Asexual Representation: Viktor in Arcane & League of Legends (Part 1)

Transcript Transcribed by Hannah E.

Courtney: Hello, everyone, and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I am here with my spouse, Royce. And together, we are The Ace Couple. And I am so sorry to do this to you, but I fear we must speak [laughing] about League of Legends, or perhaps a little more specifically, Arcane.

Courtney: Now, I do think I have outed myself as a League of Legends player a time or two on this podcast, so maybe it’s not a shock to all of you, but I certainly never thought that it was going to actually be a topic of conversation for the day.

Courtney: [faint knocking sound]

Courtney: Alright, I’m just going to say this out loud because they listen to our podcast and it’s funny. But we just got very distracted because we’re sitting in our dining room recording this now, and someone just came to our door and put something in the door. And from the little, like, decorative window that isn’t super clear — it’s got shapes cut into it, so you can’t really actually see out of it very well — I just saw a very small human come to our door, put something in the door, and then run away really fast. And I was really confused, [laughing] and I just turned to Royce and I said, “Was that a child at our door?” [laughs]

Royce: You said, “Was that a child or, like, a really short person?”

[Courtney laughs]

Royce: And I didn’t say anything because I was pulling up a motion camera image. Pretty sure that this was QPR friend.

Courtney: It’s QPR friend. [laughs]

Royce: Because delivery drivers don’t put things in between the doors. They put things on the porch. So there were two people in existence that this could have been.

Courtney: [laughs] Well, I just got a really lovely Christmas card from one of the neighborhood kids. And I knew it wasn’t small enough to be her, but she’s got an older brother, and so there was a moment where I was like, [laughing] “Is that her older brother?” No. So, that’s silly. Shout-out to QPR friend. I haven’t opened the door yet. It’s still sitting there. You just left. But thank you for whatever that is. [laughs]

Courtney: Now, back to the topic at hand: League of Legends. Arcane.

Royce: So one of the reasons you might not have been expecting to talk about this: I mean, the Arcane TV show just ended recently. It ran for two seasons. I think it was pretty big. I think it got a decent amount of attention to it. But there has always been a lot of League of Legends lore. They have a lot of short stories that have been written about the characters and about the universe. They just aren’t things that, if you are a casual player of the game, that you’ll get into, because the game itself has little to nothing to do with those things.

Courtney: Right. Absolutely. It’s so strange. And I don’t know if I’ve told this full story when we’ve brought up League of Legends in passing before. But I want to say, like, 12 years ago I started playing League of Legends, and in a much earlier iteration of Twitch, I even started streaming on Twitch my League of Legends games. And at the time, as perhaps you can imagine, I was, like, the only woman playing and streaming League of Legends at any given time that I would log on and play. I’m not going to say I was the only one that existed, because I’m sure I wasn’t, but it was not a large pool of people. So, just on nature of that fact alone and the fact that I always had, like, cool, gothy, Victorian-ish outfits and, let’s be real, because I had very large boobs online [laughs], I could just log on and start playing without needing to advertise myself and I would just get people showing up to watch me.

Courtney: So I didn’t like streaming very much. I was very new to having internet in my home [laughs]. But even when I quit streaming, I still played for a while. And, much like every League of Legends player, I really hate this game. So [laughs] I go through phases — like, years and years and years where I will not even log in or play a single game, and then every now and then, something compels me to log back into League of Legends, and then I’ll have, like, a month where I’m playing every single day before I quit again.

Courtney: So when we heard that there was going to be a TV show about the League of Legends universe, we were really curious, and we watched the first season. And we were waiting for the second season, and we watched the second season pretty much right when it came out. And we were like, “Okay, there’s that.” But then, I kid you not, like two days after we finished watching Season 2, we start getting all these messages from you lovely listeners being like, “Hey, don’t know if you saw this, but a creator said one of the characters is Ace.” Oh no. [laughs] I was like, “Are you kidding me? We just watched that.”

Royce: So to set the stage a little bit: Arcane… As I mentioned, League of Legends has a lot of writing, a lot of short stories around it. I think there have been spinoffs that were things like comic books and I don’t know if they have any actual full-length novels. But there’s a lot of lore that exists that, again, you don’t really get if you touch the game, because it’s not that kind of game. It’s not a story-driven game.

Royce: But the show Arcane takes place in one of the notable cities where a number of champions originate. The game itself has somewhere over 150 characters in it, and they add more every year, basically, to some degree. But a small section of the entire League universe was the focus for this story, and it fixated around a couple of more noteworthy characters. One of the primary characters in the story is Viktor, and that’s who we’ll be talking about, mainly, today.

Courtney: Yeah, let’s talk about Viktor. So this is going to be a weird one because… Right off the bat, let’s get this out of the way: If you’re a regular listener of our Ace rep videos, this will not surprise you, but we reject Word-of-God representation, and that is exactly what this was once again. This was one of the creators of a show saying, after the show released and wrapped — Season 2 is the end of Arcane as a story —

Royce: Yeah. I think there are whispers of more League TV coming, or more League media, but will probably fixate on another section of the universe.

Courtney: Right. And so, as far as we know, this story is completely done, under wraps, and nobody knew that this character was canonically Asexual until Christian Linke went on an interview on Twitch. Again, it’s a stream that is only likely to survive for so long. I don’t know if they cross-posted it to something like a YouTube, if it’s elsewhere, but it is a Twitch stream. And it was also a German language interview, so a lot of people are also getting the interview secondhand who don’t speak German, just hearing, like, “Hey, this creator said this on a German interview on Twitch. Did you know that this character is canonically Ace?” So, right off the bat, we hate that. People need to knock it off.

Courtney: So we’re going to talk about, I think, more so the discourse that spun from this. Because, Word-of-God aside, I think that is always going to do at least as much harm as good. [laughing] I don’t think Word-of-God is ever going to be a net positive because it spawns discourse like this. And unfortunately, the discourse is insufferable. So we’re going to talk about this and other folks’ opinions of it, our own. Because also, just kind of having formerly been and still on-and-off am a League of Legends player, I’m also considering what the original lore of the game was. Because I think I have an opinion that’s very interesting that I haven’t seen anyone else articulate yet in all of this tomfoolery.

