Asexual Representation: Viktor in Arcane & League of Legends (Part 2)

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 once again, we are talking about League of Legends / Arcane — specifically, Viktor and the discourse. So, let’s get into it, shall we?

Courtney: Well, I suppose first, for those of you who listened to Part 1 and just absolutely could not wait to find out what was left at our doorstep mid-recording last time, QPR friend brought me the most amazing little hand-crocheted dice bag for our D&D adventures. It is absolutely in the colors of the Ace flag, and it is gorgeous and amazing. And that is one of the many reasons why I wish people would stop devaluing the importance of platonic relationships in real life, in media, in fandom, and in shipping. But we will get there!

Courtney: How I want to start today… Because I mentioned last episode that there’s a very fascinating thing happening here between Arcane and League of Legends that doesn’t normally happen when media gets adapted to a new medium — that being, League of Legends, where all of these characters were originating from, seems to be slowly going through and retroactively changing their lore and their champions to better align with what was depicted in Arcane.

Royce: Yeah. And, as we mentioned, the lore behind all the champions in League is already kind of smattered. It’s, when a champion releases, there isn’t necessarily a ton of lore behind them, and then, as they have short stories written, as, you know, comics are made, as other things are produced, it seems like they just gravitate to, “Well, what was the most recent, best-thought-out piece of media that fits the champion?”

Courtney: Yeah. And it is interesting playing it. Because, even though the lore isn’t the most important thing for the average player, it is there. It does have a canon. And you can get little, teeny-tiny nuggets of it from playing. But at the end of the day, you pick a champion, you have a few abilities, and you play with the team doing tower defense.

Royce: Yeah. Occasionally, we’ve looked up just, like, a Wiki page of all of the sound bites for a particular champion.

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: And it has, like, a number of random sound bites that play when you’re moving or you’re attacking or this and that, and those are just kind of the default ones. But then every champion has very specific things that they will say towards other champions that they have some sort of relationship with.

Courtney: Yeah, sometimes. And sometimes, that surprises me, because not every champion has, like, a special sound bite that will trigger when they see someone else. So the first, like, couple times that I was playing a champion where that happened, I was really surprised. Because there might just be a sound bite that triggers where one champion refers to another by their name the first time you see them in a game, and it’s like, “Oh! I guess they know each other.” So, that’s interesting. And you can get tiny little nuggets like that, like I said last episode, on the loading screen. Sometimes there’ll be a little nugget of lore about a random place in this universe or a random champion. And then, of course, just through some of the standard soundbites, you learn, like, “Oh, several champions mentioned Demacia. I guess they’re all from the same place.” They’re all the annoying ones, from Demacia. [laughs] But because you get these little bits, if you go to the League of Legends website, you can look up the biographies for every single champion, and you can actually, you know, Google each of these places and learn more about it. And a lot of people do, especially if you play long enough. So, this is all there.

Courtney: And the thing is, Viktor had a biography that was a lot more inhuman and devoid of any and all emotion than how they portrayed him in Arcane. And so part of the criticism I’ve seen from some folks in the discourse is that Viktor is a negative stereotype, one of them being, “They’re portraying him as inhuman and emotionless.” I’d argue they actually humanized him a lot more than he was originally intended. And that’s fascinating. Because right now, if you go to the website for the League of Legends universe and look up Viktor’s bio, you will see his new artwork, which is very clearly the final form of Viktor we see in Arcane, which is not how he always looked, and they’re calling him the Herald of the Arcane. And if you read through the bio, it’s a lot of information that we saw in Arcane. But just a month ago, two months ago, over the last several years, if you went to his page, you would have seen his old artwork, looked a little different, and they called him the Machine Herald. So they changed the name of the champion after Season 2 of Arcane came out, and along with that, his artwork and his entire bio.

Courtney: And I want to just read a couple of sections from the bios to demonstrate, yeah, League of Legends is fully embracing the lore of Arcane. I imagine they’re going keep doing that, because I did check on, like, Vi and Caitlyn, and they still have their old artwork and their old bios, so those haven’t changed. I don’t know if or when they will, but I imagine this is a process they’re going through.

Royce: Yeah. And their characters I don’t think had as much contrasting information. I guess there is… Have you checked Warwick? Because Warwick is another big change, and that may also affect Vi and Jinx’s backstories. But yeah, Viktor changed significantly, so it makes sense that they updated that page first.

Courtney: At first glance, as of the time of recording, Warwick still appears to be the old bio. Because this is one where we only know Warwick as this wolfish monster, but Arcane gave us who he was as a human before this transformation. So that information has not been imposed onto this yet. But that was sort of maybe predating what some of this says in the bio. Whereas, like, Vi and Jinx, it might not say that they’re in a relationship, but it doesn’t specifically say that they’re not. So yeah, I think they’re probably prioritizing the biggest changes first.

Courtney: But when they called Viktor the Machine Herald, here are a few lines about how they concepted this character before he was adapted in Arcane: “An idealist who seeks to lift people to a new level of understanding, he believes that only by embracing a glorious evolution of technology can humanity’s full potential be realized. With a body augmented by steel and science, Viktor is zealous in his pursuit of this bright future.” And it goes on to talk about him inventing and building, very frequently mentioning things like, “He hates to interrupt his work, even to eat or sleep.” And we did see elements of that. We saw him pulling all-nighters in Arcane. But…

Royce: The self-augmentation in Arcane was accidental.

Courtney: It wasn’t his choice. And in fact, he was really upset the first time his body went through changes. And that was like… He took it as, like, a sense of betrayal from his friend Jace and, like, a lack of autonomy, that it wasn’t his choice. But this doesn’t even say, “As a fully flesh and bone human, he had a disability.” They’re just like, “No, he is a scientist who wants humans to be machines, so he augmented his own body.” Then, “He doesn’t want to eat or sleep.”

