#mel is at least in part using jayce in a political scheme

[vantagsmin]

after rewatching season 1, i believed jayce was ambessa's first choice to create a proxy puppet from, then salo because he was power hungry and biased against zaun, and then finally, caitlyn.

jayce is pressured to alleviate tensions from piltover and zaun, he has some preconceptions about zaunites (him getting mad at viktor for crossing the border, not realizing that the 'zaunites were the dangerous ones' bias affected viktor, forgetting that his partner is also from the undercity), and without consulting both mel and viktor, he decided that weaponising hextech was their way to equal the battlefield. in s1ep8, he's talked to by ambessa, and she leaves groundwork for him to build on about weaponising hextech. and in the same episode, during the council meeting, he's also the first person to suggest to use hextech against zaun. you can see both mel and caitlyn get surprised with this change, with caitlyn even asking 'what happened to you?' mel, coming from the same land and rule as ambessa, also counters his argument about war, and suggests diplomacy over bloodshed. he's outnumbered by the council.

vi, knowing that most of the issues raced by zaun, and silco, are because of generations of scheming and explicit discrimination against them, agrees with jayce. but not because she's concerned - at least not anymore - with the politics between zaun and silco, but rather because she believes that silco is the only way she can get powder back. she agrees with jayce not because they had the same motive, but because they wanted the same result. eliminate silco, problem solved. but since vi is from the undercity, her own voice is not counted in the council, instead she is shamed away. jayce is not shamed away, but rather pressured to go with the council's agreed take on diplomacy. it is the same reason why vi goes to jayce, wanting to help, and why jayce is at first, hesitant, but takes it anyway. when they do get to the plan, destroy shimmer production and weaken their resources, jayce kills a child.

this is where i think jayce starts to track back on his steps on weaponising hextech. you can see it in his eyes when he hit the child, realizing that children, innocent people, can be hurt. this is new to him. he had seen enforcers die and he knows its part of their job, but he still vomits from its sight, and in his mind, they died from equal or stronger weaponry of the other side. when the child he hit dies infront of him, he realises that his weapon, powered by hextech, is the polar opposite of his reason for creating it. he made hextech to help people, not kill them.

(take note that he has not seen viktor after the bridge incident up until after the shimmer raid. only after they saw each other again that he was fully against weaponising hextech - even though mel suggested to make it in case of last resorts - and met up with silco to talk about diplomacy)

now, what does this have to do with caitlyn?

well, caitlyn is still inexperienced with politics, naive, and idealistic. she still believed in humanity's goodness, and that zaunites deserve to be treated as humans too. but, after her incidents with jinx, her mother getting killed by the explosion, and the memorial of the city's councilors ruined, she is now filled with much more hatred of jinx, consequently affecting the entirety of zaun, grief, and guilt. she was the perfect test subject for ambessa's project. she is more malleable. more prone to manipulation because of her need for revenge. in doing so, she gets ambessa's eyes on her. she doesn't realize that in the need for finding jinx.

but unlike jayce, who had mel as his conscience and guide, and viktor, his guilt and his reason, caitlyn does not have that. similar yet substanstially different with jayce, caitlyn decides to gas the undercity to find jinx. this was ironic, because it was her mother that proposed and built undercity's ventilation, yet she uses it against them. this was unlike her earlier character in season 1, in the same episode where she questioned jayce's morals when he suggested weaponising hextech, she had become unbelievably cruel to find her mother's killer, and it is when ambessa realizes that caitlyn is exactly the puppet she can use to fully push through the gate and create her hextech army. she is full of rage, she takes initiative, and she does not care about the council's opinion. she is exactly the perfect model and reason for blame for ambessa to throw against the wolves when the going gets tough. (you can see this realisation from ambessa during the underground council meeting)

[ardentperfidy]

ok so I got this response to this post I made about a queer ship in the show arcane and I thought about replying snarkily and then I thought about ignoring it and then I actually couldn’t stop thinking about how commonly I hear variations on this in fandom spaces, across fandoms, and specifically the accusation that queer shipping undervalues friendship

and I think it is true that there are a lot of common queer ships, often mlm ships, that are based on coding that has an equally or more plausible intensely close platonic reading, but I want to defend the romance reading and I think it’s because of this weird confluence of tropes/social phenomena??

because the quintessential romance most of us grew up with is the Disney princess, love at first sight thing, but this doesn’t actually involve much romantic development. the romance is either an endgame prize or a side plot. and because it doesn’t really involve much development (and thus, in the absence of an external obstacle, is pretty boring), it’s the kind of romance plot seen in a lot of mainstream media where the focus of the show isn’t romance. the relationship shown on screen is often just a meet cute, or a moment where characters feel a “spark”, and then a few scenes where we establish that the characters have a common interest, admire some character trait of the other, or even just both felt the spark. and honestly, it comes up a lot in network TV because it makes it easy for producers to try out love interests, keep them on the backburner, and if people don't respond to them well, we get a briefly or not at all foreshadowed conflict that breaks them up, and if people respond well then usually we get a dramatic life or death bonding scene to show the depth of the characters' feelings for each other (of the kind we often see repeatedly between platonic leads - don't @ me, @ the number of episodes i've watched that are just 'girlfriend getting kidnapped'). then there’s the unrelated fact that most men, especially american men, don’t have close, emotionally deep friendships. it’s not good or healthy, but it’s a well-established phenomenon (thx toxic masculinity). and honestly, most people in general don’t have the intense closeness of relationships we see on tv because most people’s lives just aren’t that intense! which is all good and fine, outside of sitcoms most people don't want to watch the reality of like, weekly or monthly catch-ups on life between groups of people who are super busy with the monotony of daily life, but like, it is definitely beyond what most people experience in their everyday friendships.

so then when we get fictional depictions of very intense same-sex friendships, it just hits all of our trope buttons for one of the other big romance tropes, this time often in shows where the romance IS a big part of the story, of long time friends who realize it’s love. I mean, it’s Harry Met Sally, it’s Jim and Pam, Cory and Topanga, Luke and Lorelei. the story is they’re just friends until they’re not, and honestly often the only "set up" or other compatibility we get differentiating this from just a friendship is that the characters are het and hot (again, thx Harry and Sally, men and women can't be friends). so we've seen this trope over and over, we feel it in our bones, and then when you get a show where the canon love interests are shallow (often the female love interests of male leads, because misogyny and comphet), but the same-sex leads have this intense, platonic long-term bond, (like, lookin' at you supernatural, sherlock, 9-1-1, probably more that i just don't watch), and, even when there is no queer-coding, no romance-coding, just a platonic bond, it is totally understandable that this hits all of these trope buttons for people!

or there's also the fact that this is just all fictional, and people can enjoy their media consumption even if it's in ways you wouldn't enjoy your media consumption.