Singed; or, the Modern Prometheus: I Think I Know How Arcane Will End
If you don’t know about the new League of Legends-based Netflix series, Arcane, I want to know how you avoided the most impressive and aggressive marketing campaign in recent history. You must be the kind of digital hermit that advertisers and data stealers fear, and I guess you also don’t happen to live near the Burj Khalifa? Riot Games have pulled out all the stops this time.
Arcane is a nine-episode show animated by French studio Fortiche, set during the boiling point of sociopolitical tension between the aristocratic and progress-obsessed city-state of Piltover, and the industrialized slums of Zaun below it. ‘Topside’ vs ‘the undercity,’ steampunk vs chempunk, rich vs poor, corrupt counsellors and police officers vs mad scientists and gangsters. No matter your knowledge of or feelings for League of Legends (LOL), give this show a chance; it might not break any new ground, but when a story is told with such artistry, sincerity, and confidence, it really doesn’t need to. Arcane believes in itself, and it should, because it’s great. I’m absolutely obsessed with this show.
On the eve of Arcane’s finale, I would like to use my unfortunate amount of LOL lore knowledge to speculate on (what could be) a major development in Act 3. If you don’t know anything about the LOL champion Warwick, or if you don’t want to be (potentially) spoiled for the finale, stop reading! Wait for the 20th! Otherwise, let’s get to theorizing.
Is Arcane Canon?
If we want our Arcane theories to be reasonably informed by the LOL lore, we need to understand the demarcation between Arcane canon and LOL canon, if there even is one; it’s possible that certain characters, like Warwick, don’t exist in the ‘Arcane-verse’ (or are not relevant to this season) for the sake of telling a cohesive story.
Executive producer, Alex Lee, has said “we’re doing the best that we can to make sure that Arcane is internally consistent and is canon,” but the Arcane story isn’t “meant to force hands elsewhere in the company.” The show has made a number of significant character changes — most notably to Viktor and Jayce, their origins, and the nature of their relationship — and timeline changes — hextech was invented long before Jayce and Viktor came onto the scene — that conflict with previous LOL lore. However, said lore has never been set in stone: if you’ve followed LOL for any amount of time, you’ll know that literally nothing about it is sacred — the world of Runeterra is a series of retcons and one-paragraph character bios held together with faith, trust, and pixie dust. Riot Games’ modern standard is to release every new character with a full-length bio and short story, but this hasn’t always been the case. Over LOL’s 12-year run, a large number of characters have already received or are slated for full reworks to their design, gameplay, and story, because their original iterations were too outdated, too barebones, or just too out of place with the rest of the cast. Consequently, Riot’s recent push to develop a cohesive, linear narrative in the Runeterran universe has been a process of constant remodelling.
We’ve come a long way from the days of Mortal Kombat-esque in-universe justification for the MOBA format, but there’s a long way to go yet before Runeterra’s worldbuilding is consistent. All of this is to say that, because Arcane is the most compelling LOL story to date and none of it irreconcilably disagrees with LOL lore, I’m calling it canon. Ergo, we can use established LOL lore to speculate on plot or character developments in Arcane. In fact, I fully expect that Riot will go back and alter old character bios to accommodate all of the changes that Arcane has introduced. The hextech retcons might have some more significant knock-on effects, but when the story is this good, who cares?
His Name Isn’t Singed, it’s Singed’s Monster; Singed is the Doctor
Our story begins with Singed, the otherwise nameless “doctor” character that serves as Silco’s partner in mad, unethical, purple science. At the end of Act 1, we saw him go up in flames after Powder’s explosion destroyed Silco’s Shimmer warehouse. At the end of act 2, we saw him return from the dead, blind in one eye, severely burned, and covering the bottom half of his face with a scarf. We also find out that, when Viktor was a child, he stumbled upon Singed’s private laboratory, where the scientist was attempting to keep one of his terminally ill, genetically modified creatures alive. Singed agreed to take Viktor on as an apprentice of sorts, but this arrangement didn’t last long, as the young Viktor was horrified by the inhumane methods Singed used to achieve his goals. Now that Viktor is an adult with a terminal illness and unscrupulous research of his own, he’s turned to Singed to help him perfect the hex core that might be the key to his survival — and the next stage of human evolution.
