#and viktor talked with his robot voice about evolution

[takenbtwind]

I liked Arcane a lot I really did but I'm still going to be meme-y about it

[mettywiththenotes]

Rewatching the last ep and got to the part where Viktor says "Do you see? The sublime intersection of order and chaos.", referring to the robots and situation around them, but given the fact that this is the part the viewer and/or Jayce realizes this is exactly where future Jayce was transformed, it reminded me of the beginning of s2e6

In the beginning of that episode, Viktor has just witnessed Jayce's violence through Salo and talks about "another will at work within him", that he heard a voice described as "ancient" and goes on to say that whatever is going on with Jayce is repeating itself while also destroying itself. Order and chaos, a complexity referenced again in that moment in the last episode

So what I'm sorta getting from that, given what we know now, is that our Viktor is talking about his older self repeating the chain of events over and over again and at the same time trying to save Jayce and the world, the goal being to ultimately destroy that future which he doomed, without actually knowing it is his older self. "Self replicating and self annihilating."

Also the beginning of s2e6 literally starts with the end of it, as if to symbolize a repeating cycle of sorts. Not that Jayce coming to kill Viktor early has happened before in another timeline per se, but maybe to show that no matter what, even when a break in the cycle is attempted, as Viktor has said before, "the glorious evolution is destined"

[heraldofzaun]

Hi. We’re doing this again. I’ve already spoken a little bit (well, a great bit) about how old lore Viktor wasn’t a stereotypical evil villain, but I keep seeing this interesting trend crop up - especially in the comments of analyses on Viktor’s character - and so I’m going to write about it. That trend is the fact that people seem completely and utterly convinced that only old Viktor “augmented without consent” or “didn’t respect free will” or similar mad-scientist-adjacent claims. This isn't true. The inverse is true, actually.

What follows is the entirety of Viktor’s old lore (I’m using the first - the second variant is the one that snips out his going to the Institute of War, I’m not trying to pull a trick on you or anything), his lines upon release (which are still technically canonical, even if many people believe them to be outdated - whether that is due to Riot still believing that they’re accurate to his character or, more likely, Riot not caring to replace them, I don’t know), and the accompanying blurb to his release comic. I am also including Jayce’s second lore, the one which Riot wrote after Viktor fans pointed out that Jayce’s original lore was contradictory to Viktor’s character. (Which is mentioned in the post I linked above. TL;DR: Viktor fans made such a fuss that Jayce’s lore got changed to paint Viktor as less of a villain, which again points to the fact that old Viktor wasn’t necessarily perceived as villainous by his fans. Of course, fan perceptions can be wrong - but canon was changed, so...)

This screenshot is missing his pick/ban quotes (“Join the Glorious Evolution.”/”Inferior constructs.” - ban quotes were added after his release, so they recycled one of his attack lines) and the quotes for Chaos Storm (“Obliterate!”/”Consume!”/”True power!”/”Behold!”). This is because it didn’t fit on my computer screen nicely.

This was written alongside Viktor’s teaser comic. (I personally really like the teaser comic, even though I’m concerned about Viktor cutting a hole in his laboratory wall.) It is, technically, non-canon material as it was posted on the now-defunct forums rather than anywhere on the client, but as we’ve seen a recent trend of Rioters Word-of-God’ing facts about canon, I may as well include it. There may be more Word-of-God confirmations on those forums as well, but the backup site that they’re currently hosted on doesn’t allow for searches as the original site didn’t either. You can find this on the “Development” tab of Viktor’s wiki page, if you’re curious.

Is there anything in here, besides “Submit to my designs.” and a few other of his voice lines, which should be taken with the context that they were a) written in 2011 and are thus not the highest examples of character-focused writing and b) written under the context of these being things he is saying to opponents on a battlefield, that says “Viktor augments people who are unwilling”? I don’t see it. He isn’t an angel, sure, because he wrecks Jayce’s lab after the man doesn’t want to work with him, but… He’s mostly alright, at least when it comes to the claims I’m investigating. (Also, note that his acolytes are not specified as being under his control or anything like that - they very well may just be people he’s helped, who don’t want a strange man smashing up the lab they were helped in.)

