#atlas gauntlets

[garchankdefender]

*grab*

that's all i got this morning, nothing profound

[arcanegifs]

Riot Store on Taobao Mall is selling these Vi Gauntlet stress balls lmao (link)

[backstabber128]

I'm bringing back this random crack genderbend idea from 2 years ago bc I can 👏👏

I love to see how much the Zaundads/moms parallel their daughters/sons like this lmao. It's also cool and cursed to imagine the story being focused on brotherhood more instead of sisters.

I also got inspired by other design ideas I found, so of course I couldn't resist drawing my own 👀✍️

I mainly had fun imagining the slightly different designs and how Vi would turn into the most basic ass male character ever 😭 (still a badass softie by heart though) + Jinx proceeds to completely obliterate male gender norms 👍

[bex-is-complex]

I realised I never posted this!

[thanakite]

So I know that in Arcane and League of Legends Vi's gauntlets were created by other people, but I also know that in League of Legends she fixes/supes up the first set of the gauntlets she owns and from there I can guess that she likely at least tinkers with her Atlas gauntlets in LoL, all of which implies some fairly high level technical and mechanical skill as she is actively improving them, something which I wish had been included in the Arcane canon as it shows that it's not that Jinx is the "smart" sister and Vi the "dumb" one (not so much dumb as impulsive and doesn't think things through but smart/dumb sibling dynamics show up often in media and enough that it is semi-implied by Arcane just by being as it is in our world where that is a trope that happens) it's that Vi is smart and Jinx is a genius (because that is different)

It also is what nags at me when Jinx makes the dig at Vi that she relies on the gauntlets and didn't even make them herself, is that, that is a deliberate move away from League of Legends canon that Arcane chose to do (to make her character less intelligent/mechanically inclined/etc.) that I disagree with and yet this scene is like kind of deliberately calling attention to it

And it's a choice I don't actually understand making, why can't Vi be smart and good with that kind of stuff? You can be all those things and still impulsive enough to not always think things through and punch first and ask questions later, those aren't mutually exclusive things, just like those things can be true while still making dumb choices

So yeah it's like a messed up thing to remove from her character and then like they are deliberately drawing attention to it, because realistically without that scene you could have just pretended that Vi was still messing with and suping up the gauntlets and they just weren't showing it or whatever, but instead they were like "No, she literally does nothing with these except fight with them, she doesn't have those skills despite A LOT of people in the Undercity displaying some level of skill with such things even if that isn't 100% in line with their characters because that's the kind of place the Undercity is"

And to be clear, it still could have easily fit with Vi's character even beyond the stuff I mentioned above as just like her fixing up certain things or whatever (like a mechanic or something)

[q8qwertyuiop8p]

Beautiful Official Arcane Metal Poster!

https://displate.com/lumino/7481455

[definitetly-not-an-arsonist]

Ok maybe it was just the heat of the forge and the stress of making a weapon but I swear to jesus (Viktor) that there was a serious look of pain on Jayce’e face as he’s shown forging Caitlyn’s rifle and fixing the Atlas Gauntlets. He hates using Hextech as a weapon, especially after the events of S1E8&9, but now he finds himself making the exact weaponry he feared. I’m not a Jayce stan but goddamn with that compared to Hexcore Jesus leaving him soon after, I do feel bad for the man.

[ben-talks-art]

Jayce really needs to teach Vi how to activate her freaking shield function cause I'm pretty sure that thing could have helped her out four or five times in the climax of episode 3 of season 2.

[malakas-vihallas]

Hey Guys!

I have a question! We saw in Season 1 (E9.) that Vi's Atlas Gauntlet had a shield ability. Why couldn't she use that also in Season 2.? What are your thought about this?

Because this ability would have been quite useful in some situations.

Like in this scene, where it wouldn't have blown them away ( maybe).

Or here :

Or here. For example the shield could have pushed "Vander"/ Warwick down (maybe).

So I'm really curious about your opinions.

[hel-unleashed]

Okay, but it looks like they're holding hands ( ⸝⸝´꒳`⸝⸝)

[kurootetsuroast]

I made enamel pins of Vi's Atlas Gauntlets from Arcane!! I love how they turned out!! So excited for season 2 next month ^^

Shop link here-

[kyndaris]

Chains of Oppression

By the time this blog post goes up, the US election will be done and dusted. The votes will have been tallied and we will know if the last great bastion for Western democracy will have fallen for the lies of a burgeoning billionaire autocrat or if the people will have chosen to forge a new path forward with Kamala Harris at the helm. Should it be the former, there will be many who fear the implementation of the so called Project 2025, which already looks like a page out of the communist playbook (when it comes to China and the USSR), and is certainly a manifesto for any would be dictator.

In Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand, you play as one of the Unnamed - a lowly slave of the highly religious totalitarian regime that dominates the world of Atlas. Like manty before it, at least in the real world, there is a hierarchy. At the top sits Thelos, the God of the world, with the Enlightened - religious zealots (and who have the most power) sitting just below. Then come the nobles, the merchants, the farmers and finally the Unnamed. And much like the slaves of yesteryear, the Unnamed are considered disposable tools that none would care for if they were killed.

One day, as part of an Essence caravan, two of your fellow Unnamed go missing. Fearing for their lives, you volunteer to head out of camp to search for them. Despite the threats of wraiths in the area. These wraiths, it should be known, are creatures born out of sand and utterly vicious. They are also a means for Thelos to control the movement of humans in his rigid order based society.

It isn't long, however, before your character stumbles upon a powerful gauntlet. It bonds with you, granting the playable character the ability to double jump, dash through the air and summon forth sand weapons to do battle.

As the Gauntlet Bearer, the player character rises to become the saviour of the oppressed and downtrodden. Along the way, they also uncover the secrets of the artefact they now wield, as well as come to learn more about the mysterious entity tied to it: Nyaal.

From a story perspective, Atlas Fallen retreads old familiar ground with its focus on the dichotomy between order and chaos. Thelos, with his panopticon-esque Watcher floating in the background, represents order. Nyaal, on the other hand, represents chaos and freewill. Much like Assassin's Creed and many other games that have explored similar themes, the playable character must throw off the chains suppressing humanity. To do this, they must target the ones in power with the help of a handful of allies. In this case, it is the 1000 Year Queen, so named after becoming Thelos' puppet in ruling the humans. Throw in some God-slaying and you have Atlas Fallen in a nutshell.

What I liked about the Reign of Sand downloadable content (which was free), is that it added additional context to the world of Atlas. While Thelos is still the antagonist of the series, through the trek through the Forgotten Realms in Source, we also learn Nyaal also had a hand in shaping the Atlas we encounter - including providing humans with Essence stones and the creation of the Wraiths. And though Nyaal only wished the best for the fledgling human race, they were also blind to ramifications of their actions. Something in which they must reckon with as they do battle with their own shadow.

It just goes to show that while strict and total control is untenable, unfettered freedom can also bring out the worst in our kind. Just look at the state of the world now with the war in the Middle East. Nor should we forget how Russia invaded Ukraine.

Then, of course, there are the infamous Twitter wars as public outrage takes new form. People can be cancelled because of one comment from a decade ago, films and movies are labelled 'woke' because a woman is a main character, and online communities are split into various tribal entities. There is no longer any nuance in the world. A centrist is considered part of the problem. And even when you don't try to insert politics into your content, you will be decried as a grifter playing both sides of the political spectrum.

It's enough for this lowly blogger to want to hit reset on the entire human race. A sentiment which is shared by many of the Earth-Trisolaris Organisation in the science-fiction novel: The Three-Body Problem (a novel I'm reading right now at time of writing up this post).

Gameplay-wise, Atlas Fallen brings in a traversal system that felt fun and refreshing. It also helped speed up the slow slog of running from one part of the map to another like another game I could name.

Then, of course, there is the combat. The Gauntlet Bearer can mix and match three different styles of weapons: the axe/ hammer, dust whip and a pair of knuckledusters. While all are viable depending on playstyle, I favoured using the axe/hammer with the dust whip because of the range it allowed me. Slotting in the essence stones that helped maximise my attacks, I was near unstoppable in taking down the enemies that crossed my path.

What was a little bit different, I found, was how player character level was tied to the armour one found. The game only has a maximum level of 11, which can only be reached by upgrading the armour one receives through the use of Essence. Additionally, by upgrading armour, one receives perks to put into passive upgrades including the ability to get more tribute (the currency within the game), essence, or having more momentum to pull off special attacks. These all blended quite well with each other although I didn't feel much need to experiment once I'd found my favourites.

Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand from developer Deck 13 is not a triple-A title. The controls are a little floaty and the story isn't something I would write home to. And yet, I did find myself enjoying the time I spent skimming across the sands and fighting off huge sand monsters. So many games coming out in the last few years have focused on being bigger than ever with little to no experimentation. But I have found the ones that stick in my mind are those trying to break the mould by telling their own fun little story. What's more, they don't try to follow trends by trying to have a huge sprawling open world or have huge budgets that can only be sustained through excessive monetisation of in-game items.

