Plot Of S1, Basically

omg.... two posts in one month o o don't call me out on my arcane brain rot ok, its not a problem I swear

Victor and his solitude in his glorious evolution:/

Jayce's protectiveness and need to be with Viktor after realising Viktor is dying is special to me but also makes me want to scream.

Prior to the hospital scene it's the "Are you sure this is safe?" "Of course not" and while Jayce does look concerned he leaves the lab. (He had that meeting with Mel but still)

After the hospital he immediately becomes slightly more protective and stays even if it's dangerous, the scene with the bomb. When Viktor triggers it Jayce panics but he doesn't leave Viktor even though they could've both blown up/been hurt.

Then when the hexcore destroys the plants Jayce instantly moves in front of Viktor. Another instant of this protectiveness is when Heimerdinger says he's shutting it down after seeing the plant + hexcore and Jayce says "No I won't let you" and "Professor this could save Viktor's life" which is what triggers Jayce into taking Heimerdinger off the council. While he does bring up other points to it in the meeting itself the main motivation was this scene with Viktor.

Then finally the whole "Promise me" scene Jayce did not want to make that promise, we visibly see him hesitate to make it and only accepting because of how important it was to Viktor. Unfortunately for Viktor in the opening of s2 we see Jayce's love and want for Viktor to live was more important as he breaks it to save him.

arcane pokémon au scribbles… so messy had to get it out of my brain

Zaun vik and Jayce

you're not alone, look at my shadow I'm behind you like a ghost

I hope they’re having a good time in the infinite embrace of the arcane

it's about how jinx was always perfect in silco's eyes. it's about how jayce always loved viktor because he was imperfect. it's about jinx saying, "i thought maybe you could love me like you used to, even though i'm... different." it's about viktor saying, "i am more than i ever was." silco bringing jinx back to life after she tried to kill herself on the bridge; jayce bringing viktor back to life despite his promise to destroy the hexcore. it's about jinx's "looks like you got a couple" cutting to the core of viktor's obsession with curing himself, and viktor instantly parrying with "you have much to offer this commune, powder," a stark reminder of the child she no longer is, the child people won't stop recognizing her as.

vi accusing jinx of murdering powder. jayce snarling that his partner died in this room. vi's lesson being that she has to accept jinx for who she is now, who she has the potential to be in the future, and to stop letting her grief for powder eclipse her love for jinx in the present - jayce's lesson being that he has to experience the world through viktor's eyes to really understand him, and then he has to show viktor how he has always seen him, and everything else only gets in the way. silco telling jinx that she needs to find the strength to walk away, or the cycle will never end. jayce and viktor ending the cycle together.

i'm always with you, sis. even when we're worlds apart. // in all timelines, all possibilities... only you can show me this.

Beloved if you could tell me more about how Arcane is a tragic romance staged as a geopolitical collapse in six acts i would love you forever. I find your mind so sexy

okay. i’m going to try and say something semi coherent about this, because you, my beloved mutual asked and i? would die for you.

if we’re going to talk about tragedy, we might as well start with jayce and viktor.  in true tragic fashion, they follow the classical arc to the letter: hamartia (a fatal flaw – hubris, idealism, the belief that their creation could save rather than destroy), peripeteia (the reversal – hextech becoming a weapon rather than a miracle. viktor dying, jayce bringing him back),  and anagnorisis (the moment of recognition – when they realize the cost and the damage. viktor seeing what he’s become and jayce saying what he should have said years ago). and the devastating thing is: these don’t happen separately. they collapse inward, spiral together. the tragedy hits hardest because the fall is of their own making – and because it comes too late. 

if there’s anything i’ve learned from my (very humble and very deeply felt) studies in literature and literary history it’s this: romantic tragedy is not just about heartbreak. it’s about the world collapsing as a consequence of love gone wrong. loyalty, desire, misjudgement and betrayal rippling outward into total ruin. arcane doesnt just tell a tragic love story: it tells five. ten. maybe more. the show is a lattice of relationships – romantic, familial, platonic, political – and every one of them cracks in some way. and each crack runs straight through the city’s foundation somehow.

jayvik may be the most overtly mythic of them all. our science husbands, our gilgamesh and enkidu, our cautionary tale about what happens when affection tries to hold up empire  – but they’re not alone. their spiral isn’t the only one.

arcane, in its very structure, ties systemic collapse to personal grief. every conflict begins in a relationship that couldn’t hold. vi and jinx are antigone and ismene rewritten in gunpowder and neon: sisters locked on opposite sides, loyalty twisted by trauma. mel and ambessa are imperial legacy embodied: the exiled daughter who tried to love her new home, and her mother who thinks love is weakness. caitlyn standing between love, lineage and law. ekko mourning a girl who never got to grow up and jinx is the living fallout of everyone else’s failure to protect her.

even silco and vander – two men who once shared a vision of an independent zaun – become enemies, because one believes revolution requires uproar while the other hopes reasoning might still be enough. and in the end, every character is fighting someone they still remember loving once. no character fights in isolation. every blow lands on someone they once believed in. and that’s why the city burns.

because that’s the thing, right? the show treats interpersonal relationships like structural beams: when they crack, the city does, too. the emotional subplots aren’t really subplots at all: they are the plot. hextech was supposed to be a bridge: between science and magic, between piltover and zaun, between a boy who fell from grace and a man who never got the chance to rise. instead, it becomes the wedge. a miracle turned into a weapon, with the miracle workers on opposite sides of a war they helped create. when the marriage of minds ends in divorce, the whole city pays the price. 

and that’s why we don’t have any neat hero-villain binaries, right? what we do have is people trying to claw their way back to something they lost. a sister, a partner, a version of themselves that they could still forgive. but every attempt to go back costs them something new, again and again. that’s the real tragedy, i think: not just the people lost, but that they keep losing the things they’re trying to save.

if you’ll allow me some nerdy indulgence i’d like to go back to jayce and viktor being our gilgamesh and enkidu by way of hextech. radiant ambition meets terminal wildness. they build a future together and then have to destroy it with their own hands. and the thing is: they don’t fall apart because the love fades, (affection is the one thing holding them together, after all). they fall apart because it festers into betrayal and all the ways they fail to reach each other across the gap that’s widened between them. the tragedy isn’t the end (though i really, really wish they had more time) – it’s everything that leads to it. they hit every note of a classical downfall: a shared dream born of light, warped by power, splintered by grief. their fatal flaws (call it hubris, call it desperation, call it idealism) spiral into the kind of break no apology can fix. and yet, in the end, when everything else is gone, they still choose each other. if antigone dies to bury the one she loves, if gilgamesh carves his grief into stone, then jayce and viktor choose to hold each other in the infinite embrace of the arcane in order to stop what they created from consuming everyone else. not to undo the damage but to stand in its ashes and say: no more.

(aristotle once said that tragedy is supposed to evoke pity and fear, and then purge those emotions through catharsis. this post? may have done the opposite. i have never feared more. i have never pitied harder. and i have certainly not been purged)