goodoldfashionednerd

[goodoldfashionednerd]

Winter, spring, summer and fall, four seasons, four loves

(i did this art for the zukka week of a couple of years ago but zukka still real and true 🤟🔥)

[goodoldfashionednerd]

I promise I didn't disappear, I just don't have any impulse control and started several at once again haha

[goodoldfashionednerd]

'I need you.'

[goodoldfashionednerd]

vik :)

[goodoldfashionednerd]

[CCAU] finally had time in my day for them again ❤️‍🩹

[goodoldfashionednerd]

was supposed to post this before feb ended oops lol

[goodoldfashionednerd]

Og post

Being a jayvik fan is a spectrum

All I can say to this is:

&

[goodoldfashionednerd]

Jayvik, the missing years 1\2

[goodoldfashionednerd]

do u guys also ever wonder why the two most popular transmasc headcanons in the arcane fandom (viktor and silco) are also two of the only remotely "non-masculine" characters??

[goodoldfashionednerd]

Oh this is fun! Thanks for the tag 🫶

Tagging @skyline-sunset-in-my-veins and @benjaminrussell

aahh thank you for the tag @soupforsoup !!!

Put your music library on shuffle, then list the first five songs that come up in a poll to let people vote for which one they like the most!

I am tagging @beyonderland , @suburbanrot , @tyba1t , @silv-paru , @haventacluewhatimdoing , @jam-the-hologram , and ofc anyone else who wants to participate!

[goodoldfashionednerd]

在所有時間線、所有可能性中，他進行實驗。

IDK My mind was as chaotic as Jayce's when I drew this comic.🤣🤣🤣🤣

[goodoldfashionednerd]

no one's mentioned how viktor has his cane here even though he's not even standing and it's jayce's hallucination/fantasy

jayce meant it when he said he loves viktor wholly, not excluding his disabilities, and that he thinks viktor's imperfections are beautiful and admirable

viktor's cane, and therefore his disability, is a part of him and not something even jayce's subconscious could cast aside as he was losing his mind. his high opinion and adoring perception of viktor has always included the parts of him that viktor himself views as flawed and shameful

[goodoldfashionednerd]

Viktor and Jayce Art

[goodoldfashionednerd]

A nice little detail I noticed tonight.

They bar the door with Viktor’s cane, so when the Enforcers break in, the cane breaks too.

And then the next thing we see is Viktor floating, with his amazed smile, his childlike wonder.

There’s this sweet, almost bittersweet implication that he’s transcended his body, just for a moment.

He won’t feel so free in his body again for years, until he drops his crutch and runs on the docks.

The ways that their partnership is imprinted on his body, and the stages of it reflected through his body—how he finds freedom and joy that first night; how he’s wasting away during the period when Jayce’s attention was elsewhere; how Jayce reconstructs him through love and it’s too much for him to take; how Jayce’s body comes to mirror his; how they’re both bodiless in the end, and free, like it’s taken them years of suffering to reach the purity of that first free moment again—will always be so moving to me.

Arcane is a story written on Viktor’s body.

[goodoldfashionednerd]

Our hextech dream….

[goodoldfashionednerd]

Considering he won his Hunger Games, I think he'd send things to the kids in the arena in a smart way like Haymitch. So then it's either the kids are smart enough to understand the clues, or they're not and they die. I think he'd have prepared them well by showing them how to survive without much physical strength before, though

Mod Submission After Receiving Flashback Version of Character

Keep Reading for Mentor Info

We previously polled Viktor as a tribute since he had been depicted as a teenager in a flashback. Click here to see the results for that poll!

If you would like to see your favorite character either as a tribute or as a mentor, please fill out this Google Form. Just keep in mind that for mentor polls, they will be posted every Saturday so chances are it could take a long time before they are posted.

Please also look at my pinned post for submission rules as well as a list of previously submitted characters prior to submitting your character.

