Amanda Overton is a television writer with credits on series like Marco Polo, Severance, andEdge of Normal. She worked on Riot Games’ and Fortiche’s recent hit League of Legends animated series Arcane,where she is credited as an executive story editor and wrote the fifth episode “Everybody Wants to Be My Enemy.”
Overton has made a point to talk about the series and her work on it on Twitter and Reddit, telling fans how she and the other writers went about crafting the richly detailed world of Runeterra and set the story in motion. I recently did a public interview with Overton on Reddit about her work on the first season of Arcane,the series’ production, and its LGBTQ+ representation. Here was our discussion:
You have spoken about there being nine people in the writers’ room for season one of Arcane. Can you walk us through a little bit of how that environment looked? How much did you all collaborate vs. go off to work on different scenes and episodes separately?
As far as writers’ rooms goes, this one was pretty typical in that the whole group, all nine of us, worked together to shape the story. But it was atypical in that there was a mix writers with all different areas of experience. We had a few writers that had been working at Riot for ten years and really knew the lore and Champions, and had even helped to write or create them. We had a writer with an animation background and one with a feature writing background, and a few writers, like me, that had live action TV experience. It was a really great mix backgrounds and perspectives.
One thing we had in common was just how much we love video games, and how we all desperately wanted a video game adaption to tell a great, character driven story. To do this, the first thing we did was talk about who the characters are, what their wants and attitudes are, and create backstories for them that were both inline with their lore and filled in gaps that were missing, but were necessary to tell our story. For example, I was lucky enough to give Caitlyn her last name, she didn’t have one before, and with that we filled out a lot of details about her parents, family and upbringing.
