have u seen that artists r getting death threats on twitter over hc viktor as russian 😭
I have seen a literal friend of mine get stupidly angry comments from new age arcane fans who swear up and down he's been czech all his life and it truly boggles the mind. that's straight up not true. Viktor was created as a russian communist caricature by an american corporation. he was "villainous crazy russian guy" for twelve years, the funny harry lloyd czech impression only started out 3 years ago. We're just doing cold war propaganda all over again now???
viktor being russian =/= liking the ghoulish russian government. You aren't giving Putin an endorsement, you're drawing a cartoon faggot //russian immigrant allegory// who would get deported by the CIA during the first red scare. Viktor can be russian. there's gay and trans and disabled russian people who are discriminated against & very much at risk at at a home country that is hostile and controlling towards its own citizens, and when they try to get out of that oppressive environment there's all these preloaded notions painting them as "untrustworthy" or "inherently shady" thanks to the Russian Enemy american popculture slop archetype.
My own country has gone through decades of horrific dictatorship before! Through the hands of our own military forces and highly aided by the USA, profiting off our misery! Should our people as a whole be conflated with the military troops that abducted protesters into death-torture camps? Should our people as a whole be represented by the worst geriatric nationalistic bigots who can plant themselves in power? Is this how we look at the whole world? This is a dangerous line of thought. I get that a lot of arcane fandom is young but that is a rightwing calling card line of thought. If we're all to be represented exclusively by a sum of our Leading Cops, we're deep in the muddy shit. I don't even like these pigs in a good day. If you're an american saying this, especially? LOOK AT YOUR OWN FUCKING TROOPS. YOU'RE THE IMPERIAL CAPITAL. IT'S YOU.
It also stands out to me that viktor league of legends was perfectly fine as crazy evil russian stock villain n.99999 for 10+ years, but as soon as he gets an adaptation that depicts him as empathetic/altruistic and well intentioned all the way through, humanized like a proper human being... the americans in charge conveniently drop the 'russian' part of his persona. (but oh, they keep the red scare stuff. and they keep the stuff about communism being a path to certain evil, they just cut out the russian identification, so people have a harder time criticizing it.) I don't think that is a neutral decision, and its not one I'm interested in reproducing.
It's completely fine to have your own hcs, but I don't like the shallow conversations around this. Viktor isn't a representation of the russian government; but he is, fundamentally, a byproduct of how american propaganda rules the entire world and defines who gets to be alienated as the villain forever. We used to see this with china A LOT as well (still do!), and it only changed after a whole lot of effort, be it by chinese immigrants or the proliferation of media depicting them as whole, multifaceted people, distanced from the american-made boogeymen. The common citizen is not my enemy. It shouldn't be yours either.
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