Courtney: It talks a lot more about him working in Zaun, also, which is not at all what we saw in Arcane. He is from Zaun, or the Undercity that is to become Zaun, and pretty much all of his actual dedicated research as an adult seems to be above ground in Piltover, where he meets and works with Jace. But this talks about all the work he’s doing in Zaun before he even moves away. So that is all very different. But it shows him researching all these accidents that are happening in Zaun, where he comes to the realization that all of these accidents are the result of human error, not mechanical failure. And so he decides machines are better than humans, so he basically seeks to automate everything and put new technology.

Courtney: And in this old lore, apparently, that works. It says, “Viktor’s inventions in automation reduced the number of accidents in the Forge to zero within months.” So he says, “Oh, machines better than humans,” and he is then proven right by making everything better. And it repeatedly mentions human error, and “He removed human error,” and that’s sort of the phrase that they keep coming back to in this old lore.

Courtney: And then, when it finally does mention that Viktor meets and works with Jace, it says, “The two worked together frequently but never truly became friends.” Compare that to Arcane, where they are best friends, and it’s mentioned that they are like brothers — which is still, I remind everyone, a thing that was in the show. I, once again — just in the brief window between recording last episode and this one, I once again saw someone say, “Oh, the only reason why the creator saying Jace is Asexual is to scorn the Jace and Viktor shippers.” And I really — sometimes creators do actually just conceive of characters that aren’t going to ever be in a relationship in their media, and I think that’s okay. [laughs] And I think the very nature of the fact that the media said “We are like brothers” probably is an indication that they never intended to put them in a romantic scenario together. So I really don’t think we can get mad and call them homophobic when, after the fact, they’re like, “No, I actually thought he was kind of Ace.”

Courtney: In the old lore, Viktor creates Blitzcrank, who is also a champion in League of Legends. And there’s some sort of major accident, a spill, that happens in Zaun. His work on Blitzcrank and trying to clean up the spill, it says, “taught him a great deal about merging of human anatomy with technology and how mortal anatomy could be enhanced with technology,” which is, again, very different than what we see in the show.

Royce: Right. And Blitzcrank the character did not make an appearance in Arcane the TV show.

Courtney: No. And so, after this incident, he goes back to work. And this quote here, I think, is one of the biggest differences between old Viktor lore and the new one. Because this is still him as a human: “He continued to excel, finding ever new ways to eliminate human error and weakness from his work, a facet of his researches that came to dominate his thinking. He saw human involvement in any part of a process as a grossly inefficient aberration, a view that put him at odds with a great many of his fellow students and professors, who saw the very things Viktor sought to remove as a source of human ingenuity and creativity.”

Courtney: And then Viktor and Jace, who are not friends in this lore — [laughs] I do think that’s funny, too. They were just coworkers who were not friends, and then the show makes them close friends who are like brothers, and then the fandom is like, “No, they’re lovers.” [laughs] If you just let the men be friends instead of rivals and coworkers, people are going to take it so much further. And I still think men deserve to have healthy, close friendships depicted in media. I really do. Let the men have friends! [laughs]

Courtney: But, yeah, it goes on to sort of foreshadow how Viktor has always been trying to control humans and remove the flaws that he perceives in everything that they do. And he and Jace are making, like, diving suits, and the suits are supposed to allow people to dive even deeper, stay underwater for longer, but when using these suits, the people inside of them were getting horrible hallucinations, and they were panicking. Some of them ended up dying in the process. And quote, “Viktor saw this problem was not technical but with the wearer’s nerves unraveling in the inky depths. He devised a chem-shunt helm that would allow the operator on the surface to bypass the wearer’s fear response and effectively control the diver. A heated discussion between Viktor and Jace on free will and mental enslavement turned bitter, almost violent, and the two vowed never to work together again.”

Courtney: Viktor ended up actually getting disciplined at the college for violating basic human dignity, and he was expelled. And he got depressed because he got expelled. And his response to getting depressed is, “He wrestled with the ethical dilemma he now faced, finding that once again human emotion and weakness had stood in his way.” So he gets sad, and he’s like, “Damn. Sucks to be a human. We should fix that.” [laughs] And that led to him operating on himself to, quote, “Remove those parts of his flesh and psyche that relied upon or were inhibited by emotion.” So it sounds like he somehow did brain surgery on himself. I don’t know how he pulled that off.

Courtney: But “When the surgery was done, almost no trace of the young man who had traveled to Piltover remained. He had supplanted a majority of his anatomy with mechanical augmentations. But his personality had also changed. His idealistic hope to better society was refined into an obsession with what he called the glorious evolution.” He, quote, “worked tirelessly to reduce human inefficiency by decoupling physicality from emotion.” And, yeah, from here on, it’s all about removing all human emotions. We get, “bettering humanity by ridding it of its destructive emotional impulses,” “unburden humanity of the failings of the flesh,” “shepherd humanity beyond their emotional weaknesses,” “bring them to a more reasoned stage of evolution.”

Courtney: So, here’s what I think is so neat! Like I said, we often get Asexual characters that, over time or in subsequent adaptations, have their Asexuality removed, which often coincides with some kind of emotional evolution or personal progress, or I often use the word “humanize”. It seems like they’re trying to humanize this character, and as part of humanizing them, they use sex with other people as a lazy shorthand for, quote, “human connection.” And everyone’s saying, “Oh, well, they made Viktor Asexual, and this is a negative stereotype.” But actually, if we take this Word-of-God and say, “Yeah, okay, Viktor is Asexual. Let’s analyze him as an Asexual character,” they added his Asexuality alongside humanizing him. Because in the old lore, he was already despising human emotion and weakness and failure as a young man, before he got these mechanical adaptations. It did not say anything about him having any sort of chronic illness or disability. So they ended up humanizing him, fleshing out his character more, giving him a backstory and a goal that was a lot more human and noble than, “Let’s perfect these imperfect creatures.” Because, like I said in the last episode, when Warwick was brought to him to be healed before his sort of final transformation that turned him into the inhuman creature he ended up being, he was suffering and trying — like, overextending himself, trying to help the man inside Warwick, because he was saying, “I still see the humanity in there, so this is worth fighting for.”

