Sleeping With Your Lab Partner Whatever😒

for love

🥂

Honestly? I’d be super curious to see more “Jayce got sent to the Powder reality” or just any other reality where he inhabits his own body there (so not S2 Jayce/S1 Viktor fic I mean fic where Jayce gets the Ekko treatment) but where Jayce just… tells the truth about being from an alternate universe right away?

Because really, if ANYONE would accept the possibility of alternate universes RIGHT AWAY, it would be Viktor, or Heimerdinger, or in general people from the circles that Jayce very much moves in as someone working on the theoretical edge of science.

The reason I’m thinking about this is I feel like I’ve seen a few of these fics now where a lot of sort of predictable drama gets generated by Jayce trying to blend in and pretend to be his AU self with absolutely nothing to go off of, but to me that seems 10x more difficult and prone to disaster than just… trusting that his science buddies will be open to the possibility that a very weird scientific event is happening to the guy who was fiddling with HARNESSING MAGIC WITH SCIENCE and needs some help right now.

Idk, maybe it’s my penchant for thinking in straight lines. Maybe I just need to write it. But I also genuinely have a story… Frustration? With unexamined tropes and stories that immediately assume that talking about or asking for help about the magical or supernatural things happening to the characters would get them consigned immediately to some insane asylum.

Like, unless someone has a HISTORY of struggles with reality, I think most people are willing to play along a bit. If one of my friends or even my partner ran up to me and said “I know I look like myself but I’m actually from another dimension inhabiting my counterparts’ body and I need your help getting back.” Idk, I’d like to think I’m pretty genre savvy and have a decent sense of humor. I’d be willing to play along until they get tired of the game or provide me with some hard evidence that something legitimately out of this world is happening. I’m not going to immediately have them arrested or committed, ffs, even if they’re my worst enemy. I MIGHT check in with someone close to them to ask if they’ve been acting strange lately or if they have suggestions in case this person is legitimately having a psychological event of some kind, but again, my first response isn’t to freak out at them, it’s to ask for more details and get a sense for what’s going on here.

But to get back to Jayce, in general, he has people in his life experimenting with the bleeding edge fringe of theoretical science and I think he could count on a fair number of sympathetic and even helpful ears. At least, people willing to entertain his hypothetical for a bit if he brings it up as a possibility rather than a thing actively happening to him right now. I think he’d definitely have more success going to an AU Viktor or Heimerdinger and asking for their help with such a theoretical scenario than he would stumbling around trying to pretend to be his alternate self when he has no frame of reference for what this AU’s self is even like. After all, Jayce is a scientist, not an actor, and he knows it. He can give a speech but I’m not sure that translates to like… playing along with an entire life that isn’t his, full immersion LARPing type stuff.

And for the record, it’s not so much that I’m critiquing these fics. I get the reason for the tropes and how they generate the drama and the plot for the story the author wants to tell. It’s more that it’s a trope I’ve seen turn up in a few unrelated authors’ fics and that always gets my trope-contrarian brain buzzing with, “Ok but does this trope MAKE SENSE? Would Jayce or anyone in his situation be actually under so much pressure to disguise what happened to them as this story is implying they would be? Would anyone actually get locked up or in trouble for floating that they’re their AU self? Heck, wouldn’t it almost be SAFER to bring up the hypothetical, even as a joke, just to see if it’s like a known experiment in this world or a thing that regularly happens that everyone knows about, or at least to make some allies amongst your AU loved ones, rather than stumbling around getting in ACTUAL trouble in a world that could have completely different laws or customs than you’re aware of?”

Tropes, people! They should be interrogated!

（WIP）jayvik Spirit Blossom AU

She's an excellent subject for texturing fun if you ask me 😌 Also she doesn't really have golden nails but it felt fitting for the vibe...

Beloved if you could tell me more about how Arcane is a tragic romance staged as a geopolitical collapse in six acts i would love you forever. I find your mind so sexy

okay. i’m going to try and say something semi coherent about this, because you, my beloved mutual asked and i? would die for you.

if we’re going to talk about tragedy, we might as well start with jayce and viktor.  in true tragic fashion, they follow the classical arc to the letter: hamartia (a fatal flaw – hubris, idealism, the belief that their creation could save rather than destroy), peripeteia (the reversal – hextech becoming a weapon rather than a miracle. viktor dying, jayce bringing him back),  and anagnorisis (the moment of recognition – when they realize the cost and the damage. viktor seeing what he’s become and jayce saying what he should have said years ago). and the devastating thing is: these don’t happen separately. they collapse inward, spiral together. the tragedy hits hardest because the fall is of their own making – and because it comes too late. 

