Maybe Arcane Was The Friends We Made Along The Way

Tried editing for the first time!! I’m too busy to work on my fics atm but it turns out these are really fast to make which is cool :)

I have truly so many thoughts about how Le’blanc was just stalking Mel her entire life. I was rewatching S1 and Amara is just There, all the time, whenever Mel is on screen. It’s crazy.

That fucking necklace dude. Mel was ALREADY weird about it, she paints it abstract and bloodstained on the ground; on a canvas big enough that it takes up the majority of her entire wall. Then she hangs it above her bed. Crazy.

No one knows what that means but her; no one else even sees it but her. The rest of the room is empty. It’s just the bed and the source of her nightmares. Mel is a freak.

Then Le’blanc comes along and is just unimaginably cruel. She prys into Mel’s mind and finds this thing that affects her more than anything else and she puts it on Kino. She takes the face of the dead girl and wears that, too. She could have conjured any object to give to Mel and she chose that specific necklace. What’s worse is it feeds into Mel’s already pre-ingrained awful response to grief.

“Wear this thing around your neck, carry it with you always. No one can see it. It will kill your mother; just as it killed your brother and your friend and that girl in your dreams.”

1 slot at a time, first come first served. PWYW minimum £40

eurydice's wife

rating: explicit

pairing: mel medarda / elora

tags: canon divergence, viktor's commune, necromancy, angst, eventual smut, doomed relationship

Mel leaves her imprisonment by the Black Rose traumatised and grieving the loss of her most beloved friend. When she reunites with Jayce, transformed by the Herald and wanted for the murder of an enforcer, she has no intention of staying with him in Viktor's commune. But then Elora appears, healed by Viktor and transformed. Mel chooses Elora instead of saving Piltover and Zaun.

At first.

Overwatch x Arcane by grass-moo (reddit)

Caitlyn Ana

Vi Zarya

Jinx Widowmaker

Echo Lucio

Victor Ramattra

Jayce Reinhardt

Warwick (Evolved Vander) Winston

Everyone knows he is going to die and that he hasn't named an heir yet. The servants hide his shaving tools from him because they worry that he will use them to kill himself.

By the way other characters describe him I don't think anyone, and certainly not someone who works for him, would have dared to interfere in his autonomy like this before.

As soon as it becomes clear that he won't be the head of the family for much longer, this position becomes bigger than him. Family members are already trying to curry favor with the presumed heirs. It isn't Menelik's job to govern anymore, it's his job to name an heir.

MEL: I'm one of you? A mage? LEBLANC: We each have our own expressions. Yours is quite rare. An empath. Attuned to the ethereal. Able to sense others' inner selves and bend their magic. A conduit and a mirror. [...] [Ambessa] hid you because you are that which she covets most: a weapon.

Above, we have the snippet of dialogue from the intro of s2e8 “Killing Is a Cycle” that’s been haunting my thoughts, because while I do think Mel’s mage arc could have been executed better and not crammed into a handful of scenes across *checks notes* two episodes, there’s a lot of interesting information packed into here

So empath is a loaded word, especially since the way it's used within the general "narcissist" discourse on tiktok (i believe, i don't have nor plan to get on there anytime soon), but it's originally from the ancient greek ἐμπάθ which more closely correlates to passion, and then there's the self-proclaimed clairvoyant Judith Orloff, who identifies "empaths" as people able to both sense emotion and use it to the benefit of those around them—the classic definition found in scifi and fantasy literature, but in Mel's case, I'll argue that the more important words are the ones Leblanc says (aligning with the first part of Orloff's definition): "A conduit and a mirror"

So obviously this has the technical application where Mel's powers work as a mirror, from deflecting Maddie's bullet to being able to hijack Leblanc's black rose shadow dimension with light, but then there's the emotional aspect: apart from simply having high emotional intelligence, throughout season one, Mel is Piltover's clearest "mirror" and enactor of its principles, despite being an outsider: she rewards scientific brilliance coinciding with economic gain and dreams of pushing the city to the future and brings enterprise directly into the decision-making room with Jayce, and also takes on its faults, making deals in shadowed balconies of opera houses and not fully acknowledging Piltover's responsibility in having laid the grounds of the conflict, as Ambessa points out

Thus: in regards to Mel's political modus operandi and magical powers, I'd argue that the primary key to both is reflection rather than the healing/nurturing associations that the word "empath" has, and we can see this immediately when Leblanc adds "[Ambessa] hid you because you are that which she covets most: a weapon", which of course could be Leblanc attempting to turn Mel against her mother by playing on Mel's aversion to violence, but in context of the previous quote I think there's a chance Leblanc genuinely believes that this "reflecting" power is what makes Ambessa love Mel by seeing herself in her

And maybe that's why she reveals her true nature and her plans to Mel so soon after she destroys the Oculorum, hoping that, destabilized, she'll mirror Leblanc's cloak-and-dagger mannerisms as she once mirrored Piltover's elite, but then the finale Mel manages to outsmart her by "reflecting" both of her mentor figures—Leblanc by turning on her ("sly girl") and Ambessa by defeating her ("you are the wolf")