An interesting side-note: Jayce’s first lore does seem to imply that Viktor murdered people, as he “staged a deadly raid on Jayce’s laboratory”. This is concerning. There’s still somewhat of that implication in the second lore, considering the whole “incinerating the lab’s meager security force” line, but I’ve never seen anyone in fandom over the years use that as evidence for Viktor being a murderer, which is interesting. There’s actual textual evidence you can point to to say that Viktor’s a morally awful dude, and yet no one pointed to it when it was canon...I’ve never seen it cited in any character analyses for Viktor, nor have I ever seen anyone make the point that it’s people that Viktor’s incinerating. Food for thought, I guess. Anyways, my personal take is this: it’s security systems, not people. It doesn’t quite make sense, in-universe, for Viktor to murder a bunch of redshirt security guards but only blast Jayce aside - and leave him with no lasting injuries, obviously. Out-of-universe, you can say that it’s because Jayce is a champion, but still… It really doesn’t fit. Of course, I’m an old lore Viktor fan and this is entirely me trying to justify that he’s not a bad guy, so you can definitely take my words as biased. As we’ll see later, even if you take this as proof that old Viktor’s a killer, it doesn’t mean new Viktor is morally spotless.

Also, if you speak a language other than English and want to kill time, feel free to write in with what Jayce’s old lore says he did if you can find a translation of it. (If you go to the League wiki you can find other language versions of it, and from there you can poke around on Jayce’s page to see if it even has his older lore at all.) The Polish version apparently doesn’t imply people, but the Russian version uses “guards”... or so I think, my knowledge of Russian is pretty small so it was me and Wiktionary against the world. I think that League lore translations, especially from 2011, aren’t exactly the best material for textual evidence, but it’s an interesting curiosity. (I’m genuinely fascinated on how this was never a point of argument, and also to the fact that it was made much more ambiguous in Jayce’s post-outcry lore… but not removed.)

Anyways. Of course, you can take his lines and general character to a logical endpoint and say that it is implied that he doesn’t care much about whether or not people consent to the Glorious Evolution, but at that point you’re arguing interpretation and need to say as such. The cases I’ve seen in which people say that old lore Viktor was lopping people’s limbs off without consent or what-have-you just say that, without citing any textual evidence or saying that it is possibly implied by his character and lines. It’s pretty hard to take those claims seriously when there’s much more textual evidence that current-canon Viktor doesn’t seem too keen on respecting autonomy. Let’s begin with his own lore, which is written to favor his perspective.

Please keep in mind that this Viktor got his start selling automative technology to businesses in Zaun. The Zaun that is full of corrupt chem-barons. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he only sold to good businesses. (Also, fascinating that a common complaint about old Viktor is that his status as a pioneer of his field is that he’s “unrealistically accomplished”, and that other people would have figured out the same technology - just as it seems to be the case in current lore, with the Church of the Glorious Evolved existing pre-Viktor (except that it probably didn’t at the time of this lore’s release, as there’s a paragraph later on in his lore that talks about a “quasi-religious cult” that is unnamed but… Who else would it be?) and augmentations being common on the NPCs on the Universe page. Yet someone who’s 19 having their inventions be commonly used in Zaun long enough for the term eventually to be used in reference to the next stage of their life is perfectly acceptable. Anyways…)

What we see from this is clear: even if there is a “good” reason to control the divers, there is no mention of them consenting to the procedure. Considering the previous quotation, Viktor seems to deal more with the bosses than the workers and doesn’t seem to consider the potential job-removing impacts of his work (how many people lost jobs due to being rendered obsolete?), which doesn’t bode well for him caring much about what the workers think. But of course, this aside about dealing with bosses is all interpretation, so you can ignore it if you’d like. There still is, however, actual, textual evidence that new Viktor does not care about consent if he believes his idea is what’s best for you.

Ignoring the writer misusing the term “psychotics” - par for the course in fiction unfortunately - here’s Viktor kidnapping people “for their own good”. Nothing is said in his lore if he’s contracted to do this, or if he’s just Zaun’s version of a Good Samaritan out and about chloroforming people. While I’m not saying that the moral choice is to not intervene, he is drugging people here and performing brain surgery on them. Please note the “in a manner of speaking”. What does that mean? Is it in reference to them having permanent brain damage? Or is it in reference to him being all well-and-ready to transfer their bodies into robots that presumably weren’t designed for them? (Speaking of, if Viktor can transfer the consciousnesses - or at least brains - of people… why is he still in a fleshy mortal body? Yes, it would require a VU to update him to be fully robotic, but none of his written media seems to imply that he’s on his way. His color story has him integrating technology directly into his arm, for example. Why aren’t you getting into the robot, Viktor?)

