#;; JAYCE ;; isms.

[h-a-unted]

Make Jayce's wish come true...

[atissi]

well that sucked

[playedbetter]

"The Wicked's lives are lonely; Goodness knows; The Wicked cry alone; Nothing grows for the Wicked; They reap only what they've sown."

[chaosmultiverse]

which rage language are you - Jayce Talis

the full read

whoever pisses you off is in for a rant that exposes every single one of their deepest insecurities and issues. your rage gives you the clarity to hunt for weak spots in a person's mind. your brain works fast, firing off insults at a rapid-fire pace that terrifies everyone within a ten mile radius. this is usually followed by buckets of guilt.

Tagged By: @playedbetter

Tagging: Whoever wants to do this

[cushfuddled]

I don't know if I want to make a video about this because it's SO subjective obv but also like. I've NEVER felt compelled to write a "homophobic au" where I take a tolerant fantasy world and make it bigoted. As a kid I used to complain ALL THE GODDAMN TIME about how fantasy writers could imagine a world with talking dragons and magic powers but always drew the line at equal rights for gay people. And here I am PUTTING THE HOMOPHOBIA BACK into a fantasy world WITHOUT homophobia. And I was like.

do I feel so compelled to do this???

I knew I didn't NEED an excuse to insert homophobia into Arcane. Write whatever you want etc etc. But I was so curious, since my preference up 'til now has always been for casually queer fantasy worlds. And uh yeah honestly I think this pivot stems from like, a disconnect between my understanding of systemic bigotry as a queer disabled autistic woman and the way Arcane appears to pick and choose its world's politics from a salad bar.

In the real world, social issues are all tangled up in each other. Racism and classism and queerphobia and xenophobia and ableism and misogyny and misandry and ageism...all these 'isms bud off each other in a kind of swirling feedback loop, necessitating an intersectional approach to activism.

At the end of Arcane, no one broke the cycle of violence. The council chamber table is shaped like a gear, symbolizing its members' status as a "gear train" for all change within Piltover and Zaun. Jinx's bomb destroys that gear with the rest of the council room, only for an off-screen contractor to glue the pieces together between scenes. Piltover adds more "progressive" representatives to its gear train, but the underlying oligarchical mechanism remains. If the cycle of violence ever breaks, it will be because these new "teeth" convince the council to trade their power for democracy. If the elite don't give a real voice to the marginalized (I'm not sure one or two non-elected representatives makes the cut), the marginalized will take to more radical measures to be heard, and the conflict will start anew.

Arcane's hostile oligarchical world sculpted Viktor into the perfect time bomb. Its proud disgust for immigrants; addicts; the poor; the disabled, taught Viktor great shame and hate for who he was and where he came from. These lessons are at least cousins to Social Darwinism, fascism, and the politics of eugenics. Viktor aimed to "evolve" himself and his people into a "perfect" final form. He equated "progress" with the eradication of disability and sickness...then emotion.

Here Viktor branches off from the emotionalism central to fascist ideology, declaring passion ("Our emotions...rage, compassion, hate...") the "cause of [humanity's] greatest evil." Viktor describes emotions as Freudian "baser instincts," dirty and corrosive in their "self-corrupting" force.

To deserve love and admiration, Viktor believes he must become perfect. And for all he waxes poetic re: science and reason and the people of Zaun, Viktor still bases his definition of "perfection" on the ideals of his oppressors. It says a lot to me, that Viktor's idea of "progress" looks like the total eradication of sickness and disability; the rise of an obedient, docile, dogmatic collective; the dominance of Viktor's dome amidst the modest shelters of his followers; Viktor's sleek, agile, white and gold robots. Viktor's goals share a springboard with those of the Piltover elite. Both systems place undue value on power and purity. Both depend on a complaisant, malleable public, and both punish individualism. Piltover pretends to champion movers and shakers and out-of-the-box thinkers, immortalizing key figures like "Stanwick Padidly" and Jayce, but Jayce was only allowed back into the world of the wealthy once he proved

a. he had something to give

b. he was deemed suitably manipulable.

