Arcane's creative team has always been able to kill off any League of Legends character they wanted. 'Riot accepted any story we wanted to tell about any of the characters.'

If you don't want to be spoiled for Arcane Season 2, please do not read this article.

When I first started watching Arcane I thought it wouldn't have many surprises. I had a basic understanding of League of Legends. We'd get a better look at the characters' pasts than ever before but that was just a continuation of the status quo of LoL and its spin-offs.

Yeah... no. Season two will have destroyed that belief if anyone still held it at the end of season 1. Its dramatic changes to key characters, and a handful of emotional deaths, will have done so. In reality, the canon has overridden the games' canon in many cases. Season two, in particular, saw a controversial redesigning of champion Viktor, from cyborg villain to magical prophet.

As it turns out all bets are off from the beginning, as Riot gave the creative team a lot of freedom to tell the story, and even allowed them to kill anyone they wanted. Amanda Overton is the one who said that. She wrote the first season, and returned to the show as executive story editor for the second.

She told our friends at GamesRadar+ that "Riot was able to embrace any story we wanted with any of the characters." "We were like, 'Can we kill Jayce Viktor? 'Yes'. "There were no limitations to what we could make a good tale, which, in my opinion was absolutely the right decision for them, because we are adapting the game into a new medium, into television. You want to be able make that version as good as it can be."

Although longtime fans may be unhappy with some of the changes, it is hard to argue the results. The show has been a huge hit, and the depth invested in characters is a big part of that.

"That support [from Riot's] was really what allowed us to create characters like these--complicated and interesting, dark and vulnerable--that we had to decide what would work best for the show. We didn't have to worry about what might or might not be interesting in a different medium," says she.

It was apparently always intended that this would reflect back into the actual game. Overton cites the "mobile, moving, and changing" nature of League of Legends as a major difference between Arcane's videogame adaptations and other videogames.

"It changes constantly, it is a very agile, changing game. There aren't many opportunities to adapt a game and then be able change it or adapt it. The Last of Us cannot do that. The Witcher cannot do that. "Any game adaptation we've seen in recent years doesn't have the same relationship with League as Arcane."

The story of Arcane was planned six years ago. Viktor's League of Legends redesign, along with the other major transformations and deaths, were likely on the agenda almost as long.

On the other hand... How many of these fates do you think will actually stick? I thought that, when it came to deaths, almost all of them left the door wide open for characters to return (or revert), if Riot needed them again.

It's still interesting to see that a TV series is leading the way for a connected universe of videogames. I'm not sure if the company has achieved its goal of uniting the entire canon, as promised last year. But it is certainly bold, no matter how many Viktor Mains it upsets on the way.