if there’s anything i’ve learned from my (very humble and very deeply felt) studies in literature and literary history it’s this: romantic tragedy is not just about heartbreak. it’s about the world collapsing as a consequence of love gone wrong. loyalty, desire, misjudgement and betrayal rippling outward into total ruin. arcane doesnt just tell a tragic love story: it tells five. ten. maybe more. the show is a lattice of relationships – romantic, familial, platonic, political – and every one of them cracks in some way. and each crack runs straight through the city’s foundation somehow.

jayvik may be the most overtly mythic of them all. our science husbands, our gilgamesh and enkidu, our cautionary tale about what happens when affection tries to hold up empire  – but they’re not alone. their spiral isn’t the only one.

arcane, in its very structure, ties systemic collapse to personal grief. every conflict begins in a relationship that couldn’t hold. vi and jinx are antigone and ismene rewritten in gunpowder and neon: sisters locked on opposite sides, loyalty twisted by trauma. mel and ambessa are imperial legacy embodied: the exiled daughter who tried to love her new home, and her mother who thinks love is weakness. caitlyn standing between love, lineage and law. ekko mourning a girl who never got to grow up and jinx is the living fallout of everyone else’s failure to protect her.

even silco and vander – two men who once shared a vision of an independent zaun – become enemies, because one believes revolution requires uproar while the other hopes reasoning might still be enough. and in the end, every character is fighting someone they still remember loving once. no character fights in isolation. every blow lands on someone they once believed in. and that’s why the city burns.

because that’s the thing, right? the show treats interpersonal relationships like structural beams: when they crack, the city does, too. the emotional subplots aren’t really subplots at all: they are the plot. hextech was supposed to be a bridge: between science and magic, between piltover and zaun, between a boy who fell from grace and a man who never got the chance to rise. instead, it becomes the wedge. a miracle turned into a weapon, with the miracle workers on opposite sides of a war they helped create. when the marriage of minds ends in divorce, the whole city pays the price. 

and that’s why we don’t have any neat hero-villain binaries, right? what we do have is people trying to claw their way back to something they lost. a sister, a partner, a version of themselves that they could still forgive. but every attempt to go back costs them something new, again and again. that’s the real tragedy, i think: not just the people lost, but that they keep losing the things they’re trying to save.

if you’ll allow me some nerdy indulgence i’d like to go back to jayce and viktor being our gilgamesh and enkidu by way of hextech. radiant ambition meets terminal wildness. they build a future together and then have to destroy it with their own hands. and the thing is: they don’t fall apart because the love fades, (affection is the one thing holding them together, after all). they fall apart because it festers into betrayal and all the ways they fail to reach each other across the gap that’s widened between them. the tragedy isn’t the end (though i really, really wish they had more time) – it’s everything that leads to it. they hit every note of a classical downfall: a shared dream born of light, warped by power, splintered by grief. their fatal flaws (call it hubris, call it desperation, call it idealism) spiral into the kind of break no apology can fix. and yet, in the end, when everything else is gone, they still choose each other. if antigone dies to bury the one she loves, if gilgamesh carves his grief into stone, then jayce and viktor choose to hold each other in the infinite embrace of the arcane in order to stop what they created from consuming everyone else. not to undo the damage but to stand in its ashes and say: no more.

(aristotle once said that tragedy is supposed to evoke pity and fear, and then purge those emotions through catharsis. this post? may have done the opposite. i have never feared more. i have never pitied harder. and i have certainly not been purged)

THAT scene but without the cuts

YESSS. YOU GET IT

When we are introduced to viktor, we are first led on to believe that he has a confident, almost flippant personality— from how he relished in his power as that of the dean’s assistant and practically talked down to jayce. And yet this confidence only stems from his position in piltover, and this also leads into another really fascinating point I noticed between jayce and viktor: what they value about themselves is what society values about them.

Viktor cannot see value in his personality or his character in the slightest. What he sees as worthy is what the good he can do for society. This also ties back to what Viktor said in the finally to Jayce once he achieved godhood: “I was more than I ever was.”

He only truly values himself because he has made an effort to society, because he has done great. The ONLY reason he said that line was because he finally decided that he had reached his goal of helping others through his commune. He had made himself a legacy.

Another really great example of this is his line to jayce during act 2: “Come. Visit me. See what I’ve accomplished.”

He wants to show Jayce his inventions, he wants to show Jayce that he’s worthy. He literally can’t imagine any other reason why Jayce would be interested in him other than his work.

