A few weeks before Christmas in 2024, the algorithm decided I needed to watch Arcane (2021-24).
I’d missed the first season while catching up with a pandemic’s worth of day-job projects and bracing for omicron. So what hit my feed when the second season dropped—and its fan art started breaking containment—was the full torrent of a fandom discovering, after a three-year wait, that the sapphic tension between Vi, the masculine-of-centre undercity brawler, and Caitlyn, the hard-femme scion of the topside, really was canon.
Nothing had ever stuck in my algorithms to this extent. I wanted to discover what about these characters was drawing such intense creativity and affinity from a community of mine, so I acquiesced to the platform showing me more of it: Vi’s pink undercut and well-built arms; an emo palette-swap that has ended up on the lockscreen of two successive phones; clips of quotable moments, fan art, cosplay, endless CaitVi recaps; cosy alternate universe art of Vi and Cait drinking hot chocolate in matching Christmas jumpers; Vi’s blue-haired sister, who was having at least as much impact on the more femme-inclined, butch fitness influencers who were getting Vi’s back tattoos; cosplayers likewise; anything the algorithm thought I’d spend time looking at because I’d been curious why this character was appealing to so many queer women, just then. [1]
And most of this before I’d even seen a second of the show.
A quieter algorithm, back when Twitter still went by that name and hadn’t yet reengineered its plans for users like me away from engagement and towards disempowerment, was probably also where I first heard about and immediately preordered C. L. Clark’s The Unbroken, the first novel in Clark’s Magic of the Lost trilogy. Its first two volumes clearly put Clark in pole position to write this present franchise novel for Riot Games, developer of League of Legends (2009-) and IP owner for its animation spin-off Arcane; Ambessa appeared six months before the third.
Clark’s own military fantasy is driven by colonial violence and anticolonial resistance, the wounds of complicity with power and the shattering moral compromises of revolution, and sapphic desire’s interplay with all these things. Her action and plot are suffused with appreciation of what internalising the metropole’s ideas of civilisation and progress does to the consciousness of subjugated peoples and their colonisers everywhere, from the battlefield to the bedroom—spaces which, for her protagonists, are never very far apart. Equally part of Clark’s authorial signature is the physicality she brings to writing lesbian sex and swordplay alike, which find themselves in the hands of an author who knows exactly what strength training involves, what muscle that builds on a woman’s arms, how attractive her viewpoint characters find that, and how much her readers with similar sapphic eyes for detail will appreciate seeing that gaze on the page. [2]
Clark and Ambessa, then, are a happy match. Ambessa Medarda is Arcane’s most scene-stealing villain, the warlord matriarch whose story links the intrigue of Piltover and its undercity Zaun into the wider lore of the Noxian continent and the greater world of Runeterra, in which League’s game universe unfolds. Arriving to retake control of her clan’s trading interests from her soft-spoken daughter Mel, Ambessa immediately impresses herself on viewers with her love of hot baths, her insatiable sexual appetites, and her domineering role even as the city’s ruling council and underworld barons scheme for advantage amid Piltover’s magical energy/AI revolution.
Indeed, even before Riot approached Clark’s publishers, Orbit, about suitable authors for an Ambessa novel, Clark had already noticed—while herself getting hooked on Arcane’s first season—how much the battle-scarred general resonated with the kinds of characters she likes to write. Ambessa’s ruthlessness and pleasure-seeking, her clan’s embodied and cultural characteristics, which map on to our world’s Africa, and her taming of powerful beasts would also suit the rebel factions of Magic of the Lost.
Readers who already know both the author and the franchise might find even more to enjoy from this synergy, or what we might call the novel’s metanarrative. In that respect, Ambessa pairs well with another franchise novel from this publishing era, V. Castro’s Aliens: Vasquez (2022). Castro’s reparative homage to the hard-bodied Latina space marine—whom sapphic fans have made into an icon despite her production history’s uncomfortable whiteness—restores dignity and heritage to the character. [3]
Clark’s task with Ambessa, though, is to give interiority and story-driving energy to a woman whose role in Arcane is to be an intimidating, katar-wielding immovable obstacle in the way of the younger (anti)heroes’ unstoppable force. Striding into Piltover with her bodyguards, Ambessa’s place is to shake the city’s political foundations, force characters into all-or-nothing choices, and finally be defeated if the heroes are to save the day.