Courtney: So we got someone who resented all humanity, and they changed the lore to say, “This is someone who actually cares very deeply about humanity and sort of succumbed to his own inventions through error and accident and the actions of others, and sort of became a victim of the most nefarious parts of his own work.” So you get this very rich unintended consequences narrative. You get this very rich… Like, his change is now a tragedy. In the old lore, this change would not have been a tragedy, because that is what he wanted. He did all of this to himself, and he dug his heels down in this believing that humanity is bad and should be replaced by technology, and then he just sought out to do that. Whereas before, he loved humanity; he wanted to save and help and improve the quality of life for the humans — specifically, from his home, where he was from, who were suffering. And now he’s gone through this magic technological change that he did not want and did not ask for, and now he’s unrecognizable as himself. That is a compelling story, because now we have a tragedy.

Courtney: And I don’t think that the analysis that people are saying — like, “Of course, make the inhuman robot Asexual” — is fair in that reason. Because from my understanding of this interview and what the co-creator claims is that, if indeed they did intend Viktor to have always been Asexual right from the get-go, that was him as a young man, that was him as a kid, that was him as a human. So we now have what I think can be a very relatable, very empathetic character until tragedy befalls him.

Courtney: And I think — I would love more Ace tragedies, actually. We so often get this very cushy type of representation where our characters just sort of exist as Asexual characters to teach the audience that Asexual characters exist. And I just want interesting characters. I want characters who are Asexual, where their Asexuality is, like, the least interesting thing about them. I want the character to be more interesting than their orientation.

Courtney: But I do still want it to be obvious. And I do still think this Word-of-God thing that we always get from Ace characters… Because this is a big pattern now. So we have… What are the ones I can just think of off the top of my head where a character off screen said, “Here’s an Ace character”? So, we’ve got this one, obviously, on Arcane. We had Lilith in The Owl House for the longest time. We had Alastor, and arguably still do — it wasn’t super clear in the TV show — but even if not as Asexuality, his Aromanticism has only been a very wishy-washy Word-of-God. We recently talked about Alan in The Hangover being another one. And I’m sure there are a lot more than that. So that alone is a problem, that creators either are afraid to commit to Asexuality on the screen or they don’t know how to do it in a way that is obvious. And the state of the fandom and the state of just acephobia in the general viewership and fanbase for nearly any given franchise demands that it be obvious, because everybody will use any single thing they can to say, “No, actually, this character is not Ace.” So that’s why we need it to be abundantly clear.

Courtney: And I see this as another example of that. Even when there’s Word-of-God, people will be like, “That’s still not good enough.” Because someone says, “Oh yeah, I’m a creator of Arcane, and Viktor’s always been Asexual,” the fandom’s going to be like, “No, you’re just saying that because you’re homophobic, not because this character could actually be Asexual. Because we know the real deal: this character is actually gay and destined to be with this other character,” who they never showed any inclination of that on screen at all. So that’s why we need it on screen, and we need it so clear and so obvious.

Courtney: So compare that old lore, that former Machine Herald Viktor biography. We now have Viktor, Herald of the Arcane. And his bio is written more like a historian trying to uncover the man who helped create Hextech. Because, in this world now, there is a lot that is known and written about Jace. He stuck around. He had a very public-facing persona before, during, and after the events of Arcane. But right now, they’re saying a lot of information about Viktor got destroyed during this tragic event. But the bits and pieces that they do know and say are close, if not identical, to what we saw in Arcane.

Courtney: We see, “Born to a poor family in the fissures beneath Zaun, Viktor always knew hardship. Polluted Undercity affected him with both a limp and a rare, life-limiting illness which alienated him from the other children. Yet despite all this, his mind was allowed to grow without restraint and flourished.” And it talks about him meeting the disgraced doctor, whom we know from Arcane to be Singed. It talks about him meeting and working with Jace and how they have a shared vision, which — it did start that way in Arcane. They had a shared vision. They occasionally strayed one direction or another and butted heads a little bit, but at the end of the day, the reason why they started this project was the same, which is very different from what we saw in the old lore.

Courtney: And here it says, “Viktor and Jace were not just peers in innovation but brothers in all but blood.” There’s that word “brothers” again. And then we have, again — like, I love the tragedy of Viktor if you don’t reduce him to inhuman, disabled stereotype, bad Ace rep. Because it lays it out here very clearly, what we watched in Arcane. It says, “When his friend” — that being Jace — “When his friend’s prejudices against the Undercity and its people came to light, it seems Viktor felt their bond beginning to weaken.” And, yeah, when you look at it through that lens: they were friends, they were brothers, they were partners in innovation. But at the end of the day, Jace came from a much more privileged society, life, family, upbringing, and he had these biases against Viktor’s people and the society Viktor came from. And even though everything about Arcane is dramatic and tragic and embellished for drama, the heart of what’s driving everyone’s motivations and driving the interpersonal conflict is, like, so real that it hurts.

Courtney: And it does mention here that, after everything we saw in Arcane, the first blast that injured him nearly to the point of death, that Jace had to scramble and try to save his life using this Hextech, he was not happy or grateful at all about this. He left and then started to heal people and create this little commune. Then, when General Ambessa launched the attack — I don’t think we said her name in the last episode because it probably wasn’t that important. But that was sort of the first step in League of Legends incorporating Arcane, because Ambessa was just a character in Arcane, and they added her as a champion in League of Legends after the fact.

