Something occurred to me that I find really fascinating about Viktor. He truly has two fatal flaws: ambition and ego.
He is obsessed with his legacy, almost from the point when we meet him: "Do you think it was my life's ambition to be an assistant?" He also mentions legacy when he's talking with Heimerdinger after his hospitalization. He wants to make contributions that matter. He wants to change the world.
But ambition alone isn't enough to push him into the atrocities he ends up committing. He also, very early on, comments on Jayce's ego, but Jayce, remarkably, isn't very egotistical. He might come across that way, but that's because Jayce is a people pleaser, and the people around him are pushing him into the spotlight for their own reasons.
But Viktor thinks he knows better than everyone. He knows better than Jayce how to make hextech work. He knows better than Heimerdinger how to control and wield magic. He has a brief moment of humility when Sky dies, which, ironically, the hex uses to manipulate him to grow his ego even more.
He knows better than those shimmer addicts what they need. He knows better than Singed how to save Vander. He knows better than Jinx what she could do with her skills. He knows better than everyone, and if they would just stop arguing, he could bring true peace and harmony to the world.
And because he thinks he knows better than everyone, he erases everyone's humanity. He removes the parts of them that would argue with him, push back against his actions, or cause any conflict whatsoever. Only harmony is allowed, so if you disagree with him, the part of you that disagrees will simply be removed. Viktor knows what's right. You do not.
This is fascinating, because, to all outward appearances, he's pretty meek and mild. He doesn't raise his voice, he doesn't scoff at people, he doesn't insult them. He just quietly, internally, thinks that they are ignorant and wrong.
And that's why only Jayce could get through to him. Because only Jayce went through the same journey Viktor did while retaining his humility. Jayce never wanted to be in charge. Jayce never wanted to change the world. He just wanted to show everyone the beauty in magic that he saw as a boy—the beauty that was Viktor all along. Jayce never cared about ego or ambition. He didn't want Viktor's legacy. He just wanted his partner back.
I love how Viktor's ego sneaks up on you in the show. It made me think about how often arrogance/egotism (particularly of the STEM Guy Asshole Genius flavor) gets lazily shorthanded in media by having the character just be a dick to people. Viktor doesn't do that. He's reserved but generally polite, not verbally insulting or condescending. (We also just...do not see him interact with many people other than Jayce, whom he considers his intellectual peer.) He wants to leave a legacy but he doesn't want the kind of personal spotlight that Jayce gets thrust into. And he does genuinely want to help people, which is one of his own blind spots, because if he has good intentions then he can't possibly be going down the wrong path. He's too smart to make a mistake like that, right? So you can get pretty far into his character arc before you realize oh, this guy thinks he is right about everything and it's gonna be everybody's problem.
It also does one of my favorite things which we'll call "nooooo don't let your understandable defense mechanism metastasize into a fatal flaw." Because I'm sure that arrogance was useful armor for a lot of his time in Piltover. He's isolated, poor, disabled, from the Undercity, no powerful friends (very possibly no friends at all), but at least he is fucking smarter than everyone else in the room. He says it to Jayce in the beginning: "Nobody believed in me." He's probably had years of telling himself I know I'm right about this, I know I'm smart enough to solve this problem, don't listen to what anyone else says, in isolation, without anyone he trusts to occasionally be like "bro what the FUCK are you on about." And, when it comes to science, his predictions about being right have almost always been accurate. And then the ego comes in with the logical fallacy that he must then be right about everything, and if you disagree it's just because you're not as smart as he is, and the most efficient solution is simply to take that ability to disagree away from you.
Yes I love this addition!
And even though he thinks Jayce is his intellectual equal, he doesn't think Jayce is his equal in ambition. He is dismissive of Jayce's political career and sees Jayce's work in politics as a "poor use of time," even though Jayce is doing the work required to get them the resources they need to keep their scientific work going. He thinks he knows better than Jayce what to do when he realizes the awful potential of the hexcore, and when Jayce chooses to save Viktor's life instead (which Viktor himself had literally just done) he leaves him over it, striking out on his own.
Because Viktor knows best, in all situations, about all things. Nobody can see his vision, nobody shares his dream—until, at the end, Jayce comes back to him and shows him that Jayce always saw him and always valued him, and even when Viktor has chased his own ambition to the destruction of the entire world multiple times over, Jayce still loves him. Jayce pushes back and tries to stop Viktor, and, because he's the only one whose opinion ever mattered, he's the only one who accomplishes it.
