Framing it as the 'I'm 17 and this is deep' really hits the nail on the head, because there's so much to the perspective of emotion being necessary but also messy that's at the of the underlying narrative that SEEMS like it'd play into that, but it really doesn't have the moments to reconcile the perspectives that they arrive at to make it meaningfully follow through on that.
Viktor's journey & Jayce's have always had parallels over their struggles with helplessness & hopelessness while being JUST short of being able to make a lasting difference really shown off in Season 1 with the, "Am I interrupting?" scenes of them contemplating suicide and standing on a ledge after a mistake in their efforts winds up with terrible consequences. Viktor making Jayce promise to destroy the Hexcore and instead Jayce using it to save Viktor's life ends up being something that causes them to necessarily part ways, because it's something that represents a betrayal of that trust because Jayce was acting out of an emotional reaction to what happened during the attack & seeing his best friend getting severely injured after already being exceptionally concerned about Viktor's mortality.
Initially the integration that he has with everyone down in the undercity where he's healing the shimmer addicts is interlinking their minds to his as he is using himself to heal them. It's how he's able to talk through them occasionally. Reveck mentions that each healing takes things out of Viktor and that his capacity isn't limitless, and what he's doing with Warwick to try and get Vander's mind back is deeply more complex than what he's had to do with the others, and will take a toll on him directly, as that's meant to show a vastly more difficult version of how he's repairing all of the others and why they look to him as a savoiur.
So at this point in having a collective who all share some link through their messianic figure, they operate more like a pacifist cult, which is disconcerting but there's nothing inherently bad going on there. There is some loose sense of this from the way that Skye exists alongside him in his mind, but there's not nearly enough time or context spent on this to really understand the nature of their relationship & what happened to him the way that you'd expect to have a whole episode focused on the scientist figuring out the science of his own condition. Viktor is calm and thoughtful about what he's doing because he's now living his life in a way that's attempting to be purposeful given that he's no longer what he was due to a decision that went against his wishes and was made outside of his control.
Meanwhile, Jayce ends up in a possible future, which is already undercut because we get to see that Ekko & Heimerdinger ended up in another alternate timeline where Hextech seemingly didn't lead to that outcome. If he got tossed into a certain future that'd be more impactful, especially given that Heimerdinger was disconnected from following up on the danger of the Mages given that his role as the older individual who experienced that is completely cast aside to have him seemingly vanish into nothingness for an unspecified beyond-last-second adjustment, which is another one of those oddly rushed writing things that really feels like it's because the elements of the story that he should be connected to happen completely absent of his presence in a way that cuts out how the THREE of them were necessary to remain balanced between considerations of the balance of progress against the stagnation that comes from moving too slowly to bring healing to those who need it most – which is what Heimerdinger's journey with Ekko into the undercity in Season 1 really emphasized.
On top of that, Jayce's fall lands him with a broken leg & forced to deal with this situation of being injured & stranded in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. While the injury itself is an echo of Viktor's leg, the circumstances under which he experiences it flatly aren't ones where he's able to get a sense of what's going on rationally. He's operating on survival impulses which are all of the lower brain functions with the amygdala that are building emotionally-charged, highly biased survival responses – that's where trauma comes from. Making him into an anti-hero vessel to try to undo his emotional decision of using the hexcore to save Viktor to then have him reverse that decision out of an emotional decision – again without allowing Viktor to have any agency is the underlying issue. It's why it leads to all of the trauma with Isha, Vander/Warwick, and all of the people he healed with the terrifying screaming as the healed parts of them get cognitively ripped away, seen even more vividly in Warwick as those things all melt out of his body in fountaining streams of molten tears/blood.
It's only at THIS point that Viktor has to rely on the now nearly dead Warwick's body to give himself the fuel that he needs in order to sustain himself, and where he loses his emotional connection and his link to his humanity in exchange for survival and ascension to overcome nature, with him telling Skye that he'll miss their conversations to which she replies that he won't – because he's losing the emotion that will experience that. (Again, NONE of this is adequately set up in the story and it's obtuse until you really try to dig at figuring out why things are happening).
Even at THAT point, Viktor still explicitly says that he'll ascend everyone who is willing. It's the agency of choice, and being able to choose freedom from emotional trauma is something that isn't necessarily a point of moral judgement. It's at that point that they're TRULY a hive mind of interconnected experiences & memories, and where they all end up serving an emotionless imperative to convert everyone else and overcome nature itself, hence Ambessa weaponizing it as a tool that she can control with absolute certainty again the Black Rose – who just... are SO underdeveloped that it's just a complete and total mess of attempting to raise the stakes WAY too quickly. This is what brings everything to the, "If everything is perfect no one does anything. Emotions are necessary despite the suffering they bring." conversation between them that just feels monumentally reductive on top of being tonally dischordant to Jinx's journey given that she's literally attempting to kill herself multiple times by jumping off a ledge like both of them did because of the unhealed trauma & consequences of the emotional damage of what she went through.
