vrakali

[vrakali]

This is Viktor, Viktor loves his personal space.

And this is Jayce, he also loves Viktor's personal space

[vrakali]

In all timelines, in all possibilities, only you can show me this-

☄️

[vrakali]

someone commented ‘the sun, the moon and jayce’ under my previous meljayvik post i laughed so hard that i just had to draw it

[vrakali]

Do you think we’re soulmates in another universe?

[vrakali]

Sevika's first day as a counselor

My baby standing up to the snobs that treated her people horribly for years <3333

[vrakali]

All I'm saying is Jayce Talis is a bisexual polyamorous man who has a type and that type is just, Higher Beings. His type is just Jesus Christ. Bro straight up wants to fuck God

Edit: damn bisexuals found this post hello y'all hope you have a nice day the post reached its target audience

[vrakali]

We finish this together.

[vrakali]

[vrakali]

Mel ✨

[vrakali]

something something despite the all horrors and tragedies of the world, love was there and that's all that matters

[vrakali]

Now feels like a good time to remind people that the foundation of BDSM is consent. If there’s no consent, it’s not BDSM.

Rough sex can be done consensually.

Sadism can be done consensually.

Impact play can be done consensually.

Emetophilia can be satisfied consensually.

Even consensual non-consent is a thing.

Neil Gaiman had the money and the means to find willing partners for his sexual preferences. There are countless people out there who would be more than happy to perform the acts he wanted. If he wanted, he could have had exactly what he desired with the consent of the other party. But he didn’t look for that because, fundamentally, his interest was in assault, not BDSM.

Don’t let him trick you into thinking what he did was BDSM. It lacked the core element of all BDSM: consent. It was assault that he wanted and that’s what he did to those women.

[vrakali]

Shared here today by Matthew Boroson on Facebook. (ETA: Gaining inspiration from other authors is great. Lifting passages and avoiding giving credit isn’t.)

Tanith Lee was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel, for the second book of the Flat Earth series. She died in 2015. You can buy Tales From the Flat Earth here and here .

[vrakali]

I’m not naming names because I’m not trying to start anything but I’m seeing several mutuals claiming they always knew Gaiman was a bad egg and it was so obvious, as though they didn’t make me stand in line with them to get his signature and kept their signed copies of his books on a special shelf akin to a shrine.

And like, listen, you don’t need to pretend.

This isn’t the devil’s sacrament. You’re not tainted by association. You’re not morally bad for not immediately knowing when someone is being charming and persuasive to hide something they don’t want you to know.

Abusers don’t just groom their victims. They groom their witnesses too. You were never supposed to know something was wrong because it was intentionally hidden. It’s okay you didn’t know. You don’t need to act like you never liked him or his work. You don’t need to pretend. But you do need to stop being shitty to other people who also didn’t know because it reeks of victim blaming.

“Well I knew, so how come others didn’t?”

His victims were fans. Are you blaming them for not knowing?

Christ alive, I hope not.

[vrakali]

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.

[vrakali]

[vrakali]

I must not mock Gen Alpha. Mocking Gen Alpha is the mind killer. Mocking Gen Alpha is the little-death that brings total generational solidarity obliteration. I will engage with Gen Alpha lovingly. I will permit them to be cringe. And when they grow up I will turn my eye to their accomplishments. Where mocking has gone there will be nothing. Only generational solidarity remains

[vrakali]

You may have talked about this before, but what's your opinion on Arcane!Machine Herald? Because I've seen him get a lot of hate because he diverges a lot from his original self-made cyborgy lore, but I personally LOVE him to bits. I was kinda worried because Arcane S1 already had lots of mechanical bodymods and an entire race of sentient robots so I was like "ok how is he supposed to be radical compared to that?" and then he engineered himself into a worldending cosmic horror being, i love him

I have no investment in League or its lore so Arcane Machine Herald doesn't have a strong emotional attachment to me one way or the other?

To me, the design emphasizes the magical aspect of the Hexcore taking over Viktor. The one complaint I do understand from League fans and somewhat share is that Viktor's Herald villain arc is a bit muddled with his S1 scientific motivations, to me.

The thing is, to me, Viktor is a scientist, and the Machine Herald and Commune leader stuff is a bit too mystical to me for the Viktor we knew. I have trouble reconciling how he pivoted to that if it was his own choice. That's why I tend to headcanon that the Hexcore was pretty active not just in persuading Viktor to become a Cult Leader, but also for the aesthetics and tone of the cult leader choice, leaning into mage imagery like robes and a staff.

Of course, that robs some agency from the character, which is overall less interesting, but I can't help but feel a true villain arc that was totally self-directed by Viktor would have been a bit more scientific, it would have been more him willfully replacing parts of himself to stay alive.

But as you noted too, that doesn't really work within Arcane, neither does that original Machine Herald motivation. We've got Bolbok on the Council who is basically a robot, we've got Sevika and the entire undercity with tons of metal body modifications. Viktor making it some sort of cause to replace humans with machine parts to cure their imperfections doesn't really work in Arcane as something that's an ideological stand or a philosophy of any kind. It's just day to day life. So from there, I understand leaning more into mysticism as his route for making people "perfect".

Perhaps my... hmm, not point of criticism but simply a personal story squick is that I don't like cults and I don't like the hippy sort of imagery they went for with Cult Leader Viktor, for me the whole vibe was very squicky throughout (which is why I was thoroughly baffled when people ever thought the cult was a good thing, I was silently screaming with discomfort the whole time) and a part of me really struggled to reconcile how S1 Viktor would ever choose to craft a place like this. Like I said, that's why I kind of had to go with the idea, for my own sake, that Viktor on his own wouldn't craft some weird hippy monastery where everyone just works and praises him all day, that this is an element of the Hexcore. That Real Viktor if he could control his own actions and was fully present (rather than half living on the astral plane) would also be horrified.

As for how this lends to the Machine Herald design *shrug* that's also a very "mystical" look to me, it follows from the more magical take on Herald, but it is artistically cool and very alien. Personally, I see it as simply the humanoid form of the Hexcore, its choice for what it will look like, and it's basically just using Viktor as a battery at that point to power itself in turn and to give itself a voice, Viktor is all but wholly subsumed, he didn't design that look, he has been the cocoon for the Hexcore growing inside him, and Ekko + Jayce + Anomaly Future Viktor are needed to rip it off of the real Viktor, who is immediately horrified by all that occurred and, to me, had very little agency throughout while being constantly fed the belief that he did have control. Honestly, I think Viktor was contending with an ancient seed of Void power using him as a vessel and he was hilariously outclassed by something far more ancient and powerful than him using him as an incubator for itself but, again, that's just one possible interpretation.

I know this got a bit off topic but yeah, I agree on some points about how the original Herald stuff just doesn't work in Arcane and the rest is sort of my more general feelings about the Herald and the Herald look.