#mel’s powers

[golden-forge]

I was trying to recall if Maddie had the hex rifle but I do think it was a regular gun so that’s very interesting.

When Mel had the shield up for Cait and Ambessa’s knife was piercing the shield, I think it was the runes wrapped around her forearm that allowed Ambessa to pierce the shield.

According to LeBlanc, Mel is “an empath”, a “conduit and a mirror.” She can bend others’ magic to her own will. This explains why she’s so powerful, because she’s basically redirecting other people’s energy against them. So when she’s up against a powerful opponent she can turn that power against them. In other words, Mel isn’t just using her own innate power.

It also explains why she seems to only use her magic defensively — her target has to strike first in order for Mel to redirect that attack back onto them. And it’s not just magical attacks either. When Maddie fired a bullet at Cait, Mel redirected it to kill Maddie.

In my opinion, this power suits Mel perfectly. It’s technically non-aggressive, and reflects Mel’s natural talent for identifying others’ strengths and using them to her advantage.

[bonkaii4]

Mel being an empath

(Okay i just got say arcane has sparked passion in me i haven’t felt for a show and fandom in yeeeears i haven’t written a meta in forever so bare with me.)

Anyway at first watching act 3 the reveal of Mel being empath felt crazy like that’s such a huge bomb that we didn’t get build up on or much follow through but i do think it explains so much about her character. Traditionally empaths are written to be overly emotional or sensitive sort of like telepaths and being smart but Mel wasn’t written like that she’s quite calm and collected her most emotional outbursts are with her mother and jayce and even with jayce it’s only because he’s hurling accusations at her and she still remains relatively calm in her responses. I think her knowing people’s emotions wether she was aware of this or not plays into this she knows Jayce is coming from a place of hurt and confusion where as her mother back in season one she knows she’s being disingenuous with the reasons of being in piltover.

First watch this just seems like a disgruntled daughter and her mother trying to get on her good side but knowing that Mel can read people’s emotions adds another layer she see right through her mother which not only from just being raised by her but through her her empath skills.

also wanted to bring this up someone pointed this out tiktok and someone else pointed out that this maybe because we’re seeing this scene through Mel’s POV and since she is empath she see that Maddie is secretly enjoying executing Caitlyn. This got me thinking about her career as council member/politician I’ve wondered how she got so high up while seemingly not only being the youngest member but being young period if she’s assumed to be Jayce’s and Victor’s age this makes her about 24-27 in s1 which is extremely young for council member which essentially this region’s governing body. Being able to sense people’s true intentions allowed her to know who to align herself who not to, knowing when people agreed and disagreed with her, or when people sympathize with your views, causes, or concerns on certain issues which all helped her advance quickly her career. I’m sure being from a high born house helped but we see other high born houses in council positions but they’re all older.

She also seems to be somewhat bored with politics and somewhat disillusioned when we meet her i mean giving a fellow council member a child’s toy almost like a practical joke doesn’t seem like someone who views politics and her colleagues with utmost seriousness it isn’t until she meets Jayce that we see the passion for change. I think being empath she saw that Jayce and Vicktor’s vision for hextech and Piltover and Zaun were pure and genuine which is why she supported them. I also hate the rhetoric that Mel never loved jayce and just manipulated for her own gain she does everything in her power to stay true to him and Vicktor’s vision she doesn’t push him to do anything that goes against their morals and goals. When Jayce is worried about Vicktor and his absence at the council may lead to she reassures she won’t let them corrupt their dream. Like i said early she isn’t written like a typical empath she also isn’t written like a typical manipulator(if you can call her that) she is genuine in what she’s says to Jayce she just also knows how people work and his feelings on the matter so she’s able to play on that.

Ambessa describes her to be too soft and she tells Jayce she didn’t Medarda standards i think the way she operates as empath is the cause of that I don’t think Mel is welling to corrupt herself or others when getting what she wants unlike her Mother and the rest of her family i think they operate much more cut through in their goals.

Whew anyway mind any typos i didn’t mean for this be as long as turned out just wanted to share revelation i had!:)

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

The stewards of the old world are always keen to give you a glimpse of their might... According to legend, the ancients built specialized chambers to seal away false prophets.

