Stars, hide your fires

The Delusion of Negation

Late Ch.30, missing for a month, the scavenger Vi is stunned upon viewing her own death announcement, and suffers a psychotic break. Vi is the monster and machine Piltover and Ambessa created, has defected from her instilled purpose, and is discarded by the mother who ‘built’ her. 

In the shock and disillusionment, she is also revolted by her heroic portrait, a ‘smiling lie,’ as she recalls the blood she spilled for Noxus. 

Extending from years of dissociating from her violence, she suddenly believes she is a separate entity from the Vi in the portrait. She ascribes Vi, and her cruelty, to the person who has died.

This irrational belief is a slip into delusion (a psychosis symptom, along with her more obvious hallucinations). But if she’s not that person, then her existence begins abruptly about a month ago. She observes the people around her connected in mourning, and feels sharply how alone she is; she is terrifyingly rootless, disconnected from everything and everyone, from Zaun, Noxus, family, community, or origins. 

She observes in mounting terror how the people around her don’t even perceive her — seemingly forgetting that she is treated as nonexistent because of the scav suit, as discussed earlier in the chapter.

The malevolent hallucinated voice taunts her:

“You’re half-right. That person is dead. But you’re hiding from the real question.” A question like a smile, like one more slice. Feeling everything that shook, and relishing in it. “What’s left? (...) You are no one. No one, daughter of no one.” 

She develops a delusion of negation — questioning whether she is even still real/alive, or has died at some point, left as a phantom or empty shell somehow still walking the city. 

It’s like her twisting logic is juggling the inability to identify with her past self; the existential dread of purposelessness; and a crippled sense of self in leaving the only life she knew (i.e., the piece of her that ‘died’ seems like the vast majority of her); and explains it to her as a nightmarish You’re so messed up/miserable because you’re just the animate hollow shell left over from this person who’s actually died.

Though she snaps out of the initial panic, it continues needling under the surface in her fear that she is weak and therefore worthless and therefore doomed. 

Grim surroundings

As an aside, Vi’s day-to-day existence scavenging a dark, gloomy, death-filled ruin, itself laced with ‘underworld’ themes in its descriptions, is probably not helping her mental health.

Earlier in the chapter, her childhood home is also cast in an eerie light foreshadowing the existential confusion.

(Ch.30) Seeing the towering crest, a twist of electrified gas tubes (…). Glaring back at the challenge, the rod-struck eye. Nearing the structure below — marked at some point with that thing, like a ward.  Against the living, or the ghosts? Barging into the run-down hovel. Unoccupied after all, quiet as a curse.

Not knowing what it is, she glares instinctively at Silco’s Eye of Zaun sign like a challenge — framing the ‘rod-struck eye’ similarly to her crest, the Enforcer’s ‘sword-struck gear.’ The conqueror returning home, seeing an unknown standard placed above it.

She then terms it a ‘ward’ (a shameless LoL reference), questioning whether it wards off the living or the ghosts. 

A literal meaning in the symbol as the likely explanation for why the house has been left alone.

But she enters, which by hidden or ‘supernatural’ interpretation would seem to prove it permits the living, and wards off the dead. 

Vision ward, which reveals the map in a small area around where it's placed. This was retired/replaced by different types of wards in LoL in 2016.

Yet in early Ch.31 we see the more unstable Vi uncomfortably depart the house, looking for a new place to stay, after observing the house is ‘overfull of ghosts.’

On the more literal side, the scene shows it to be haunted by the memories of her family she’s lost, and then the child she hallucinates looking at her like a stranger. It is a 'cursed’ site for the pain of these losses.

Supernaturally, by the prior logic — some part of Vi implicitly believes, post-shakeup, that she is a ghost among ghosts. It’s as if she is in the process of joining them (and literally, her health is in decline). 

So her impulsively setting out is not only for the pain of the  memories, but her unnerved, superstitious-but-not-superstitious push away from this notion; paranoid of nonexistence, she acts in accordance with being warded off, like the living.

Next post will go into what I consider the first real unreliable narrator scene -- the symbolism-heavy sequence where Vi (sees? hallucinates?) Ekko in Ch31.

