Anthropological and philosophical analysis of Viktor’s story in Season 2 - Part II
Eh, here it is, the 2nd part. It’s a direct continuation of the 1st one, ‘cause I’m gonna be referencing stuff from the previous post. So go check that out. Here’s more intellectual rambling.
Author Sara Ahmed (my beloved) writes that emotions are more than individual states. Society produces and prioritizes certain groups’ emotional responses over others. She calls these responses, these emotions - ‘affects’. We see the Council members express disgust, contempt and anger directed at the Undercity’s citizens. We see Caitlyn’s reaction to the attack at the memorial, her anger towards Jinx and disdain for Zaunite criminals, the grief over her mother killed in Jinx’s attack. Do Cait's emotions justify her actions, usage of chemical warfare and abuse towards Vi? Seems like they do, from writers’ perspective. Salo is angry and he's presented as corrupted, unsympathetic, but Caitlyn is angry and her actions aren't critiqued by the narrative. Her anger is righteous because she wants to contain the situation in Zaun. That's why she formed the special team right after the memorial. She becomes angry and acts violently, but at the end of S2 she's not held accountable.
Caitlyn's affects and her actions came from her grief and anger, and she considered her choices as right because as an Enforcer and a Kiramann Caitlyn felt that she has a moral duty to protect Piltover's interests and citizens. She goes on to gas Zaunites because she's protecting Piltover's 'right' to peace and safety. Which is accurate with Ahmed's understanding of prioritized affects - the privileged people can respond to tragedy, loss and trauma with affects such as anger, rage, despair. Ahmed writes about that in Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects):
(...) When anger becomes righteous it can be oppressive; to assume anger makes us right can be a wrong. We know how easily a politics of happiness can be displaced into a politics of anger: the assumption of a right to happiness can convert very swiftly into anger toward others (immigrants, aliens, strangers) who have taken the happiness assumed to be "by right" to be ours. (...) (Ahmed, ''Feminist Killjoys'')
Cait indirectly killing Zaunites with Gray isn't addressed as state sanctioned violence and killing, but Renni's attack at the memorial, her anger and revenge she wanted for her son's death are considered wrong. As if Caitlyn isn't acting with revenge as motivation all this time too. Why are Renni and Jinx dead by the end of the story and Caitlyn is supposedly absolved of all her crimes because she... had no energy left to be angry after the time skip? No, the narrative states that Cait is privileged and she can respond to tragedy with anger and violence. Renni and Jinx are Othered, their anger and violence aren't right, these are pathological affects. The narrative takes sides.
According to Ahmed, rage of the oppressed people is actually the dissatisfaction with the system. Ekko being angry with Caitlyn and Jayce is absolutely justified and necessary. It’s the frustration, the resentment coming from an experience of discrimination and embodiment of the Other. It’s the rage simmering in lifelong trauma, it's an emancipatory rage. Then, community as basis for change, grassroots action that connects marginalized groups - that comes from feelings of empathy, connectedness, determination. That’s what Ekko does with the Firelights.
Ekko is right to be angry, to point out the wrongdoings of privileged characters, to call them out on their ignorance and decisions beneficial only for Piltover. But Ekko’s anger is dismissed by the narrative. He’s basically absent in S2. Why? I think because he's a Feminist Killjoy. Or rather a Zaunite Killjoy. And the writers couldn't give him space to speak more, because the things he said were too uncomfortable.
Viktor in S1 is also frustrated very often because of the state of affairs after Jinx stole the gemstone. He expressed annoyance, disappointment and anger at Jayce, at Mel and indirectly at Haimerdinger. Wish we could have seen Viktor's reaction to Cait weaponizing the Gray. It’d have personal significance and further radicalize him, helping in severing his ties to Piltover, fully dedicating himself to Zaun.
And ever since S1 I wanted Viktor to express rage. I wanted him to be so fucking angry. Him screaming and mirroring Warwick during the transformation into the Machine Herald felt so satisfying when I saw it for the first time. Look at him! He's mad as hell! Good.
