Toks Olagundoye (Mel’s VA) answered my question about the Oculorum!!

Full interview here

There’s a LOT we can get out of this answer. I’ll probably reblog with more thoughts once I stop reeling from the fact she actually answered my question but for now:

Mel in the Oculorum doesn’t have any initial suspicions of not-Kino. She’s also in the opening scene both deeply disoriented and actively hallucinating.

This lines up with what Toks said -> we now basically have “word of god” confirmation Le’blanc was erasing her memories between attempts to manipulate her. Because we never see Mel talk about what happened we unfortunately don’t know if she ever regains those memories.

I've made a list of the questions asked and wrote down some of the answers (not all of them, sorry) on the ones that I found interesting, or that haven't been answered in other interviews, or that haven't been already posted (most of the CaitVi parts were already shared). What she says is in quotes, the rest is me paraphrasing. Enjoy!

Video: youtube link

59 Amanda arrives

1:00 Q: why was the storyboard changed and would you consider restoring it someday?

Amanda is unsure of which scene (probably the sex scene, IMO), talks a bit about the storyboarding process (interesting part, maybe I'll try to go back to transcribe it later).

1:05:56 Q: why did no one call Jinx by her name (Jinx) in the last episode, is there a symbolic reason for that

Great question, but Amanda didn't write the episode and isn't sure about the answer. It might have been a happy accident.

1:07:48 Q: what happened between Jinx and Ekko in last episode

"We brainstormed a lot about what that moment could be (...), we had just shown an entire episode of Powder and Ekko, we really took the time to develop Ekko's feelings in that, and any kind of version that we rewrote for the final episode ended up being something people had already seen, or felt emotionally. And what we decided was that it would be wonderful if each individual audience member could fill that gap in for themselves. Because between, like you said, all the details and art and stuff that was put into their reunion moment and everything we showed in that first scene, and the entire episode we spent developing... we felt like people could connect the pieces together and connect those dots on their own and it made the story much more personal to the audience, if we allowed them to do that"

1:09:48 Q: if Vi were to write a letter to Caitlyn how much time would she spend on the first sentence

1:10:51 Q: could Amanda write a snippet for Cait and Vi after the end of the show

"We tried to leave up to the audience imagination. (...) To me, I felt like we sort of completed their coming of age arc in the show, then I would have to, in order to think about where they go next, think of a new arc and a new story for them. And potentially I might want to jump forward in time a little bit, and give them all new wants and am new sort of problems. I've mentioned this before, but we told the story about how they became adults, I think, in this coming of age, but we haven't told the story of, now that they're adults, what do they do? What does Vi fights for when she doesn't have to protect her family all the time? That was her whole mission from the time when she was a child, to protect her family. She didn't even get any... She didn't get to ask herself what do I want? Who is Vi when she's not protecting someone else. So, I tried to get her to a point where she could start asking that question. And so, that would kind of be.. I would start asking, what does it mean that she's still in Piltover, that she's chosen to be in Piltover when she used to be from Zaun and all that. Does she have a new mission to bring the cities together? Who is she protecting now, does she even want to keep protecting people, does she want to find something else for herself? Those are a lot of things she would have to wrestles with. And you know, we obviously put Caitlyn through a huge ringer, does she take up the Kiramman mantle or does she become something different? And so, we always thought that she might choose to be the Sheriff of Piltover which is her endgame point instead of following her mother's footsteps. But then again, who is she fighting for, because I think she has a lot to atone for, personally. And she started by giving her eye, so that's one step in the right direction. So you know, I think I would have to ask myself what is their whole new arc, what is their whole new story now that they're adults? I think I've changed more than anything between the time in 20 to the time I'm 40. So there's a lot of potential for story there"

1:13:50 comment about Vi getting solo time (like Zuko Alone and Korra Alone in ATLA/LoK)

"About episode 5 (...) We always tried to clear as much runway for her as possible in that episode because it was always about getting the sisters back together. And for us that episode 5 was... Vi has to see her sister as an adult who can make her own choices and kind of respect (...) in order to respect Jinx for who she is she has to accept her boundaries even if they're not ones she agrees with, you know, which she has to do later in the season. So she has to start seeing her sister as an adult, and not a child anymore, which is very hard for family members to do. You know, I've been with my family for the last week here in Maine and there's just some times where you're like "I feel like a 16 years old girl again" around my dad or something, 'cause you revert back to familiar dynamics. And so I think that was an important thing for her to at least try and see in that episode (..) and try to imagine Silco and Vander being different from the Silco and Vander that they both knew. So, we always knew this story would be "will the daughters repeat the sins of the fathers", that was a very early on mantra for us. So that episode was kind of highlighting that shift once they saw the sins of their fathers and what they used to do, would they make the same mistakes they did?"