Royce: Yeah, I think, as of right now, she’s the newest champion in the, what is it, like, nearly 160 champion roster or something like that.

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: And was — yeah, came from Arcane; is the one, the only character thus far to be created from Arcane.

Courtney: Right. And I was curious because, watching through Season 1 of Arcane and kind of trying to pick out, like, which ones were the champions and who’s going to be whom and all that, I was right from the beginning going to say, like, “Alright, which of these new characters is going to become the next champion?” [laughs] I was surprised they waited until Season 2 to actually add an Arcane character as a new champion, but they finally did it.

Courtney: But after this attack, and after he once again becomes incapacitated, it now says, “This time, however, something changed. Devoid of fear, love, bitterness, joy, hatred, or compassion, he rose up as the Mechanical Herald of a second new era, with his followers reduced to little more than puppets of his will.” So that does sort of give us the confirmation about the way I interpreted Arcane, where it was this final attack that sort of created that last change in him that did essentially take away all of his emotion, all of his humanity, and he started enslaving people.

Royce: Yeah. It made sense to me after we talked about it. There was just one instance before that change where he did temporarily take over a follower. It just wasn’t… I guess, not as extreme or as permanent. This one ended up being permanent because Jace killed this follower immediately after, but.

Courtney: Yeah. Yeah, that happened. And so, I have seen, like I said, quite reductive commentary being like, “Of course, the emotionless machine is Asexual.” But I have seen some folks who try to word it with a little more intention and will say things like, “The character who is meant to become emotionless and is disabled.” I am aware of the stereotype, and I still fail to think that this actually is a problematic version of that stereotype. Because how is that not subverting the stereotype by saying, “Okay, the one who is eventually going to become a robot, eventually going to be emotionless, eventually is going to lose all of his humanity,” and saying, “He was always Asexual, we always intended him to be this way.” Then there is no explanation for that being like, “He’s Asexual because he’s an emotionless robot.

Royce: Yeah. There’s no cause-and-effect or anything like that here.

Courtney: And Viktor’s storyline, for the physical and emotional changes he goes through, would be a tragedy, regardless of the orientation of the person. Even if the shippers got their way and he was gay and he had a crush on Jace, the changes he went through would still be a tragedy. It would equally be exactly the same tragedy. So I don’t like this tiptoeing around it, like, “No, the Ace character can’t have this, you know, gut-wrenching emotional storyline because it’s bad rep for the Asexual orientation,” when that wasn’t even — that was clearly not the point of his character was to be Asexual, because it wasn’t even that obvious to begin with.

Courtney: And [sighs] the disabled side of things, too. I think I haven’t seen “disabled Aces are bad rep discourse” this bad in a couple of years now. It used to be this bad, and it feels like we’re coming full circle and it’s getting worse again. Because some of the things people are saying in the discourse are just outright hostile to real-life disabled Asexual people. Because disabled Aces do exist. I created an entire day about it [laughs] working with Ace Week. And when there ever is a compelling character who is disabled and may or may not be confirmed, overtly or not, Asexual, there are disabled Aces who feel super seen and happy and represented by it. But it seems a majority of the Ace commentators are like, “No, I refuse to accept that this character is Asexual, because they’re also disabled.” And just… why? Why? There are good and bad ways to portray disability and Asexuality, and there are good and bad ways to portray them together.

Royce: And before you get into that, I think it’s important to note that, like, the broader Ace community, the broader Asexual and Aromantic community, has so many little identity pockets, so many microlabels, so many different experiences. And it seems like a lot of the anger comes when an individual person looks at a screen and says, “That isn’t exactly my experience.” Which is never going to happen for the vast majority of people, when you have one Ace character in an entire show.

Courtney: Right. And, I mean, that’s why we just need more representation overall in general, but.

Royce: But, also people need to chill.

Courtney: People do need to chill. Because another criticism — aside from “He is disabled and therefore bad Ace rep,” because that that is how reductive some of the comments I’ve seen are — is, “Of course, they make the disabled character Asexual. That’s bad. They shouldn’t do it.” Which leads to times when, in the real-life world, people have looked at me, Courtney, as a human person, sharing my actual real life, as someone who is disabled and Asexual, and someone has said to me, “You are bad Ace rep. Stop talking about Asexuality, because you’re disabled and we don’t want that negative stereotype.” Come on. So, since people have, yes, said this to my face — and I know I’m not the only one — it is so hard to not look at all these comments being like, “They can’t make the disabled character Asexual. That’s bad rep.” It’s like, I think you’re just… maybe got some ableism that you need to unpack there.

Royce: But this whole, like, token gold-star representative of a community is not a new thing. Every other marginalized community has had these same arguments.

Courtney: Yeah. Well, there’s also… Because of the fact that people have also claimed, “Oh, he’s also a bad Ace character because they show him just constantly obsessed with work, and his only interest is this thing, and he’s, you know, he’s the genius inventor kind of a stereotype,” that is just a type of character, regardless of orientation. But a lot of Ace viewers of this — before this whole discourse came out, I was seeing a ton of people headcanoning him as Autistic.

Royce: Oh, yeah.