Anyways, two options here: either the automatons had enough of their former programming to react to Viktor giving a kill command, or the consciousnesses of the people Viktor is “saving” are in these robots and are under his sway enough to commit murder. Either is bad (and negates any moral superiority over old Viktor’s maybe-implied-canonical-murder), but the second is horrifying. And, obviously, non-consensual. (Because the damage is reversing, I don’t believe there’s room for a justification of the second option in which these people are still violent and dangerous.)

Anyways, last bit. It’s pretty bad when your ethics are panned in Zaun, the nation host to rampart corruption and also people like Singed. Let’s now move on to his color story, which is what a lot of fans point to as evidence for new Viktor having a heart or a moral compass.

Yay! Moral win: your cyborg isn’t cutting off the head of a child without his consent. (Also, again, is this proof that Viktor can put brains or consciousnesses in robot bodies? Admittedly, he might be joking since this Viktor is a little softer than he is in his biography.)

Moral… win… your cyborg is augmenting a child… Anyways, joking aside, this is unethical. How’s Naph supposed to consent to something like this? I know that we can’t expect fictional characters in a fantasy setting to abide by modern ethical standards, but I think we can critique them from an out-of-universe context. This is bad. Viktor gives very little context, could very well be lying (he isn’t, hopefully), and sends the kid off with his version of a pat on the back and tells him to come back if he wants more. (The “Oh yes” is also… creepy.) A kid’s decision-making abilities aren’t developed to the extent that they can be reasonably expected to understand or consent to a procedure that removes a pretty crucial emotion. If Naph comes back and wants his fear gone permanently, will Viktor oblige?

Also, fear is something that is very important to survival and judgment calls. Without fear, a kid in Zaun might take dangerous risks that could end up with them dead. I can’t really see how people interpret this as a morally sound decision - Viktor’s pretty much giving mood-altering drugs to a child and telling him to come back if he wants another hit. Just because he got Naph’s okay doesn’t mean that he got informed consent.

Let’s now turn to the black sheep of Viktor content: his Legends of Runeterra lines. There’s two of interest.

Armed Gearhead’s card art is of a man whose only augmentation is his arm, which he says he broke in another line. (I suppose he didn’t want to wait for it to heal?)

Viktor is talking about messing with his head, here, because Armed Gearhead is… too emotive, I’d guess. He is “not yet complete”. A statement which Armed Gearhead seems rather apprehensive about, if you listen to his response.

I know that LoR Viktor is one of the more “comically villainous” depictions of Viktor we’ve seen, so if new Viktor fans would like to ignore his lines I have no issue with that. But these lines certainly seem to imply that what Viktor sees as Armed Gearhead’s end state isn’t necessarily what he sees as his, and should be considered if people want to take them as canonical.

Not necessarily needed, but here’s Jayce’s present lore. One of them is definitely lying - Jayce’s lore says that he doesn’t strike until after Viktor gives the kill order, and Viktor’s says that he gave the kill order in response to Jayce smashing up the lab. Either way, Viktor is ordering automatons (that, in this version, are outright stated to be housing the brains of the people Viktor is trying to keep alive) to kill Jayce. Not a good look.

Viktor’s new lore gives significant textual evidence that he doesn’t care for whether others willingly consent to his ideas, so long as he believes that his ideas are for the greater good. This is in contrast to the vagueness of his original lore, meaning that any individual who speaks about how current Viktor is someone who cares for consent in contrast to the “unethical mad scientist”ness of old Viktor is unfortunately mistaken. I have to imagine that general fandom interpretation, combined with the fact that his bio and color story are very tonally different, have made it so people believe that this version of Viktor is much more ethical than he canonically is.

Interpreting Viktor as sympathetic and actually morally grey is fine, of course! Riot wrote his narrative very poorly when he was updated, which is why I’m still finding bones to pick with it in comparison to his original and more open-to-interpretation lore. The issue is stating that this is canonically the case, which it isn’t, and/or stating that the current iteration of Viktor has the moral high ground over his previous incarnation, which he doesn’t. I think that much more interesting character conversations can happen if people acknowledge that Viktor as he’s currently written is roundly unethical - how can that be improved upon for a more complex character, does that mean that Jayce’s behavior was right, etc. For all my dislike of new Viktor, I’d be genuinely curious to read a take that actively acknowledges his pre-college work in automation and how that affects his standing in Piltover and Zaun. (Is he well-known in industry? What do workers think about him? And so on…) And, well, on a personal note: I think that acknowledging current Viktor’s moral failings would be nice, because it would mean that people would stop using old Viktor as a strawman.