But that's not enough. His rage is only a fragment of the sequence when The Line plays and the writers don't explore Viktor's anger. Which is a terribly missed opportunity. If I was able to rewrite Viktor's arc, I’d make his anger expressed explicitly, he'd be seen in the rage that gathered within him for so long. And it would be justified, as he recognizes his supposed internalized ableism and how badly xenophobia, classicism and laws of Piltover affected him and Zaunite people. People who're also angry, as we've seen at the very beginning of S1. Vander went on that bridge for a reason and I dare say revolutions always start with frustration, evolve into anger and burst out in rage. People gathered at the rally by Sevika are also angry. Anger calls for action.
(When on topic of Zaunites, it's also fucking horrible that Viktor doesn't bond with Sky over their shared identity as Undercity citizens who migrated to Piltover with the intention of educating themselves so they can improve Zaun’s situation in the future. Sky's story is so underdeveloped and simplified it's making me go insane. She’s used as a plot device in both seasons, Black woman serving white man’s character arc and she got fridged twice. No words. Now I feel angry.)
Coming back to rage, it's so interesting that Viktor isn't allowed to express it in the narrative the same way Warwick isn't. I mean, he gets feral, but it's not... rage, not really. Originally Warwick is literally The Wrath of Zaun incarnate. And the writers fucked this up by making Vander come back as a plot device to 'unite' Jinx and Vi. It says a lot about writers' real premise and priorities. Warwick couldn't remain the embodiment of Zaunites' rage and a chaotic, uncaged beast, a Radical Other, a force Piltover fears (Salo literally calls Zaun a basement with demons inside) because it's a character in opposition to the state sanctioned violence of Piltover. And the creators don't want to address that. I believe Warwick's mess of an arc in S2 should be studied in the context of politics of affects and specifically how anger is an integral part of Zaun and Arcane as a story. But this post is about Viktor, so imma move on.
Viktor should have had a chance to acknowledge that him working in Piltover won't really help because in reality majority of the Council doesn't want to help. He’s overlooked because of his social status despite being the co-creator of Hextech. The majority of the Council wouldn’t give a fuck about whatever projects he’d present as improvements for the Undercity. Viktor's rage against the system could be so cathartic and satisfying after such a long time of suffering both physically and mentally. Suffering caused by Piltover’s destructive actions and intentional inaction in certain spheres.
And if he chose to augment himself, ideally in a way he did in original LOL Lore, I’d want his thought process to be: ‘You see me as the Other, so I will become the Other in the most extreme way possible, and will do so out of spite and despite of you all’. I’d be screaming, crying, throwing up!! If he saw there's no way he could achieve his dream because the system won't ever allow it. If Viktor left and used his skills to help his people, maybe siding with Ekko and combining their anger to become integral to the Zaun-Piltover conflict, I’d be so happy. Guess the writers could make Viktor prominent in S2 as the villain but not as the revolutionary he deserved to become.
I want to emphasize how integral affects, specifically anger/rage, are to the Arcane as a series. All characters experience them in different ways. When I saw Viktor's anger in S1 I dreamed of him becoming the Herald through the experience he had in League Lore - in some messed up form of stages of grief, from depression through anger to acceptance.
And that's what should have happened, but S2 destroyed this integral part of Viktor. He can't be angry, because he lost his humanity to the Hexcore. AND IT HAPPENED WITHOUT HIS CONSENT AND NOT OUT OF HIS OWN FREE WILL. What narrative tells us is: the Other needs to be neutralized and then villainized, he can't act out of his own volition, he must be a shell of who he once was, because if he remained himself and acted the way he wanted, he would make everyone feel awkward - his actions would reveal our prejudices.
And Viktor was already established as a Zaunite Killjoy in S1. Specifically in the 'I'm from the Undercity' scene (more on that later) and when Mel implied weaponization of Hextech. Writers of S2 took away Viktor's real agency and took his Killjoy status away, because he'd make it all awkward! If he left Jayce because he was disappointed with him making Hextech weapons for Cait or whatever other reason that connected to the Zaun-Piltover conflict, Viktor would be making a statement: he won't go along with this.
But who is a feminist killjoy? Ahmed writes that a person who's marginalized and experiences oppression can become a killjoy in a political sense. Being a killjoy is an act of causing 'social awkwardness' - by expressing dissatisfaction with the system or verbalizing someone's biases, and most importantly entire society's normative and oppressive institutions. A (feminist) killjoy refuses to be neutralized and silenced, it's a political role, a form of action, activism. That's why I think of Ekko as our Zaunite Killjoy who never got the chance to act to his full potential in political sense (because writers yeeted him into an AU).