The other issue here are that this hive-mind concept was most significantly brought about by Childhood's End, (FFVII, StarCraft, and countless other things directly cite it as the influence of those things, so its influence carries through a lot of different avenues that may not know the initial source – especially given the very Protoss-like appearance of Viktor after his ascension those bits of thematic DNA feel especially significant). It really mangles the delivery of the idea that this ascension into something else just... happens as a part of advancement, and it generates fear and aversion BECAUSE it's so different and it operates in a modality that normal people can't experience, and it's destined to leave the previous form of humanity behind for something that's unrecognizable to the older generations (i.e. the same fundamental fear & prejudice that the Mutants in X-Men face).
This basically takes that framework, removes all of Viktor's agency multiple times through Jayce's emotional actions driven out of concern for the well-being of those he wants to help, and then because it ultimately characterizes Viktor as a threat, it ends up justifying Jayce's villainous actions through the ham-fisted preachy bit that overlooks the history of human Viktor's physical struggles that had defined his life outside of his control by making it so that Viktor the one who was just stopping himself through Jayce to prevent himself from becoming a danger to everyone as he even regards himself as a threat – rather than seeing that there is a facet of progress that the world might not willingly accept ESPECIALLY at an accelerated pace without the necessary safeguards.
The pacing is why that all feels oversimplified, because what the story needs is moments to understand that while Jayce is still on a heroic path the entire time, his trauma & the execution of that will mean that he's NOT the hero in certain circumstances and he has to commit to that IF he's certain that the ends justify the means – a decision that you cannot rationally make when you're driven by emotional guilt, trauma, & bias without a LOT of time to be forced to hold onto that choice through things that want to dissuade you or test that resolve in complex ways, because even when you're in the role of trying to be a big picture saviour – you're going to be a villain at a different scale, which is especially difficult when you force others to experience the same trauma you went through.
This is the sort of thing where Jayce having to actually face Vi & Jinx after his actions made them lose their father ALL OVER AGAIN... AND it made Jinx lose herself all over again with Isha's death are exceedingly paramount parts of that story that either don't happen, or happen completely between episodes. That SHOULD have been the connective tissue between those storylines. Jinx losing Isha how she does is a VERY specific trigger because Isha not only models herself after her big sister, but she's blown up after her dad turns into a monster to protect them, and she does it by stealing and cramming 3 Hexgems into a weapon and using it to do what she thought was right & what her adoptive parental-sibling does all the time, and it got her & everyone else killed and left Jinx with nothing because she had to watch all the parts of Powder that she'd re-nurtured die all over again to the EXACT same cycle.
This is where there's one element where I've gotten a bit more forgiving about Isha's portrayal. One of the things about animation and the "anime look" is that animated characters rely on "baby schema" which is that they have particularly exaggerated proportions in their eye size, face shape, etc. because it's a mammalian trait that makes us inclined to be protective or nurturing towards something. It's why mammals raise young that's not their own, and (on top of other olfactory cues), it's why they instinctively know how to act differently around babies, as well as why we naturally think baby animals are cute. It's more lower-brain automatic survival pattern subconscious function, and it's why Disney princess & animate characters have a look that makes you emotionally inclined to feel protective & emotionally attached to them more easily.
Because Jinx IS still Powder is broken little fragments, she has to carry a lot of that same look even when she's older, whereas Vi's older self looks a LOT different comparatively speaking. That's because there has to be an audience impulse to still want to protect Jinx despite her trauma & struggles, which means the animation will parallel her younger self visually. This means that it's more complicated when Jinx has to become the older sibling/psuedo-parental guardian over another kid that's like she was, because you then have to maintain that dynamic which means that Isha's child-like qualities end up being REALLY amplified. Even lanky little Powder crossing the bridge with Vi when their parents die never looks as little as Isha. We know Powder isn't tough enough to get into fights, but Isha's constantly getting into brawls & diving in to shield Jinx again Vi and doing the sort of overly precocious things that happen in children who don't have a guardian, because they're developing on their brain's own survival instincts rather than relying on having a safe environment for cognitive development. That's how & why they often become overly co-dependent when they DO find someone who will protect them and they mirror & protect them exceptionally strongly regardless of whether that attachment is protective or toxic (the same way that Jinx & Silco's relationship was deeply complicated).