Courtney: But for those who have not watched the show, let’s give an overview of what Viktor’s deal is and what we actually saw and heard in the context of the show itself — what was actually on screen.

Royce: So, Viktor in Arcane — to just pull out some tropes to ground ourselves a little bit — is your sort of stereotypical genius inventor type, which is noteworthy here, but I guess not maybe as unique or special as this trope would be in most media. Because even in Arcane — which, again, is a small slice of League of Legends as a whole — there are, like, five or six genius inventor types.

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: And they’re all a little different. And that is because League has, like, I don’t know, 168 champions right now, and every one of them is extraordinarily talented or powerful in their own right. Like, they’re all very prominent members of their respective societies. That’s why they’re champions.

Courtney: Well, even in this TV show, like, two of the other genius inventor types are, at different times, a mentor to Viktor. [laughs]

Royce: Yes. Viktor, I think, is interesting, though, because a lot of these different characters have a lot of different motivations, they have different personalities. Viktor, to me, seems to be the most Nikola Tesla type.

Courtney: Mmmmm. [laughs]

Royce: And a lot of people have argued about Tesla’s sexuality.

Courtney: Yeah, Tesla is one of those historical figures where a lot of modern Ace people are like, “We see something there! Hmm!” But he is also a disabled character. And he has been disabled, if not from birth, at least from early childhood, because we see, even in flashbacks to him as a kid, he is walking with a cane at different points. He may be walking with a cane or a crutch. He seems to wear a back brace of some type, and clearly also has more, like, internal chronic health issues, like with organ systems — which, in the context of the show, is theorized to be because of the poor conditions he grew up in. Because he grew up in the Underground, where these are definitely the underprivileged, underserved, dare I say colonized group of people.

Royce: The people of Zaun. Yeah, I think that fits. They’re, like, a city underneath a city that exists in a very classist state, where they don’t have quite the same level of rights and privileges as the people living in the upper city above them.

Courtney: Yeah. And there’s definitely a freedom fight. Like, you say Zaun, but there is definitely a group of people who are fighting to create Zaun.

Royce: That’s true. They are —

Courtney: Because right now, they are the underground.

Royce: They’re definitely in the means of, like, occupied area trying to establish independence, kind of a thing.

Courtney: Yes. And so Viktor grew up there. But now, as this, you know, genius young adult, he’s gotten a place above ground. He’s gotten a place in a university with a well-esteemed mentor. And so it’s sort of mentioned, like, “Oh, all of the, you know, toxic chemicals he breathed in as a child when he was living there may have contributed to this.” So not only do we have someone with a lifelong disability, but we have someone who is very likely to be disabled due to capitalism and colonialism and systemic injustices, which I think is neat, and that’s honestly the kind of character I would love to actually be obviously, canonically Ace [laughs], because that could be cool.

Courtney: But what we see of his life chronologically in the show: We see him as a young child who uses a mobility aid. He is not out running and playing with the other kids. He’s sort of sitting and making a little toy boat that can float on the water. And we do see a young girl who’s very curious about that and curious about him and sort of watches him from a distance without interacting with him directly, who later goes on to be a research assistant of his. But we don’t really see them interacting at that young age on the same level.

Courtney: And his little boat invention goes down a river and into a cave system, where he meets another genius inventor type who is also a League of Legends champion, Singed. And Singed immediately sees, “Oh, this is a very talented, intelligent boy,” and sort of looks at his little boat invention. And he does give a line offhandedly about how loneliness is the byproduct of a gifted mind, which I think was interesting for him to say, because even though we saw Viktor alone, there were very few instances where we saw him, like, alone and suffering for it. We didn’t get enough of his own commentary or seeing any signs that he was, like, bothered to be alone, because that was only a comment coming from someone else. And so that’s hard to tell, because some kids genuinely do enjoy playing on their own more so than other kids. But then also, being the disabled child, could he have just physically not been able to do the things the other kids were doing? Could the other kids have been picking on him? We don’t know, because we didn’t actually see that. And I imagine the main reason why we didn’t see that is that there were a lot of characters and a lot of plot lines that they were trying to fit into this show, and not all of these plot lines had enough time to fully breathe.

Royce: Yeah. And while Viktor and Jayce were both very prominent characters in the storyline, I think that they were ultimately secondary to Jinx, who probably got the most screen time out of any character.

Courtney: Yeah. Well, it’s Jinx. I mean, Jinx is like the Lady Joker character [laughs], just the completely off-her-rocker, having a great time, always a smile on her face, doing fucked-up things but looking fabulous while doing so. And, listen, she was a new champion during my first stint of playing League of Legends, and she was a big deal when she got released. And they knew she was going to be a big deal, because they made an entire music video for her, and it was a whole thing. So I am not at all surprised that she became one of the main focuses of this first TV show.

Courtney: But, [sighs] you guys, [sighs] I really wish that we had just waited a couple of days to watch Arcane so that we could have watched that second season going in knowing what we now know about what this creator said about Viktor, because then I had to watch it again. [laughs]

Royce: To take notes.

Courtney: To take notes and to see, like, were there any possible signs of this that I did miss? And some of them I really don’t think they were intentional; I’m not sure. But going in knowing this character is supposed to be Ace had me thinking, oh, well, when he meets Singed, Singed is taking care of this, like, mutant creature that kind of looks like a giant axolotl.

Royce: Yeah, it’s a fantasy axolotl.

Courtney: And so going in, watching through Arcane a second time, going, “Okay, this character is supposedly Ace, let’s watch it again with that in mind because I didn’t pick it up the first time,” I’m like, “Well, axolotl. Were they actually that clever about that?” But then it’s like, that isn’t even really Viktor’s thing, that’s Singed’s thing, and Viktor just really develops a fondness for this creature. Because then, when Singed goes on to do his, you know, mad scientist kind of a thing, there’s a moment where this creature is dying, and he’s trying to artificially preserve its life when there’s very clearly no quality of life remaining, and…

Royce: Is that the takeaway you got? I think that Singed was running experiments on this creature because it had extraordinary regenerative capabilities.

