you know, everything is always a blessing and a curse – is how much time it takes. We worked on Season 2 for over four years.

That is a blessing because we had four hundred people pouring their hearts and souls into this. We could get so much detail and meaning into every shot and every expression, every facet of the story. But it also meant that the people who were working behind Arcane spent years of their lives on it.

Some spent ten years with these characters. With that comes an element of, “Are we even telling the right story anymore?” You’ve just been with it so long that sometimes your instinct is to make changes. The risk is that you’re making a lot of lateral moves instead of levelling up. So, I think that was something the team was always very mindful of. Is this change to make the story better or is this change because we’re tired of seeing the same thing? It literally occupied every moment of our lives for years.

[More: Amanda Overton joins the 2018 Young And Hungry List]

Tell me about writing for a series that is so driven by visual effects, especially when it comes to the fight sequences. How do you, as a writer, approach that and what is your process like?

I try to write all scenes like a dramatic dialogue scene. When it comes to the fight scenes, to me, what the characters do in the fight needs to tell you something new about them. So we always start from “what does a character want?” versus “what does that character need?” How can we make that journey for them as difficult as possible? And what can we learn about them by putting them in these extreme situations? I think that with a dramatic scene, you want them to be forced to make decisions, be forced to react in ways that they’re not comfortable with. You do that by putting them with other characters or by having them fight. Even when it came to our sex scene, we wrote it like we needed to learn something new about the characters.

I think that’s the cool thing about this – how many layers there are and how many different creative talents get to come together from so many different departments. I tell people that at every stage of Arcane, we get to level it up. The actors come in and level up the script with their performance… the storyboard artists and the directors come in with their vision and are able to show so much of the story through their choice of camera angles and their visual storytelling… and then the nuance of the animators. And so, having that amount of visual storytelling and subtext in the performance is what makes this show so rich and deep and layered.

In addition to that, there are original songs written for the show where the lyrics speak to the theme and the characters and the journeys they are going through in the moment. You can sit in your car and listen to the music on your way to work and be thinking about what a character is going through on an episode you watched three days ago.

Every character in the series is rich, layered and complex. But let’s focus on the two “main” characters. Tell me about Vi and Powder/Jinx and their relationship.

We always knew this would be a story about two sisters who are tragically torn apart. For us, it was a question of, “Are they going to repeat the sins of their fathers or can they break that cycle?” That’s something we always knew the story was going to be about from the beginning. And it was something for us to answer through their stories – “Is there a way to break this cycle, and how would it feel for these characters to do that?”

I think we always knew how the story would end. I wrote a version of the last scene between them back when the series was only going to be one season. The original end of Season 1 was a version of the war and had that scene in it between the two characters. Then we expanded the series and were able to dive into these characters for another season. But those scenes were pretty much the same because we knew exactly how their story would end. It was just a matter of finding the right way to tell the story.

At the highest level, Arcane is about two sisters who love each other deeply, and because of their tragic circumstances and backstory, end up having a toxic relationship where they need to find healthy boundaries for themselves. I think finding a healthy boundary for yourself when it’s someone that you love as much as they love each other is the very hardest thing on earth to do.

So if that was what was at the heart of this story, we had to figure out how the two characters would find a way to create those boundaries that they need from each other. We knew it would be a bit of a tragedy. I think that the way it happened, we were able to find hope for them. Those necessary boundaries gave both characters a better future.

Tell me about the, quite literal, “upstairs/downstairs” theme you explore in this series.

For us, this was always a tale of dualities. It’s two cities. I think with Caitlyn and Vi, we were able to take opposites and bring them together. Silco and Vander tried desperately to make something work and failed. Were their daughters able to succeed? In a manner of speaking.

I’ve looked back on Arcane and the stories we were telling – how we told them was always about finding trust in people’s differences and respecting them. I think the writers’ room was all about having trust to dive into stories that made us uncomfortable. When Christian pitched that Vi hits Powder at the end of Episode 3, that made me deeply uncomfortable. I thought, “How are we going to save her from this mistake?” But then I heard his vision for it and how we were going to execute it. Her reaction afterwards, what she does and how she tries to make up for that mistake was really important. I originally thought,“We can’t have the slap in the show” and now I can’t imagine the show without the slap. It’s so crucial to Vi and her arc, and the guilt that she carries with her and all the decisions she makes.

We were able to do that in the writers’ room – we were able to look at things that made us uncomfortable or pitch some really “out there” things that we never could have imagined, finding the common ground between all of us that would make an idea resonate. Even if it made one or the other person uncomfortable, we were able to come together and trust each other. I think that was the heart of the creative process for us and something that I feel I need to take with me moving forward from Arcane. I’m always going to be trying to tell stories in that way.

Video games traditionally have a villain. Given the complexity you’ve injected into these characters, is there a villain in Arcane? If so, is it a who or is it a what?

I think villains are always a “what” in our series.

The biggest tragedy for me is that Vi and Powder lost their parents. Vi had to become a parent far too young, and I think so many of her mistakes were driven by how she was “parentized” at such a young age. But that made her who she was, and she has to spend the series undoing that trauma. We don’t know if she’s even successful by the end. So to me, that was the real villain; the tragedy for those characters was the circumstance they were put in.

I like to say that people do the wrong things for the right reasons or right things for the wrong ones. For me, that extends to the villains as well. Or antagonists. I’ll call them antagonists because we loved all of our characters so much. We had to really understand why they were doing the things they were doing in order to write them.

Do you have a favorite character?

I have such a soft spot for Caitlyn. I ended up giving her the parents she has and her last name, and had a say in her design changing from being a white person to half Asian. It’s now reflected in the game. I think that was very important in terms of representation, and getting to add something to such a beloved video game means a lot to me.

I loved Vi too. I even used to have her haircut when I was first brought on. The way she so selflessly thinks about other people, even to her own detriment, and then has to finally think about herself. That’s a deeply personal journey for me that she traveled, and getting to show her go through that arc was really special. I think you have to find something in each of the characters that you can understand. With Vi, it was like, “I’ve dealt with this in my own personal life and my own family.” It really was an emotional journey for me to get to share that with her.

Tell me about the importance of giving voices to the underrepresented.

It’s everything.

I’ve played video games my whole life. I love them deeply, and they mean a lot to me. But it wasn’t until I played the Left Behind video game from The Last of Us where I think I sobbed for days because I finally felt like I saw a character in that space that felt like me. That was the moment where I thought, “This is what it’s like to feel seen.”

That was the moment where I realized it’s very hard to see the absence of a thing until you finally see it. So I think that it’s very important to put different perspectives into these shows so that we can start understanding what different people’s experiences are like. I know how much it meant to me to finally feel seen in a space that I had always loved. I tell people, “I’m writing for my 16-year-old self so now other young girls can hopefully feel seen through these stories and be inspired and empowered to tell their own stories or live their own life in a more authentic way.”