The Arcane is waking up.

[neomel]

Hi sorry I need to do some more Pokemon posting bc this is the funniest shit. the cute-looking Pokèmon TCG series is making "TM10" part of its branding. Like, TM10 from the games - its the TM for the move Hidden Power, thats cute! Its reflecting the main character discovering herself in the same way the move works in the game, what a cute little detail!

Except uh. Just one problem.

Game Freak in all their brilliance removed Hidden Power from the franchise four years ago in Generation 8* and its still not able to be used in Scarlet and Violet. Its not just that you cant teach it to Pokèmon anymore, you straight up cannot use the attack even if you trade in Pokèmon from older games who know it. Its like a banned technique.

So then that begs the question – if the TCG show is gonna be referencing TM10 this much, but TM10 *isn't* Hidden Power anymore, surely that means TM10 is another similarly inspiring attack - Stored Power, or Calm Mind, or Smart Strike?

Well, depending on if its Gen 8 or 9, I hope the kids will have fun Discovering Their Own Magical Leaf and/or Discovering Their Own Ice Fang. Truly inspiring words. love how well managed this franchise is

[reality-detective]

Mel Gibson 🤔

[her-soliloquies]

Also let's hear it for these two hooded queens

[mentally-ill-for-bes]

So funny Viktor chooses to present himself to Jayce as a white-golden robot (considering it is shown he could possess one of his followers) despite his representative colors being purple and blue (during s2 arc 1 and arc 2 and as the Herald Machine). But for the very specific purpose of convincing Jayce to join him, he's represented in the colors associated with Mel. Literally CATWALKING into the room, which is an action associated with Mel too

[mizgnomer]

Levitating Tennant - Part Two

Just a few photos where his feet don’t touch the ground

See also: [ Levitating Tennant Part One ]

[mettywiththenotes]

Mel coming back and pulling one of these at her mother with Caitlyn

[melorivers]

Has this been done yet?

[starliteonearth]

thinking about mel's armor and jayce being a blacksmith and how he would probably be utterly fascinated by the metal artwork engraved into her skin and would likely spend hours mapping and tracing it until he memorized every curve and plane and dip by heart

[fazedlight]

“KARA!” Lena screamed. I killed her, Lena grieved.

She didn’t have time to linger as Eve attacked her again, Lena throwing one last punch before she found herself scrambling out of her jet. The explosion killed her, Lena’s mind shouted, thrashing in agony, a litany of damnation that she should never have brought Kara to Kaznia in the first place. It’s all my fault.

But to her astonishment, in the dark, a figure shifted ahead - blonde and burning and bright, and Lena thought for half a second to run back for the fire extinguisher, that Kara might be saved.

But as the figure turned, somehow unaffected by the flames that adorned her like a god, Lena halted. Kara looked concerned, confused. But she didn’t look injured.

Lena’s eyes drifted lower, to the bright S now etched on Kara’s chest, solid blue emerging amidst her burnt clothing. “Kara…”

“Lena,” Kara breathed, reluctance written on her face.

Lena hesitated a moment longer, before taking step after careful step, approaching the reporter as the embers continued to burn across her body. Lena’s hand drifted to the top of the suit’s crest, just below Kara’s neck, where yellow met red. Oh.

It was too much - the whiplash of the explosion, thinking that Lena had carelessly killed her best friend, to realizing that the reporter had once thrown that’s not a great question for a Luthor to ask someone in my family back in her face.

Kara Danvers was her best friend. Did she ever really exist?

“Lena…” Kara whispered again.

Lena dropped her hand, her eyes raised to Kara’s, looking her over again. “Don’t,” she said. Without another word, Lena turned on her heel, and went back to her jet.

-----------

The flight back from Kaznia was longer alone.

Plenty of time for Lena to fume and grieve, for her to rage internally at weathering yet another deceit. Kara Danvers - or whatever the hell she was really called - had used her, betrayed her, spied on her. 