Courtney: Oh, yeah, I’m sure that was also happening.

Royce: I don’t think it was dying a natural death. I think the cruelty there was entirely from Singed’s experiments.

Courtney: Yeah, that could be. But he was still trying to keep this creature alive —

Royce: Yes.

Courtney: — while it was very obviously, visibly suffering. And Viktor saw this creature suffering but still, like, attached to life support, and he was like, “Why? This is terrible! Why are you doing such a thing to her?” And Singed was like, “You have to understand, this mutation is highly beneficial. It has to survive. We need to be able to harness this,” and sort of a, like, “You’ll understand someday” kind of a thing. So Viktor does have this empathy for this creature.

Courtney: But again, just the presence of an axolotl-ish creature is not going to have me going, “Oh yeah, that character: super Asexual.” [laughs] It was a very fun Easter Egg for the Ace community when Bojack Horseman did that and had an entire axolotl family and had an Ace axolotl character and had Todd as an Ace character date an Ace axolotl. That was cool, because I know, as part of this community, they did their homework. They were doing that on purpose. But the representation has to be so obvious to every single viewer like it was in that show — they were not mincing words: those characters were Asexual — that the average viewer I’m sure doesn’t even know that axolotls are an Ace community symbol or have been. So that was like — that was extra for us. So we can appreciate, not only are they teaching the audience and making it obvious to everything, but they’re also giving us a wink and a nod, saying, “We did our homework. We’ve talked to Aces. This is for you.” And I didn’t get any kind of those vibes from this, so I am not giving them credit for that.

Courtney: And even if I were to be proven wrong, even if one of the creators came out and said, “Yes, we did intentionally decide to make this creature like an axolotl because we know that that is an Ace thing and Viktor has always been Ace to us,” I’d be like, “Okay, you still need to make that more obvious to us, though. Thanks.” Because the first time I watched the show, I did not come away going, “Oh my gosh, is Viktor Asexual?” It didn’t happen.

Courtney: Because what we did see was just an unreciprocated crush. This girl who grows up to be the woman who is his lab assistant, who’s helping him with his research — she does seem to have a crush on him. And we never get, like, a conversation about it. He does reject her, but in such a way that it’s not obvious that he’s not interested in any kind of sexual relationship, because it seems to just go right over his head — which does happen sometimes. But he is so invested in his work, he’s working late at night, he’s sleeping in the lab. And we’ll just see moments where she’s trying to be like, “Hey, are you leaving soon? I thought maybe we could walk home,” and he’s like, “No, I’m sleeping here tonight.” She’s like, “Are you sure? There’s always tomorrow.” And he’s like, “Good night.” And then she leaves. And this whole time, he’s hunched over his desk working on something, so he’s only really half paying attention to that conversation anyway, because his work is the most important thing to him in that moment.

Courtney: And then we later see her, like, trying to rehearse a conversation for him. Like, she’s been doing a little research of her own, and she just seems to really want to impress him and wants to get his attention. And so we see her trying, like, to workshop how she’s going to present this new idea of hers and how much she admires him and wants his approval. And so we get a few different instances where we know, okay, she has some sort of feelings for him that are not being reciprocated.

Courtney: But just having one person who has a crush on you that is rejected or unreciprocated or, in the way I read it, was just going over his head… Because I never really got the impression that he knew that she likely had romantic feelings for him. Did you get that at all?

Royce: I think it’s questionable. I don’t remember Viktor mentioning anything. I think, at one point, he mentioned to others that she was a childhood friend. I don’t know whether to say if Viktor was completely oblivious or if he knew to some extent. I don’t think we got anything that specifically showed one way or the other.

Courtney: Yeah. And we don’t get much of their history either. Because saying “childhood friend” — the only thing we saw on screen from their childhood was her just looking at him from afar and they, like, made eye contact and then she left. So if they did start developing a friendship after that and talking more, we didn’t really see that or get it explained. So, that is hard to know. Because in isolation, a single unreciprocated crush… maybe he’s not into women; maybe he’s so invested in his work that he’s just not interested in dating right now but might be later; maybe the fact that she’s his lab assistant, he thinks that’s an inappropriate relationship; maybe because they’ve knew each other since childhood, maybe he thinks of her more like a sister. There are so many conclusions you can draw from that that are not, “He’s Asexual.”

Courtney: And that’s why I’ve sort of said, if you’re not going to say the word “Asexual” — if you’re in a time period or a world where this word doesn’t exist — you still need to demonstrate it in such a well-rounded way, it needs to be presented from different angles at different times to paint this picture, because that one thing in isolation is not going to bring the viewers to the conclusion that you’re allegedly hoping for. Because in this interview, he claimed that Viktor was always meant to be Asexual. Like, throughout the whole process, that was the intention. Like, “To me, Viktor has always been Asexual.” And since I do not speak German, I am guilty of getting this interview secondhand. So I’ll link in our show notes to some of these articles, some of these Reddit forums where people are conveying this information.

Royce: And I will say, from what I noticed watching Season 1 and 2 of Arcane, I never saw any indication that Viktor was interested in any type of relationship.

Courtney: Right.

Royce: From the narrow view of his life that we saw.

Courtney: So this creator claims to have spoken to a group of LGBTQIA+ Rioters — Riot Games is the company that creates League of Legends — and he apparently spoke to them before and during the creation of this show and asked them what is lacking in good representation in the media and that a big answer was Asexuality — which I do buy. I buy that. I know there are Asexual employees at Riot. I have heard some of them speak. I’ve seen panels of some of them.