The moment Jayce tried to clamp down on Piltover's rampant corruption (aka wield his newfound powers in service of the less fortunate), Mel was there to reinforce the status quo. It was made very clear that Jayce's options were either to fall in line or lose his job—along with the chance to make any kind of positive change. Behind the curtain Jayce and Viktor were only puppets in service of the wealthy and powerful. Hextech didn't better the lives of marginalized people. It upgraded weapons for the police and generated new trade opportunities for employers (the economy would've undergone a hell of a shakeup with the sudden flush of consumer goods and access to overseas labor. From the state of Zaun and Piltover post-time skip, I assume the new trade routes shuffled money around but didn't make necessities like medicine or shelter any more attainable for your average citizen).

"You used me, and Viktor, for Hextech. You called us 'investments.'" "Two brilliant young inventors who shared a penchant for impossible surprises. Carrying magic from myth to machine. Rallying the hope and hearts of a nation. You were a wise investment."

Anyway. Why is Viktor so threatened by his ability to feel "affection?" Every other goal aligns with a kind of supercharged version of Piltover's oppressive value system, but this one...not so much.

I guess you could say "civil society" frowns on explosive emotions like rage and hate because they threaten the docility of a healthy status quo. Compassion poses a similar threat. It makes sense for Viktor to fixate so hard on emotions when they're the only weapon powerful enough to snap him out of his Hexcore power trip. But I'm more drawn to the reading where Viktor recognizes queerness within himself (cough his love for Jayce cough) as another barrier on the road to perfection (as measured by the standards of an oligarchical regime).

It seems to me that Viktor's goals are all symptoms of a society steeped in ableism, classism, xenophobia, and queerphobia—but only three of those conditions manifest in Arcane's worldbuilding.

I dunno, man. What resonates with my queer experience will totally contradict someone else's. But I guess I can't envision an oligarchical system like Piltover's—a system founded on classism, ableism, and a weaponized fear of the dirty "other"—would somehow evade racism and queerphobia. Like..."We're fine with black people and gay people. But god help you if you're poor or sick or disabled or from Zaun!" Bigotry is irrational and contradictory, so there are surely examples of this pick-and-choose phenomenon outside of Arcane. And good lord, I don't think anyone should feel "obligated" to fill their fantasy worlds with homophobia! But Arcane definitely sparked enough cognitive dissonance in me to make me crank out some "what if this world was also homophobic" fanfic.

(There's also League of Legends' legacy as an alt-right cesspool. Before I even knew what an MMO was, I'd been warned about a game called LoL, the supposed "worst of the worst" when it came to voice chat culture. Not sure how I feel about that context yet.)

[astral-herald]

on arcane and the sin of naivety

ripped this from a twitter rant i had:

another arcane observation bc i'm watching ep7: obv we have to prepare for some both side-isms come season 2, but i think a way that the writers can (and have) circumvented this problem is thru how/why arcane characters are punished: their naivety.

everybody (save for ambessa and silco, and maybe mel too) operates from their own place of well-intentioned ignorance. jayce is the most obv example of this, but the contrast between cait and ekko is even better, i think re: their meeting in ep7.

cait sincerely thinks that there can be healing between piltover/zaun bc of her inexperience, whereas ekko is sure it's impossible bc he's bore the brunt of the enforcers' abuse - he's the least naïve character in the whole show. how the writers dealt with this is Crucial.

if the both side-isms were implicit in the writers' ethos, we wouldn't see the enforcers stand idly by while marcus *almost* kills 2 innocents in cold blood. it goes Beyond the bad apple cop and into a full anti-establishment ethos. thru violence, cait's naivety is broken just like ekko had insisted! and THEN they have a showdown between the 2 most jaded/hurt characters, ekko and jinx, to contrast the cait/vi relationship that is still underscored by blind hope. jinx and ekko don't have that luxury, and it foreshadows vi's s2 alliance with piltover.

and this theme is everywhere, beyond ep7. jayce's entire arc hinges on his insistence that he is still naive, so he can't be blamed for his very consequential choices. viktor insists that knowledge for knowledge's sake still exists and that's why he's destroying himself. and mel falls back onto her childhood self to explain away her own penchant for manipulation/bad choices. she's fascinating though because she's the closest of the bunch to undoing her role in this dynamic when ambessa returns (which is why i hope sm that she isn't dead in s2).

also, this transition from ignorance to jaded understanding is done SO WELL via the timeskip, and that's why i'm fairly certain that they'll have another in ep4 of s2. it makes so much sense. there is a lot of painful learning to be done post missile attack.