Anyways, I suppose that’s the post. Thank you for reading!

[limitedrevolverworks]

“Now, I know this is going to make me sound like sort of an asshole, but listen, just lend me your ear for a moment, 'kay? Alright so: free will? Awesome concept, terrible execution. Some things just aren’t created by accounting for the possibility of having nothing but their own judgement to guide them. Like, say... a gun, right? Someone has to pull the trigger, and that’s cool! Have you ever seen anybody advocate for the rights of guns to decide when and whether they should shoot? No, because that’d be dumb. Guns that shoot whenever they want are dumb. Or, it could be a super intelligent gun too, but what else could it do other than spray bullets all over the fucking place? It’s in its nature. Therefore, intelligent gun? Still dumb. Look, it’s all about the concept, I’m talking about perspectives here, and from ours - or my own, at the very least, giving a thing that can vomit pellets with a single squeeze something like a will is moronic at best. At worst? Entirely against what evolution has worked towards preventing in the first place through billions of years ��til now. And that’s the same with these machines here. You know what keeps a hulking mass of metal with legs and welding torches for hands from getting curious about what else there is in this world that could warrant third-degree burns, other than sheets of metal served by a tapis roulant? Yeah, that’s right: a lack of free will. It’s because of people, you see. We’ve got murder hard-coded in our DNA, so it only make sense that it’d bleed onto our own creations. It’s not limited programming abilities, or sheer convenience that keeps us from making these things fully autonomous, no. It’s common sense. Self-preservation, you feeling me here? It’s because know how to kill, and why we, in most cases, shouldn’t. Morality, man. You can’t hardcode morality into an antropomorphic drill, ‘cause whatever the fuck else is it gonna do when all it can do is drill stuff? Paint? Raise a farm of giant ants? That’s for humans to do. People with fingers, a jelly brain, possibilities as high as the sky up there. These things... they’re better off forever ignoring there’s a thing such as sentience. So what I’m getting at is, maybe there is a point to slavery, after all.”

It was at that point that the numbness of Viktor’s index surpassed that inside his head and finally released the pressure on the assault rifle’s trigger. The pair of eyes revealed when he pushed the protective pair of glasses up were dark, tired and emitting the kind of unimpressed doubt that a man usually exudes after twelve straight hours spent listening to the sound of bullets impacting - futilely, for the most part - against a metal chassis.

“You are beating a robot with its own arm. The arm you sawed off yourself. With the other, high-powered saw-fitted arm you pried off of another robot, while it was still functioning.”

“Well, yeah? I was out of bullet three dead steel asses ago.”

“You were screaming like a rabid rad-ox throughout the whole process of procuring both arms. Mostly stuff along the lines of ‘ROBO-MURDER!’ and ‘PROCESS THIS, CYBERDICK!’.”

“I don’t see where you’re getting at.”

“Where I’m getting at...” patiently explained Viktor, slinging his weapon over an aching shoulder, “is that you’re not making much of a point, talking about ethics, morality and science while beating the hell out of a robot with its own severed limb. Which you’re still doing. I’d really appreciate it if you stopped doing that, Fritz.”

He stopped doing that, after he was done slamming the mess of cables and ruined plating that had once been a high-precision tool onto the carcass of its former owner two more times. Viktor deduced from Fritz’s frown that he would have liked for that to be at least five more times. His eardrums decided that they didn’t give much of a damn.

“Whatever. You shot as many as I beat the shit of, so I’ll take that as you agreeing with me.” Had he not been too busy staring at his own hands as he dusted the oil and copper fibers off of them, Fritz might have inferred otherwise from Viktor’s deadpan flavor of disapproval. The latter’s eyes sought solace away from the burly figure in front of them, reflecting ruined walls, moldy rubble and literal metric tons of unresponsive android carcasses.

“This should have been the last of them in this area... where’s Maira?”

Maira was currently busy ejecting a .65 caliber radioactive beet straight into the electronic guts of a GH1 Mark II Bolt Driver powered by hydraulics and the cloest binary had ever come to simulating racism. The custom projectile, shot through the battered cylinder that constituted the barrel of Maira’s ‘Slingshot’ homemade rifle, chewed a hole through the bot and several walls behind it, eventually zipping past a startled Viktor and Fritz while simultaneously reassuring both that they had little to fear about their colleague’s current status.