Mentor Name: Viktor

Age: 25-33 (throughout both seasons)

Media: Arcane

Restrictions: Can only submit tools and weapons existing in the Hunger Games universe as sponsors to assigned tributes

[goodoldfashionednerd]

So apparently, Fortiche shared concept art where Jayce's Hexcorization in the cave would extend all the way to his face:

And this is really interesting to me from a narrative perspective, here's why:

Much of S2 Jayce's arc is incredibly... punitive. Like, he is really being punished step by step for everything he did wrong in S1. From Renni terrorizing and almost killing him for the death of her son, to Viktor leaving him "for another woman" (the Hexcore as represented by Sky) much like Jayce left him for politics as represented by Mel, there's really a sense of the narrative not only tearing Jayce down to his bare essentials (something that's very common for TV writing to do, by the way, it's very common that you want to see characters reduced down to who they are for their "long night of the soul" moment before they learn the lessons of what they really stand for before going into the climax armed with those lessons), but Jayce's time in the cave really goes even further than that and not only does S2 take away his political career, his Hextech ambitions, his state as someone able-bodied, much of his strength, and certain other gifts, it looks like in this draft they considered taking away his beauty too.

I think it would have been interesting either way if they had, but I want to dive into the narrative structure of action and punishment in Arcane, why Hexcorizing Jayce's face might have been a step too far and not really addressed a lesson he needed to learn, and my thoughts on punitive character arcs in general in Arcane (or lack thereof), specifically with regards to Jayce and Caitlyn.

I've mentioned elsewhere that I always found it interesting that much of the hate directed towards Jayce by the fans was for his perceived incompetence in difficult moments, rather than at how naturally gifted he seems to be at everything.

When I first watched S1 on my own, I thought Jayce was a bit unbearable because everything comes so easily to him (after Viktor becomes his partner and Hextech takes off as a result, that is). He is naturally beautiful, he's built like a god but doesn't appear to do any sort of exercise routine to maintain this other than working in the forge, he becomes the Man of Progress and rockstar of Piltover pretty much without trying, girls are literally sighing dreamily as he goes by.

He's also naturally a genius, from what we see, revolutionizing multiple industries with one invention. Even his rescue as a child is a literal miracle and it spurs him to create an invention that makes him a rockstar. When he enters politics, he immediately dominates, to the point where he's able to get a unanimous vote to overthrow the founder of the city within weeks of going there. Even in battle he's naturally gifted and naturally lucky during the raid of the Shimmer factory (up until the death of Renni's son), even though he has no prior skills as far as we know. He also wins the love of arguably the most beautiful woman in the series, again, seemingly without trying.

Then, S2 doesn't just take all of this away from him, it seems to go a step further into actually punishing Jayce for how easy and miraculous his life was in S1.

I'm of two minds about the Hexcorization reaching his face, but I have a hypothesis. I think it would have looked fucking rad but, I kinda get why they didn't do it:

Because Jayce's good looks are not something he can control, unlike the other things the narrative punishes him for.

Insofar as he can control his looks, he gives up on the clean-cut, immaculate "Golden Boy" image. Even in the idealized astral plane, he keeps most of the marks of his time in the pit like his hair and beard. I think it's because Jayce likes who he became down there. The clean-cut version of him was always the mask of him trying to please others, Jayce's appearance after he emerges from the cave is him shedding the opinions of others (contrast this with how Viktor idealizes himself in the astral plane, removing all marks of his illness. This isn't a criticism, just an interesting point of contrast).

So basically, my theory is Fortiche may have pulled back on Hexcorizing Jayce's face on the one hand to soften the visuals a bit, but secondly because it keeps the focus on punishing Jayce for things he chose to do, rather than things he doesn't really have control over.

But make no mistake, the narrative comes down hard on Jayce in S2, for every little thing the fans could and often did hate him for in S1. He pays for all of them, arguably in excess of what he maybe deserved, since as he says he didn't ask for any of this. But he did go along with it, and there's where the hammer of consequence (quite literally) comes down on him, tears away all his privileges, drags him down to literally the level of Viktor when he first left the undercity and says, "You have to do it all again but now focused on what really matters, and it's going to be ten times harder than it ever was."

This, in my opinion, is why Jayce is so popular coming out of S2. It is a hell of an arc, it's a hell of a redemption! You gave the man everything any man could want, then you took it all away, and then as his crowning moment of showing he has truly learned these lessons and made up for his mistakes, he makes possibly the most loving gesture possible, puts his weapons down, and reaches out to the person he loves most and literally sacrifices himself on the altar of his mistakes to make things right and show Viktor he is loved, and to protect Viktor from the horrifically lonely fate of his future self. It doesn't get any more noble, loving, or self-sacrificing than that.

