“Let all bitterness, anger and wrath, shouting and slander be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I remember a day when cartoons were just for kids and they were mostly silly. In the early 90s, though, cartoons began to mature some. They were still designed for kids, but they started telling more nuanced and complex stories. Actually, they started telling stories period. No longer could you just watch one episode and not wonder or worry about anything else. They became episodic. And they were good. Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series which later combined to become The Justice League and eventually Justice League: Unlimited, Spider-Man, X-Men, Gargoyles, and more like them changed the way a whole generation of kids – including me – watched and thought about cartoons. Today animation has become a vehicle for mature and in-depth storytelling that takes viewers on a grand adventure while exploring large and important themes. And I’m not just talking about anime which I have just never taken to liking. One of the more recent entries into the genre is the Netflix series, Arcane. Let’s talk about what works, what doesn’t, and why, once again, the Gospel lies at its heart.

I am not a gamer. I love video games, but I’ve never become a gamer. I”m grateful for the distinction as it has allowed me to enjoy a pastime without becoming a stereotype. Because I’m not a gamer, I’m generally not up to date on what the latest most popular games are. Apparently, one of the more popular MMO games (that’s massive multiplayer online game which is basically an online-based game that lots of people play together working toward the same goal) over the last several years is the game Arcane. If you noticed that the game has the same title as the Netflix series we’re talking about, you’re right. The series is yet another game-to-screen adaptation. I had never heard of the game and knew nothing about it going into the series. I didn’t even feel the need to Google it until I had watched the whole thing. As it turns out, I don’t care for that kind of game anyway. Thankfully, that didn’t matter at all. It certainly didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the series.

Normally game-to-screen adaptations are just okay at best. Okay, that’s not true. Usually they’re awful. The Super Mario Brothers movie from last summer was a notable exception. So is Arcane. The decision to make it a series of two seasons that tells one complete story instead of a single movie was brilliant. And it paid off. The series was a hit for Netflix and I understand why. If you don’t like animated content, it’s probably not going to be for you, but whether or not the idea of animation turns you off, the storytelling alone is worth giving it a shot. The animation itself was wonderful and helped create and heighten emotion in ways that just isn’t possible when working in live action. The voice acting was terrific. The writing was superb. But it was definitely for adults and not kids. I honestly don’t think I would let even my 16-year-old watch it (although none of my kids like animated shows much, so that isn’t really a concern for me). The violence, language, and sensuality are all set firmly in the MA rating territory. If you are sensitive to any of that and aren’t willing skip a few scenes, this probably isn’t for you. As for me, and that caveat firmly in place, I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.

The story is set in a steampunk world of magic and mythical creatures. It is about a city state called Piltover which is a place of wealth and abundance and culture. On the other side of that, as most wealthy and powerful cities have, there is an underside to the city where all the have-nots are fairly well forced to live. It is marked by poverty, drug addiction, and organized crime. Several years before the main action takes place, the people of the under city sought to rebel against the Piltover elite in order to form their own nation called Zaun. The effort was the vision of Vander and Silco, to create a better life for their home so that with new leadership in place, the new nation could flourish for the betterment of everyone. The rebellion became violent and was violently put down by Piltover enforcers. And in the aftermath, Vander and Silco had a disagreement that turned violent, and their opposition caused further fractures in the under city’s fragile state. As a result, the under city became a cauldron of resentment and bitterness that simmered throughout the first season.

The series is really about Vander’s two adopted daughters, Vi and Jinx, and their respective journeys. After a violent confrontation with Silco in which Vander is killed, Vi gets captured by enforcers and separated from her adoring sister, Powder. The separation combined with Silco’s manipulations causes Powder’s fragile psyche to fracture, and she loses her mind. She eventually changes her name to Jinx and becomes Silco’s erratic and violent attack dog, helping him to consolidate power over the under city. Vi draws the attention of an enforcer who is connected to the leading counsel of Piltover and what amounts to a grand miscommunication, gets set in opposition to her sister in a conflict that stretches for most of the rest of the series.

Alongside this main story, the primary tension is created by the invention of Hextech by Jayce and Viktor, two brilliant inventors and best friends. Hextech is basically a hybrid of technology and magic that they don’t really understand even as they unleash its potential to great and initially positive effect in the city. When they later weaponize it, the potential for power starts to draw the attention of more unsavory characters looking to manipulate them and to control the power for themselves. Eventually, Jayce and Viktor’s paths diverge and the two find themselves working in opposition to one another.

