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Avelera's Dreamling Fic Status Update:
(The rest are below the cut!)
Ah, I see! I kinda get your perspective a bit more even if I still disagree.
For me, the contrast between Jayce and Viktor’s interactions make sense. Jayce is from Piltover whilst Viktor is from Zaun, so he’s naturally more distrusting and suspicious of the council. I didn’t interpret his expressions as dislike towards Mel personally, but instead him being guarded and uncomfortable with a councillor getting involved.
And Viktor’s so angry at Mel’s proposal because it’s more personal for him when it comes to weaponising Hextech against his own people. These aren’t really ‘rare and unusual reactions’ nor do they really happen because of Jayce when they’re both more about Viktor and his ties to Zaun.
In the third scene, his glare is barely any different or vicious than when he glared at Jayce in season 1, I don’t believe he’s cosplaying her as they don’t really look alike, and he’s hardly even furious. The strongest piece of evidence for his dislike towards her would be the second scene, but even then, it’s a disagreement that would obviously make him angry in the moment and doesn’t mean that he dislikes her perpetually especially when they team up by the end of the season.
I think my confusion is where even if you were right about him disliking her, none of it really seems to have anything to do with Jayce which makes the idea that he’s jealous towards Mel and thinks she’s getting in the way of them because he wants Jayce all to himself feel a bit like unnecessarily pitting them against each other over a man/ship. I don’t at all think you’re intentionally doing it. I think that’s just how this specific interpretation comes across when he doesn’t actually seem to have any dislike or jealousy towards her in relation to Jayce. Removing Jayce from the equation, he’d still be uncomfortable and stand-offish when she catches and tries to help him, he’d still be mad at her proposal to weaponise Hextech, and he’d still be mad about her catching him off guard and attacking him.
Yeah it really comes down that they don’t have any positive interactions, so it’s hard to imagine them being friendly let alone friends. Distant, cordial, professional, polite, that’s about as close as they ever get on screen (at least, while both are conscious. Mel is lovely about Viktor while he’s in the Hexgoop and seems to genuinely care for his recovery.)
Personally, and I’ve talked about this elsewhere, I don’t see Viktor as overly political or that he makes being from Zaun core to how he interacts with other people. As in, I don’t think he’s ideological about “being a Zaunite” in the way Silco is. He never even calls it Zaun in S1 and only says it once in S2 in reference to it being a vision that never came to pass.
Viktor seems apolitical to me also because he helps Salo in the commune and before that he was Heimerdinger’s assistant so I don’t know if he’s automatically against Piltoverians or Councilors and we’ve never seen him express an “eat the rich” attitude towards wealth or privilege, only an earnest desire to help those without it, specifically in the Undercity.
And furthermore to the point of his attitude towards Mel being shaded by the a Piltover vs Zaun conflict , Mel isn’t from Piltover, she didn’t grow up with those biases. She’s an immigrant, arguably a political refugee from Noxus, albeit a privileged one. So I don’t personally think considerations of class, wealth, privilege, or point of origin like bigotry between Piltover and Zaun is actually shown to factor into Viktor’s assessment of people, except insofar as he defends the Undercity from Jayce’s bigoted moment and states that he felt ostracized in Piltover when he first arrived, (note, he was ostracized in the Undercity too for his disability) before he rose to a position of prestige as the assistant to the most powerful person in the city, then set that aside to be Jayce’s partner in Hextech, the most momentous technology to hit the city in a generation. I note this, because unlike some other assessments I’ve seen, I don’t personally see Mel’s reaction to Viktor as being based on class and privilege because Viktor has BEEN in a position of prestige pretty much all the times she’s met him, either as Heimerdinger’s assistant or the co-founder of Hextech, even if he’s not AS consequential as Jayce after Jayce becomes a Councilor.
Really, all I’m trying to answer for my own sake by analyzing their interactions is, “What does Viktor think of Mel?” And I admit, we have very little to go off of. When I say rare I mean their interactions are rare. Viktor also rarely interacts with anyone who isn’t Jayce or Heimerdinger, so it’s hard to set a baseline even of how he is around anyone who isn’t Jayce or Heimerdinger, in S1 at least when we can be certain we’re getting his uninfluenced personality.
So all I can look at is evidence from their canonical interactions. And to my eyes, their interactions are shaded by polite standoffishness at best and anger at worst. It’s hard to make a case for friendliness between them with what we have. Therefore, I can only conclude that the answer to, “What does Viktor think of Mel?” Is, “He has a neutral to negative opinion based on the tone of the interactions we see.” *shrug* and that’s all we’ve got. But the narrative doesn’t really come out and give us an answer so ultimately, it’s up to everyone’s own interpretation. This is just mine.