While this makes things feel discordant with Isha being visually WAY too young for the realism and ways in which the story established things with Vi & Powder as kids in the undercity, it's an animation choice that doesn't really work for Jinx's story without her looking that way, because anything else will make it so that Isha's precocious traits from being wholly abandoned, like when she's trying to "be" Jinx and show up to things will start to elevate her into the elder sibling role instead of Jinx which isn't the purpose of the characterization of that relationship. It's a mirror that helps to show that Silco's trauma from his fractured relationship with Vander made it so that he was like a vulnerable younger sibling when he & Jinx were alone, which is why he always needed her to give him his medication and couldn't do it himself. That vulnerability is why he couldn't give her up and would have let the whole world burn to keep her alive. That particular dysfunctional coping mechanism is what's REALLY important for Jinx to see when she's experiencing Isha's death – because she's also watching herself shoot her own father figure who loves her which is the OTHER WAY SHE LOST HER FAMILY.
That's why she shatters into apathy & total helplessness, turns herself into Vi, and is sitting in her cell with her hair unbraided, because she's completely and utterly unraveled. The problem is that rather than getting to see how this impacts Jayce – since the Hexstone explosion from his research is LITERALLY what started this whole mess. We never get any moment to see him have to grapple with the ways in which that echo is repeating or how that's pushing her into blowing herself up or jumping off of a ledge to her death like he & Viktor both saved each other from. That all violates the key storytelling rule of, "Show, don't tell." when that reveal just just delivered as a single line of dialogue from Caitlyn to Vi about where her sister is.
And not-so-surprisingly, this all sort of leads things back into Jinx in the jailcell being glossed over with a quick bait-and-switch to locking up Vi so that her & Caitlyn can get all steamy before any of the meaningful things about what happened ACTUALLY get addressed. There's not enough time to build up to what's happening there to be a healing moment, because we don't get to understand the weight of the impact that this has on Vi by seeing things that are like having Powder & Vander back – only to lose both of them again to the same thing and then end up in a jail cell.
Vi went through those traumatic things too, but Vi ha's had Caitlyn working on her side THIS WHOLE TIME even allowing the both of them to covertly team up against Ambessa, so the impact of that lingering doesn't need to be on the popular lesbian ship so quickly, but rather it needs to be taking time to unpack that emotional cycle of repetition, because it's important to recognize that all of these cyclical pairs of Ambessa & Mel, Jayce & Viktor, Vi & Powder, all have an interwoven relationship where the trauma one of them experiences is re-triggering those events for others, and building this into a cycle that just keeps repeating even as it keeps amplifying over & over again, and where breaking that cycle is critically important – which is where a love scene FINALLY breaking the self-guarded Vi's outer shell would really work... but where another key element is critically important.
That's where the value of Heimerdinger & Ekko comes in. They're impacted by this same cycle, but they're in different places. They're responsible for larger communities, and figureheads of those places. They're doing good from different directions, and their exposures to one anothers' lives fundamentally shifts their core purpose as well as how they're able to think about what they do. Heimerdinger spends almost 3 years LIVING IN THE UNDERCITY before Ekko shows up in that timeline. He's learning about the best of what things are while also showing his core weakness is that he'll be content to be somewhere and let time pass because he has time to spare. Because that's a single episode just sort of slotted in like Jayce's Arcane Apocalypse or the Black Rose, we don't get the necessary juxtaposition of the sense of urgency that Ekko has to consider for the death of the tree in his community back in their world that drives him back there in mere DAYS, and which would create the framework for Heimerdinger making a sacrifice to save Ekko feel meaningful rather than oddly just writing him out.
This also loops back around to the fact that from the moment that Viktor meets Reveck, he can see Reveck's dead daughter. He KNOWS what he's trying to save, and the lengths he's willing to go to in order to ensure that Viktor can fulfil his purpose because it'll bring his daughter back. It's the same reason that Silco would've given up Zaun to keep Jinx free and recontextualizes the two of them working together on Shimmer in the undercity, it's the same sense of loss & hopelessness that is emblematic of Jinx's trauma of losing Vander when Viktor's core is blown away by Jayce – because not even Viktor would sacrifice Vander to save himself, and was pushing himself past his limits because Vander was worth saving... and Vander felt that way about his daughters because it's what kept Warwick alive and gave Reveck real hope that he could actually bring her back – WHICH ULTIMATELY DOES HAPPEN because we see Orianna standing in her room at the end.