So, here's to more experimental AA games!

After all, when major game developers (and by extension, publishers) begin to crumble, they'll be the ones picking up the slack with fresh ideas and new IP. And maybe we can return to a time when games weren't politically weaponised. Or are seen by big corporations as a means to pad out their bottom line.

Time will tell who will win out when it comes to free will or oppression; anarchy and security.

[backstabber128]

The Monster You Created.

....

[books-in-a-storm]

Currently Reading 💛

Acer & Gauntlet

[avelera]

Arcane's Jayce & Viktor: A Tech Industry Perspective

I've been wrestling with whether to make a short and sweet post about these points or to just have another long-winded meta and clearly since I'm incapable of being brief, I guess we'll just dive in.

I work in tech. What I see in this industry colors a lot of how I see Jayce and Viktor in Arcane. I'll try to be brief about a few of the things that stand out to me the most and that I think are intentional.

1 ) Jayce and Viktor are references to Alfred Nobel - This is a historical reference so direct I genuinely don't know how people grasp Jayce and Viktor's characters if you don't know about it.

Alfred Nobel is known for two things: inventing dynamite and bequeathing his subsequent fortune to founding the Nobel Peace Prize. These things are very much related.

Nobel was brilliant but socially naive. When he invented dynamite, he intended it to make life easier and safer for working in mines. Sound familiar? That is literally what the Atlas Gauntlets and Hex Claw Jayce and Viktor invented with Hextech was posed to be. It is a direct reference to Alfred Nobel and dynamite, there is no question about it in my mind whatsoever that they pose the benefit to society as specifically being useful to miners.

Nobel also believed that the awesome destructive power of dynamite would mean the end of warfare. Literally. He thought it was so disgusting and unthinkable that people would use explosives on each other that it would grind violence to a halt. He was very, very wrong about this. So wrong, in fact, that he spent the rest of his life in horror and remorse at how explosives were being used to kill people and created the Nobel Peace Prize to promote innovations aimed at peace, a prize which annually recognizes those who "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind".

Likewise with Jayce and Viktor, they are both horrified to imagine Hextech used for warfare and we think they're incredibly socially naive for thinking this, because they are. Maybe in another universe, there'd be the Talis Peace Prize to try to make up for what they unleashed on the world. Which brings me to my next point:

2 ) Jayce and Viktor have typical engineer blindspots to society's ills - As I've discussed in-depth in another meta, Jayce and Viktor both desperately needed some non-STEM or scientific classes in their life because their worldview is so naive and stunted as a result that it's the source of a dizzying number of their problems. Neither of them could even consider that Hextech, like dynamite, would be weaponized immediately. But they have other huge gaps too as a result of their narrow focus on science, and I do believe this is intentional by the writers as a commentary on engineers and tech people in general.

Short version, Jayce desperately needs some understanding of history and of rhetoric. When Ambessa asks him if his school teaches military history, he doesn't even know if they offer it. She was testing him with that question and as a canny manipulator and general, she clearly takes that to mean she can run circles around him, and she is right. Because with incredibly simplistic plays to his male ego, like calling his leadership "impotent", Ambessa immediately gets Jayce riled up and not thinking clearly. She blindfolds him, spins him around, and shoves him headlong into taking violent military action in exactly the direction she wanted him to go in to kick the nest and set off a war.

Jayce is also easily manipulated by Mel for more benevolent but still self-serving reasons with appeals to his life's work with flattery, his male ego with sex, and his dreams for a better world to make him fall quickly into step with the city's corruption with only a little nudging because he has no strong civic understanding of his own to fall back on. As Cait notes, he's never taken an interest in the Council or politics before until he becomes a Councilor himself.

Short version for Viktor, he wants to make the world a better place but he's never actually had to think through human nature before. He's literally never bothered. We know this because of his blindspot towards Hextech weaponry where he truly believed they could avoid it being used for warfare, and the fact that later in his cult, he's somehow shocked to learn that people will do bad things for the ones they love and won't just slice pieces of their own nature and personality off to fit into his little Utopian commune.

Literally cracking any kind of history or sociology book or heck, a Pratchett Discworld book, would have told him that there's a straight fucking line between deciding people are the problem when it comes to fixing society's ills and eugenics. He falls headlong into that trap and it requires his older, wiser self to beat him over the head with the truth of the horrors of his own simplistic worldview would lead to before he literally annihilates all life in his home city in his attempt to save it.