I was just wondering, and I apologise if I’ve missed it, but why do you think Viktor doesn’t like Mel? I don’t really understand the portrayal of Viktor as someone who hates Mel, is jealous of her, and believes she’s getting in between him and Jayce. They had one disagreement in season 1, which I don’t think means he perpetually dislikes her, especially when they ended up teaming up by the end of the season. He doesn’t seem to hate her, he seems just fine with her in general.
I don't think he has outright hatred of her as a person, as such, but most of his reactions to her when they meet directly are negative which if you're looking to sum up his opinion of her, it's all the evidence we have.
They have 3 face to face direct interactions and all 3 of them include Viktor glaring at Mel or glaring as a result of her interaction with Jayce. Their positive interactions while Viktor is conscious are 0.5/3, at best. Therefore, if pressed for evidence, the only kind I can find is that Viktor overall has negative reactions towards her.
For example:
Despite the fact, as the video is titled, Mel helps Jayce and Viktor escape exile and survive this little moment of near-capture, when Viktor sees Jayce's reaction to Mel, rather than being pleased they escaped the situation or good-natured about Jayce's little sigh of admiration, Viktor grimaces and looks exasperated, even upset.
The thing with Jayvik is that both of them think the other is too good for them. Viktor looks at Jayce and sees the Golden Boy, the Man of Progress, the most eligible bachelor in Piltover, the handsomest man to ever handsome, with a brilliant brain and a heart of gold to match.
Jayce looks at Viktor and sees a genius, his saviour, the one person who believed in him when no one else did. The epitome of Good Intentions even if life had tried to make sure he'd become bitter and fiendish.
They are both each other's adopted stray while thinking the other is way out of their league of legends
One of my favourite things is how mysterious they keep Viktor at the start of Arcane to Jayce, we get the first scene in Jayce's apartment where he deliberately doesn't give his name, the court scene where there's a deliberate shadow drawn over him and finally the next scene in Jayce's apartment, where he talks him down from the ledge and says he believes in him and his research all before finally revealing his name.
The whole hilarity about this is the reason it's written this way is to have Viktor's identity be a big reveal to League players as him being the Machine Herald but without that in universe it comes across as a huge romantic trope to me for someone suddenly coming into your life, sweeping you off your feet before you've even been properly introduced (Jayce's "I don't even know your name" quote has such unintentional Cinderella nods to me)
The teacher at my writing workshop was a miracle worker of an instructor and among the things she would often stress were the causal chain and the importance of pacing to make a tight story.
This is why she did not recommend time skips for beginner authors unless they really understood the risks. Not that it couldn't be done, but that many didn't recognize how much a time skip can mess up the pacing of your story.
Here are some risks of time skips:
1 ) Destroying your forward momentum: If you've spent a huge swathe of your story up to that point building the tension and urgency of the Big Thing that's going to happen in the future, having a time skip can stop that momentum dead. A time skip represents a reset of your story and is not advised if you're trying to ratchet up tension. A time skip, even of a few hours in a really tight and action-packed story with urgent pacing, can leave audiences scratching their heads wondering what happened during that missing time and why did the characters (and the author) take their foot off the gas?
2 ) Breaking your causal chain: In a tightly-written story, your cause-and-effect chains (aka 'causal chain') should be ironclad. Even if not everything is shown on the page, you, the author, should know how events and characters got to where they are at every moment, at both the large scale and the small scale. But when you throw in a time skip, suddenly you have a huge break in the tight line of your cause and effect. How did we get to where we are now? Why didn't we do something sooner? What has everyone been up, were they just twiddling their thumbs? It's all lost in the blank space and that can be unsatisfying for audiences if not handled well.
3 ) The need to backtrack to explain skipped events: This is in large part what killed the forward momentum of "A Song of Ice and Fire" for George RR Martin. Originally, ASOIAF was supposed to have a several year long time-skip, hence why the characters are so young at the beginning of the books. But then he realized, after publishing the earlier books, that he wanted to explore a lot of the events that would be skipped and the amount of flashbacks and backtracking required would be prohibitive. He decided to write through the timeskip instead, but that created a lot of deadspace and a less-tight story because not everything in those years really needed to be explored on a day to day level. (Frankly, I think he made a mistake by building this time skip into his outline, BUT that he was a skilled enough author that he should have trusted his instincts and kept the time skip, and just resigned himself to losing the chance to explore the events of those intervening years.)
If what happened during the missing time can't be quickly and elegantly summarized or referred back to, it might be better not to build a time skip into your story.
Raising more questions than you answer: How did we get here? What are we doing here? Why are characters in trouble that weren't before? Why didn't other characters intervene before things got so bad? Why didn't our heroes stop the new bad state of the world before it happened? Did everything the heroes did before to save the world not matter?