Ambessa therefore both epitomises the adage that the villain never believes that they’re the villain, and leads the reader around part of a continent which League of Legends players will know well but which fans brought to the mythos through Arcane will only have glimpsed through the Medardas’ backstory. The Ambessa we meet at the beginning of the novel has yet to take her place as the chief of her dynasty, and faces powerful rivals along the way, but already embodies the conflict that propels her antagonist role on-screen: her drive to perfectly express the traditional Medarda code of honour and fearlessness and instil it in her children, against their own inclinations towards peace.
Her calculating plans to build her warband from the pick of Noxus’s arena fighters see her become mentor to the novice rider Rell, who does not identifiably appear in Arcane but had been a playable League champion earlier than any of the Medarda clan. [4] More is revealed, too, about the machinations of Noxus’s secret Black Rose society—which increasingly wraps its mysterious thorns around the action of Arcane season two when things are slow in Piltover and Zaun, and is rumoured to be the focus of whatever animated series Riot develops next.
Riot’s prior worldbuilding largely delimits Noxus’s identity as a space of desert fortresses, medina quarters, and grasslands roamed by wild yet mountable beasts—though Clark has managed to read between the lines of Noxian lore to thicken its food culture, for example, with inspiration from Ethiopian stews. She writes the character of Ambessa, too, with understanding of how rarely narratives of any mythos allow mature women, especially mature Black women, to fight, command, enjoy sexual pleasure, and bear the next generation all in the same uncompromising way. If Arcane’s Ambessa has the function of what pro wrestling would call a monster heel, most fully realised in her combat montages, Clark’s Ambessa balances her warlike fervour with her human side—a human side that, consistent with the show, still enjoys a handsome attendant and a steaming bath.
Since Ambessa’s underestimation of Mel precipitates the elder Medarda’s entry into Arcane, one function of this prequel has to be establishing their conflict. As Ambessa strives to toughen up both her children, Mel seeks a different way of embodying the honour of her clan, modelling strength in ways her martial mother cannot comprehend—that is, much as she begins the animated series. As viewers have seen Noxian magic and tattoos in a climactic moment of Arcane's second series, they will have more context than other readers for appreciating the rune magic Mel reveals, which also leads into showing readers how such magic has been used in lands beyond Piltover’s newfangled scientific take. It is for League players to judge what this adds afresh to their understanding of the world in which their favourite champions endlessly fight.
Common themes from Clark’s author-owned work emerge in Ambessa, to the more limited extent that the franchise novel format allows. While the format’s super-commercial pace precludes, for instance, the amount of detail about the power of dress and appearance at court that Magic of the Lost conveys so deftly, Ambessa’s characters are definitely aware of it. Yet the narration still has to be content with telling the reader through Ambessa’s viewpoint that every moment of positioning at court events is “pure performance,” where Clark’s author-owned books would illustrate it through multilayered details of what outfits her characters wear, how they acquired them, what political influences any of these choices might express or reject, and what secret signals in each other’s intimate dramas they represent. Still, both flavours of narrative voice manage to notice battle-trained women and their muscular arms.
The arena fighter Rell serves as another vector for a talent well known to Clark’s armoury: the ability to convey the pleasures and pains of corporeality even to readers who might live in very different bodies, be these the physicality of combat training (a routine bodily experience for Ambessa as for the soldiers and duellists of Magic of the Lost) or the adaptations that Luca, Magic of the Lost’s cane-using princess, has to make to defend herself from assassins in her intrigue-riddled court. [5] Rell’s transition from gladiator bouts to life-or-death battle enables Ambessa’s narration to reflect on how the stakes of battle become apparent to a young woman experiencing them for the first time, even though the title character herself has long surpassed those moments of doubt (as she must have done, to become the already-determined implacable antagonist of Arcane). When the text comes to reflect on the life-course of a warrior, readers of Clark’s original characters know they have taken those journeys many times, and have grappled with more psychological conflicts than this novel’s fast-paced format can accommodate.