To create awkwardness is to be read as being awkward. Maintaining public comfort requires that certain bodies "go along with it." To refuse to go along with it, to refuse the place in which you are placed, is to be seen as causing trouble, as making others uncomfortable. There is a political struggle about how we attribute good and bad feelings, which hesitates around the apparently simple question of who introduces what feelings to whom. Feelings can get stuck to certain bodies in the very way we describe spaces, situations, dramas. And bodies can get stuck depending on the feelings with which they get associated. (Ahmed, ''Feminist Killjoy'')
Ahmed wrote about anger in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, in the chapter Feminist Attachments. Her point is: anger is an appropriate response to systemic violence, suffering inflicted on certain groups by those in power and the processes of Othering.
That's why Viktor's response to these issues should have been him making people uncomfortable on purpose - with his political stance and his embodiment. As I argued in my 1st post, he should have affirmed himself as a Zaunite and a disabled person, reject Piltover and make a conscious decision to use technology similar to his OG League counterpart (maybe tone down on the amputating limbs part tho). It'd tie with original premise of Arcane, the story of class struggle, of political and social conflicts between Zaun and Piltover.
But the writers didn't feel comfortable with that idea. Kinda awkward.
And the same point about who’s affects, specifically anger, can be expressed was brilliantly analysed by @ceaselesswatchersspecialboy:
(...) to have Viktor question Piltover further, to have him present for Cait’s rise and the gassing of the Undercity and growing brutality towards its people, would mean that it would have to be acknowledged deeper, and that there would have to be actual consequences. Viktor’s arc cannot centre around the conflict of Zaun vs Piltover anymore, because to do so would mean actually addressing the horrifically inhumane acts of Piltover, and the centuries of oppression in a way that justified Zaun’s violence and anger.
And that- THAT IS THE REAL THING! (snatches wig)
Even more importantly, he points out:
Viktor's arc cannot centre around him choosing to become the Machine Herald, because that would mean acknowledging that he has a right to be resentful and hurt, that the fact he was dying was caused directly by Piltover.
Preach it to the heavens. I have nothing to add. (text in quotes was emboldened by me)
As Audre Lorde’s classic quote goes: For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. (Lorde, ''Sister Outsider'')
Why then, does Viktor agree to help Ambessa; why then, Vi and other Zaunites join the war? These actions won’t help in dismantling Piltover’s system of power. It's perpetuating violence and destruction. Giving Sevika a seat in the Council isn’t about to bring genuine change. The Council has never worked in favor of Zaunites, so how having just one representative at the table helps in the long run? There shouldn't be a Council anymore! Abolish it!
Lorde, along with bell hooks, are the most notable Black Feminist Killjoys in the history of the movement. The meaning of anger in political context for the oppressed groups and social justice activists is crucial. Having anger within the fabric of their stories, Zaunite characters should have been given agency to act. And cause awkwardness. The way Ekko made Jayce uncomfortable (get him Ekko!).
I believe Arcane draws far too many parallels to real live social issues and different civil rights movements that writers omitting the political message in Season 2 is simply them indulging in the privilege of ignorance. They allowed themselves to avert their gaze from actual source of Zaun-Piltover conflict, the same way privileged groups irl just 'go along with' discrimination because it doesn't touch them, it's not their concern, it causes them to feel shame, guilt, anger and fear.
And that's what I wanted, I wanted Viktor to cause these affects in Jayce, Mel, Heimerdinger, all of the Council, Caitlyn and just in general, because that just made sense in his character arc and general narrative. The final villain should't be Viktor, the villain was Piltover's power all along.
It would be good if S2 Viktor saw that the glorious evolution was basically him trying to fit in a society that won't accept him anyway. He won't dismantle the master's house by pursuing idealized standards of health and progress. He needed to build connections with people like Ekko and radically reject Piltover and its values because they made him Othered and emotionally miserable.
How even cooler of a character he would be, if he said ‘screw you’ to the discriminatory society and tried to build sth different the way he did in League Lore with Blitzcrank (rip) and augmenting people who wanted that sort of help. The transhumanist part of augmentation is kind of complicated, as I explained in the 1st post, but hey, Viktor isn't supposed to be morally perfect. He's all shades of gray and that’s why I love him. But S2 changed him so dramatically, made him do things contradictory to the original character from S1. He became a plot device, not the active engine of social change, and that just makes me uneasy.
