#Mel does what she wants

[recent-rose]

yknowwww there is something... deeply uncomfortable about the way mel never speaks directly to viktor in the 'build hextech weapons' scene. she really only speaks to jayce. plenty of people have pointed this out already but like the one scene they actually share a meaningful interaction and she treats him like he's beneath her. all this after jayce has emphasized how important viktor is, that hextech is theirs, together. she unequivocally ices him out, there's no other way to interpret this scene. the way it's shot too - from viktor's perspective, looking up at her, as though to reinforce the same belief in him. like he doesn't even bother expecting respect from her - or anyone from the upper echelon of piltover. he's fully accustomed to being dehumanized by everyone around him at this point. sometimes even by jayce, despite the trust they clearly have in each other.

then of course after this scene is viktor experimenting on himself. it's pretty clear that he has internalized his own dehumanization. crazy.

[herblinz]

The Golden Child

I know Mel isn’t everyone and their cat’s favorite, but I came in disliking her to becoming a support of her beautiful arc. There’s-always-another-way Mel. Looking forward to more of her from other parts of Runeterra 💛

Under the cut for painting process. 2.8 hour, oil painting, minimum smudging.

Long version of my drawing process is up on my Patreon. Support an artist by joining my moot for behind-the-scene peeks, art talks, tips, cat pics, commission discounts and morrr :3

You can also get a print from my Inprnt shop.

[sweatandwoe]

i wanna do a whole post about Mel and Amebessa but I have zero energy so I'm just gonna say that they ruined their relationship by making it so that Ambessa only ever wanted Mel as a weapon and that Ambessa would not need a magic baby to fight magic users because she already had those rune tablets and Noxus itself has fought Ionia, land of many magic users, for YEARS

it really feels like they completely retconned their original relationship by making Kino the heart when Ambessa was saying this shit in S1 (timestamped)

[tryingonametaphor]

just watched this video on why the women of arcane feel like well rounded characters and i just kept going 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

then i thought about mike’s monologue and how some people genuinely believe that was good writing for el’s arc

like, imagine elora dying and mel needing to hear jayce tell her that he loves her for her to help her friend. imagine thinking that’s a well written character arc for a woman.

if the entire nina plot was 1 step forward, that monolgue was 2 steps back for el’s character. in that moment, her love for her best friend who was dying in front of her should’ve always been enough. period.

this is why i’ll never accept that monologue as a solution to mlvn’s relationship problems. it was oddly placed, badly executed, and framed suspiciously. plus will had to push mike to do it as if all of this wasn’t insulting enough to el’s growth.

i’ll genuinely be disappointed with season 5 if they try to convince me that mike saying ily is what el needed to save max. i trust the writers to not do that because they’ve shown us that the women in ST don’t need men to save them. certainly not with a big cheesy love monologue.

el just has the misfortune of being in a loveless relationship that the audience seems to think is exactly what she deserves.

[chemzee]

So uh. MelDan ammirite? This (kinda) blew up on Insta and other socmed I use so ig I'mma upload this here too lol

It started as a crackship (and it's still is, I kinda like to jokingly them imagine them pretending to like each other but actually wanting to skin each other alive, a little ooc for both of them, but it's mostly just for fun) but rn I'm exploring the potential ""relationship"" through a more angsty lense.

No text version below

[typheus]

Anyways. Arcane season 1 was a solid 7/10 couldve used 4 eps per act instead to really tell the story more but the writers were really dedicated to the rule of 3s.

Season 2 is like. 4/10 tho. WAY too dedicated to the rule of 3s. Added a bunch of side characters that did nothing n took up way too much time. Tried to dive into all the characters stories all at once while also changing the story itself to not focus on the class disparity and instead just swept that shit under the rug :/

Also used up so much time for music videos that wasted time cause they just ended up showing the situations even better after anyways.

Also I liked the episode with ekko n powder but good god. You wasted an entire episode. On an au. When you were already running out of time.

I know they said they're doing other shows after this but that's not really an excuse to completely change characters personalities and butcher a bunch of the storylines :/

[woolly-aph1d]

Soon enough act 2 is gonna be out and i am prepared

[j12at3]

LOVED arcane. But did anyone else think the ending felt a little rushed/unfinished? Curious what people thought about it

[daisyachain]

I wonder what the thought process was behind introducing Mel into the Jayce-Viktor subplot specifically. The game lore has them as a bread-and-butter flip of the superhero/supervillain dynamic where the supervillain is noble and the superhero is a jerk. Also hewing to the superhero/supervillain tropes, they’re close friends before they have an explosive blowup that turns them into devoted rivals. Classic, well-trodden, tropey set of mutually obsessed characters who read like X and Magneto (films) or Spider-Man and Green Goblin (Raimi films) or Wolverine and Sabretooth or Obi-Wan and Anakin or any one of approximately five billion matched sets.

