Arcane teases that Orianna may be Singed's daughter
Arcane’s first season has ended and fans are feverishly dissecting every detail of the final act in order to find hidden story connections and hints at Arcane’s next seasons. One of the biggest revolves around Singed and his seemingly deceased daughter, who may be League of Legends champion Orianna.
During the final act, Singed takes a bigger role in the story after only being a background character in the first two acts. A mysterious Zaunite chemist, there are not many concrete details about Singed, but a few clues can help to unravel the bandaged enigma.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for all three acts of Arcane
In the third act, Singed mentions that he once had a daughter, and in the final moments of the show he can be seen holding a locket with an image of a little girl. From the brief glimpse at Singed’s daughter, fans are speculating that this could be seeding Orianna’s backstory for Arcane’s second season.
Over the course of Arcane, Singed comes further and further into the frame as a central character in the events of the story. At the earliest point when he appears, he meets a young version of Viktor in the undercity of Zaun, who he takes on as an apprentice. Viktor helps Singed care for a creature named Rio, a lizard-like creature reminiscent of an axolotl.
Rio is mentioned to have a mutation that Singed is cultivating, apparently associated with the purple flowers seen throughout his cave hideout. Eventually, Singed has Rio hooked up to a series of tubes that conduct Shimmer between Rio’s body and an unseen device.
Is Orianna Singed’s daughter?
There are a number of reasons to believe that Orianna is actually Singed’s daughter.
In Arcane’s third act, a desperate Silco brings a gravely injured Jinx to Singed to treat her. Singed sedates Silco and injects Jinx with a variant of Shimmer in order to strengthen her body. In this horrifying, trying operation, Jinx is changed forever. During the interaction, Singed speaks about having once had a daughter.
Orianna’s official story has some possible parallels with where we first meet Singed. Orianna’s father, per her Champion bio, was a talented artificer named Corin Reveck who made prosthetic limbs in Piltover. After a Zaunite mine collapses, Orianna defies her father’s orders and goes down into the mine to save civilians.
Orianna goes as far as to give her oxygen mask to a child but ends up returning to Piltover with permanent organ damage from the toxic fumes. As Orianna’s organs begin to fail, her father crafts her new mechanical organs, slowly replacing Orianna’s organic parts until the only one that remains is her heart. This process is incredibly expensive and forces Orianna and her father to move to Zaun.
Orianna’s father grows ill shortly afterward and required a heart Transplant. Orianna, wanting to save her father’s life, offers her own heart and becomes a fully mechanical being.
Singed has a short story about stitching two people together in order to extend a being’s life, during this story he is a Piltovan professor. Singed’s true name has not yet been confirmed but he is confirmed to have once been associated with the academy, given his mention of parting ways with Heimerdinger in the past. It’s possible that Singed replacing Orianna with mechanical devices, or tinkering with other ways to prolong her life, left him at odds with the academy and resulted in an expulsion similar to what happened to Jayce in the first act.
There’s one coincidental clue that not many fans have pointed out yet comes in the name of Singed’s beloved pet. Rio is an anagram for Ori, the often-used short form for Orianna’s name by League of Legends fans. It seems plausible that should Singed have lost his daughter, he might have renamed a beloved pet after her during his attempts to find ways to possibly return her to an organic form. To top it all off, the only clear shot of Singed’s daughter at the end of the ninth episode is a near-exact match to Orianna’s hairstyle.
All of Singed’s experiments, from his work with Shimmer and Rio, to aiding Viktor, to possibly turning Vander into Warwick, all have a common theme of preserving or enhancing life. Singed has his fingers in multiple iterations of transhuman transformation, almost as though he were searching for a way to return his daughter from a mechanical existence to organic life. If his work on Orianna led him to move to Zaun, that could very well work with the timeline of him meeting Viktor during Viktor’s childhood.
It’s not as solid as early calls of Vander’s transformation into Warwick, or Ekko being the Firelight leader, but right now there’s nothing in the lore stopping Singed from being Corin Reveck, Orianna’s father, and still participating in Arcane the way he does. Arcane’s second season won’t be out for a long time, so for now it’s just speculation, but there are certainly enough hints to be worth considering.
Nicholas James is a gaming writer with a passion for all things geekdom, as well as live theater. Nicholas is best known for covering League of Legends and other top MOBA titles, but his expertise covers numerous games across multiple genres. When not watching the LCS or playing the latest new release, Nicholas can be found doing some tabletop gaming and painting his favorite miniatures. Nicholas has also published with Hotspawn, TheGamer, Dexerto, Esports.gg and other industry outlets.
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