Courtney: And that makes a lot of sense. I see why some people will look at that and be like, “Well, this is his special interest.” [laughs]

Royce: Yeah. But if you compare that with, like, everyone getting all excited during Heartstopper because Isaac was reading some books…

Courtney: Yes. Which, I wanted… In at least the first round of discussion we had about Heartstopper, I was like, “Please show me anything about his personality that isn’t just reading books. Please.” And we did start getting more, and we talked about that. It has gotten better, in my opinion, for sure. But when I look at a character like Viktor, I’m like, “There’s a lot going on here.” We have a history of poverty. We have disability. We have debility, which a lot of people will say is a type of disability, but I won’t get into that whole school of thought right now. Chronic illness. We have a friend that is close to him, who’s like a brother, and they’re working on this thing together. And then he has this tragedy that befalls him, partially as a result of his own doing, but also because of the actions of others that he didn’t consent to. And I think it’s a very gripping storyline, and there’s a lot going on, and it’s so rich. And that’s what I actually want from Ace characters! I want them to have a rich history and plotline.

Royce: Yeah. And we’ve talked about stereotypical representation in non-Ace spaces as well, and how it’s kind of like a critical mass sort of thing. Like, having your stereotypical depictions aren’t necessarily bad in and of themselves if the character is done well, but, like, the way you get over that is just by having more representation, more kinds. Like, yeah, the isolated inventor is a stereotype. Neurodivergence and Asexuality has become a stereotype. Those aren’t bad in isolation; they’re unfortunate in repetition.

Courtney: And we talked about this in our breakdown of Everything’s Going to Be Okay, because there is an Ace character in that show who is Autistic — and is not the only Autistic character in the show, and other Autistic characters have other orientations. So we get that sort of, “Here are multiple people who share one facet of their identity, but other areas of their life are all distinct in their own.” And we talked about how that was actually very good representation for that character.

Courtney: But then there are times where the character who is overtly or at least coded to be neurodivergent is just supposed to be the weird one, the strange one, the one that is less human. If they use neurodivergent and Asexual and/or Aromantic as just a shorthand for, “This is the weird, inhuman one that no one can relate to,” that is when it is bad. But if you’re taking all these facets of this character in order to enrich them and humanize them and make them a more well-rounded character, then I do not think it is bad.

Royce: And to go back to disability in Arcane, disability is very frequent in the story because of extreme classism.

Courtney: Oh, yeah! That’s another thing. When people say —

Royce: It’s not just Viktor.

Courtney: It’s not just Viktor! I mean… Neither in Arcane nor League of Legends. I mean, League of Legends has a blind champion, a nonverbal champion. We have champions and Arcane characters… There was a character in Arcane who had a prosthetic arm, and we thought for sure, this was going to eventually turn into a League of Legends champion who also —

Royce: That was our first pick for —

Courtney: — has a similar prosthetic, and then didn’t end up becoming that character. So it’s like. “Alright, we have several characters in this universe with limb differences.” We have so many examples of this. There are actually a lot of disabled characters in League of Legends and Arcane. And so to also say, “Of course, the disabled character” — like, maybe if he was the only disabled character literally on screen in this entire universe, then maybe I’d be like, “Eh,” but he’s not. It’s shown all over the place.

Courtney: And there could be — and this isn’t the point of this episode, so I won’t get into it too deeply, but there could be an argument about this world perpetuating negative disability stereotypes like the wonder crip. Like, everyone who is disabled ends up getting, like, a super-powered prosthetic limb and now they’re stronger than ever before — like, that sort of a thing. Or, oh, the blind champion does have XYZ ability that actually makes him incredibly powerful. So you’ve got things like that which, if it was also in isolation, would probably be problematic. But when I look at something like League of Legends, I’m like, “This is just how this universe works. This is true for everyone.”

Royce: I mentioned during the last episode that, like, the game itself is a spotlight on a wide range of… calling them superheroes isn’t quite right, but they are all larger-than-life, like, legendary figures from their respective areas of the world.

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: Now, in Arcane, you see a lot of ordinary people, because it’s a TV show, and you see the city and you see the world, and there are a lot of ordinary people just trying to get by. But yeah, it is focusing on people who are, you know, prominent members of their own stories.

Courtney: Mhm. Yeah. And so, like, there are conversations that I’m sure could be had about just general disability representation across this franchise. Especially when it comes to, like, Jinx, there’s very clearly, like, a mental illness component that I have seen a range of opinions on, so not everyone’s going to think exactly the same way about her. But that’s not the point of our episode today. But my point is, like, this is not the sole disabled character. Disability is everywhere in this world. So, dare I say, if there are many examples of disabled characters, it is inevitable that at least one of them is going to be Asexual. [laughs]

Courtney: So here’s another interesting thing coming out of the discourse. The exact quotes, as it has been translated — so I cannot promise that this is a perfect translation — was from a question, “Was there anything ever between Viktor and Jace that was more than just their friendship?” The response from the co-creator was, “I know there are some people who ask this. There is a love. I don’t think it’s romantic. What was interesting… I remember many, many years ago also thinking about this when we started developing these characters. To me — I can say something here now that would be good for you and bad for me because it will be a wildfire — to me, Viktor was always Asexual. And that was always something that we talked about from the very beginning. So a romantic friendship between Jace and Viktor was just never part of it. There is a love, absolutely, but we just found it a bit… Love and relationships are so complex and take so many different forms. Viktor loves in a different way, and that’s okay, no?”

Courtney: And the interviewer said, “I like that answer.” He followed it up with, “Well, it’s something that, when we talk to our LGBTQ group within Riot, I remember asking the group many, many years ago, like, ‘What is something that you never see depicted very well?’ and someone said Asexuality. They say it’s often depicted as, like, emotionless, when it’s not true at all. It’s just that your feelings don’t mix with physical. So to me, that was always a part of Viktor.”

Courtney: And I think this has become a very uncharitable view of what he said, but so much of the discourse is, “How dare he treat Asexuality and Aromanticism the same way?” A lot of people have taken that answer to be like, “Asexuality and Aromanticism are two totally different things.” And some people are using that as, “So he can still feel romantic feelings for Jace. He can still feel romantic feelings, even if he is Asexual.”