Courtney: The interesting thing is, I have never seen an employee at Riot who is Asexual or anywhere else under the queer umbrella identify with Viktor before this show, and in fact, a lot of them have wanted to go with a more subversive option. So there was a panel with a homoromantic Asexual employee at Riot who was asked, “If any of these characters could be Asexual, who would it be?” And the answer was Elise, who is, like, this total seductress spider lady. And the idea behind that was sort of the same idea as The Imperfects, where we talked about the character Abby Singh, who — that wasn’t animation, that was live action, but it was very fantasy — Asexual woman develops powers and basically becomes, like, a succubus. Like, she is not experiencing sexual attraction to anyone else, but she now has this intense power of seduction. And in the context of that show, I thought that was a really fascinating concept.

Courtney: And I am going to talk about… We’ll put a pin in it, but we are going to talk about what the Viktor lore in League of Legends was before the TV show Arcane, because I think that’s notable and I think it’s interesting. But, given what the lore was before this show, I fully understand why there were not likely a lot of Aces who identified with Viktor, who would look at the diverse spread of champions in this game and be like, “Yeah, that one. That’s the one that’s Asexual.” Because if you want to talk about harmful tropes, that would have been a harmful trope. And that’s become a big part of the discourse coming out of Arcane, which we’ll also get to. But let’s go ahead and round out what we see from Viktor in the show first, and then we’ll get into the, uh, nightmare that is the discourse.

Courtney: So, Royce, you mentioned Jayce. Jayce is the character that is closest to Viktor throughout this show on a personal level.

Royce: Yeah. I don’t remember exactly how and when they meet, or if that’s even shown in Arcane, but throughout the bulk of the show, they are, like, inventing partners. They work on a lot of things together.

Courtney: Yeah. And it’s kind of interesting, because right off the bat in Season 1, Viktor is sort of the student who’s following and helping enforce the rules, and Jayce is the one who’s sort of stepping outside of the bounds of what has approval in way of experimentation. Because Jayce has this idea, this invention, this… basically, a type of, like, scientific magic, magitech concept that he hopes will improve the world if they can just get it right. And Viktor is, like, present when they’re going to shut him down, arrest him, no more experimenting on this. But Jayce gives this plea, like, to the city council, to his professor, to say, “No, there’s really something here, and we need to explore it, and this could help people.”

Courtney: And in his plea, that caught Viktor’s attention. And then Viktor approaches him after and basically says, “Yeah, I heard you loud and clear. Let’s do this. Let’s figure this out.” And it was all sort of on the basis of, “This can improve the lives of other people,” which makes a lot of sense when we hear these things about Viktor growing up in this very underserved, underprivileged community and potentially playing a part in his debility. And I think a couple times he even kind of says, like, “I want to be able to help people like me,” and it’s all a very valiant intention. And they become willing to break a few rules and push a few boundaries to get there.

Courtney: And the thing that drives me nuts, and part of what turned into the toxic element of this discourse, is that Jayce and Viktor are really good friends, [sarcastically] which must mean that they’re in love, right? Because men can’t have close friendships! They’ve got to be gay!

Royce: Oh, fandoms.

Courtney: Which to me did not make any sense at all. Because Jayce and Viktor, like, say at different times, like, “He’s like a brother to me.” “You are my brother, and we are partners in this experiment.” And I don’t know if it’s just the nature that Viktor is talking more to Jayce and giving Jayce more attention than the girl who clearly has a crush on him that has a lot of people being like, “They’re definitely gay.” But they say they’re like brothers to each other. And apparently, everyone forgets that or that’s not interesting enough to them. [laughs]

Courtney: And the thing that just really grinds me down about fandom over time is that, so often, you take a very deep, meaningful friendship — maybe something that could even be coded as a queerplatonic relationship — and people do the whole, like, “Well, there’s no platonic explanation for this,” or “If this is really special, they’ve got to be in a relationship romantically and sexually.” And I think that really can feel to a lot of Ace and Aro people like you are just devaluing how meaningful and important platonic connections can be to someone. Because you’re doing the hierarchy thing, right? You’re saying, “This relationship would be better than if they had this.” And so that is why a lot of the Ace and Aro people who are not prone to shipping have that concern.

Courtney: And the thing is, even the people who are in the Ace and Aro communities who do ship often do ship in an Aspec way. There are people who will still write fanfiction of maybe Jayce and Viktor having a queerplatonic relationship. That is a thing that does happen. So it is never going to be as black-and-white as, “If you are Ace, you cannot be gay.” That is never how anything worked, in real humans or in characters. But the thing is, with characters, we’re not going to get representation that complex anytime soon, probably. Not in a show with this high of a budget [laughs] and a built-in audience from a widely popular game.

Courtney: But there was never anything to me, as part of their relationship, where I was like, “They are more than friends,” as much as I hate the concept of “more than friends.” I never saw anything as other than friends, may be a better way to phrase that. Because the very first relationship that was sexual in this show that was presented and confirmed on screen was Jayce and another woman. That was the first sexual relationship thrown in our face, was Jayce and this other woman.

Royce: And what else was happening during that scene? Because it was flipping back and forth.

Courtney: Yeah! That’s the weird thing, too, right? So the first time we watched this — because this was still Season 1 Arcane — we thought it was about one of the weirdest sex scenes we’d ever seen. [laughs] It wasn’t one of the most insufferable, because it wasn’t like we had all the oversexual, like, mouth noises and things that drive me nuts.

Royce: It wasn’t particular — I was going to use the word graphic, but you were talking about auditory things.

Courtney: Yeah!

Royce: It wasn’t —

Courtney: It wasn’t graphic, but it was ethereal. [laughs] It was like, they’re in a bed, they’re going to have sex, and then all of a sudden, it’s, like, galactic. [laughs] Like, galactic space sex. But it’s inter-spliced with… Those two are having sex and Viktor is alone in his lab trying to work on this Hextech. Hextech is what they call it in this universe. And he sees the potential in it, but something keeps going wrong every time he tries to add a biological element. Like, there’s experimentation on plants, and eventually all the plants die when he tries to do what he’s trying to do. So he’s, like, working on this, head down, alone in the lab, while those two are having sex. But he starts coughing up blood because his chronic illness is progressing, and the blood he coughs up kind of gets absorbed into this energy he’s experimenting with.