Throughlines and Themes

Some themes and narrative threads significant to the current arc. The look at style choices and literary devices in the subsequent posts will benefit from an idea of how the choices enmesh with these overarching things.

Vi’s relationship with control. The strength = control = safety equivalence Ambessa ingrained is virtually the only way Vi has coped with her trauma. It is seen in interspersed flashbacks that Ambessa granted the teenaged Vi safety (food, protection), stability (self control), and strength (the power to exert control, to protect others, and to take hold of ‘fate’); but virtually every assurance is coupled with lessons that reinforce Ambessa’s control.

Vi’s relationship with death, with respect to Noxian warrior culture and Zaunite tradition. The multiple layers of ‘Death is her mother’ (but a mother that culls the weak), when the figures of the Wolf (Death) and the Wolf (Ambessa) overlap. 

Long cast as a grim reaper figure — clinging to control over death as a ‘Fang of the Wolf,’ at the cost of her dwindling humanity and selfhood — Vi is explored along this boundary of human (driven by her mortal will) and borderline psychopomp (serving as an inevitability, a vessel for death), and in Ch.31 sees her longtime role subverted.

Vi’s relationship with Zaun, and her ‘roots’ (family, home) as someone cut off and returned. 

Vi’s daughterhood. She has been called a daughter of Zaun, and a daughter of Death, early as Ch4. Noxus is a few times in the fic referred to as a mother; creating implicit friction in the ways its adoptive claim has supplanted her identity and bonds. 

As an aside, Ambessa in Ch31 mourns her ‘Poor, ugly, beautiful daughter’ — a reference to Princess Mononoke (1997), spoken in the film by a wolf spirit about her adoptive daughter who is neither wolf nor human. Similarly Vi, daughter of the Wolf, is presently caught between worlds.

Vi’s inability to see intrinsic self-worth. To be called upon is to be loved, and to serve is to express her love in turn. Vi is shown in Ch.12 flashbacks to pull away from unconditional love, when Ambessa, after Vi's injury in battle, suggests Vi could live a peaceful life; Vi is dismayed at the realization that Ambessa has become able to love her simply for who she is. As regards herself, she sees love not grounded in service as undeserved or even dangerous.

From Vi's reflections in Ch.6:

Ambessa Medarda, and Noxus behind her, loved Vi in a way that was grounded in well-appreciated capability. A day had come that Vi realized she no longer ached to be loved unconditionally, like a child. Gone was a girl like so many others the world had battered about. The Hound was a woman of purpose.

So to be loved unconditionally is to be childlike and vulnerable, subject to the whims of the world that hurts her; to be loved for service preserves a degree of control, and is a mark of pride and maturity. She has things to unpack! But she found her place as a Noxian because this system represented a safer form of love, even as the empire's use of a loyal soul exploited and inevitably starved her of love.

Vi’s turmoil in the spiral boils down to (1) made codependent on Ambessa, she feels no control with that bond severed; (2) having ‘betrayed’ the Wolf (both meanings), she feels inescapably doomed, and (3) not yet able to value her own wellbeing, she feels self-loathing when she is not serving some purpose.

She was raised as a machine, and both joy and self-worth are locked to extrinsic function. 

The Machine and her Codes

A hidden archetype thing — not meaningful in-universe, but that I have in mind in the background and sometimes nod toward — is that this is Vi’s "rōnin" arc. She is the masterless warrior struggling to find her way. The Codes of Conquest mentioned throughout the fic, including conduct and philosophical mores meant to set apart ‘proper’ tyrants and grant Noxus its mandate of conquest and rule, are her bushidō. 

Incidentally, with respect to the long-running machine metaphor — the hierarchical nature of the grand 'imperial machine,' and Vi's carved-out place in the world as a component of it — the ‘Codes’ are her programming. She struggles in her identity and to find her way in the world outside these confines.

A key undercurrent running through these chapters is Vi’s dread of death, and the experience of various premonitions through the eyes of the broken machine.

That's enough for one post! Next time we really dig in, starting with a key development in late Ch30.

Oscar Vega’s cover:

Commisions are still closed as of now