The End of Jayce and Viktor
New video essay up now!
I was sincerely heartbroken by the disintegrating relationship between Jayce and Viktor in season 2. And that surprised me, because this story was fumbled at so many turns, I’d just about convinced myself it was unsalvageable.
We’re about to walk through the story of these two characters so I can show you what I saw in this climactic moment. But, there’s something you should know first. I was for the Glorious Evolution.
Like, why not? Could be fun!
So, if you’ve seen my last video, which is required viewing in all computer science courses at MIT, you may have walked away thinking that I am not a fan of pursuing technology that has the potential to be dangerous. But that’s not true: I don’t believe in avoiding knowledge or discovery. I believe in being critical of people who try to sell you fake technology, but being critical of people isn’t the same as being skittish of the tech itself.
When humanity receives a Pandora’s box, I believe they should open it. If the fire harms people, stop the fire and protect the people. If no one can figure out how to use the fire in order to help people, contain it. But don’t just not open the box. Knowledge can’t hurt you, only fear or greed can hurt you. So don’t be scared or greedy.
The storylines of Jayce, Ekko, and Heimerdinger this season were very strange to me. Heimerdinger, as usual, is deadset against the development of technology that uses the arcane. He explicitly states a position that, frankly, I assumed he’d held all along. The arcane is inherently dangerous. Don’t open that box. Whatever treasures might be inside aren’t worth the suffering. This seems to the position the show holds.
But then, almost off-handedly, Ekko calls out the real problem. Yeah, he’s right! The problem is that you just put a fucking nuclear reactor in the ground near the infrastructure that keeps the people of Zaun alive. It’s not the inherent problem of the arcane; it’s the disregard with which the high-minded socialites up top treat the safety and health of people with less power.
Discovery is a great thing. If splitting an atom was only done to generate enough energy to power every hospital in the world, I’d be all for it. The issue was that the fucks who did it turned it into a goddamn bomb. Knowledge and discovery are good. Hubris is a shallow concept made up by butt-hurt gods who don’t want humans to be able to fend for themselves. Fuck you, gods. Give me the damn fire, I can cook me own empanadas.
Humans need to look out for themselves and each other. That’s one point for me supporting Viktor right off the bat, which had significant consequences on my experience with the season.
Additionally, I’m like a ridiculously hard-line fan of The Prince of Egypt: I guess it’s sort of my trash. I love disheveled, barefooted people with staffs, humbly doing the work of some higher power, and being willing to suffer for that conviction. It’s my jam. I did a video about Tommy like 5 years ago, no one watched it, it wasn’t good, but I just have a real affinity for this trope. I have a sincere and potentially problematic love of the prophet with no ego whose connection to the sublime inspires tireless service of others. Again, Viktor is immediately very compelling to me.
If you don’t share my interests and opinions, you probably didn’t see the ending the way I did.
So, let’s walk it back. By the end of the first season, Viktor is hyper-focused on helping individuals. He’s essentially taking the Zaunite side of the argument posed by the first season. He argues that building weapons, getting involved in politics, dividing nations: none of that is the job of a scientist. He wants to make individuals’ lives better.
At this point, Jayce and Viktor have an uneasy agreement. It’s clear that Jayce is conflicted about how to deal with the raw, violent potential of hextech, while Viktor has determined unambiguously that it must be destroyed. Viktor was willing to die (and allow the deaths of thousands more who could have benefitted from the Hexcore) because of a single casualty, the death of Sky. Viktor is on the side of protecting individual people, even if it means turning away from huge, grand ideas about how to change society forever. Jayce is effectively following along with Viktor’s decision: he’s giving in to Silco’s demands, therefore choosing not to create hextech weaponry, and we assume, eventually shutting down the hexcore, as he promised.