Royce: I see nothing wrong with the response he was given. It was actually from someone who was a part of writing a TV show. It was a better response than I expected.

Courtney: And it’s honestly… These two statements can both be true and not treated as one in the same, but they can just exist alongside. He says, “There is a love. I don’t think it’s romantic.” Alright, that’s a full answer. He later says, “To me, Viktor’s always Asexual. Love and relationships are complex and take on different forms, and Viktor loves in a different way.” I don’t think that’s inherently saying — like, inherently conflating Asexuality and Aromanticism.

Royce: Nowhere in that answer was the thing that people are mad about spoken.

Courtney: I think what happened is that there are people, yes, who do not understand the Aspec school of thought where Asexuality and Aromanticism are not always the same. Some people can be one and not the other, vice versa. And people are always so concerned that people are going to get the wrong impression that if you don’t break out exactly the right talking points and explain the entire concept of the Split Attraction Model and this, that, and the other thing, then people are going to be like, “Oh my gosh, whoever is just learning about Asexuality and/or Aromanticism for the first time is going to get the wrong impression, and that’s bad.” And then they kind of crucify the person who said the thing, even though the things that were said I don’t think are wrong. I think those all can exist at the same time and not be incorrect.

Royce: Yeah. I think that was a good answer. The other side of that — aside from, you know all the issues with word policing — like, had the topic of this interview been Asexuality in the first place, and had the person responding had the wherewithal to break out the Ace 101 presentation, a person’s introduction to something that complex can’t always be, you know, busting out the full pocket dictionary and giving a thorough rundown. A lot of people will tune out.

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: You have to meet people where they’re at, and sometimes you have to ease in with imperfect explanations and then go deeper into it.

Courtney: Yeah. And we’re… Like, this is one question amidst many. This is an interview. So we have, also, questions about Ambessa in this interview. We have questions… Like, they’re talking about Heimerdinger at one point. They ask — I mean, spoiler alert for the last episode, if you’re still listening and haven’t watched at all but want to — like, one of the first questions is, “Is Jinx actually dead?” Like, it seems like Jinx fell down a very big pit that she probably couldn’t survive at the end and then we don’t see her again, but that’s the end of the episode. So a lot of people were like, “Did she die?” And that was one of the questions in here. So, no, this entire interview was not revolving around every single nuance of Viktor.

Courtney: And honestly, this is like… There’s sort of a weird full circle that we come back to. Like, when you’re just giving a very brief something like this — saying, like, “Love and relationships are complex. They take different forms. He loves a different way” — that’s very basic, without pulling out every single phrase that is hyper-specific to our community and our schools of thought. But then you do have, like, the Ace 101, where you’re pulling out the Split Attraction Model — Ace and Aro are two different things, they’re very distinct, here’s maybe some of the overlaps, here’s the Venn diagram, but here are the differences on either side. Then you have, like, the Ace 201, where, oh, the Split Attraction Model’s even more complicated than just sexuality and romantic orientation, there are actually all these other quadrants to think about, and then you get even more complicated into it. But then you get to a point where it gets so complicated that, once you understand all of those advanced schools of thought, you loop right back around to, “Love and relationships are complex. Some people, just, you know, have different types of relationships.” [laughs]

Royce: Yeah, I mean, it gets to the point where, like, you get so in-the-weeds about different experiences that there are — like, you have a sort of combinational explosion, where there’s, like, a near-infinite number of terms that we now have to go over, and experiences, and they’re all different. And at the end of the day, it’s like, if you meet someone and you want to know about them, you just need to talk.

Courtney: [laughs] Right.

Royce: I can’t explain all of their — I can’t explain whatever the Ace population of the entire world is, because there’s going to be differences in every person. I can provide my own experience, and I can give you some, like, vague, overriding patterns that we see, and that’s about it.

Courtney: Yeah! And the thing is, too, we so often talk about, within our community ,the concept of a queerplatonic relationship. And that is such a valuable part of the lives of so many Ace and Aro people — surely not everyone, but if there is a community of people that understand queerplatonic partnerships, it is the Aspec community. And I find it so interesting that, outside of fandom, we talk about how beautiful a QPR can be — because it can be completely on your own terms, it can be completely platonic, it may or may not have romantic elements of it, and the point is that it’s all gray, and make the relationship that works for you. And the benefit, to some, of giving it that name and naming it and giving it vocabulary is so that you can say, “This is just as important as any other type of relationship. There isn’t a hierarchy. My romantic relationship is not inherently more valuable than your queerplatonic relationship. It just takes on a different form.” And that’s such a beautiful thing that I cherish about this community.

Courtney: And yet, when it does come to characters in media, it does seem like the fanbase is so eager to assign such specific labels to characters that, if they don’t get the labels, they are mad and trying to debate what the actual labels are. So, in this instant, the word “Asexual” was said; the word “Aromantic” was not said. Therefore, everyone’s like, “Well, he’s not Aromantic if he’s Asexual. So therefore he still clearly can have a romantic relationship with Jace, because we still want him to have a romantic relationship with Jace” — still ignoring the fact that they call each other brothers.

Courtney: And I don’t know why we’re so quick to say, like, “Well, if it’s not sexual, but but but at least it’s romantic,” when it’s like, even if… I would have so much more… Let’s say, I would be a lot less frustrated reading these conversations if more people were chiming in saying, “This could be queerplatonic. It could be a type of relationship that doesn’t even have a label. It can be something that isn’t identifiable as romantic or sexual and still be very important.” But I’m not seeing those things. I’m seeing, “Ace and Aro, two different things 100% of the time. If he said it’s one, then at least it can still be the other,” which to me can sometimes get so aggressive that that’s also really alienating towards actual Aromantic people or actual AroAces.