So that’s Singed in Arcane. What’s he like in LOL?
Singed was a prodigious student at Piltover University who rejected hextech research in favour of alchemy and the natural sciences, feeling that magic was a crutch for the unintelligent and an impediment to scientific understanding. Despite his genius, this position got him laughed out of Piltover pretty quickly. Leaving the city of progress behind, his research found success in Zaun, where he developed transhuman augmentations for chem-barons: aspiring or exiled aristocrats, chemtech enthusiasts, and gang bosses with the resources necessary to seize power in the lawless undercity.
Eventually, his talents were noticed by the warmasons of Noxus, the Northern empire that used Piltover as a trade and transport nexus during their conquest of neighbouring countries. Emystan, a Noxian commander, commissioned Singed to produce the ultimate chemical weapon for use in Noxus’ Ionian campaign. The result — think napalm but much, much worse — might have devastated Ionia and made Singed a war criminal, but it also made him very rich. With all of the resources he could ever ask for and absolutely no morals left to speak of, he returned to private transhumanist research, trying to create chimeras from man, animal, and machine. Thus began his experiments with Warwick.
Warwick, the Uncaged Wrath of Zaun
Warwick used to be a human man, a Zaunite gangster who endeavoured to live a better life, only to end up an unwitting subject on Singed’s operating table. Alive, conscious, and unmedicated, Warwick’s body was cut apart, modified, and pumped full of chemicals. To his credit, Warwick resisted Singed’s alchemy, eventually succumbing to the trauma without ever fully transforming. Singed, disappointed but undeterred in his efforts to create chimeras, dumped Warwick’s body in a charnel pit. Unfortunately for Warwick, he could not resist the transmutative action of the chemicals in death, which were still being pumped through his veins by the machines that were grafted into his body. When he awoke, he was as you see him: a chemtech-powered wolfman, amnesic and bloodthirsty. He stalked the alleys of Zaun mindlessly for a while, eating whoever he came across, until memories of his past life began returning to him, and his conscience with them. Now, he hunts criminals, including the man who transformed him into a monster; this is why Singed covers half his face with bandages, having narrowly survived a confrontation with his creation.
So what if I told you that Vander is Warwick? Wouldn’t that be a fun twist? Well, it turns out, there’s a lot of evidence and foreshadowing for it in Warwick’s biography, LOL, and Arcane itself:
First and foremost, Vander was a gangster that turned over a new leaf when he started adopting orphans and dedicated himself to maintaining peace between Piltovan enforcers and Zaunites. Strike one. He’s also nicknamed “Hound of the Underground,” which is so obvious that you might be tempted to call it a red herring instead of foreshadowing. Strike two.
Vander and Silco have a complicated history where, for unknown reasons (presumably related to their revolutionary vision of Zaunites having human rights), Vander attempted to kill Silco. Before everything goes explodey at the end of Act 1, Silco tries to convince Vander to take up arms with him against Piltover once again, because, despite the animosity between them, there is still some kind of love or begrudging respect. He doesn’t want Vander to be Piltover’s “lapdog” anymore. Then they have the following exchange:
SILCO: “You’d die for the cause, but you won’t fight for one!”
VANDER: “I’m just… not that man anymore.”
SILCO: “I’ll show you what you really are.”
Strike three. Singed’s experiments were an effort to “reveal [Warwick’s] true nature — the deadly beast hidden within a “good man” — exactly what Silco is threatening to do here. It just so happens that Singed is Silco’s right-hand man, so this transference of motive is only a teeny, tiny retcon. In this regard, we can think of the Singed in Warwick’s bio as a combination of Singed and Silco. To reveal the beast inside Vander, Silco plans to give him Shimmer, the chemical that Singed developed to monster-ify people, making them bigger, stronger, hardier, and angrier; funnily enough, the chemicals that Singed uses to make Warwick “boosted his healing” and respond to “rage, or hate, or fear […] fully awakening the beast within.” Strike… four?