TLDR: arcane punishes characters for their ignorance and naivety, and their unique realizations of this fact will lead to their undoing in season 2! i love this show so much.

[icouldntthinkofabetternamesook]

honestly Mel. I got interested once she started getting into her family drama and I look forward to seeing what they'll do with her next season but I think her character really goes to show Arcane's insistent both-sides-ism and playing extremely soft ball with PIltover. You cannot be the richest and most powerful person in Piltover without exploding and profiting off of the suffering of the underclass but we never actually see that explored with her character. I feel like the show really could have benefitted from more focus on truly heinous, destructive topsiders instead of keeping all of the moral weight on those trying to change a broken system. I really think that her role for the vast majority of the show, as Jayce's patron and corrupter, could have been done by Camille in a way that would be much healthier for the shows all over themes. As is, a lot of Mel is tied into Noxus and the broader boars Piltover is playing on and we can't really get payoff for that until next season. It leaves her disconnected from the majority of the actual conflict and other characters in a very distracting way

Okay I'm interested. Tell me what arcane character you dislike and why. Whether it's a hatred from the depths of your soul that genuinely makes your day worse to think of them or just not being able to see their appeal.

I have yet to dislike anyone to a major degree (or at all) so I wanna know pfff

[adveanture]

tswift tag drops:  jayce talis,  arcane: league of legends  ( netflix )  pt. 1

╰   ––––––– ✧   JAYCE  TALIS!      :      ic      ❨   like  we’re  made  of  starlight   ❩

╰   ––––––– ✧   JAYCE  TALIS!      :      replies      ❨   like  we’re  made  of  starlight   ❩

╰   ––––––– ✧   JAYCE  TALIS!      :      asks      ❨   like  we’re  made  of  starlight   ❩

╰   ––––––– ✧   JAYCE  TALIS!      :      starters      ❨   like  we’re  made  of  starlight   ❩

╰   ––––––– ✧   JAYCE  TALIS!      :      about      ❨   like  we’re  made  of  starlight   ❩

╰   ––––––– ✧   JAYCE  TALIS!      :      isms      ❨   like  we’re  made  of  starlight   ❩

╰   ––––––– ✧   JAYCE  TALIS!      :      visage      ❨   like  we’re  made  of  starlight   ❩

╰   ––––––– ✧   JAYCE  TALIS!      :      art      ❨   like  we’re  made  of  starlight   ❩

╰   ––––––– ✧   JAYCE  TALIS!      :      desires      ❨   like  we’re  made  of  starlight   ❩

[dailyroymustang-blog]

is there a dailyrizahawkeye blog? because holy shit i love your banter and want to join the shitshow

everyone is encouraged to join teh shitshow

[oodlyenough]

man if i was still 21 and trying to fight the entire internet the 'tales from the arcane tag' posts i could be making. whew

even though the takes themselves and the uh. isms at work are often different i think what arcane and borderlands fandom tends to have in common is this sort of refusal to engage with any kind of character complexity or any sort of more complex morality... borderlands doesn't take itself as seriously and everyone is kind of a caricature anyway, but you still get this attempt to sandpaper over character flaws to make them more defensible to like. or to handwave everyone as "morally gray" and therefore every action is equivalent to every other action and who's to say who the bad guy is anyway?? etc.

with arcane it seems like fandom views every character as either wholly Right or wholly Wrong, which none of them are. most fans talk about jayce like he's some kind of supervillain and the single most morally reprehensible person in the show for the crime of uh, not babysitting his white friend better, and then other fans defend him by arguing actually jayce is too stupid to have any agency or make any decisions of his own so therefore he's not responsible for any of his own actions. mel either gets flattened into some girlboss pacifist paragon of virtue and ethics or she's some sinister seductress puppetmaster orchestrating piltover's downfall. a vast majority of posts about viktor infantalize him to all hell and then a remaining handful are like 'when will viktor pay for his Crimes Against Humanity' ie not lying down and accepting death immediately. even the arguments about Good/Bad Sister Vi and Good/Bad Father Silco. these characters and relationships are so much more interesting taken as complicated and multifaceted and fanon is so determined to make them not that way

[elegiesforshiva]

jayce-isms replied to your photo “kukuku not so stoic now, are you, uchiha?”

thank u for this

haha glad to contribute some lovin to the fandom

[playedbetter]

"Just you and I defying gravity."