One of Ambessa’s most intriguing devices is the recurrence of arenas as a space, which could well invite being read as a metatext of this IP’s origins in a MOBA game. The arena is where Ambessa finds fighters for her warband. It is also the space for supernatural trials into which the heat of battle projects a younger, pregnant Ambessa at the very start of the book (as well as the animated music video heralding Arcane season two), when—given her presence as a character in the animated series advertising it—we as readers probably already understand her ultimate rationale is to fight in League. Frequent players might form their own opinions as to the identity of fellow combatants, like the assassin with twin red daggers or the man in a black raven-feathered cloak. Indeed, the vision which offers Ambessa a future of dying in battle to take her place within the realm of heroes even pictures her “dressed in the armour of a legend”: a Valhalla of perpetual combat after death, presumably controlled by League’s faithful players, for the characters who must have arcs and resolutions in the world of Arcane?
Clearly, as a franchise novel, Ambessa has to move at a faster and more immediately commercial pace than Clark’s author-owned plots. Its narration cannot linger on the interiority of how power and command seduce, trap, and harm people—in other words, the approach that makes Magic of the Lost’s interactions between ruler and ruled so compelling—nor on as much heartbreak, nor on the deft 180-degree turns of dialogue at which the author-owned trilogy excels, where in the course of one conversation a character’s desire will make her do the opposite of what duty compelled from her at the beginning of the scene. Ambessa’s politics are those of a world that exists so that multiplayer characters can take each other down with blockbuster attacks, not one built from the ground up around a story which a single author wished to tell. It faces the challenge of creating dramatic tension from a rune magic system that game designers originally created for purely aesthetic effect. Its stakes can never be as high as an original work because its prequel status means in-the-know viewers at least understand which characters have to survive: Even when Ambessa fears enemies have kidnapped Mel and her brother Kino, there can be little serious suspense because we know both must play parts in Arcane.
Ambessa also, therefore, exists at a revealing node in the multimedia publishing and IP ecosystem for genre fiction. Its resolution must open action up rather than close it down, so that Mel can be dispatched to Piltover, join the city council, and set the stage for her mother’s intimidating entrance, and everything that stems from it, in Arcane. Its fights must ring true to gamers’ playstyles, and its scope must lead into whatever Riot plans for the next stage of its animation spin-off strategy, rumoured to focus on Noxus and the Black Rose. Whether or not that means animation viewers have also seen the last of Piltover’s sapphic enforcer couple, I understand that, as someone who has enjoyed both Arcane and Clark’s author-owned work, I am unabashedly being marketed to: Riot wants me to watch its future series on continents further from the setting that first gripped me, to buy its licensed merch, and to choose to spend time in the universe of its collectible card game rather than Blizzard’s, even if I may never have the dexterity or PC spec to play League.
Yet on the other side of that commercial bargain, Arcane’s word-of-mouth—word-of-algorithm—success means that many of its fans, who appreciate the themes at the confluence of the animated series and the book, might discover Clark’s other novels for the first time because this tie-in exists. Much more richness awaits them when they do.
Endnotes
[1] The season dropped in November 2024 as essentially the first new sapphic entertainment content that anyone on the anglophone internet had seen since the US presidential elections. It was filled with characters going through absolute despair and crushing repression while still finding moments of queer comfort; so probably, you know, there was that. [return]
[2] Though sex for Ambessa herself is a casual rather than story-changing matter, the novel has a sapphic subplot, between the young fighter whom Ambessa is training up as a protégée and the novice cavalry rider in an ally’s warband. [return]
[3] Castro is a Latina horror author who certainly felt her own attachments to Vasquez growing up. [return]
[4] Indeed, Rell—an arena fighter whose newfound magical powers over iron make her a high-value target for the scheming sorcerers of the Black Rose—may well read as a wholly original character to Arcane-only viewers. She will, though, be one of the story’s most immediate reference points to League players who know the Noxian champions well; to them, Ambessa’s role in her backstory is what is new. [return]
[5] To name but one ensemble from Magic of the Lost which could appear on Riot’s Runeterra just as easily, Clark’s regular readers will not need much reminding of, say, the vest that reformist princess Luca acquires for colonial-marine-turned-rebel-ambassador Touraine, nor what its signals about identity and empire mean between them. [return]