#chemtech

Fishbones

Pow Pow

Zapper Gun

Bombs

Hammers

Rhino

Monkey Mech

Hextech Gun(True Genius)

Also... in s1 both Shimmer and Hextech were parallels in being irresponsibly developed potential weapons tech with real practical uses. Piltover has Hextech, Zaun has Shimmer, there's an equivalence there. And Heimerdinger isn't wrong, powerful things are dangerous and rushing to commercialisation can be unwise!

When I was watching season 1, I was more influenced by League canon and so to me it was always:

Piltover = Hextech Zaun = Chemtech

So I was more open to seeing Shimmer as the new "radical" element, where it makes sense for it to be not there anymore.

The thing is... what exactly to we classify the hoverboard technology as? I presume Ekko wouldn't use Shimmer for it as he hates it. So that is chemtech too?

Is that the "responsible use of chemtech"?

To be honest, I'm not even completely sure on what the state of Shimmer is in the end. Is it gone after the destruction of the factories, the death of Rio, the arrest of Singed?

I'm sad that again, they never really went into it. I expected them to at least confirm that Rio is the one original source of it. And it bugs me that there seems to be little mention of what the removal of Shimmer does to the society other than getting the chem barons to fight.

I tend to head canon that it's gone outside maybe some left over stashes in season 2 because nobody knows about the Singed and Singed is doing his own project. But I would expect Sevika and the addicts to handle it worse. (it would have been interesting to lead back the whole "mayhem in the streets" more directly to people having withdrawals, but they never did)

Sevika's shimmer based arm is broken. Smeech uses shimmer personally but seems to be using a chem tech based prosthetic and offers to make Sevika one but then of course gets a mechanics based one from Jinx. Why is Sevika handling it so well even though she was presumably a pretty regular user? (pr does Shimmer not have the one main characteristic that we associate with drugs, addictiveness? And it's just what, Huck and his peeps having odd reactions to it?)

=> which brings up an interesting thing. To me Renni and the council attack seem more chemtech than shimmer to me. Or at least a mixture.

Maybe Silco himself after Act 1 came to see Shimmer as thing that isn't actually useful as a weapon? Maybe because it's too unreliable. And hence spends the years putting time into accumulating power on one side and developing chemtech on the other?

That Shimmer's primary use as a drug and something that makes Silco money and less as a weapon and the weapon focus turns more on chemtech. Or that Shimmer is more as a catalysator, it makes chem tech powerful and maybe it mixes with hextech/the void as well? I remember some people saying that Viktor's shimmer dripping on the hextech stuff causes it to deform and create the anomaly.

(I also just watched a theory video that says that Shimmer amplifies people's dominant abilities, which is why some people get bulky but Jinx gets speed. But yeah, not sure how convinced of them, I think the "different strain/mixture" headcanons work better there)

So when Hextech turns out to have side effects in s2, I think it's reasonable to say "in the utopia, neither tech was developed". And I appreciate all the good-coded science in s2ep7, I think the creators were trying really hard to avoid "science is bad" as a takeaway.

I can read the AU as "they found a third option and the third option is nature/plants" and neither Shimmer nor hextech are a big factor in the AU. And the main universe is a more "flawed" ending of compromise and hence some hextech and some chemtech is still around and Shimmer is being phased out.

That's again probably because of what I said first that to me "Zaun = chemtech", so to me the balance doesn't rely as much on Shimmer. I can read it more as Shimmer being the new (=Arcane tv show without League Lore) element that was introduced specifically for this story.

I think there's some appeal to portraying Shimmer as the big poison the big catalysator that maybe poisoned Silco, poisoned the hextech, that works at the catalyst in combination with both hextech and chemtech and makes everything and everybody worse ... but to me it just doesn't work really line up again with the whole "seems to work for Jinx alright" and to me the whole herald thing just goes into a completely different direction it just doesn't make sense to me anymore to trace it back to Shimmer in a visual language kind of way.

Like the whole thing where the Arcane is still a blobby cube

I can maybe picture that as "Shimmer interacting the Arcane and birthing something new and misshapen". That this is visual language of "it's not supposed to look like that, something is being tainted".

But by the time Viktor's puppets run around and Viktor is all ancient mage it just feels too clean. to me it doesn't visually refer back to Shimmer anymore.

I guess Viktor has still some of the Shimmer purple in his color language

And when they heal/transform Viktor into the herald, you can read it that they just throw everything together? The Arcane, Shimmer, Chemtech, Warwick's regen factor or blood?

So maybe the herald is supposed to be the amalgam, the blend of all the powerful things that run around?