Before Silco can have his way with Vander, he breaks free and takes the Shimmer himself, transforming into… well, into the kind of thing that would precede becoming Warwick: he’s a mountain of muscle, his hands turn into claws, he growls and snarls like a dog… everything checks out. What’s more, he dies in the midst of transmutation, like Warwick does, leaving his body for Silco and Singed to experiment on and reanimate.
The only thing that Warwick could remember during the weeks he spent strapped to Singed’s table was “a little girl screaming [something that] sounded like a name,” which is exactly how Vander died: the last thing he would have heard was Jinx screaming for Vi. Warwick’s bio concludes “Singed had been right all along — the good man had been a lie, before disaster had burned it away, revealing the truth”: though the disaster this references is Warwick being experimented on and the burning is metaphorical, this line serves as a clear inspiration for Vander’s death in the show. Warwick was released in 2017, and Arcane had been in development for at least two years before that, so — if Vander is Warwick — it’s entirely plausible that his bio served as inspiration for or was inspired by the character concept/script work being done for Arcane around the same time.
Warwick’s in-game voicelines imply that his being Vander was planned from the start and the lore crumbs in his bio were deliberate foreshadowing.
Vi:
- “Who taught you how to punch?”: Vander taught Vi how to fight. This line now reads as Warwick, on some level, recognizing the results of his tutelage and criticizing her form for not meeting his standards.
- “The fear in your eyes… I’ve seen it before”: This is likely referencing the events of episode 3, specifically when Vander takes Shimmer and Vi is so afraid of his monstrous form that he turns away in shame and disgust.
- “Zaun needed you!”: This one is a little less obvious. At first blush, it might be what’s left of Vander inside Warwick criticizing Vi for becoming a Piltovan enforcer, abandoning — and betraying — Zaun.
Jinx:
- “You were there…”: Jinx was there when Vander died. Easy enough.
- “Let me forget...”: Warwick would want to leave the painful memories of his past as Vander behind, especially those involving his untimely, violent death, and the subsequent leaving behind of his youngest daughter.
Finally, we see some of Warwick’s human face in his PROJECT skin, and he looks a lot like an early design for Vander, complete with the widow’s peak, bushy eyebrows, and a grey beard. It’s not exactly what we see in Arcane, but the similarities are obvious.
So, there’s a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that Vander is going to return in Act 3 as a cyborg werewolf under Silco’s control and that this exceptionally juicy plot twist has been in the works since Warwick’s inception. What we want to know now is how this twist might play out, and what consequences it will have for our favourite characters.
Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?
Silco is our primary antagonist, but that doesn’t mean he’s our final boss. To build tension, the stakes and/or threats of a story tend to escalate linearly, so the final boss is always the hardest. Silco might control the final boss, but he’s not final boss material himself. He’s a skinny little guy. Even if he took Shimmer, he’d only be as big as the blonde kid from Act 1, and that’s not very threatening after everything we’ve seen in Act 2. He’s the kind of BBEG who attacks our heroes out of desperation only after the eleventh hour has passed, when his strongest minion has been defeated and his master plan has fallen apart around him. The final boss is defeated to release tension, and Silco is defeated after that for catharsis. So that begs the question: who is the final boss of Arcane?
I think Warwick is perfect for the job:
- Even though they shared the Jokerification moment in the dirty river, Jinx’s loyalty to Silco is beginning to waver: his goons have been mistreating her, and she’s just had a tearful reunion with the long-lost sister who most certainly did not abandon her as Silco said she did. If these events aren’t enough to drive a wedge between them, finding out that Silco had Singed play God with her father’s corpse certainly will. Jinx will never be a “good” guy — she’s an anarchist with little regard for human life — but she will be on our protagonists’ side by the end of the show because Arcane is really the story about Jinx and Vi’s relationship; the class war between Piltover and Zaun, the invention of hextech, it’s all (fantastic) set dressing for that emotional core.
