#just in case people haven’t seen ingame designs yet

[ahli-stuff]

Arcane Season 2 Act III Theory: Viktor was the one who manipulated Jayce into killing him (not the promise they made)

Call me insane on this one but what if the future version of Viktor was the one who influenced Jayce to kill Viktor’s past self when Jayce was (most likely) having visions of the future stuck inside of the anomaly.

Hear me out. Viktor’s arc from Act I to Act II was realizing that emotions are the sole cause of all human suffering and pleasure—therefore, machinery, which removes all emotions, is the highest form of being. Therefore, machine herald.

But the only way for the future viktor to become the machine herald was for there to be an inciting event in his past; something that drove current Viktor to that realization—something that catapulted him towards his, yes, final glorious evolution.

What better way to force that realization than to have his closest friend destroy his commune, his body, and past self’s belief that he can mitigate human suffering through his pure sterilized love?

My loose theory is that machine herald Viktor met Jayce in a distant future (my one piece of evidence for this is the fact that Jayce is wearing a leg brace and a one shoulder pauldron VERY similar to League of Legend’s Viktor design) and either manipulated him or terrorized him to the point that Jayce killed Viktor’s past self—therefore ensuring that Viktor would be reconstructed by singe, and eventually become the machine herald.

It’s a classic self-fulfilling prohecy—in the Greek legend of Oedipus, a king is told a prophecy in which his son kills him. The king then abandons his son in hopes of avoiding his fate, only to have said son kill him in the following years as an adult. In arcane’s case, Jayce is the king and Viktor is both the prophet and the son.