Somewhere in the back of Lena’s mind, there was a different acknowledgment - that her glide ratio in her custom-designed jet was good, but not good enough to reach the Kaznian runway when the engines had failed. That her assumption at the time that mountain updrafts had saved her ran contrary to the now-more-obvious explanation - that the kryptonian had saved her from aviation incidents three times now. 

Lena looked out the side of the window, where dawn was slowly rising. She desperately needed sleep, but was too wired from watching her best friend be blown up - and then revealed to be a traitor - and sleep was just… not going to happen. 

Lena could swear that she was seeing glints of red and blue, just behind her plane, a kryptonian possibly trying to stay out of sight while still being protective. It was infuriating.

-----------

It’s not Kara, Lena’s mind begged, trying to convince herself that the dead kryptonian was the clone she had learned about in Kaznia. It can’t be Kara.

It was with overwhelming horror that Lena watched the footage of Kaznia’s failed invasion, her brother parading around a dead kryptonian in his lexosuit arms, the supposed traitor Supergirl. 

He was a hero. For killing her. It can't be Kara. It can’t it can’t it can’t-

Trying to still her trembling fingers, Lena picked up her phone, trying to figure out what to text, what to say, anything to get a response from the kryptonian that she had shut out. Operating out of instinct more than logic, she pressed Kara’s name to start a call instead, holding it up to her ear, her stomach twisting with nausea.

But luckily, it only took one ring before Lena heard a familiar voice on the other end. “Lena,” Kara said softly

Lena pulled the phone away, and hung up.

-----------

There was no other choice in her mind. Not when Lex had regained legitimacy in the eyes of the country by “saving” it from Supergirl’s attack. Not when Lex sought to commit a secret genocide to solve the energy crisis and be named a hero. Not when Lena was the only person who would know where Lex would go.

Not when all Lena could see was Lex cradling Red Daughter in his arms.

The image was burned into her mind, and all Lena knew was that Kara was next - Lex would not rest until every kryptonian was gone. And Kara would be too kind and noble to seek anything but legal justice. But that wasn’t Lena - it wasn’t Lena when she decided to kill Morgan Edge, it wasn’t Lena when she decided to kidnap her mother from prison and poison her, it wasn’t Lena when she tucked her gun in her belt that morning.

A single bullet to the head, and Lex was gone.

-----------

Kara’s door opened just a few seconds before Lena reached it. Lena supposed Kara could hear her down the hall.

Lena ignored the shock and concern on Kara’s face as she stepped inside, making her way to Kara’s window as Kara closed the door. Truth was, she still couldn’t face Kara at all.

“I’m sorry, Lena,” Kara started. “I tried to save-”

“Don’t,” Lena said.

Kara grew quiet, flanking Lena’s side, joining her as Lena stared out onto the streets below. Lena shifted. “I thought she was you,” Lena said. “When Lex killed her, I thought she was you.”

She could feel Kara shrink, uncertain of what to say, of how to move forward. And maybe Lena didn’t know either. But she could try. If… “Is Kara real?” Lena asked, her voice cracking. “Or just a mask?”

“I’m real,” Kara whispered, prompting Lena to finally turn. And Lena couldn’t help herself, seeking the warmth of Kara’s arms, the kryptonian all too happy to wrap Lena in a tight hug as Lena stepped into it. “I… sometimes I feel more real with you than anyone else.”

Lena swallowed harshly, burying her face into Kara’s shoulder, holding back a tremble. “I want to believe you.”

“I’ll spend a lifetime trying to prove it,” Kara whispered. “If you’ll let me.”

Lena took a slow, trembling breath. “Okay.”

---------------------------------------------------------------

Idea taken from a tweet I saw floating around. If you're interested in a longer season 4 reveal, I also wrote No One and Nothing.

[mollysunder]

The Medarda Family and the True Goal of Shimmer

Nature has made us intolerant to change, but fortunately, we have the capacity to change our nature. -Singed

For most of s1 the only versions of magic the audience really gets familiar with are visualized through hextech blue and shimmer pink, but we can't trust it to represent what actual magic is like on Runeterra. People from PnZ are incredibly unfamiliar with magic, it was banned for centuries, and they're mostly retracing steps and doing guess work. The best metric to understand how magic works is to look at characters and regions that are actually inclined to magic, and the Medardas may be the best example yet.