While the superhero/supervillain sets have one more prominent character (the hero), Jayce and Viktor are designed to be equal parts of it in a trite well-neither-one-is-actually-good storyline. They’re specifically created to be equal and opposite. Mel is inserted right into the subplot of both of that duo. More on that later.

Now, Jinx and Vi are also a matched set of stories. From game lore, Vi is tied to Caitlyn’s lore. Arguably Sevika, Isha, Vander, Silco are inserted between them in much the same way. From just the basic source material, Viktor technically has Blitzcrank as his other major lore connection. Plus it’s League. Treating the source material with reverence…probs not a good idea for writing a narrative. Arcane has to sand down the really rough-sketched archetypes into something resembling a proper story.

The web of connections between the Zaun and Piltover characters does get fleshed out. Jayce gets connected to Caitlyn as her mentor-figure and (much more loosely) Vi as a bash bro. Viktor gets Sky as an OC story partner. Mel should be just another node in the spreading network that Arcane builds between the existing lore points.

What stands out is that she doesn’t have clear ties to the existing lore Jayce lab—as a new MC/Champion, it does make some sense to have her be her own central node rather than an accessory. She spends most of her time with new characters or with Jayce. In s1, mostly Jayce, in s2, mostly herself. Her alliance with Caitlyn starts up pretty abruptly at the 11th hour. Mel feels disconnected from the cast in a way that can highlight her as a sort of third party third way political leader, but also one that puts a lot of pressure on her relationship with Jayce to express and carry her character

The cracks become clearer when you refer to her mom. Ambessa’s in the same spot as a new champion, her only proper connection is to her OC daughter, and she integrates much more seamlessly into the show for better or for worse. Mel’s relationships with her spy, her assistant, Heimerdinger even Viktor show off Mel’s professional side, which tells us precious little about her under that surface. Jayce and Ambessa are the ones around which she reveals a little more. Ambessa, on the other hand, lives out loud and has a pretty emotionally intense connection with daughter (domineering mom), her henchman (possibly more…?), and Caitlyn (substitute evil daughter). Singed and Viktor are also in her posse, but we won’t count them as their dynamics with her aren’t illuminating.

Mel is a pivotal character in Arcane, more plot-critical than the nominal main (Vi) with far more screentime than the fan favourite (Ekko), and one of the few mains who doesn’t do a stint as a villain (alongside Vi and Jayce). Her role in the plot is to push Jayce’s research to the point where his magic becomes practicable (s1), then to take responsibility for her mother’s misdeeds (s2). She and Jayce arguably form the Big Good alliance to Ambessa and Viktor’s Big Bad; while not the emotional core of the show, those four get the last word in on the plot while the Vi-Jinx subplot gets foundered upon the rocks of ‘i forgor.’ (The character stuff for Vi and Jinx remains strong; they just cease to have any impact on the things that happen in the story). Mel is also The Mage; more than the hextech, she embodies the discovery that the show is supposed to be about.

So: Mel is the one true mage character in a series called Arcane and the one main character that Arcane needed to set up within its own runtime. The only connection she is given to the remaining world is via a relationship with Jayce, a character locked in binary orbit around one (1) single other character in the source material. It does make sense to have Mel introduced meddling in magic, pushing forward the research that will ultimately clue her into her own powers.

It does feel awkward to have her interactions be with a character who textually canonically is always thinking about something else. Mel is the one who gives Jayce the ideas that escape him—the mettle to reach beyond his caution, the sway and savvy to enter politics—because they’re living in two completely different worlds. The substance of their connection isn’t bonding over any shared interest in the process of discovery (Mel clearly holds her own as an arcanist as we see from her diagrams in the mind prison, but it’s not on screen) or in games of words/meanings/people (THE key character trait for Jayce is him being the most tone deaf man in the world). They are interested in magic, but the substance of their interactions is them each saying things at each other without communicating. The most intense moments in their relationship are mediated, triggered, or broken by Viktor of all people [trombone noises]. Who Mel doesn’t know from Adam.

