In All Timelines—

Jayvik and Timebomb double date

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Jayce: “I knew it, you were the one who ripped me off back then!”

Ekko: “First, I was like 10 so do you really want to advertise that? Second I know how Piltover patrons work, was it even YOUR money?”

Jayce: “It’s the principle of the thing!”

Ekko: “PRINCIPLE? Necromancer says what?”

Jayce: “What!?”

Jinx: (sipping a milkshake and watching with glee) “This is the best idea I've ever had."

Viktor: "When do you think Jayce will remember you were the one who once killed me?”

“butterflies can’t see their wings, so they’ll never know how beautiful they really are” im gonna throw up

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)

BAD REPUTATION

a little comic strip

copernicus’s golden boys

cosmic jayvik 🤭

Postliminary Conversations

always thought that Silco became a council member in the ep 7 AU... I would've loved to see him interact w/ Mel or Cassandra 🥹🥹🥹