In order to make a real change Viktor initially wanted, he’d have to accept his Otherness and become the Radical Other on his own terms FORM THE VERY BEGINNING OF SEASON 2. He’d leave Piltover and Jayce behind for good, because that would be true to his character's values. It would make sense for him to be angry, resentful, scornful. It hurts to say this as a Jayvik shipper but only a bit, just a tiny bit. Imagine the Divorce Era if Viktor went this direction and they never reconnected? Doomed, tragic. Imagine the yearning and inability to reconcile their contradicting worldviews. Soulmates this, partners that, but what about actually giving Viktor a character arc? (i’m partially joking, don't @ me)
Anyway, this approach, with understanding of the role the affects have in political contexts, would be more subversive and focused on the characters' motivations. It'd show how the affects reflect the bigger picture of socioeconomic state of both cities' dynamics. The affect of rage felt and expressed during various events which caused social changes is integral to the history of emancipation and freedom in our world. Arcane touches real political issues but downplays Zaunite characters’ actions and affects. It's supposed to reflect really important issues. But Viktor in S2 is angry only for a split second, and we're not even sure if it's his own anger or if it's just Warwick's blood and Arcane connecting them for a moment. What S2 showed us in Viktor's case is that when the Other gets angry, they’re alienated further and further…
VIOLENCE, NECROPOLITICS & ABJECTIFICATION
Philosopher Simone Weil wrote that violence/force is the thing that takes away human choice. Systemic violence committed by Piltover took away many choices from Zaunite characters, but they still managed to adapt (Silco, Vander, Jinx, Ekko). Their actions are normal reactions to abnormal circumstances. That’s why Viktor’s decision to use the Hexcore in S1 is understandable - he’s dying because of Piltover causing industrial pollution in Zaun. Yet he made a choice to discard the chance to live after he accidentally killed Sky. He was still the idealist he started as in act 1 of S1, who valued human life above all else, even if it meant losing his own.
It doesn't feel right from his character arc’s perspective, but it’s a bit understandable that at the end of S2 he said choice is false. Because even when he chose his own fate in S1, the choice was taken from him - in an act of violence committed by a fellow Zaunite (Jinx) and then by his partner. Yes, Jayce merging Viktor with the Hexcore is a difficult decision he made, he saved Viktor’s life, it was out of love, but it’s still violence done from selfish reasons (it’s sort of resembling real situations in which cancer patients refuse treatment while their families push them to change their mind). This isn't ok, to have a disabled character make an autonomous choice regarding his body and life, only then to be taken away by a non-disabled character. Disabled people’s physical boundaries are so often crossed and ignored in medical and social contexts, and it’s maddening to see Viktor experience that in S2.
Now, as an important note to Viktor’s analysis, I’ll delve into violence as an inherent part of social and political conflict. Violence itself is much more than military context. We see a group of Zaunites join the Enforcers in the last episode, they even die during the Noxian invasion while wearing Enforcers’ uniforms, as we see in Gert's final moment (the Zaunites fighting for Piltover is ridiculous, it just blows my mind. Gert and Vi should have been girlfriends change my mind). When discussing violence and protest sociologist Walter Benjamin noted that people in power create legal orders and governments in order to decide what’s considered lawful and unlawful violence. Police can do violence because their actions are sanctioned.
Jinx is considered the biggest threat because her violence isn’t sanctioned. Piltover associates a 'good' type of violence with uniforms and flags, weapons created to ‘defend’ the City of Progress which are wielded by the police. While we see police brutality as evil in S1 and Caitlyn sees the corruption this status quo causes, she then leans into it in S2 and abjectifies Zaunites (more on that later). She gasses them and declares martial law. She might be conflicted and then betrays Ambessa, but it’s not developed enough, so I criticize the message based on what we got - and we got no accountability for the state sanctioned violence.
The theory of necropolitics, created by Joseph-Achille Mbembe, states that politics is the power to decide whose lives matter and whose death is justified or unnoted. He writes about this theory specifically in connection to colonialism and racism. I want to use Mbembe's theory to explain how Arcane's narrative allows necropolitics to be implicitly shown but never explicitly addressed.