In other words, Mel doesn’t have many characters to bounce off of to show different parts of her personality. The intent was to have her come off as cold in public with a soft side for Jayce, but we see so much of her soft side that she comes off as a straightforward nice rich girl coming out of her shell. To my memory, she doesn’t spend any time having much proper dialogue with Caitlyn (the nice rich girl gone cold to her cold rich girl gone nice), Viktor (literally always there), or even Silco (a fellow icy diplomat with a soft spot). While Jayce is around, she’s his girlfriend, which doesn’t work because Jayce is permanently, unilaterally, and plot-endingly tied to a different character to the exclusion of all else, carried from og lore into the tv show.

When Jayce isn’t around, her interactions with her spy do something to give her back her personality of a ruthlessly efficient operator. However, she gets locked in Character Development prison for half of s2 and fights her way out by…force of personality. Her magic use isn’t tied to the empathy that’s supposedly the source, and we don’t see her analyze it or take it to bits as fellow scientist Viktor does. As someone else pointed out, she loses the cunning part of her that makes her Mel and becomes just a white mage for the entire last quarter until she pulls her Black Rose double cross. Which is cool.

All that is to say in a very disjointed way: Mel has a lot riding on her, but it doesn’t come together. Jayce takes up a lot of her screentime for a relationship ultimately written to end, and not just to end, but to be preceded consumed and eclipsed by Jayce’s existing lore. She’s isolated by a cast of OCs without making the logical connections to the other main characters, and she doesn’t even have a distinct relationship written for a man she’s spent years with in the trenches (Viktor). She lacks a showy personality in a series full of characters designed to be as over-the-top hammy as possible, she lacks stakes in the pre-existing characters’ fight, and her ultimate power-up does not tap into her most distinct traits (thinking outside the box). She does get one crowning moment, but I was waiting a very long time for her to get out of them chains.

[heyitslapis]

I wonder if Abby even realizes that her penance for what she did to Joel was to BECOME Joel.

[hauntingblue]

Last arcane episode ever..... here we fucking go....

[witchofthemidlands]

tales of the tardis is enough for me, it is, it really is, after all those years, jamie & zoe finally got their memories back & if that's the last we see of jamie mccrimmon that was fantastic, it was more than enough, there is & now will always be a conclusion

but

if i had to bring any classic who companion back to new (new?) who it would be jamie, it would always be jamie because the idea of jamie meeting a modern doctor sends me just a tad feral, just a a little bit balls to the wall feral.

[gilfrespecter]

Listening to coinstar by the growlers and thinking about mel so hard I get nauseous

Ridiculous stream of conscious in the tags apologies but not really

[musical-chick-13]

unpopular opinion: I loved Eurus Holmes. She made s4 so much better and she had great chemistry with Sherlock. I feel like people only dislike her due to the old “a woman wrote by Moffay?? must hate!”

BIG AGREE!!

I mean, this is basically the Problematic Women Blog, so this comes as no surprise to anyone, probably, but as many issues as I had with season 4 (one of which, I will admit, was the way they hand-waved how she could, for all intents and purposes, mind control people), I greatly enjoyed watching her. She was smart, she was terrifying, and she was incredibly vulnerable too! All of which is a hard balance to strike well, but I think it really worked here.

The reveal of her identity-and that she was the woman John had been texting-was wonderfully done, and the scene where Sherlock hugs her while she's having her breakdown legitimately had me in tears the first time I saw it. She added a lot to the Holmes family dynamic, and Siân Brooke did a fantastic job of not making Eurus a direct clone of either of her brothers.

One of my biggest pet peeves is how people immediately dismiss (or actively, vitriolically spew hatred at) any woman in a Steven Moffat property just for the sake of talking about how much they hate Steven Moffat. Which it's fine if you hate him or think he's a terrible writer. But I think it's reductive and unhelpful to automatically write off every single female character in his shows and to refuse to consider them on even the slightest deeper level.

send me controversial or unpopular opinions and I'll tell you if I agree or disagree

[relicsongmel]

You know, I've held for a long time the belief that canon!Denise eventually surpasses Sylvia and is just a notch above her in terms of battle prowess despite being younger. But the more I think about it the more I realize Paldea!Denise blows Sylvia out of the WATER with how strong she is to the point it's not even a contest

[highlifeboat]

Lil Swap!Mecassa smoochin