That's what would FINALLY give enough of the context to Ambessa & the Black Rose being a parent going above & beyond way too far for their child at the expense of what their child actually wants, because that drive ends up being more of a self-defining vendetta against the world that becomes their core purpose where it's no longer about their child but it's about them feeling that they were able to save their child in a way that they'd failed to do – Ambessa's son being murdered by the Black Rose because they thought that he was the child that she'd taken from them. Hence why Mel is still sympathetic towards her mother in the end despite all of the manipulation & destruction that she caused, which doesn't really have the necessary weight nor does it define what the threat is well enough for that to be clear, let along for Mel's CONSTANT subconscious emotional influence over everyone else's lives because of not knowing about her powers within her position in politics have time to be unpacked in just how deeply she ended up creating the circumstances that everyone experiences – hence the reason why Heimerdinger & everyone founded the city of Piltover in the first place.
It also adds in a layer of context & complexity around how her & Jayce are having sex in a scene where the visuals are being interwoven to Viktor's blood fusing into the Hexcore. There's a massive weight of that core conflict of Mel's history that fundamentally shapes the lives of everyone in the entire series, and it's why her & Ambessa's conflict as the escalation of the warmongering of the mages from other lands is of paramount importance to looking at things like the juxtaposition of the sovereignty of Zaun being countered with Ambessa puppeting Caitlyn in order to enforce Martial Law and place everyone under a system that she can control. She's used to working against something that can manipulate those things and win on TOP of having overwhelmingly powerful magical capabilities that will snatch you out of a room with astral thorns if your anti-magic defenses aren't up. She's paranoid out of necessity.
This once again reflects back into how she puppets people into positions where she can use their own motivations to achieve her own ends in a calculated & controlled way for her own safety that disregards everyone else as pawns that REALLY heavily pits that juxtaposition against the brand-new, bright-eyed, naive cadette Maddie as the perfect target for her to influence from both directions. She tells the story about seeing Caitlyn fighting to get Vi the rights to join the enforces & threatening to pull her family's funding, and that influence becomes the catalyst that actually gets Vi to join them. She sees Ambessa taking charge in the aftermath and putting Caitlyn in charge and again is still starstruck by that whole scenario, and gets nudged into a place where she's Caitlyn's trusted intimate partner, but the closer she gets to Caitlyn as this person she admires, the farther away Caitlyn grows towards her to the point that she won't give up that power that Ambessa recommended her for when it starts changing her as a person – and Maddie isn't able to get that to change, because she was explicitly manipulated into that role by Ambessa because she's the person with the LEAST amount of ability to reinforce her emotional influence over Caitlyn, since that is explicitly what Ambessa is creating systems to avoid.
That's why Maddie's line to Caitlyn is a reflection of that type of discarding and dehumanization that she's been slowly put through for months at the hands of the two people who she looked up to more than anyone else given her introductory dialogue. That's the kind of manipulation that echoes Mel's own weakness which is why Ambessa sent her away, and she intentionally disassociated herself from her family, because she KNOWS how dangerous her mother is to anyone where showing mercy will earn the exact opposite, because Mell watched her mom murder a child in front of her, which is where the whole conflict with the Black Rose emerged from in the first place. Maddie shooting at Caitlyn by Ambessa's order driven by both military obligation as well as out of a sense of justified betrayal by the person who she treasured most, and MEL'S magic being the thing that kills her for it is just gut-wrenchingly awful, because it's a reflection of Mel's trauma being intertwined with Caitlyn, given that she's Jayce's childhood friend who he always tried to go out of his way for.
I expect that there's a similar type of arc that's at play with Loris & Vi given that they have a reflection of that relationship, explicitly during the self-harm phase of Vi falling into her darkness both literally & metaphorically with fighting, drinking, and amplifying all of the self-protective & hard outer shell elements of her relationship that have constantly created issues in her life, while Loris is always shown just watching from the background and being around to try and help her despite herself. Given that we meet him in the gutter surrounded by bottles, it's very clear that he recognizes that path as one that's utlimately going to put her in a bad place, but she's rejecting that in the same way that Caitlyn is breaking that connection with Maddie. It's more of the cyclical traumatic influences being interconnected to one another with those two new key characters who we don't get enough time to get to know fully.
That's what puts Vi into such a particular place when Jinx shows up as the icon of the Undercity that Vi was supposed to have been that puts her into a different role, where the whole reason Jinx is there is because Vander's her dad, too. The other thing that this glosses over is that this moment in the story is addressing that there's a vacuum in Vi's life that's stemming from a mirror to something that we've seen before – Jinx & Silco. There's a big & messy layer of complexity in those types of relationships when someone's at a point in their life where they're broken and there's someone who's looking out for them, and that sort of thing is why I referred to the "goth bi Vi" phase as such, because there's that thing where she needs a source of stability, but she's constantly running away from it no matter how well it's caring for her because that trauma of losing Vander isn't healed and she felt that it was on her for not being strong enough. Vander wouldn't have had to step in if she could beat that Shimmered-up bully on her own – especially since she let him walk away when he threatened her with a knife in the very first episode.
