#the way ekko literally built a time machine to get back to jinx

[afterthelambs]

All this money can't buy me a time machine, can't replace you with a million rings

I should have told you what you meant to me 'cause now i pay the price

[electronicdelusionstarlight]

That's actually the point of Ekko's Backstory.

He's the smartest human in the world (Literally, there is a time mage at the edge of creation who saw every timeline and he frequently visits the kid for tea and puns and counsel and grandpa jokes) yet the condition he found himself in makes inventing and researching way more difficult than it would have been had be been born in Pilltover. The Class System of the Twin Cities frustrates creation, for every day a mind as bright as Jayce Talis is born in Zaun, only to die at sixteen of starvation, air poisoning, or police brutality.

That's the tragedy of the situation, a situation not helped by the not existent upward mobility in the Twin Cities enforced by Clan Ferros (Mel's business partners).

That's not even just him too, many Zaunite characters deal with this reality. Viktor is in Pilltover now, but he's an assistant, first to Heimer than to Jayce, his merits are not recognized or stolen by far less competent Pilltovan professors like when he designed Blitzcrank (A autonomous AI Robot for rescue operations in Zaun) because THEY are from Pilltover and he isn't, his body is sick for years of air poisoning and he's forced to take dangerous drugs to medicate, which then leads to the whole Glorious Evolution thing.

One of Ekko's friends from the card game? She invented a cloning machine that creates perfect replicas of anything, she is forced to only use it to mass produce Elnuks to be slaughtered for food. One of his friends in the short stories managed to train several mutated animals for exploration, he dies during a violent Riot. Professor Von Yipp manages to get into the Pilltover Academy after fighting tooth and nail and his research on Souls is never taken seriously with little to no funding until he's forced to experiment on himself and get stuck into his cat's body.

(The last one is actually a great character believe it or not).

There is a story about a Zaunite Chem Baron falling in love with a Pilltovan Heiress. The second they try to marry Camille, a character that didn't show up in Arcane that is literally a Android Cop hired by the Pilltovan Estaishment to murder eventual attempts at social climbing from Zaun into Pilltover, literally up and murders the groom in front of a distraught bride.

That's the point, the cruelty of a system built on the backs of the less fortunate, literally in the case of Pilltover, a city elevated and built upon the radioactive ruins of Zaun, uncaring of who still lived there. It's supposed to be a tragedy, we're supposed to understand that, under different circumstances, Jinx and Ekko would have saved the world many times over, and without the starting line as they had, people like Jayce wouldn't have ever left the mines they ended up stuck in.

So no ones gonna talk about how if jinx was given different circumstances she would have been a hex tech prodigy? She figured out how that shit worked all on her own from just a vague understanding of jayce’s notes. The girl built an elaborate alarm system, bombs, and was repairing all the arcade equipment at like 10-12 years of age. She would have been in a lab somewhere.