Many genre fiction stories will use a time skip after the Bad Guys have won a battle in the larger war in order to show the world plunged into a new darkness that the heroes have to face. For example, in The Force Awakens installment of the Star Wars franchise, the story was often criticized for having the bad guys of the Empire return without explaining why the previous generation of heroes were unable to stop this threat in the apparent 20-year time skip it took for them to return. This was quite unsatisfying for many audience members, to put it lightly and it seemed to invalidate much of the story the audience had been invested in up to this point, namely the ability for the good guys to stop the bad guys and save the world.
Just because you skip a period of time between one story and the next, doesn't mean you the author gets to skip over what happened during that time. If anything, you might need to work even harder to work out what happened in the missing space, in order to make your causal chain bridge the long span of that gap in a coherent and satisfying manner.
TL;DR Anyway, this is not to say you can't do time skips. Time skips can be great for purposefully wiping the slate clean, or purposefully resetting the story so a new evil can arise when your prior story has nowhere else to escalate too.
But a professional editor might caution against it if you don't really know what you're doing, and what can be lost when utilizing this particular plot device.
A lot of creators seem to think that a time skip will allow them to cover up sins and not force them to explain how a new world-state they wanted to explore came to be, but just as often it reveals the weaknesses of the story and demands more work of the author than simply following that time span linearly would have required.
My mom is a pharmacist and got 16 out of 30. SHE’S SO MAD.
HAH! I got 18. Barely. But I think one I got wrong by accident (like the screen was still loading when I pressed the answer but still, 18 isn’t bad?)
Ahhh!
Damn! I was about to be all, "Ahaha, it's so easy once you know the way names work in Quenya and Sindarin, certain letter combinations simply do not appear, blahblahblah..."
And then, motherfucker, I got four of them wrong??
I posted this originally on Twitter but I find the format there quite limiting so I thought I'd expand on my thoughts here. (For those unfamiliar with Jayce/Viktor-centric Arcane fic, a lot of fics have as a plot point that Jayce needs to be constantly out fundraising to make their Hextech dream a reality before the events of Arcane.)
Not to debunk some widely held fanon that my own fics have indulged in, but we actually have evidence that Jayce and Viktor did not have investors before 1.04 "Progress Day" (ie, during the time-skip) because Jayce was surprised by the notion when Mel brought it up.
Now, I’ve seen and WRITTEN plenty of fics where Jayce spends much of the time skip promoting Hextech to investors, so I know this fanon is very widespread, but actually Jayce seems surprised by the very notion when Mel brings up that she has found investors for Hextech. The idea is foreign to Jayce, implying Hextech to that point was a state-run effort, ie, Piltover-funded and they only ever needed to convince Heimerdinger/the Council.
(*Puts on my tech startup-founder hat*) What changes in 1.04 is that Mel is offering to bring in OUTSIDE interests who want to add their funds to Hextech’s development in exchange for a “piece of Hextech” that has until that point been 100% limited to government funding, ie Piltover, which makes sense. The Hexgates were a government effort and therefore only ever had one customer.
i always see people look at jayvik and go “omg he’s so hot you know all his classmates had crushes on him” LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER! WRONG!
literally everyone at the academy didn’t wanna talk to jayce because he constantly had that energy of “autistic guy who REALLY wants to tell you about his special interest” but because his special interest was illegal he would just never mention it and instead stand in the corner at parties and if you tried to talk to him he wouldn’t respond properly because he’s busy thinking of hextech, but again, illegal, so he just wouldn’t pay attention to you and if you asked why he would stare blankly at you and say “huh? oh sorry continue”
viktor is even WORSE at parties but his lack of bitches was more due to classism and not personality defects. despite that, when jayce and viktor got together everyone at the academy breathed a collective sigh of relief that their two least eligible bachelors were finally taken OFF the market for good, and only at the price of like 2 explosions
the line is covered in jellyfish (CHAPTER 6) ship: jayce/viktor summary: Jayce and Viktor survive the Arcane, a blizzard, and the silence between them. Slowly, they put themselves back together—piece by stubborn piece. word count: 60k (6/10) teaser: When Viktor finally asks why Jayce stayed behind inside the Anomaly with him, Jayce stares at him as though he’s supremely disappointed by the question— as if Viktor has betrayed his own brilliance by asking something so irredeemably stupid. “How could I not? We’re partners.”
Partners, Jayce calls them. Not for the first time, Viktor wonders: Partners in what? New Chapter - Read from the beginning
The amount of times I had to blink watching WoT S3 because I could simply not believe how many diverse and three dimensional female characters were present IN JUST ONE SHOT/ FRAME. Like, they were of different ages, ethnicities, sexualities. And none of them were cardboard cutouts because of these factores. And none of them were male gaze sexualized.
LIKE WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN ACTUALLY CHOSE WHICH FEMALE/ QUEER CHARACTER I LIKE BASED ON THEIR CHARACTER AND NOT JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE THE ONLY ONE IN THE SHOW??!?
I feel powerful and represented and happy and I never ever want to watch anything else anymore. More please!