- Viktor comes to Singed at rock bottom, literally on death’s door and desperate to survive, to unlock the secrets of arcane science, for his life to have served some greater purpose. As he tells Singed, he understands now doing whatever is necessary to achieve your goals, even if it involves terrible cruelty. Warwick is Viktor’s dream come true, filled to bursting with chemtech augmentations that brought him back from the dead. He is also the product of immense tragedy, horror, and violation. Consequently, Warwick represents a pivotal moral choice for Viktor: is Viktor truly willing to pursue science at all costs if it means becoming a bad person, severing ties with Jayce in the process? Does the research responsible for Warwick’s creation fundamentally oppose his dream of a fair society that uses science to reduce suffering? Soon enough, Viktor is going to become the most prolific scientist and transhumanist of Zaun, the Machine Herald, handing out cybernetics to Zaunites like Oprah does cars. This is his first step on that journey.
- When Viktor takes Silco’s side by allying with Singed, Jayce will finally have a personal stake in the conflict between Piltover and Zaun; so far, his call to arms against the undercity has been on behalf of others, for the fantasy of Piltover as a peaceful and righteous utopia. He may have lost his hextech crystal, but he hasn’t been personally victimized by any of our antagonists like Vi, Jinx, or Ekko have; he doesn’t have a meaningful relationship with one of our Zaunite protagonists like Caitlyn does with Vi; and his life isn’t literally on the line like Viktor’s is. Once Mel has no more use for him as a sockpuppet and Viktor leaves forever, Jayce will have no one but Caitlyn, who’s already embroiled in the conflict. This is the dramatic shift that Jayce needs to go from the most reactive character in the story to actually doing something.
- Mel has called in (presumably) her mother and a band of Noxian soldiers to deal with her little Zaun problem, and the Piltovan enforcers are already prepared to storm the undercity. Warwick is exactly the right kind of match to ignite this civil war, representing everything about Zaun that scares Piltover: a mindless, man-eating monstrosity made by ‘dangerous chemtech’ science and the ‘unclean transhumanists’ of Zaun to threaten the sanctity of their good city. He’s terrifying, and no soldier or enforcer is a match for him. If Silco wants to send a message, this is how he does it.
- If it comes out that Warwick is Silco’s creation, everyone in Piltover will want Silco dead. Notably, it could be the breaking point for Marcus, causing the sheriff to publicly expose him (likely at the cost of his own life, delivering on the self-sacrificial heroism that he was tempted by in episode 5 with the grenade). If it comes out that Warwick is the abused corpse of Vander, everyone in Zaun who doesn’t already want Silco dead will want Silco dead. Not only is Warwick the ultimate weapon, but he’s also the ultimate target on Silco’s back, making the Industrialist everybody’s no. 1 enemy. With a common enemy who can serve as an embodiment of/scapegoat for decades of sociopolitical tension, the immediate conflict between Piltover and Zaun can be resolved by Silco’s defeat, preventing all-out civil war.
- Warwick is a poetic and tragic end to Vander and Silco’s relationship. He is Silco’s perfect revenge, forcing Vander, the Hound of the Underground, to return to — to crave — the life of violence that he worked so hard to distance himself from. Forcing him to turn on or endanger the people he dedicated his life to protecting. Forcing him to fight his surviving children, whose lives have already been ruined by Silco in Vander’s absence. But as I said, Warwick and his identity are the keys to Silco’s downfall. Just like in the past, Silco’s extremism will lead to Vander killing him, in one way or another. That’s some exceptionally sexy parallelism. Imagine it: while fighting Jinx and Vi, Warwick regains memories of his past and turns on Silco, dragging him into the underground, never to be seen again. That moment then serves as the new trigger for Warwick to begin his vigilantism in Zaun. It would also give us an opportunity to revisit the past, learning what happened between the two men in the river all those years ago — that initial conflict is ultimately what caused all of this today.
So, that’s my theory! I know this isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination — people, including myself, have been talking about this since Vander was revealed however long ago — but I haven’t seen anybody else reason through it from a story writing perspective, nor with the information we got in Act 2, so I thought it was worth talking about again. We’ll find out if everyone’s right tomorrow! I can’t believe Arcane is already over after waiting so long for it, but it has been a better show than I could have ever imagined. I have every confidence they’ll finish strong.
Thanks for reading!
POST-FINALE EDIT: So, it didn’t happen exactly like I thought, but in the ending montage, we did see Vander peri-transformation in Singed’s lab! Additionally, Warwick’s theme played at the end of the season 2 announcement teaser! Very excited to see my boy soon.
