Recently With Arcane Ending And The Backlash/critics The Second Season Received I've Come To Feel Like

Recently with Arcane ending and the backlash/critics the second season received I've come to feel like it's even harder to start writing and creating art (as in, "if even people on that level aren't perfect, what chance do I have of making something truly good?"). How do you deal with this feeling, to start creating, knowing all the mistakes you're gonna have to make?

Well that's an interesting question. I think Arcane is actually a really good example for this. Because as far as I can tell, everything Arcane did with its story was, from the creators' perspective, a success.

I didn't see any glaring mistakes in Arcane season 2. I just saw a lot of decisions that served the themes they wanted to explore - love being unbreakable even when the participants have hurt each other unfathomably, sisters and sister cities falling naturally back into care and alliance when faced with an outside threat, the blinding allure of vengeance and rage and how it's a trap that must be actively escaped.

I think it's always important to meet a story where it's at. "I wanted the story to be a different story" is never a useful criticism. A storyteller needs to tell the story they think should be told. I think Arcane is throwing some people because season 1 in isolation looked like it could have been setting up some different threads - I was expecting them to more thoroughly explore the class divide in Piltover and Zaun and how they could navigate mending their relationship after so many atrocities and injustices inflicted on Zaun, but instead they used the sister cities as a mirror for Vi and Powder, and Vi and Powder are two people who love each other and have hurt each other and despite that will never stop being sisters, so that gets reflected back into Piltover and Zaun. I don't think that's a perfect analogy, but I do think it's the analogy they were going for.

A story cannot be every story. They picked the story they wanted to tell and executed it in the time they had, and I think they did good. That's a lesson we can all internalize as artists; my art, once created, cannot contain every possibility it held before it existed. And even if I fulfil my vision as closely as possible, some people are going to wish I'd done something else. And if those people have such a strong vision of the story they wish I'd told instead, it sounds like they should probably tell that story, since it's already taken shape in their mind. "I wish this story had scrapped its plans and themes and explored this OTHER idea" isn't useful as a criticism, but it is a very powerful artistic motivator.