When Ambessa accepts the Wolf totem from Lamb one half of dual aspects of death, her body is enveloped in a bright purple transformation before being reforged into a red that resembles the kind her ancestors and the Lamb wear.

It's the same bright purple that consumes Sky in Viktor's last experiment with the hexcore in s1.

I think this purple represents magic at its most malleable state, where it can be refined or change others into final products with a proper catalysts. By s1's final scene, we know that Mel possesses magic and likely uses it through her golden armor. We also know it's possible for magic to be a hereditary trait that can be passed down (not perfectly) through family lines, which is prized in Noxus (and Ixtal?).

So if Mel has magic that likely means the Medardas family in general has latent magic that flows through them naturally., but qhat does this have to do with shimmer or PnZ in general?

The Medardas are relevant to PnZ because Zaun leading minds, Silco and Singed, have spent their capital trying to replicate what the Medardas can do!Shimmer doesn't exist purely as a bioweapon, that's frankly secondary to it's point. Shimmer exists as a means to artificially make the users capable of performing magic, or at least shift the user's biology into something that can tolerate magic. Hextech as a solution to the mystery of maguc completely sidesteps the relationship between magic and the user by using machinery as middleman, while shimmer takes a more direct route.

Singed can't literally biohack nonmagical people into mages all by himself. Singed instead developed what's essentially a hormone therapy to give users temporary magic abilities by synthesizing shimmer from these mysterious plants that resembles the color of the magic within Ambessa before her deal with the Lamb.

Why didn't Singed and Silco just give people the magic purple plants directly if it's capable turning them into mages? Sky and Rio might be the best examples for why you don't do that. When young Viktor feeds Rio the purple plants we see Rio immediately lose vigor, as an audience most of us assumed that was simply Rio's pre-existing condition acting up, but the relationship is more simple. When Singed said Rio was dying, he said it with surety because Singed KNEW the exposure to magic was killing Rio. And Sky was DISINTEGRATED upon being exposed to the hexcore's magic.

In that vein, Singed used Rio as a work around. From what we see non-mage humans absolutely cannot tolerate exposure to even base magic, but Rio was able to last longer. Instead Singed and Silco exposed Zaun to a version of those magic flowers that was broken down by Rio's metabolism into a more version that non-magical humans can tolerate.

The wild thing is that all this effort is to get non-mage users to Ambessa's UNREALISED state, the purple is just the base magic that exists in mages. Even still, Singed seems to have developed the kind of strain of shimmer that's the closest he's ever come to real magic, and Viktor and Jinx used it.

Viktor's own magical transformation has been facilitated by the hexcore in the same way the Lamb facilitated Ambessa's transformation. Do i think Viktor has essentially created his own Aspect through the hexcore? NO.

But in the same way shimmer is facsimilie of magical ability, so too is the hexcore a subsitute for living magic. And by living magic I don't mean unicorns or mermaids, I mean magic that is given consciousness and shape by being tethered to human concepts. And the hexcore's basic purpose is supposed to be magic that thinks and Viktor has tethered it to the human plane with his blood.

This all begs the question about what could exposure to the hexcore do to long term shimmer users? What WILL it do to Jinx? We all know that's inevitable next season.

You see, power, real power doesn't come to those who were born strongest or fastest or smartest. No. It comes to those who will do anything to achieve it. -Silco

Tldr: Shimmer is a large-scale project to turn the population of Zaun into mages, or magically tolerant, by essentially microdosing the population with magic through shimmer.

[obsessed-izzy]

Can we please talk about this?? 🗣️🗣️

[beompercar]

󠀠󠀠󠀼⠀꒰ ✿ ₊ ꒱ f l o u r . ݁₊ ⊹ ݁power !!! ₊˚⊹౨ৎ

@qqmariztwsse @awwriri

[thegayestdiaz]

mel and ekko deserved their own 2-3 episode arcs each because what do you mean one of you invented time travel and the other became a godlike being and we just skipped over that