Vi's still dealing with that trauma, and so when she's in the midst of a self-destructive spiral, Loris is watching out for her, because it's established at the same time Maddie's character is that he's watching more closely than he lets on, and he's also intimately familiar with this particular type of self-destructive behaviour from his own experience. However, that kindness & love is just going to reinforce her own feelings of helplessness which is what's fueling her impulse to fight and push away, which is why it's imperative that Jinx is the one extending the olive branch to mend that broken bond by reuniting with the person that they both lost in a way that's at the foundation of how they had originally repaired the trauma of both of their parents dying on the bridge up from the Undercity that fundamentally defines the existential conflict that they're battling against.
Vi not being the emblem of the Undercity while Jinx is holds specific weight in the context of her meaning to be the thing that reformed the bond between Piltover & the Undercity by bringing Jinx in – which is initially when Jinx was attempting to coordinate a situation where Vi killed her, but Isha intervened and so at the last second, nothing went the way that she planned (again, Jinx's core trauma), and where she lashes out at Caitlyn over acting like Jinx for trying to kill Jinx when a kid could've gotten hurt – exactly what Vi was doing when her & Jayce raided the Shimmer facility and a kid got killed which lead to the terrorist attack in the first episode of Season 2. There are all of those intermingled complexities of Vi & Caitlyn's relationship that specifically breaks apart & rejoins with the other members of that unit in order to try and recover from them – but we don't see enough of those to be able to understand the context of those people as individuals who are just as much a core part of the story as the Season 1 characters are.
That's why those two specifically are points where the weakness of their portrayal is the easiest way to pinpoint where the writing is weak, because they most visibly lose out important development and come across as 1 dimensional background NPCs or pawns rather than being genuine people whose role in the story is an important part of the overall tapestry that gets truncated and cut short in other ways that's a bit easier to detail in poking around at the parts of the story that we don't see, but that given the way Season 1 was written it's almost CERTAIN that those are details that existed because they're still a part of the framework to the underlying character motivations & cyclical trauma, but the way in which those things get portrayed at a breakneck pace that doesn't take more care in emphasizing what parts of that are vibes vs. what parts of the story are key information ends up making all of that difficult to discern without revisiting and doing all of the reading between the lines for the story, because it's not doing it on its own any more.
It's the moments where things get emotionally mischaracterized that bother me the most (Maddie & Loris being the most apparent), but there are nuances to everyone's relationships, the struggles that they face, and how they change that makes it feel like some of those things end up in a weird place where there's a delivery that doesn't always match the emotion of what that story looks like from multiple directions, which is what I love the most about the first season.
There are details that I really miss like Jayce & Caitlyn as childhood friends since her family sponsored him, and they have such an interesting sibling-but-not-sibling relationship, which makes the fact that Vi is intertwined with the person whose house she robbed that started all of those hardships, but also catapulted both of them into their positions exceptionally interesting as a dynamic. Jayce & Viktor have a really heartfelt & loving friendship, and even while Mel can't help but have magic that's interconnected to her emotions in ways that impact both of them, she's always been understanding of that love in a way that doesn't overlap with their own romantic entanglements, and which the kaleidoscopic interconnection between them and the Hexcore doesn't really get enough moments for those elements to reevaluate each other as more & more things change with the three of them. Those same things apply to Ekko, Powder/Jinx, & Heimerdinger in being different sides of the old & new where they're drawn together to be happily together and to make a comfy home out of the tough times that they face despite all seeingly coming from walks of life that have absolutely nothing in common with one another.
They're all so interesting when they have more time to explore what those dynamics are, but that's only possible at certain points in the story & why it's important to take TIME with characters when they're in the thick of it to make sure that you're intentionally reinforcing all of those threads, which the single-character-focused episodic tangents in Season 2 can't really do, because they're either moving past developments that don't give things time to breathe or not focusing on the significance of the passage of time to change the status quo just because things are going to loop back into a familiar pattern. Just because Vi & Caitlyn are going to get back, or Jayce & Viktor are going to be reunited after Viktor leaves, or any of those other things isn't a reason to rush into those moments, because it loses on the understanding that you get from living through the LASTING IMPACT of those things, rather than just the shock of the event.
Everyone is well-interconnected, but those relationships are overly distilled in Season 2, and rather than making things more clear, everything ends up being more diluted for it – so hopping out of the spoilers now to cover that.