Royce: Yeah. Hextech, or the Hexcore in this instance, is kind of a weird thing that they, even in the show, don’t fully understand. But it’s — I don’t think it’s right to call it alive, and I also don’t think it’s right to call it inanimate.

Courtney: It seems to take on more of a lifelike state after it absorbs Viktor’s blood. Because that was sort of the issue: they were not able to sort of harness this magic on anything biological, and that’s why plants were, like, the experiment. He’s like, “Why are my plants dying? In theory, on paper, I think this should work. I should be able to use this on that.” But, even though this was an accident, this was a result of a chronic illness, this is sort of a turning point in this magic technology, and that’s happening while Jayce is off having sex with a woman. And so we see, like, they’re having sex. Now there’s all this, like, galactic, ethereal wisps around them — and it’s a very visual show. It’s animated for a reason. They really try to use animation to its fullest extent to add ambiance and visual flavor. So they get abstract when it serves their larger purpose, and that’s sort of what happens here. So then you see Viktor coughing up blood, and then you see this sort of magic within the core start to take on a new life and expand. And so it was a very, very weird scene.

Courtney: But I also can’t look at that scene as such a major, drastic turning point and be like, “Yeah, Viktor and Jayce should kiss.” [laughs] But, had it been a little more obvious, I would add that point to the tally of, that is another “Yes, Viktor is not interested in this type of relationship, while Jayce is.” They are still partners in this experiment. But at the end of the day, Jayce goes home to his girlfriend, and Viktor stays all night and keeps working.

Courtney: And so, after this night, after the coughing up blood, Viktor sort of gets a terminal prognosis. And we aren’t told a specific timeline, but we are sort of told, “Yes, he is dying, and it is imminent.” And so that only motivates him even further to keep working harder and longer. And some strange things end up happening with the Hextech. Because even though it was kind of taboo to begin with, but then they convince everyone that there’s enough potential that it’s worth the risk, both Viktor and Jayce at various times try to step back from it, sort of afraid of what… like, the unintended consequences of a new invention. What harm could this end up doing if we see it through?

Royce: Yeah. And every time they get into one of those states, they kind of get pushed into reckless action by the city around them and what else is happening in the rest of the plot.

Courtney: Yeah. Because there’s a moment when Jayce is trying to back away from it and Viktor’s like, “No. This is what we need. This will save the world. This will save everybody. We need to do it.” Meanwhile, this city council, due to other things happening in different places, starts thinking, like, “Hey, why don’t we use this as a weapon against the Underground?”

Royce: Yeah. They both start developing tools for trade, for economic growth, and for weaponry. Which, at least the weaponry, Viktor is very heavily opposed to.

Courtney: Viktor is very opposed to it. And in fact, he tries to completely end his friendship with Jayce when Jayce ultimately agrees to participate in this side of it. Because Viktor outright tells him — he’s like, “We did this to help people. We did not do this to hurt people.”

Courtney: But a lot of things happen, including, but not limited to, our little delightful agent of chaos, Jinx, like, launching a rocket at City Council while they’re meeting and [laughing] killing multiple of them. And Viktor very nearly dies in this attack as well. He’s heavily injured. They aren’t terribly sure if he’s going to wake up. And Jayce does some kind of Hextech thing, which is very unclear, to try to wake Viktor up, to heal him. And it does work, in some sense. Viktor does wake up. He is alive. He’s even walking stronger than he is; his leg that normally required a mobility aid doesn’t seem to need that anymore. And when he finds out from Jayce that it was because of how he used this invention, this energy, Viktor was really pissed off at him. And this leads to Viktor completely walking away.

Courtney: But then, now that this Hexcore is sort of actually able to work with biology now — and maybe specifically because it was Viktor’s, because of the aforementioned blood absorption — Viktor just kind of starts changing. And it’s hard to explain. Maybe I’ll let you try. But at least on this earth, as something still recognizable as a human man, he kind of goes all cult leader, healer, cleric, messiah on everybody.

Royce: Well, Viktor… Before sort of intertwining with Hextech, a core aspect of his personality was always trying to find ways to use technology to reduce suffering. And I don’t know exactly what happened to his mind once he merged with the Hextech, but it seems like… The closest thing that I can sort of relate it to is how people describe the theoretical advent of general AI, where an AI is created and then it works so much faster than a human mind does that it ramps up technology to an extreme point. It kind of seems like this is happening to a certain extent to Viktor, as, I don’t know, a magical cyborg, where he suddenly has thoughts and abilities that are beyond what they were before. And he seems to kind of reach the conclusion that there are aspects of human autonomy that are imperfect, and the only way to fix those is to remove the human element.

Courtney: Yeah, but that doesn’t happen all at once, either. It’s sort of a slow drip. Because at first, he now has some amount of healing powers. And so he finds people who need his help. And he establishes something of a commune where he does not allow weapons — like, you can come in, you are welcome, but you need to leave all of your weapons at the door. You can come in, you can live with us trying to establish a peaceful society. And he’s sort of the head of this, and people come to him as a healer. And he still very much cares about removing suffering, and he still very much cares about that human element for a time, because Jinx and her sister, Vi — whom we haven’t spoken about much yet, but Vi and Caitlyn are probably the biggest, most notable romantic sexual relationship that we have in the show, who, might I add — they are lesbians and now, I believe, the first canonical lesbians in the game League of Legends. We technically got a gay character last year. Oh, what is he called? The one with the big… K’Sante, yes. K’Sante is gay, right? That wasn’t just a thing people were saying?

Royce: Wasn’t he released when Lil Nas X was president?

Courtney: I think they released him around the time that Lil Nas X became the president of League of Legends, and let me tell you, that was a glorious time. [laughs]

Royce: But anyway, I have not looked into that champion.