Everything eventually culminates in a massive battle among multiple different sides, all of which are driven by forces which, seen from their perspective, justifies their actions. There’s a moral grayness to the whole thing that mimics reality in ways that are sometimes uncomfortable. This doesn’t mean there is moral cover or approval given for the violence each of the various sides unleash, but rather, it highlights the fact that when conflict has exploded, only rarely is one side entirely in the right and the other side is entirely in the wrong. More often, both sides have valid points and are pursuing understandable and even laudable ends. But their pursuits and the paths they are taking to achieve them come into conflict with each other, resulting in their fierce opposition.

So often this same kind of thing (generally minus all the highly stylized violence and magical powers) plays itself out in the world around us and even in our own lives. We want one thing and someone we love or even simply like wants something similar, but is coming at it from a different direction. In our pride and stubbornness, we don’t want to acknowledge anything praiseworthy about the position from which they are pursuing the goal we both basically want, and they adopt the same posture. With our respective pride thus wounded, we start to see them as the primary impediment to getting in our way. That is, they become our enemy. From there the bitterness and anger and wrath, the shouting and slander tend to come as par for the course.

It’s almost, then, like Paul knew what he was talking about when he called followers of Jesus to let all of that go, and to instead be kind and compassionate with one another. When we seek first to understand instead of jumping straight to condemnation, while we may not come away agreeing with the position of our ideological opposites, we can nonetheless come away with more respect for them that allows us to work with them in pursuit of a similar goal rather than sitting forever in increasingly strident opposition to one another for reasons that mostly just stem from pride. More importantly than that, though, when we can adopt a posture of forgiveness modeled after God’s own forgiveness of us in Christ, a way forward will almost always start to become clear. And even where one is not quickly apparent, we can still avoid giving our enemies power over us that they never tried to get in the first place, and which will absolutely control our lives until we take it away from them.

Coming back to Arcane for a moment, in the third-to-last episode, one of the characters gets transported to a parallel reality where all of the problems of his reality never happened. Hextech was never invented, preventing the rise of all the problems it caused, and more importantly than that, Vander and Silco were reconciled by forgiveness preventing the bitterness and chaos that infected the under city in the main story’s reality from every taking root there. One of the most poignant moments of that episode came when this character went to cross a bridge that separated Piltover from Zaun. In his reality, it was heavily barricaded and guarded. Here, there was nothing. The bridge doubled as a thriving and happy market. It was the forgiveness between Vander and Silco that had made all of this possible.

In the final episode, Vi and Jinx finally forgive one another for their respective contributions to their conflict. Jayce and Viktor do the same. And those two relational reconciliations are what paved the way for the peace that finally took hold. It was not a peace without tragedy. Rebuilding what once had been was going to take time. But these reconciliations were pointing and paving the way forward toward a much grander restoration.

This is where the hope of the Gospel lies in the Arcane story. The writers spent a long time setting the brokenness of sin before the viewers. We saw how injustice can flourish in the dark even as people who fancy themselves as walking in the light believe with sincere motives that they are doing what’s best. We saw how prejudice can take away our ability to see people as unique individuals with stories and struggles that may not be so dissimilar to ours rather than as merely a block that all carries the same label regardless of who they are and what they have experienced in life. We saw how relational wounds can leave scars that take years and years to heal, and that this healing will always and ultimately only come when we finally choose to walk a path of forgiveness. And we do this not because the other person deserves it. We do it not because the offense didn’t matter or didn’t hurt. We do this not because we are just finally tired of fighting and are trying desperately to find an exit ramp. We do it because God in Christ has forgiven us. If we are going to be a forgiven people, we have to be a forgiving people. Try as we might, there’s simply no way around that.

Better yet, we don’t really want to go around that block even if we could. Carrying the burden of unforgiveness around with us everywhere gets exhausting. It quickly becomes the lens through which we see and engage with all of our other relationships. That pall of negativity and bitterness can come to define how we think about and assume about the people around us. The poison of the pill doesn’t stay with us. It gradually spreads out and leeches its way into every single other area of our lives. In believing unforgiveness to give us some kind of power over another person and protection against future harms, the truth is that it isolates us and eventually leaves us inhabiting a world all by ourselves, impermeable to outside interference even by those who want to love us. Forgiveness is the only way out of this spiral of destruction.

Like the Arcane characters did, like Paul commanded us to do, if you have people in your life you need to forgive, people you need to release from the debt they owe you because of an offense they’ve dealt you, what are you waiting for? There’s not a single good reason to continue withholding forgiveness. Embrace the Gospel power of Christ’s forgiveness by unleashing that forgiveness on those around you, and find the life that is truly life. You’ll absolutely be glad that you did.