"So I think we got a lot in there for Vi through that window I think. But you always wish you had more time, more space, more time to just sit and breathe with your characters. Especially like I lived with them for 3 years, I spoke about them with my therapist like they were real people, which I've mentioned before, so..."

1:16:42 "Let's see, if there's one thing I would like to see Vi wrestle with more. I think she's always always fighting, and I wanted to look for a way, you know... everyone was very keen on her fighting in her darkest moments too and fighting to work through her problems and it always made sense that that would be her go-to. But, you know, is there a version of Vi who could not fight and not just drink away and numb away her problems, who could actually tackle them head on or who could just be present with them for a moment. You know, what if she did walk through the lanes, sober and without her gauntlets, and talk to people, like the fish market man, or the (?) or anything like that. What would she say to them? Could she ask about how they see her sister. And the image the Jinx, kind of, we had the mural in the background of Jinx with Vander because, that was sort of our way of hinting at that. You know, kind of seeing, what if the person you thought was a villain was actually the symbol you thought you would become. She always thought she'd follow in Vander's footsteps and suddenly it became Jinx who was doing that. I think that would have been wonderful to have more conversations like that with those people. Who knows, maybe there's future stories where she could have a version of that story come to light, where she has to reconcile with who she is now that she's an adult."

1:18:40 Q: did you ever publish any caitvi fanfic on ao3 (she tried!)

Apparently the snippet Amanda shared on twitter a long time ago was a cut snippet from s1. It was supposed to be a 1 season story. Ep 8 was the firing of the rocket and that triggered immediately the war between Piltover and Zaun in Ep 9. What used to happen: Caitlyn had a shot on Silco / Jinx but Vi told her not to. They went back to Caitlyn's house, Cassandra didn't die. Caitlyn was kind of crying on the steps like "I could have prevented this" and Vi held her and absorbed her tears. And that was gonna be the first moment where they kissed. "Then we expanded in two seasons and there was a huge conversation about whether they should kiss on the bed"

Also the Undercity was supposed to attack Piltover, led by Viktor.

1:23:27 sing the chorus of fantastic

1:26:35 "Christelle", the director of S2E3, apparently thought that kiss wasn't caitvi first kiss lol

"(.....) when lesbians kiss, you know, (..) I see a lot of straight women playing lesbians and they're very gentle and delicate and they like, face touch or whatever, and I'm like, "no no no, she's got to grab her and pull her towards her, that's what Vi would do" and so, it was Christelle's idea that she would drop the gauntlets and yank her and when I saw that, I was like, (whooping)"

1:30:41 about Maddie:

"So about the Maddie character... you know I think a lot of people are like "oh I wish we knew more about Maddie or I wish we could see sort of behind the veil". And we, you know, we thought about flipping her card over sooner or showing her talking with Ambessa. And ultimately, we felt like (..) this was all from Caitlyn's perspective. So as long as Caitlyn trusted her we wanted the audience to trust her. So that's kind of why we pull the rug out at the last minute like that. In our mind, she was always Noxian and she came from Noxus, and had been with Ambessa. You know, we kind of showed there were spies and stuff in episode 3 with the Amara character, laid into the fabric of Piltover always. So we felt like we had kind of laid in a little bit that Ambessa might have done something like that, or planted something like that. But again, we wanted the audience to be as blindsided as Caitlyn was, which kind of meant you didn't get to really dive into that character and her true motives very much"

1:32:54 Q: if you could change one thing about an episode you wrote for arcane, what would it be

"Wish we had spend more time with Viktor going through the lanes." Scene with his parents: he was working out the Grey, but his parents went, "you should go topside", they got him a academy uniform, and he impersonated a real student but was found by Heimerdinger.