Royce: Well, yeah. The issue I’m seeing is that people are coming in with their own preconceived notions and trying to force those on the character. Because, yes, the person giving the interview did not say Aromantic. They also didn’t say any alloromantic orientation. Nothing was said from a term perspective. There was a sentence that you read off that defined it pretty clearly.

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: But that being said, there are real-life people who another person might listen to their experience and say, like, “Well, by my framework, what you just described is Aromantic and Asexual. It’s AroAce.” But that person might say, “Well, when I self-identify, I just say Asexual,” or, “I just say Aromantic, because that is the primary thing that I feel and associate with.”

Courtney: And some people are like that. A lot of people relish the AroAce title and say, like, “Yeah, I’m AroAce.” Some people use exclusively the AroAce flag, as opposed to one or the other of the Aro and Ace flags, because those are three different flags.

Royce: The point I’m getting to is, you can’t force your own label structure on another person.

Courtney: Mm-mm.

Royce: And when we’re getting into the impact that visible fictional characters have — the way that we talk about them, the way that they impact, like you said, discourse towards actual people — it kind of counts there, too.

Courtney: Yeah. So, here’s something that I did just think was interesting. Because when the discourse doesn’t get so toxic that real people are just arguing labels and definitions — and often very binary views of things, also, sometimes. I’ve been getting increasingly more frustrated with this discourse, because Ace and Aro have almost become a new binary in some of these conversations, in the way that they’re used as, like, two very separate things actually, and that, also to me, if pushed too far in that direction, is missing the point and a lot of the nuances of the spectrums and a lot of real-life experiences where there is some or all area of overlap.

Courtney: But when people do really identify with a fandom and there isn’t any verification, on screen or off, of an orientation they identify with, we do get fanfiction. And I actually, a couple of years ago, got very fascinated when I saw, around the time of Ace Week or, like, leading up to Ace Week, this was getting announced, there was a group of people who are doing an Ace Arcane Week. And this was — only Season 1 had been announced, so this was pre anything in Season 2, pre this interview. But there were a group of people that were like, “We love Arcane. We’re going to write Ace fanfiction of this, and we’re going to make it a little event. We’re going to make it a little Twitter group, and we’re going to share our work with each other.” And even though I am not someone who writes fanfiction and I don’t even read it all that often, I read some of the Ace Arcane Week things, because I thought it was cool that it was also becoming a community thing as part of Ace Week. Because Asexuality is so broad that not every Ace person is going to get along or have the same interests or have the same identity or worldview, but if you can take just, like, your own little corner of the Ace community and make a real community where you’re interacting with shared interests, I think it’s really neat!

Courtney: So I was watching Ace Arcane Week online. And most of what I saw and read was not people headcanoning Viktor as Asexual or really even writing about Viktor and Jace. A lot of people were writing about Caitlin and Vi, where one or both of them was Asexual but they still had some kind of relationship, so they were shipping them together. I think I also saw some Echo and Jinx Asexual headcanoning happening there.

Courtney: And so I just found that really, really interesting. Because now, coming out of the discourse, I saw several people who would chime in now and then and say, like, “I did always kind of headcanon Viktor as Asexual.” Although the interesting thing is, some people will correct themselves. Some people will say, “To be fair, I did headcanon Viktor as Asexual, but it is a negative stereotype, so they shouldn’t have done this.” [laughs] And I always find that fascinating! Because I’m like, “No, if you saw this character, and in your head, this is an enriching addition to this character, as if he’s Asexual, like, stick to your guns! Stick to your guns! [laughs] Don’t let the discourse tell you something’s wrong just because that’s what’s popular to say right now.”

Courtney: So, I was just very curious: of the sort of fanfiction with Viktor being Asexual, how much of that actually happened before this announcement? And at least on Archive Of Our Own, on AO3, not a lot of it, turns out. If you look up Asexual Viktor on Archive Of Our Own, nearly everything is within the last few weeks. So I do think it’s interesting enough to be worth noting. And it’s not the only one. I mean, there were people who were writing and headcanoning Asexual Viktor going back to, like, 2022. Was it 2021 when Arcane first came out? So there was probably some back then, also. I don’t want to make it seem like there was none. But after this announcement in the discourse, there has been more. More has come out. But yeah, I do just think it’s very interesting that when I was reading Arcane fanfiction specifically for Ace Arcane Week, that I wasn’t reading a lot of Viktor.

Courtney: And not that I think every Ace character to ever exist in media needs to be exactly who a majority of the community would have picked for itself. But it is kind of interesting that a lot of fanfic writers are taking the less conventional takes and doing Asexual ships and taking the character that I don’t think the TV show would have ever picked for itself to be the Ace character and writing around that school of thought. And that’s some of the best part of not only fanfiction but we’ve talked about just indie publishing, is that, in terms of nuanced representation for sexual and/or romantic orientations, it’s going to be the creatives within that community making things for their smaller, more niche audiences that are going to be the most progressive and most groundbreaking types of representation before we ever see it in a big name like Arcane.

Courtney: And I guess that’s just what I think becomes the main harm — to bring it back around to Word-of-God representation — that I think Aces get at a higher percentage than other orientations these days, is that even though there are fanfic writers out there who are doing Asexual Caitlyn and/or Asexual Vi, or they’re doing Asexual Jinx and Echo ships, the discourse has not become so prominent and pronounced that people are arguing about, like, “Well, if you make Caitlyn Asexual, that’s homophobic because she’s a lesbian” — which is also so fascinating because they never say the word lesbian. Who knows, maybe one or both of them are bi? We don’t know. That’s another one of those bi/Ace solidarity things where people will get really drilled into one label that was never actually stated at the expense of the other things it could still realistically be with exactly the same information we know.