In S2 Caitlyn abused her power and made a (necro)political decision when she unleashed the Grey on Zaun. And it isn't addressed. The action is justified because it ‘cleared the streets of the criminals’. Their lives aren’t notable. We can imagine the gassing influenced not only the chem-lords and their gangs, but countless citizens of Zaun too. Caitlyn’s politics, and Piltover’s in general, categorizes Zaunite lives as expendable. Necessary sacrifices for progress. Justified, somewhat indirect killing. We have many examples of such political decisions in our world I think...
And at the very end, Viktor is also forgotten, nobody puts his name in the bowl during the tribute on the bridge, he’s considered a villain (‘Viktor is at the center of all of this, isn't he?’). Necropolitics explains that political power also decides who is worth grieving. With this in mind, I think S2 gives a very uncomfortable message. Judith Butler explains it quite well in Frames of war. They write:
Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit lost and destroyed zone; they are ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed. (Butler, ''Frames of war'')
And who died in this war? Viktor, the empathetic scientific genius, the disabled man, the Zaunite.
Other Zaunites died too. So did Jayce. It’s incoherent how Jayce goes from declaring Viktor as dangerous to then dying together while touching foreheads in a Zaunite gesture of love. I mean, I get it, Viktor is actively turning everyone into senseless machines which is objectively bad. But from the narrative perspective it irks me that the creators decided it’ll be Viktor and Jayce who bear the consequences of this conflict. Not the Council, not the nobles of Piltover, not the police. And we can only assume that some of the Zaunites who died in the war against Noxus were remembered on the bridge. But why is it that they had to die in police uniforms while protecting Piltover in order to become worth grieving?
Sara Ahmed also writes that associating certain affects with a group of people makes it easier not to grieve for them. The way people of Piltover speak about Zaunites exemplifies it: addicts, criminals, animals, creatures, demons in Piltover's basement, trenchers, associated with disease, lack of order, threat, dirt, danger.
Making Viktor ungrievable in the end is also pretty fucking bad on writers' part, because in many societies disabled people are oftentimes considered socially useless, expendable and half dead already. With Viktor’s story as context this is even more unsettling.
Earlier I made a point that Caitlyn abjectifies the Zaunites. Abjectification, as Butler writes, is an act of turning certain groups considered inherently dangerous into ‘abjects’ and not subjects of the political stage. Abjection basically means an emotional and bodily reaction to something considered repulsive, uncomfortable, threatening and undesirable. According to Piltover's (necro)politics Zaunites are abjectified and need to be managed with sanctioned violence for 'public good'. The narrative of S2 tried to fool us with the ‘humanity needs to be protected’ plot while using Viktor and foreign military as threats. I see it as another attempt at dodging actually important and difficult discussion of class divisions and power dynamics. They did, after all, make Zaunite the final boss.
I wrote at length about Viktor's relationship to his embodiment and how the concept of Other is important while reading his arc. His body isn't normative so it's abjectified from the start. His disability is a marker of difference. Butler in their book Bodies that Matter explains that abjectification is a process that creates ''unlivable and uninhabitable zones of social life'' in which certain people exist not as subjects, but beneath ''the domain of the subject''. In Arcane it's perfectly exemplified in the way Zaunites live literally under Piltover - their lower social status is signified by the proxemics of the cities. Viktor wasn't allowed to inhabit certain spaces both in Zaun and Piltover due to his disability and social status. He was then taken into the 'unlivable zone' in his own narrative because his agency and anger had been taken away. He was then made into a villain and died. This way he was abjectified by Piltover's systemic violence and its necropolitics as well as the writers' own unconscious process of abjectification.
Viktor was Othered on many levels within the story, he was this way because the creators made this decision, they made him a disabled person and a Zaunite. As I pointed out before, representation has real life consequences and writers have responsibility when they write characters with experiences similar to real people. In Viktor's case people with disabilities and lower social class. In the end of S2, Viktor vanishes completely, ungrievable, abjectified, no more a subject with his own affects and dreams. He became the 'abjected outside' as Butler calls this status. He was literally sucked into the rune, away from Piltover. Abjected outside, rejected yet again (maybe this time on his terms, but why should the narrative force him to bear the emotional labor of this decision? why punish him for adapting into abnormal circumstances he was thrown into?), forever an outsider looking in...