1:36:05 you must Google caitvi hex strap and give your honest reaction

1:37:51 audience reaction to the sex scene

1:42:18 Q: what would Vi say when she saw Cait right after the battle

1:43:24 Q: what is your biggest red flag

1:44:04 Q: if there's one decision that you could have done differently, what would it have been (... pay less money for grad school)

1:46:08 write a short scene describing jealous possessive Caitlyn when someone flirts with Vi

1:47:40 Q: what made you decide to make Caitlyn and Vi a couple

that was already decided before she arrived on the show

1:49:59 Q: as a writer who worked on true blood what is your overall favorite episode

1:51:33 Q: would you consider changing Maddie role now that you've seen fan reaction affect the voice actress

1:52:32 about Maddie and Noxus: "we made the choice we did to show it from Caitlyn's perspective. I hope that, we get to understand more about Noxus in the future, if you know, any future projects get to dive into Noxus, because it's really sort of complicated and interesting culture. One of my shows I worked on was Marco Polo, which was about the Mongol Empire. So I learned a lot about the Mongol Empire and like, wow, they were the first sort of... the Silk Road they maintained and made it peaceful so they could communicate from all the way from the east to the west, and that was the first sort of hint at a global communication that we ever had. 'Cause they had like the way stations where the horses could sprint between and they sort of policed that road and kept it safe and made trade happen and all of that, you know, and so it was like a really rapid expansion for the human race, but also they murdered 40 million people, so (chuckles) which was a third of the population at the time. So it really is... if you're telling a story about that, it's very complicated. The amount of rape and murder and stuff. So the Noxians aren't as bad as the Mongols in terms of how warmongering they are but you do try to show two sides of everything. You know, what does the stability of an empire give you? What sort of peace... again, it's also modeled after the Roman Empire which was a huge force in history, everyone knows about the Roman Empire at this point. But also the Roman Empire is incredibly complicated in how many people they murdered and cultures they took over as well. So, trying to show the pros and cons of the Noxian Empire would be an interesting yet hard story to tell. But you know, to us that's the way she (Maddie) was raised and she was a good spy to the end and she did her job to the end. If Mel hadn't succeeded, the hero of the story, and we were telling it from the Noxians' point of view, the hero of the story would have been Maddie."

1:55:15 Q: what if Isha survived

So Christian Linke talked about the "dirt under your nails" line in the finale (which is actually a reference to an Actual JPN idiom it seems):

"VD (Interviewer): I can imagine. I read in another interview you gave that, understandably, it took you all quite a long time to figure out how to end this story. You went with a derivative of the Japanese proverb, “Boil and drink the dirt underneath fingernails.” What was the decision behind making the final line of the show, “I am the dirt under your nails, cupcake. Nothing’s gonna clean me out.”? It’s even the title of the episode and it’s referenced a few times. 

CL: So many crazy things happen between the characters and what's so interesting is that Vi is the tough character. That’s how we introduce them in Arcane, with Caitlyn being the pampered Pilty. In this end, I feel like Caitlyn is a much tougher character than Vi is just because of the emotional toil and how they process things. Caitlyn comes out of losing her mother and the turmoil between the two cities really hardened. Vi is still pretty raw. And Caitlyn just has this question, like, “Do I still have you in my corner? Or do you need to log out because it’s been too much?” That’s the real question being asked, even if she doesn’t say it like that. 

I think Caitlyn is a bit afraid of losing Vi because of just how tough it's been. And we wanted to feel that the original Vi is still there. And they are the last words. Those will echo in people's heads for a long time. So that’s always scary. "

So that resolves the meaning of the last line it seems. It's more about an emotional check on Vi than anything political. Which is an actually a better sentiment so @vi-is-badass was correct in this front.

Now that emotional fragility Christian Linke talks about here - I did pick up on it. So did Jinx and Caitlyn I'd argue. Jinx, we see that in the alt!verse she tells Ekko how fear of losing her loved ones drove her actions/fighting (thus, fighting isn't a point of enjoyment for her so much as a defense mechanism) and how in the final episode our Jinx saw her immediately go through a PTSD episode about Vander and had to navigate that with her. With Caitlyn, I think the best example of her being aware of it is when they discuss the final battle plans and Jayce mentions how they're meant to lose and Caitlyn immediately does this:

gif by arcanegifs

Moves to reassure Vi, who clearly is affected by the possibility of the Outcome (and thus, the possibility of losing everyone, and she cannot herself fight off this threat). Caitlyn here, tells her it's ok, she's here, it'll be alright. A damned shame we didn't get Vi reuniting with an injured Cait post battle tho cause I know Vi freaked the fuck out after crying after Jinx.