[chaosmultiverse]

Could you teach me to be ruthless? Could I be unfeeling too? Maybe someday when I'm older I'll be better off like you

I'm better off a stick, I'm better off a stone I'm better off a jerk, I'm better off alone I'm better not feeling stress or feeling bliss I won't feel much, at least I won't be feeling this

[rizah]

jayce-isms replied to your post “meiosis2 replied to your post “fma gaiden (translated)” ...”

nah u just get a booklet for seeing the movie! i got mine yesterday

godAMN do i wish i lived in fukuoka again

[baal-pit]

Finished Arcane! Some thoughts under the cut (spoilers for Act III obviously):

I’m not dissatisfied with this ending! I think that even though the story is obviously not finished, that’s a different thing from being incomplete.

I think Arcane is really interesting as A Tragedy. There’s this recurring theme of people’s personal obsessions and self-interests, like...underlying everything they do, good or bad. Maybe that’s just how having characters with clear motivations works lol, but I thought it was executed in a thought-provoking way.

I think that Jinx’s mental illness was handled in a kind of cringe way, but it’s mitigated by the fact that she does actually have semi-coherent motivations outside of “heehee hoohoo i’m the Joker.” That desire for approval or even just acceptance, that never really went away - I find Jinx a very relatable character, in a real way, in the way that her attempts (homicidal and cruel as they may be) to feel secure in her place in other peoples’ lives have backfired, leading her to the same ultimate conclusion that Silco did - that to survive in the face of events that annihilate your world and your understanding of yourself, you have to change, to become simultaneously something other than yourself and something that you were all along. You have to cut away whatever part of you the world was still capable of hurting. It makes sense to me, fundamentally, that what Jinx eventually settles on is that she is a destructive, nihilistic force, hurting everyone and everything around her with every move she makes - because being that doesn’t require anything from her that puts her at risk, emotionally. If everything you do hurts someone, then you have to stop caring that other people get hurt. It’s the only way to survive.

I do wonder how Jinx killing Caitlyn’s mom is going to complicate Caitlyn and Vi’s relationship lol

There were too many ways that Act III was a satisfying recapitulation of/response to Act I for me to enumerate without this post being a million words long. I loved how Vander and Silco’s arcs mirrored each other. I loved that Sevika acknowledged and validated Silco’s paternal relationship with Jinx even though she didn’t like or trust her, and that she chose to back Silco in the ways she did. I hope that we see more of her going forward.

Viktor getting his assistant killed and then covering it up was, I thought, really interesting (not wild about how many WoC this show has already killed for white manpain tho), especially in light of his subsequent convo with Jayce about “we were so invested in doing great, that we forgot to do good” which was obviously like a direct response to what he’d done. Asking Jayce to destroy the Hexcore, which he’s obviously going to punt on, was chef kiss emoji.

I’m really not wild about the “disability cure” narrative and how Viktor was punished by the narrative for not just laying down and accepting his death like the subhuman filth he is. That was ableist and gross, pure and simple. I get that it was making a point about how desperate people do desperate things, which is the broader thesis of Zaun as a whole, but still.

I thought that Vi’s response to Jayce killing that kid at the shimmer refinery was actually about the best thing she could have said in that situation. There was a cursory nod to like, lesser-of-two-evils-ism, but she was like “yeah fuck that kid, he was my enemy, i don’t give a shit that he’s fourteen, he’s not a human being. in fact, none of the hundreds of dead kids just like him were human beings either, to you up there in Piltover, so why are you acting so fucking shocked about this. this is the game we are playing. you don’t get to have it both ways.” It manages to like...simultaneously illustrate that there’s a bigger moral and systemic issue here, and make it clear that Vi’s motivations are first and foremost her personal vendetta against Silco and desire to regain control of Jinx. It also illustrates that Vi is a vigilante, a paramilitary killer pursuing her own agenda, that the state (Piltover) tacitly accepts because her violence advances their own agenda. I’m interested to see what the relationship between her and Caitlyn looks like going forwards.

Anyway, despite Act III being the weakest act imo, I still felt like this was a satisfactory conclusion and some really remarkable television. If future Runeterra storytelling is going to be of this calibre, then I’m excited.

[inumbris-blog]

jayce’s tag drop.