Jayce might say the final fight is about ''humanity itself'', but I see it for what it is - a veil hiding the fact that writing Zaun vs Piltover civil war would mean admitting that Zaunites have the right to fight the abjectification. And there’s no way we can deny the real world implications of that.
THE SPECTACLE OF OTHERING
The very first thing that specifically sparked my idea to write this extensive analysis was this frame:
The marionette is perfect in form, white and gold (like Mel’s og outfit), slim and fancy, perfect by Piltover standards, but still has the Zaunite touch of art nouveau aesthetic. It’s made from flesh of a Zaunite and the metal that came from the industrial waste in the pits of Zaun.
The marionette is displayed by Jayce and evokes a reaction of fear in the people gathered. It’s lying on the table, looking graceful but uncanny. Everyone in the room is scared because it’s inhuman and dangerous. Even when Viktor inhabited what he thought was an embodiment of perfection, in the end the Pilties still rejected him. Because he’s from Zaun, he’s a creature, Zaunites are not human in their eyes - so is Viktor no matter how he changes. He's dead already, even for Jayce.
It scares me how unsettling it is when Jayce unveils the marionette - basically Huck's corpse that Viktor used, it doubles the distress I feel when I see it. The body of a Zaunite was used by his fellow citizen whose goal was the betterment of the Undercity, but turned into eugenics because of him internalising the stigmatisation. Both Huck and Viktor were oppressed because of their origins and disability, and in the end they both die.
In S1 Viktor is considered by Jayce as one of ‘the good ones’ - same way Vi was called by Maddie. But Viktor remarks he’s still a Zaunite and isn't different to those Jayce calls dangerous. He reveals Jayce’s prejudice; as much as Jayce loves Viktor he’s still shaped by his environment. Thinking of Viktor as an exception confirms Jayce’s unconscious conviction that Zaunites are Other, they can be dangerous.
Ironic, how at the end in the Council chamber Jayce presents Viktor as the ultimate danger. It’s an odd parallel. In S1 Jayce orders a blockade, locking Zaunites’ access to the bridge, so they get angry (remember the affects stuff?), and then Jayce calls them dangerous... In S2 Jayce calls Viktor the biggest threat and names the Hexgates ‘the last bastion of salvation’, he then tries to make it inaccessible for Viktor. Viktor should be absolutely fuckin' fumin' babes. But he can't be angry. not anymore.
Jayce talking about the threat Viktor poses in S2 is reestablishing Jayce’s bias from S1 when he ordered the blockade and told Viktor in the face that Zaunites are threats. Gurl, your partner is a Zaunite. One season later Jayce presents the marionette and actively portrays his ex(partner) as the bad guy.
And then Jayce’s character does some real gymnastics in the astral plane when he expresses his love to Viktor hoping to snap him out of Machine Herald mode. If Jayce loved all of Viktor and truly understood him, then why the fuck did the writers make their actions and statements contradicting several times. If they had good writing skills left, they’d write Jayce like at the end of S1 when he took Viktor to the Council, finally let him speak and declare the proposition of Zaun’s independence. Writers could just… not do all that Jayce Judas Era in act 2 in S2. Idk fam, these characters were just devices to push preexisting tropes and cliches forward, the series turned into Avengers instead of compelling and character driven story it was before. I’m mad again, so let’s move on.
The display of the marionette reminds me again, more literally, of the freak shows where disabled people were a show for 'able-bodied' audiences (I wrote about that in the 1st post). The doll might look perfect, but we know it's a corpse of a marginalized person addicted to shimmer who acquired a facial deformity before Viktor healed him. The marionette is a stand-in for Viktor, a disabled person who's now being talked about by Jayce as the looming threat to all of society, humanity even, ‘both bottom and top’ (love how Sevika and Scar walked out, I know that's right! Too bad they came back later to risk their lives for Piltover...).
The doll on display is like an extension of the spectacle that was Viktor's body in both seasons. He's the character whose nudity is shown the most often in S1 and S2, it’s borderline voyeuristic. His disabled body is on display when he experiments on himself in the lab, we see close-ups of his back brace, we see him crawl on the floor in nothing but underwear and braces. Not to mention the self-injuries he makes by craving runes on his body. In S2 he’s basically naked all the time except for the goddamn blanket. His body is hyper-visible also because of things he uses to aid it: cane, crutch, leg brace, back brace; and because of his body itself: the nudity, skinny frame, pale skin, dark circles under eyes, prominent bones, greasy hair, bloody cuts.