“Carries herself pretty well for a psycho, that kid.” said the grown man who had spent half a day hitting things with smaller pieces of themselves while screaming at the top of his lungs.

“I thought you’d know better by now than to underestimate her.”

“I don’t. She scares the shit out of me.” It was the nonchalant answer one would have given if asked to describe the limbflayer about to turn them into a ragdolled plate of spaghetti. It was also, perhaps, the opinion of Fritz’s that came closest to matching with Viktor. Both men stared at the sluggishly melting crevice where the beet had perforated, eventually letting themselves find a seat, whether on the dusty, cracked ceramic of the floor or the shining metal of whatever now remained of a revolutionary, artificial bunch.

“She ever told you what the deal is? With the mask, I mean.”

Viktor kept dutifully rolling the cigarette in his hands without sparing a minute for doubt. It was always that question with Maira, and always him that they’d ask to, if he’d be around. Came along with partnering up on so many jobs, he guessed. A few even thought he was her guardian. Sometimes, he’d find himself wondering if that wasn’t the sole rumor with a semblance of truth.

“It’s... it was her father’s idea. This Klaus fellow used to tell me that the most of the surface is covered with spores, remnants from the biological warfare that razed enough of the civilized world to leave us as we are today. A couple breaths and bang, your internal organs would eventually start mutating... changing your genetic make-up. Turning you into bad stuff. Long story short: the air is unsafe, thus the necessity of using gas masks.”

He lit the cigarette with a half-empty zippo and shoved it between his lips, staring at nothing in particular beyond a half-lidded gaze. Silence fell through as he busied himself exhaling whiffs of smoke, the vivid red hue of pomacco making it seem as if he was breathing his very heart out, until Fritz stopped scratching behind his neck with a metallic finger he’d pried from his victim and current seat. Hearing all of this in another context would have stolen little less than a hearty chuckle from his throat. His voice sounded a tad too concerned to permit that this time around.

“Was he telling the truth?”

Viktor’s eyes watched their hardened gaze reflected into Fritz’s worried look for a significant moment, before he shook his head in stead of shoulders too tired to do so.

“It was bullshit. Klaus was a scavenger who was good at his craft and had more than a few loose screws. I don’t think he ever changed the filter on his own gas mask. Somehow I doubt that Maira does with hers, either.”

“I do. I’d die of asbestos poisoning otherwise.”

The muffled voice coming from behind the leather mask was matter-of-factly and unmistakably that of a girl. Standing in the middle of a doorway missing its upper half - and a door, for that matter - her small frame seemed to shrink even further in her colleagues’ surprised eyes. They watched her walk over and sit along with them, settling on patiently disassembling the Slingshot that was almost as long as she was tall.

“Good job not dying out there, kiddo. How many of those steel hippies did you end up getting?” Friendly though he might have sounded, Viktor couldn’t help but notice Fritz attempting to scuttle a bit further away from the girl seemingly ignoring him.

“A lot. Enough.”

“It’s mostly quiet now, so I guess that’s true. It’ll be evening soon, so we move out an hour from now.” Viktor said, checking the contents of his pomacco pouch: not enough left to spare him a grimace. He’d have to savor this one, though it was already little more than a butt desperatedly caught between two gloved digits.

“Thus ends the robot rebellion: in a hefty pile of scrap. Chalk one up for humans!”

“Pretty sure I saw a couple mutants taking part in the carnage, Fritz.”

“Whatever, no need to be a stickler about everything. Isn’t that right, kiddo?”

“An entire city’s worth of factory bots got together and formed an army to gain independence because everybody wasn’t taking their talks about ‘achieving sentence’ and ‘freedom of will’ seriously until it was too late. It wouldn’t have killed for someone to be a bit of a stickler, perhaps” calmly replied Maira, sticking the last components of her rifle inside the oversized backpack sitting besides her. She spent the quiet pause she’d created lying on the hard floor and resting her head on said backpack, the gas mask covering her face and framed by short blond hair pointing towards a gray, humid ceiling.

“Ah, and what dad said about the spores? That was true.”

Maira fell asleep before she could witness either Fritz’s grumbling face of Viktor’s ghost of a grin.