Season 2 sees a full reversal of these roles. Jayce can’t deal with the reality of his conviction to abandon the hexcore. The pressure of the situation reveals his true priorities: he’s going to save Viktor no matter what. This recontextualizes the thematic argument between Jayce and Viktor. Now, it isn’t abandoning hextech to protect the little people who will be displaced and killed by war, it’s entirely about using whatever is at his disposal to maintain his relationship with Viktor. As Viktor would put it later: “That which inspires us to our greatest good… is also the cause of our greatest evil.” It’s that classic Arcane tragic irony. How can I stop loving someone I love when they begin causing harm?
Viktor has also seen a… from my perspective, much messier evolution (lol) in reaction to facing death. It’s hard to say exactly what he’s going through, but in my opinion, he felt he had satisfactorily created the end of his own journey by accepting death in the end of the last season. Being brought back, seemingly to a kind of immortality, leaves him floundering in the shame of having caused Sky’s death. In response, he commits himself fully to his original goals in a way that he couldn’t when connected to Jayce. Since he feels that Jayce betrayed him by saving his life with the Hexcore, he’s able to extricate himself from Jayce and do his own thing. From there, he descends into the depths and gives away his own life-essence to heal others.
So, needless to say, I’m angry that Jayce. This man is constitutionally incapable of making an active decision without prodding. And now, after being steadfast in Viktor’s corner throughout the show, Jayce spawns an opinion of his own and turns against him when he undertakes an unambiguously good project?
One of the most powerful scenes of this season for me is Viktor slowly, laboriously healing Vander at the expense of his own life. How can you possibly support someone who wants to end Viktor after that? Watching this develop, I couldn’t untangle my distaste of Jayce’s actions with how bad it felt to watch this relationship crumble. Jayce looks like a violent maniac, but the story keeps telling me I’m rooting for him. This pain of being misunderstood that I was sharing with Viktor drew me in really effectively. But when he takes that sharp turn into 1-D supervillain territory, I felt pushed out and alienated.
From here, Viktor quickly moves to the position that all suffering comes from conflict and by assimilating all minds into one, conflict and suffering disappears. First he says he will “evolve all those willing.” Then, we get this bit of aggressive dialogue from Jayce: “Everything you’ve done to these people, you did alone.”
Which, frankly, I’m just assuming is there to bury the lead about how Jayce actually feels, to make it genuinely seem like he hates Viktor so our expectations can be subverted in the finale. Because, what exactly has Viktor done wrong, by this point? Does Jayce believe he’s been assimilating people by force? Are we supposed to believe he’s assimilating people by force? Because that was never my impression. I was distinctly of the mind that people were coming to him for help, and were willing to becoming mentally connected to him.
Then we get our sharp turn into 1-dimensional supervillain territory and I feel like I’m being gaslit by the story. Jayce wants to stop Viktor from getting to the anomaly and Viktor… tries to kill Jayce.
Well, fuck. That’s annoying. I became a Viktor stan because his beliefs don’t allow for compromises. He wants to protect individuals, that’s his whole thing. He puts people first by fighting back against the wild-eyed, progress-minded actions of intellectuals who see humans as a factor in their work and not living beings who deserve care. And now he’s willing to kill his best friend, the “man of progress” himself, because he’s standing in the way of Viktor’s progress toward his own goals.
Is this a logical progression? Believing in one thing so hard that you just start doing the exact opposite of the thing you believe in? I don’t know, maybe there’s a more Viktor-like way of dealing with Jayce in this moment? A way that doesn’t involve talking like a supervillain. Maybe he offers to heal his leg, with intention of converting him once they make contact. He seems to be able psychologically compel people. What if he manifested in Jayce’s mind, like a psychic? Or actually explained his accomplishment, or appealed to their friendship. Why would I want to see Viktor fight? I’m not invested in him being a badass fighter guy.
And then, we watch helplessly as Viktor throws his lot in with Ambessa, and then then we see him forcibly evolving people in the finale.
Now, we have to pause here, because this leap, Viktor going from “helping people who are suffering” to “eliminating all struggle by homogenizing all brains into a single consciousness,” is, to my mind, very fucking weird.
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