Now onto Jayce: my point might be a little bit of a stretch but I still think it’s an interesting thing to highlight about his character, and it also traces back to your post. In his journal, there’s a page where he disparages the inventions he sees at the parlors for Progress Day, claiming they’re nothing but child’s play and wondering how the world would react to such a revolutionary idea like Hextech.

He, as well as Viktor, both plainly crave society’s validation. You can see it when Jayce steps on stage— he plays along with the crowd, cherishing and indulging in the applause. He very clearly wanted to achieve personal glory for himself, to be congratulated for his efforts, as well as the desire to help the public and give hextech to the people.

Society holds him at high regard, and hence, he does too.

Except, this changes in the finale of s1, where we see Jayce forgoing this sort of attitude and saying to the council: “With respect, I don’t give a shit about what any of you think about me anymore.”

This also bleeds into s2, act 1, with “My place was always in the lab, with you”, and from this point on Jayce just doesnt care about society’s approval.

And here we see that when his consideration for the council and society’s input has completely dissipated, the only thing he cares about is his partner, and his loyalties have always led back to Viktor.

And then we go to the finale, and we go back to Jayce’s line: “I thought I wanted us to give magic to the world. Now, all I want is my partner back.”

Jayce and Viktor before season 1 act 2 had been a tango with society. Attempt to appease the council, avoid being expelled, dont let society find out about your morally dubious lab experiments, etc. etc. but with this line, Jayce has just said “Fuck society’s judgement. Fuck the rest of their opinions. You are my dream. You are the one I value the most. You are the one I want.”

In the last moments of the finale, Viktor finally, finally fucking learns that he didn’t need to change the world, or revolutionize piltover, or have his name to be embossed into history in order to feel fulfilled, but that maybe to be loved was enough.

Underrated JayVik moments/lines (16/∞)

"I suppose your legacy has been well-secured."

How is this a JayVik line? At first and even second glance it isn't, but bear with me for a moment.

What this line does do initially - seeing as it's said in response to Heimerdinger stating he never contemplates his own death - is tell us how important the idea of "legacy", of leaving something good behind to be remembered by, is to Viktor.

This is not a novel idea; I've seen multiple posts talking about the tragedy that is Viktor, in the end, leaving no legacy at all (if he's lucky, that is - otherwise there would only be the tale of that one time a metal maniac threatened to end all of humanity) because all of his accomplishments and good intentions vanish with him and Jayce.

And yes, that sure is one - very bleak - way to look at it.

However, fortunately that's not all there is to his story.

Because if you think about it for a moment - think about Viktor's motivations throughout the show -, there are two additional driving forces that contribute to this desire to leave a legacy, apart from his desire to help and his strong moral compass:

Loneliness and a damaged self-image.

People suffering from both often end up believing they will only ever be as good, as desirable, as lovable as the good they do for others. They wish to be remembered in death because they can't imagine feeling treasured in life.

I think for someone like Viktor - having placed all of his capacity to make a difference in the world on his "gifted mind" rather than his value as a person -, to be loved unconditionally for who he is may have been so grand an idea that changing the world honestly seemed more attainable to him.

Yet as I pointed out in part 4, even after ostensibly achieving what he thought he wanted in the commune ("an immaculate physique, community, the ability to help people and 'make the world a better place' - a perfect legacy"), from the way he speaks to Jayce and goes on to think and act after facing rejection by him, you absolutely get the sense that there is something vital missing from the picture here.

And it's scarcely even new information at that point, really, as we already learned this a lot earlier by how - when faced with the loss of both love and legacy - it wasn't the threat of losing legacy which Viktor's mind got stuck on:

"Jayce will understand."

It's almost as if... oh I don't know, as if Viktor had thought what he wanted was to bring magic to the world, but ultimately...

Oh.

"I thought I wanted us to give magic to the world... Now, all I want is my partner back."

Jayce, same as Viktor, had big dreams of making a difference in the world since childhood, which - while definitely also driven by a strong desire to help people - is proven here to be equally rooted in the very elementary human desire to connect with someone. For someone to understand him and share his dreams ("our HexTech dream").

He found, and was found by, that someone in Viktor. The fact that the very catalyst of Jayce's dreams - the mage - turns out to literally have been Viktor all along only serves to emphasise this point.

And here, at the end of everything they've endured, Jayce concludes that maybe, to love and to be loved in kind can be enough. Can be everything. Can be all he wants.

I like to believe that Viktor came to that same realisation about himself in those final moments of perfect connection they shared.

Part 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/11/12/13/14/15/16

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the curse of you and i .

BAD REPUTATION