Courtney: But at least at the time, everyone was like, “Yay, we have a gay champion. It’s K’Sante.” And the thing with that is: Caitlyn, especially, has been a champion for a very long time. Vi and Jinx came out kind of roughly around the same period of time — maybe, I don’t know, 11 years ago-ish, 10 maybe? No, 12, maybe? How old am I? Let’s do the math. [laughs]

Royce: Caitlyn was released in January of 2011, Vi was released in December of 2012, and Jinx in November of 2013.

Courtney: Okay, so Caitlyn —

Royce: Sorry, October 2013.

Courtney: Caitlyn was already a champion when I started playing. I think Vi and Jinx were some of the first new champions released after I had started playing. And, like, I was vaguely aware at that time, like, “Oh, Vi and Jinx are sisters, but Jinx is this loose-cannon Lady Joker character and Vi’s a cop? Huh, that’s weird.” And then I didn’t look too deeply into it, but, turns out, in the context of Arcane, Vi and Caitlyn develop a relationship. And they didn’t get the mystical sex treatment that the straight couple got, but they did get a, I don’t know, steamy jail cell oral sex scene that I’m sure made a lot of people very happy.

Royce: So, back to Viktor’s colony of people. Yes, he is healing people, but I can’t remember, honestly, in Season 2, if this was a slow drip, like you said, of Viktor changing, or if we as the audience just fully didn’t understand the implications until further on. Because the people that he heals — he modifies their body in some way that is mystical and mechanical in nature to some degree, but then he can also just, like, full-on possess them and take control of them.

Courtney: Yeah, but he doesn’t do that right away. And the reason why I think… And you could be right, but the reason why I think he does still care about the humanity… Although now that you say that, I’m going to second-guess everything as I explain it. But Vi and Jinx set aside their differences and their attempts to kill one another for a brief period of time because their dad, who they thought was dead, is a werewolf now. And surprise, he’s Warwick, [laughs] who is also a champion in League of Legends. Who knew? You get all these weird things because, like, Warwick being a longtime champion, he is just this wolf creature who can smell blood if you’re close to dying, and he’ll just jump out of the forest and eat your face. And, like, you’re vaguely aware, if you play the game, Warwick used to be a man but then Singed experimented on him, and we’re like, “Okay, interesting.” And then you see the show Arcane and it’s like, “Ohh, now we get to see Warwick as a man, and this is how this happened, I see.” So they’re taking bits of lore that were there to begin with and just actually fleshing them out, but also inadvertently changing some of the lore or adding lore that didn’t have any basis to what is already existing.

Courtney: But once their father figure returns as this bloodthirsty wolf creature who’s mostly just hellbent on killing people that are bleeding, there’s a little part of him — and his name was Vander — there’s a little part of him that’s still in there. So when he sees Jinx and Vi, he recognizes him. He gives them a big old wolf hug. And they’re trying to cure him, to heal him. So they bring him to this commune, and they bring him to Viktor. And I guess we kind of brushed over the fact that this experimentation with the Hexcore ended up completely just eviscerating… was her name Sky?

Royce: Yes, the childhood friend / research assistant.

Courtney: Yes. Because she walked in on the Hexcore kind of merging with Viktor to an extent. And she thought he was maybe in danger, so she tried to, like, touch him and move him away. But she must have not been merged with it, because she just got, like, insta-cremated. Like, all of her flesh is gone, and she is reduced to a pile of ashes, which, I don’t know how that happened. It both left her bones and cramulated them all in one fell swoop. So Viktor was also very bummed about that, and also very concerned about this technology as a result of that, because it killed Sky.

Courtney: And there was this moment when he had Warwick / Vander there, and he’s sort of seeing and communicating with Skye on this ethereal plane. While his physical body is still on earth, he’s sort of mentally elsewhere and can see more things and feel more things. And he is, like, communicating with her from beyond the grave, and she’s kind of trying to say, like, “There are limitations to what you can do. There are limitations to this magic.” And it seems to be sort of warning him, like, “You aren’t going to be able to help him.” But he keeps trying. And there’s a moment where he’s sort of asked, “Why do you keep trying when this is a lost cause?” And he’s like, “Because I can still feel the humanity in there.” And I think that was, maybe, the way I read it, the last moment where he was caring about humanity to try to save humanity and retain humanity, before he went full-on, “No, humanity is a flaw, actually.”

Royce: I think that’s true, now that you mention it. I forgot about one last step being right around this time, Singed is present with some sort of chemical, some sort of thing that they were potentially going to inject into Viktor, and his commune is attacked.

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: And, again, due to this — I mentioned earlier that there are situations in the storyline where the characters involved are hesitant to push things further, and then violence happens around them, and that pushes them to push things further, to elevate things, to escalate things.

Courtney: Yeah! And sometimes that’s a literal, like, biologic change or a physical change, and sometimes it is just purely emotional. I mean, Vi and Jinx, as young children, had their parents killed right in front of them from basically the police of the occupying civilization, so emotionally, that pushed them in a direction they wouldn’t have gone without inciting incidences like that.

Royce: I did forget that there was that moment where Singe does inject Viktor. And, in that sort of astral, ethereal plane where we see Viktor ruminating, he says goodbye to Sky’s form there.

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: And that’s the last time we really see Viktor contemplating things like that.

Courtney: Yes. And from that moment on, things very much escalate. And he does become incredibly powerful, and he’s able to basically, yes, possess and take control of the bodies of many, many people from this astral plane that he’s now existing in exclusively for a period of time. And he kind of, at that point, digs in and decides the way to end suffering is to basically become a hive mind. [laughs] Just human individual autonomy is what creates misery, but if we are all one mind and we’re all on the same page, this is what we do.

Courtney: So, yeah, he gets this sort of magic robot army and he somehow creates a new physical form for himself that seems to be completely mechanical/magic. At this point, he is not recognizable as himself anymore. He’s got a new face, got a new body, got a mechanical arm laser beam thingy that you recognize from the game. It was fun to watch the show as a player of the game, because anytime a new character was introduced in the show, it’d be like, “Wait a minute, is that someone from the game or not?” Because some of them are very recognizable. You knew Jinx the whole time was Jinx. You knew Vi the whole time was Vi, and Caitlyn and Jayce. But Viktor — it’s like, you see Viktor as this human man, and you’re like, “That’s not what the champion looks like. What happened to you?” And for the longest time, we didn’t know that Vander was going to become Warwick, but then that happened, and so it was interesting to see those things.