Because more than we like to see a character punished we like to see them learn from their mistakes and come back better. Jayce's S2 nobility is earned, perhaps even to excess, no one can question whether he suffered enough to make up for what he did in S1 but even the most uncharitable read of him in S1, his biggest hater, would have to agree his time spent starving to death in agony, alone in that cave for months, has got to be just about the worst punishment a human can face and live.

Which is one reason I must add that I find it a little puzzling that Arcane's creators didn't predict the hate that Caitlyn would get in S2.

Keep in mind, because this is very important, the Arcane creators did not make S2 in response to fan reactions to S1. S2 was already in production and the script was locked in and done before anyone outside their organizations saw S1. So nothing that happens in S2 is as a result of fan response.

But, the creators did understand that Jayce was going to need to suffer narrative punishment for what he did in S1 in order to be redeemed, whether they predicted how hated he would be after S1, they did predict that redemption would be necessary. And boy-howdy, did they give him a hell of a redemption arc!

But Caitlyn's S2 actions are almost in lock-step similar to Jayce's S1 actions, being manipulated (by a Medarda!) into accepting power, but maybe not having a choice in the matter, but still maybe expanding that power on their own because it is useful in its own right. Caitlyn also makes terrible mistakes. A child doesn't die but people in the undercity do get hurt during her rage-fuled raids, even if most of them are mob bosses and their goons. The narrative asks, does that make it right? Caitlyn like Jayce hurts the person closest to her who is from the undercity and uses bigoted language against the people of the undercity to Vi's face in much the same way that Jayce did to Viktor on the bridge, though in Jayce's defense, he apologized immediately after.

So, seeing how hated Jayce was coming out of S1, to the point where there's still barely any merchandise of him, I'm shaking my head rather ruefully that there was so much merch made for Caitlyn this time around. And I get it! Caitlyn and Vi were very popular after S1, they are intentionally THE main romance of the show and it was a very popular romance coming out of the innocence of their meet cute in S1.

But it's a romance that dearly needed a longer third act if you wanted Caitlyn to be as embraced after her mistakes as Jayce was after making up for his all through S2. You need to give her as long or at least as in-depth of a redemption act with as much suffering and acknowledgment of her mistakes if you want Vi and Caitlyn at the end to get celebrated the way Jayce making it up to Viktor is, because as much as I understand the choice to focus on pacing instead of exposition, and I do think Caitlyn's apology and realization of her mistakes are there on the page more than people complain, I do also agree that it is a bit "blink and you'll miss it" even if it's there. Jayce got a whole episode of being thrown into the Torment Nexus for his mistakes, real or imagined, if you didn't like him or his choices, you definitely got the sadistic glee of watching life kick the stuffing out of him for what he did in S1.

But besides her fight with Ambessa, which was a result of a confluence of many events in the story, not just Caitlyn's mistakes, Caitlyn doesn't really suffer much for the mistakes she made to those she loves. Her losing an eye to Ambessa didn't happen because she said bigoted things to Vi or became a short-term puppet dictator of Piltover. It was a result of Ambessa's actions and maneuvering more than it was a result of Caitlyn's personal mistakes to her loved ones.

In contrast, Jayce's time in the pit gave him the chance to reflect on and suffer for the the mistakes he made that led to the Anomaly that led to him being down in this pit, and what he would do to make it up to his loved ones like Viktor when he returned. Caitlyn never got a moment like that and from what I'm seeing of the vitriol directed towards her, so similar to what Jayce got after S1, it seems like she really needed it if we were going to like her to the same extent again, in a way uncomplicated by lingering questions about whether she ever truly learned the lessons her character needed to learn to grow as a person.

And it's just funny to me that a narrative that was so aware that this whole huge punishment arc was needed to rehabilitate Jayce wasn't aware that we'd need one for Caitlyn too, at least if they're going to move all that merch they made for her (please give us Jayce merch, Riot, I'm begging).