Image: Netflix
Arcane Season 2 might have confirmed Vander’s return in this new teaser.
Netflix’s League of Legends animated series Arcane was chock-full of origin stories for many of the game’s champions, and one of them might have been hiding in plain sight this whole time. Riot Games has dropped a new teaser for Arcane Season 2, which seemingly confirms a popular fan theory floating around Vi and Jinx’s adoptive father Vander.
Watch the teaser below:
Arcane Season 2 x Warwick?
Our first look at Arcane Season 2 - since its announcement two years ago - is a 45-second clip that picks up from a key moment in Season 1 featuring the scientist Singed. With a music box-like lullaby playing in the background, Singed partakes in a heavy amount of drugs while the teaser focuses on various pieces of equipment scattered in the room around him. The teaser ends with a rather ominous image: a massive beastly figure hanging from the ceiling, clearly being experimented on by the drug-addled Singed.
Since Season 1 dropped, fans have theorised that Vi and Jinx’s adoptive father Vander has secretly been one of League’s champions all along: Warwick, a massive wolf-like beast fused with machinery and strengthened by cruel experiments. When we last saw Vander in Season 1, he had overdosed on the drug Shimmer and mutated into a monster before sacrificing himself to save Vi.
The season ended with his implied death, after which Singed took his body for his own experiments. It looks like Singed has begun turning Vander into a cyborg-like beast with mechanical limbs and fluid pipes, presumably to keep him alive and relieve his wounds. All of this falls in line with Warwick’s official lore in League of Legends, which states that the beast was once a gangster who tried to live a better life before being experimented on by Singed.
Vi and Jinx will likely come to blows (again) in Arcane Season 2, but the return of their adoptive father-turned-monster might make things a bit more complicated for the sisters. Riot Games has also revealed the rest of its 2024 plans for League of Legends, which includes an upcoming champion taken from Arcane - Mel’s mother Ambessa.
Arcane Season 2 hits Netflix in November 2024.