Courtney: So, I do think we’re going to need to make this a part two episode. But some thoughts I want to touch on now, and then we will elaborate on further, are, obviously, talking points coming out of the discourse and why I need to comment on them more. One, a lot of people are saying, “Viktor being Asexual is homophobic and the show creators are homophobic for saying that he’s Asexual.” Now, a lot of the people saying this are the people who want to ship Jayce and Viktor. If you want to ship Jayce and Viktor and you want to write fanfiction and you want to completely ignore, disregard, pretend they didn’t repeatedly say that they were like brothers to each other, that is your right to do. But my God, please stop saying Asexuality is homophobic! I guarantee you that these creators saying “We always pictured Viktor to be Asexual” is not because they’re uncomfortable with the very concept of a gay relationship. We saw Vi go down on Caitlyn in a jail cell in this show!

Royce: Yeah. Far and away the most prominent relationship in this series is a lesbian relationship.

Courtney: It’s the most prominent one. It is the one that gets the most screen time. It is the slow burn. It’s an enemies-to-lovers kind of a thing. It was like, the last scene of the damn show was the two of them sitting down together and being like, “Well, you’re stuck with me.” Like, that was the relationship of the show, was a lesbian relationship.

Courtney: And the thing is, the thing that bothers me about Ace rep so much is that we have, in this show, very obvious overt lesbian relationship — got a lot of screen time, was explicit. We have Jayce in a straight sexual relationship that we see a sex scene for. We see that develop. We see them communicate and talk to each other. With Viktor, we get a creator — after the show has aired, in a German interview Twitch stream — say Viktor’s Asexual. So that is crumbs, by comparison to so much other queer representation that other identities get. That is crumbs that we don’t get it confirmed on the screen, that it’s not so obvious that everyone’s going to come away from the show knowing this. Most people are not going to watch this German Twitch interview. This is, as I’ve always said, bonus content for the superfans. It is not enough for me to even want to agree with the fact that it’s canon.

Courtney: But you’re looking at our crumbs, the little crumbs that we get left over, and saying, “The fact that you were given crumbs is homophobic. You shouldn’t even have those crumbs.” That’s what this is. That is what this is. And this happens so often. And it’s not only in TV representation. But there’s always going to be a shipper who wants to put someone in a gay relationship; that’s fine. Go have your fun. But when there is a canon Ace character, regardless of how explicit it is, there’s always someone saying, “This is actually homophobic.” Stop it! Knock it off!

Courtney: But real people get that too, and that’s what bothers me. So many real-life Asexual people are like, “No, you’re just a self-hating gay. You’re just so far in the closet you can’t bring yourself…” And, like, bisexual people get that too, sometimes, right? And discourse like this surrounding media certainly doesn’t help. The fact that Ace people exist is not homophobic. The fact that a creator… If I give every benefit of the doubt and say, “You were very well-meaning, you did actually try to give us good Ace rep, you really thought we were all going to super appreciate it when you said it on this Twitch interview that, yes, he is Ace,” even if I said, “Your heart was in the right place, but you missed the mark a little bit,” there are going to be people out here that are going to fight it, and they’re going to attack the real people in our community who are chiming in on it, and that’s what happens every single time, so.

Courtney: And that’s going to happen if it’s obvious on screen too, right? But, like, if we’re going to get attacked either way, if people are going to be so cruel to us regardless, at least give us something super obvious and tangible, because they will find every shadow of a doubt to say, “No, this is not real. This is not good enough. Asexuality doesn’t exist. I don’t want to see Asexuality on my screen.”

Courtney: So that’s one component of it, is the people saying, “The only reason they’re saying Viktor is Asexual is because they don’t want the shippers to have fun,” which not only is directly harmful to Asexual people but, like I said earlier in this episode, it severely devalues the importance of platonic relationships, which is… There’s such an added level for Aspec people to the significance of platonic relationships, but that’s something that I want everyone to be able to bask in more. Even if you’re not Ace, even if you’re not Aro, even if you have a romantic and/or sexual relationship that you are very happy with, even if you have multiple of them, I want people to be able to draw everything they can and want to from platonic relationships. And that is what is so lacking to me in our culture.

Courtney: And, again, there is very much, to me, an element of patriarchy here that I really can’t ignore when you’re saying, “This show with…” This was probably the biggest, like, lesbian relationship on Netflix this year. And to say, “No, this show is homophobic because they said one of the guys who had a friend who was a guy is Asexual”? Let guys have friends, please! Can’t bros just hang out and invent a magical technological abomination together? Let them have that. They deserve it. [laughs]

Courtney: But also, ohhh, the disability discourse. Ohhh, the simultaneously ableist and acephobic things I have heard from this discourse, where people are taking away from this character, Viktor, being a disabled character who, Word of God, is said to be Asexual, and everyone is saying, “Of course they make the disabled character Asexual. That’s a harmful trope.” So we’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about that a lot. Because I have feelings about that. I have feelings. Someone being disabled and Asexual is not inherently harmful — not in media and not in real life. I’ve talked about it before.

Courtney: I have even more to add to this conversation by nature of the fact that this is Arcane and League of Legends, and that’s what we’re going to get into more next episode. Because usually, in media, we have an Ace character, or at least heavily Ace-coded character, who, in subsequent adaptations or as a piece of media expands, they will make them less Asexual. And usually, that’s supposed to be a good, positive, personal growth thing. We’ve talked about Dexter, who, first episode of Dexter, super Asexual. He’s like, “Why do people have sex? It’s so undignified. I have no interest in this. What are they doing?” And then later, down the line, they make him a little more human, they make him a little more empathetic, they make him a little more… They’re clearly trying to humanize the character. But the method of trying to humanize the character is, “Now he has sexual relationships.” That is harmful. That is bad.