Courtney: But despite the fact that we have an on-screen relationship of Vi and Caitlyn, two women, because a co-creator said, “This character that some people happen to like to ship was Asexual in our minds,” they are now calling that man homophobic. And that’s not fair to him. But I’m only going to give him so much of a pass because it’s really not fair to the Ace community. The discourse right now has become so toxic. I’ve seen some horrible things said that are acephobic, arophobic, ableist, all kinds of horrible things. And people in the fandom are now attacking each other based on whether or not they’re using the right talking points, based on whether or not they’re pointing out, “Um, actually Ace and Aro are two different things 100% of the time,” or whether or not they like the fact that Viktor is Ace. And I’ve even seen some Ace people be like, “I am Ace, but, yes, it is homophobic to make Viktor Ace.” I’m like, “What?! [laughs] What?”

Courtney: Because I don’t know how many people understand this, but, like, writers are not supposed to read fanfiction. Even if you are deep in fanfiction and you are writing your own, you’re reading everybody else’s, you’ve got your finger on the pulse, you’ve read everything about gay Jace and Viktor that is out there right now and you love it and you’re eating it up and you want more, the show creators — if they are reading any of that — they’re not supposed to be. They probably are not. There are writers who, like, in contracts for writing novels, are supposed to say, like, “I will not read any fanfiction online about this.” Because if it’s, like, a series, if it’s multiple seasons that are coming out or if it’s multiple books that you’re writing, the publishers or the platforms don’t want to get sued if someone out there in the fandom happened to predict something that was already intended to happen, [laughs] and then it happens, you know? Like, intellectual property and all that. So, I know so many authors who outright are like, “I am contractually obligated to not read any fanfiction about my world or my characters.” And furthermore, a lot of them just don’t have any interest in doing that, because it’s their characters. They’re writing the story already. They aren’t seeking extra content about the story, because they’re making the story.

Courtney: So I find it weird when the fandom treats it as if they know what the fandom wants — and we are homogenous now, everyone wants the same thing — and so if they say anything to contradict what the fandom wants, they’re doing it on purpose just to spite us. That’s not how it works. It’s not how it works. But because you did the Word-of-God thing, it wasn’t confirmed on-screen in a way that was obvious enough that everyone watching it, or even 90% of the people watching it, are going to get it. Not even 50. Let’s shoot for at least 50% of people watching any given thing as, like, “Oh yeah, this character is obviously Ace.” Then we’ll have a conversation about whether or not they did enough. Now, people are tearing each other’s faces off about it. And they’re throwing Aces under the bus. They’re throwing Aros under the bus. They’re throwing disabled people under the bus. Everyone is under the bus, and that’s bad. That happens every time. Every time there’s a Word-of-God, there are arguments about it.

Courtney: So, I’m going to implore writers who are putting Ace characters in their media to not be cowards and make it obvious! [laughs] Because I will give him one thing: I don’t know how much he was thinking or what he knew or what he thought when he said, like, “Maybe I’ll get in trouble for saying this, there’ll be a wildfire, but I think Viktor’s Asexual.” Yeah, there has been a wildfire, and I’m kind of going to blame you for some of it. I’m not going to blame you for what you said there. I think what you said was mostly fine. But the fact that you had to say it in an interview and couldn’t make it more explicit on screen: that is what you are guilty of.

Courtney: But hey, like I said, since Arcane and League of Legends seem to be merging lores to become one and the same, if League of Legends would be so kind as to leave a little tidbit on a loading screen saying Viktor has always been Asexual — I don’t think they will, but if they do — or if they add it to his bio — they haven’t yet, I don’t think they will — I will forgive all of the sins that I am alleging you are guilty of. So that’s my challenge.

Courtney: But I think that’s going to do it for today, and hopefully, we don’t have to talk about League of Legends anytime again soon. So we are going to leave off, as always, with this week’s featured MarketplACE vendor, Shroom Punk Studios, where you can find art prints drawn by a disabled trans man, with topics ranging from psychedelic furry art to landscapes. And these are very fun, very beautiful. Some are specifically pride-related. There is, like, a very psychedelic but in the trans flag colors piece. What I purchased — and this is one of my favorite little bookmarks, since most of my bookmarks are not real bookmarks but pieces of art [laughs] — it’s called Hidden Away. It is just gorgeous colors, gorgeous scenery. It is an octopus woman in, like, an embellished emerald gown, sitting in, like, a nook in a library looking outside at a window. It’s gorgeous. I love it so much.

Courtney: Actually, I had this really beautiful moment. Back when I was still running the ACAR Discord server, we’d do these book clubs. And I was reading a book for our upcoming club to facilitate the discussion on that, and I was using this bookmark, and the book was in a book cover that I also bought off of the MarketplACE from The Bookish Crocheter. And it was sort of a chilly day, so I had a beautiful blanket from Johnnie Jae, who was one of our panelists on the Disabled Ace Day panel that you can go back and listen to — and I recommend, if you haven’t already. If you’re interested in the intersections of disability and Asexuality, that is a must-listen. And I noticed that everything was in the same color scheme — and this was a total accident, I did not mean it — but the blanket, the book cover, and this beautiful piece of art that I was using as a bookmark in the book I was reading for our Aspec book club. And I just felt so much community pride in that moment, and it was a lovely little moment of Ace joy for me.

Courtney: So, as always, link to find Shroom Punk Studios are going to be in the show notes on our website, alongside a full transcript, or in the description box if you are listening on YouTube. And, of course, we’ll go ahead and throw in some links to the interview with this co-creator and the articles that have spawned from it, for those of us who do not speak German.

Courtney: Thank you all, as always, for being here, and we will talk to you all next time. Goodbye.