Which brings me to my next point:

3 ) Jayce and Viktor as oblivious tech nerds who have never cracked a book open but suddenly thinking that because they're great engineers, they have the solution to all of life's problems.

This is a somewhat shorter point, but I think in modern society we all know about the proverbial tech bro who keeps reinventing things like public transportation and taxes because they've never read a book in their life that doesn't have equations in it.

To be clear, they aren't bad people! I'd even hazard to say that young tech bros trying to make public good-based startups with a laughable lack of social awareness aren't bad people either! If anything, the education system has failed them, and they're pouring their intellect and earnest, human desire to help others into endeavors with the narrowest possible world perspective, which happens to be their field of expertise and thus it makes sense they'd see that as the greatest value that can offer, it's just too limited a view so they end up reinventing things that already exist or making worse, more dangerous versions of things that already exist. Tragically, their naive but well-meaning worldview often leads to:

4 ) Viktor and Jayce, but mostly Jayce, as tech bros being beholden to billionaire interests to make their dream come true:

Like Jayce, we see how these tech bros have their vision co-opted by people with a broader vision and understanding of the world, by billionaire investors who turn their inventions into making a quick buck for themselves, to warmongers and dictators who turn the creations of their mind into surveillance state horror stories. Some of that is a lack of wisdom on their parts when it comes to building in safeguards, sure, but part of that is there is a class divide too between the powerful and bright-eyed young inventors who just want to improve the world. As Singed notes, no one in power is ever innocent. And those in power have the capital to make a young inventor's dream come true and thus, tie them to their demands and interests. As Jayce said, they built the Hexgates, "Like [the Councilors] asked." Specifically this indicates that their vision has already been co-opted to serve financial interests. It also, again, makes it almost laughable how naive they are that they didn't realize warfare was next after trade.

Like many tech bros with billionaire investors, Jayce relied on the Kirammans, who were one of the wealthiest people in the city and literally on the Council that represents the State, and on Mel who is also part of the State, who is the wealthiest woman in Piltover, and who comes from a family of world-conquering warmongers, to make his dream come true from the very start.

From the beginning, Jayce was at a losing disadvantage when it came to keeping his dream ideologically pure and free of the influence of the wealthy and powerful.

And finally, just to point out that I'm not making this up, that these parallels are in fact intentional and built into the story:

4 ) Jayce and Viktor as parallels to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, founders of Apple. Christian Linke, co-creator of Arcane, specifically noted them as inspirations for Jayce and Viktor's relationship, with Jayce (Jobs) as the face of the company and Viktor (Woz) as the real brains behind the invention.

This caused a lot of sturm and drang on Twitter with people misinterpreting that he means Jayce isn't the actual inventor of Hextech, which I think is an overreaction. Jobs, unlike many tech bros who have earned society's ire lately like Musk, was actually an engineer too. It's completely common in tech spaces for partnerships to be made up of one partner who is able to handle being the public face of the company, and one introverted and socially awkward genius who prefers to sit in a dark room and actually tinker with the problem and who would literally rather set themselves on fire than talk to a non-technical human being. I know because I've been in such partnerships before myself as the public face.

Where Jayce and Viktor rather charmingly buck the stereotypes of that relationship and so in turn actually make it more like what I've seen in the real world, is the fact there isn't resentment between the two as a result. Viktor is glad that Jayce is willing to be the public face and doesn't want to get in the way. This is actually very common with the engineers I know! It's not seen as glory stealing, it's seen as sparing them awful, painful work they don't want to do, like networking.

Yes it means Jayce needs to sacrifice some time in the lab, but it's a simple division of labor that he's happy to do, especially if it frees Viktor from the responsibility so he can focus on what he loves, because Jayce loves him. And you'll note that Jayce is very above-board academically speaking on this front, he always cites Viktor as his partner and is scrupulous in giving Viktor credit, in conversation at least, even if he doesn't forcibly drag Viktor on stage to take credit there.

Anyway, when I write meta or even fic for these two, this sort of background is always on my mind, and I thought it might be valuable for others who maybe aren't as familiar with the tech space as I am.

[badasserywomen]

Realistically, carrying Caitlyn one-handed would be difficult even for Vi, not to mention her other arm is broken.

….You do realize the atlas gauntlets can pick up boulders? i know caitlyns got a lot of cake to carry but i think they can manage to hold her.