Courtney: Then we have characters like Jughead — famously Asexual character, who, in a new adaptation, they completely did away with that. I don’t remember which Sprouse brother played him, but allegedly, he was saying, “Hey, isn’t Jughead Asexual? We should keep that in here,” and powers that be said, “No. He’s sexual now.” So that’s something that consistently happens. We already have crumbs, tiny little scraps of representation, and they often get very unceremoniously ripped away from us.

Courtney: Here’s what’s potentially to be continued. So, very cool, actually, about Viktor becoming Asexual as they flesh out his character more — because in the original lore, the original biography of Viktor on League of Legends, we didn’t have all this backstory. We had… He was called a machine, and his motivations for creating this technology wasn’t to reduce suffering, to save humanity, to cherish humanity. It was very, like, the most aggressive type of transhumanism you can possibly have, where it made him out to be, like, someone who has no emotion, no care for other people, just sees humans as character flaws, exclusively is like, “We all need to become machines because machines are better. Machines don’t have the same weaknesses, and weakness is inherently bad and wrong, and so is human emotion. So let’s do away with all of it.”

Courtney: And if they took that character exactly as is — if, even as a human, he’s like, “I don’t want to be a human. Fuck all of you and all of your flaws,” and they took that character and they’re like, “He’s the Ace one,” I’d be like, “Oh, yeah, red flag. Ah-ah. Let’s not do that.” Aces — in the real world, there are studies that show that people see us as less human than any other sexual orientation. They see us as more machine-like, more animal-like, less human, more alien. So when you take exactly the epitome of that and say that is the Ace character, that is a harmful trope. That’s bad. Don’t do it.

Courtney: Now, I know there can be two different lores. There can be the League of Legends lore and the Arcane lore. Those could have been completely separate things, where, if they change some things in Arcane, didn’t necessarily change things in League of Legends. We talked about that with Interview with the Vampire. They changed things in the AMC series that were not that way in the book. That doesn’t change the canon of the book; those are two different pieces of media. But League of Legends is really embracing Arcane, and they seem to be going through and, like, retroactively changing their lore to more match up with Arcane. And, like, don’t get me wrong, most of this isn’t probably because they’re super allies. Most of it is probably because they want to sell skins of these characters that look more like they do in the show Arcane. [laughs]

Royce: I would also say that they’re probably not heavily tied to their original lore anyway. They’re creating game mechanics and have started creating, like, supplementary lore, again, for the superfans, because you don’t get this when you play the game.

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: So, yeah, of course a bunch of time and money and work was put into a TV franchise that a lot of people saw. Of course, that’s going to override whatever was thrown together when the character was created.

Courtney: Right. So the thing that might theoretically save all of this — and I will change my mind, and I will do a follow-up episode down the line, and I will personally apologize to Riot and this creator and all the creators of Arcane if this happens, which I’m not holding my breath for — if League of Legends, somewhere on their website, says Viktor is Asexual, with his new lore and his new backstory fully implemented, I will say, “You’re right, it’s canon. You did it. I will allow it.” And I will apologize. But that hasn’t happened yet.

Courtney: And the thing is, this will be such a fascinating case study, because this will be one of the only instances I can think of where you took a character who was very inhuman, was not intended or stated to be Asexual, and you humanized him, and in part of your humanizing him, you gave him Asexuality as his orientation. In fleshing him out, you allowed his orientation to become part of the process of humanizing him. That’s the opposite of what Aces get.

Courtney: And if they do it, if they pull it off, I will start playing League of Legends again, [laughing] because I’m currently on another break. I will apologize and play your game, but I will not buy a skin. Unless you give Viktor a skin that has an Ace flag on it, then I will buy that. I will buy it. Put any price on it, I will buy it. Right now, I still have… You can get little pride flag, like, icons on your profile that, when the game’s loading, you see everyone’s icons that they selected for themselves, and you can have the Ace flag icon year-round. Sometimes I’ll get in a game with someone else who has an Ace icon, and they’re my best friend now. During Pride month, when you start the game, there’s a big trail of the flag — if it’s the Ace flag, or they also have, you know, nonbinary flag, they have trans flag, they have all kinds of different flags, even just the, you know, good old-fashioned rainbow flag, and it trails behind you and glitters and sparkles as you’re starting the game. And it’s wonderful. It’s a fun time. So I will at least give Arcane / League of Legends this. I know they did already know what Asexuality is. But if they actually…

Courtney: And sometimes you get these little nuggets. Like, you’re loading up for a game and it will just give you a little, like, “By the way, this isn’t this character’s real name,” or it’ll be like, “Did you know these two characters are sisters?” And it’ll just give you a tiny little nugget of lore. If they add a tiny little nugget of lore that sometimes comes up as the game’s loading that’s like, “Viktor is and has always been Asexual,” I might buy a Viktor skin just for the hell of it. I’ve never played that champion. I will play Viktor for the first time ever [laughs] if you do that, Riot.

Courtney: So we’re going to talk more about that: what the original Riot lore was, how it compares with the new Arcane lore, how they’re intertwining the two, and more about this discourse and why it’s so wrong. So stay tuned for that.

Courtney: But for today, we are going to send you off with our featured MarketplACE vendor. Today, we are giving a shout-out to Atticus Atlas the Friend Shaped Plant, where you can purchase earrings and miscellaneous crafts by a nonbinary grayaroAce Autist. And there are some very cool things here. I actually purchased some Halloween fabric-themed cat kickers with some catnip inside of it. But you can also, just like the description said, get some earrings. There are actually Ace and Aro rings here. So if you have ever wanted a black ring for your right middle finger to show your Asexuality and/or a white ring for your left middle finger to show your Aromanticism, you can purchase them here from Atticus Atlas.

Courtney: All links to that will be in the show notes on our website, alongside a full transcript of today’s episode, as well as the description box on YouTube. And we will talk to you all next time, for, I am so sorry, even more Arcane / League of Legends discourse analysis. Goodbye.