As Rosemary Garland-Thompson wrote in Extraordinary bodies, disability is very often marked hyper-visible for the majorly non-disabled audience and causes a visceral reaction of compassion, pity, awkwardness, fear, uneasiness, sadness. I can’t talk for everybody’s emotional reactions to the scenes I'm referencing, but there’s something to be said about the choices the creators made when framing Viktor’s bare body. Physical disability and self-injuries are so often very misunderstood and make many people anxious, because they’re different from what’s considered ‘normal’ or rational by the rules of society. The cultural and political tensions are embodied by certain people, by their skin that is the boundary between a person's inner self and their outside circumstances. In context of self-injuries skin is the scene where society gathers and observes the anxieties regarding things like control and agency, mental health and '(in)sanity', self image and visaul standards of beauty, rationality of one's actions and what people usually find weird, scary, othered. Both Viktor’s disability and self-injuries are markers of his extreme vulnerability as well as desperation and unpredictability of his actions.
For me, a non-disabled person who has experiences with NSSI, these scenes feel too intimate and painful to watch without feeling like a voyeur and somehow still relating to Viktor. I even feel weird putting the picture for reference. Not because his body itself makes me uncomfortable. It’s about the visual framing of him that the creators made, and it feels like a spectacle of Viktor’s ‘broken’ body and his moral downfall in S1. It allows us to deeply empathise with him and see him at his lowest, which doesn't have to be a bad thing all together when we understand it as a raw depiction of pain and determination, integral to his character arc and embodiment. At the same time these scenes are like a double-edged sword and can be read as extremely exploitative, like an echo of freak shows.
Ahmed claims that there's no private suffering. That what we experience on our own is always linked to the outside, to the societal rules, cultural meanings and politics that influence our lives, our embodiment. She also writes that it's imperative to respond to the pain of other people, to respond to our pain and act. This idea ties to the Feminist Killjoy role and affects I wrote about. Viktor suffers on his own basically until the very end, only to have Jayce's loving presence in their final moments. Viktor's suffering was a direct effect of politics and socioeconomic situation he lived in. As Ahmed writes, in order to respond to pain, social movements such as feminism must open up safe spaces for the disclosure of pain. We need to make spaces for ''speaking about pain''. This, for Ahmed, is a condition that allows unification of people in ''different stories of pain that cannot be reduced to a ground, identity or sameness'' (The Cultural Politics of Emotion).
This is the reason Viktor needed to meet other Zaunites, other disabled people and speak about his pain. Speak about his disability. Viktor should have been given agency to ''speak in one's voice'' (as Garland-Thompson wrote) and ''speak about pain'' (as Ahmed wrote). Then his arc wouldn't become a spectacle of Othering, it would be a raw story of emancipation that wouldn't fall easily into the Inspirationally Disabled/Disadvantaged trope.
Viktor’s body is an inseparable part of his character, but it makes me uneasy how the focus on his body is fetishistic at times. And then the doll he controls in S2, while it looks perfect… is still unsettling to see. And it's displayed by Jayce in another form of spectacle... Narratively speaking, Viktor's still an outsider just like when he first stepped foot in Piltover. He’s not dying now, his physical disability is gone, it's not the same as the body that was his lived experience. And it's depressing to watch.
Viktor depersonalized after emerging from the hexgoop (?), he seems to be apathetic and disoriented ('‘What am I ?’'). The body horror part is again reminiscent of the freak shows where disability was a pathological state, congruous to monstrosity. We don't get Viktor’s inner thoughts and feelings on his body’s current state and that's stupid. His experience was inextricably connected to his body and how he experienced this embodiment. And he was disconnected from it. Because the writers thought so??? And didn't bother to explore it??? This is an insult to Viktor's character and people who relate to him.
Viktor absolutely had so many thoughts about his embodiment, but it's never verbalized or visually explored deeper. At many points of the story he loses parts of his body, his body is in a constant state of change. It's so interesting and important to ask: what does Viktor think and feel when experiencing himself, his body/in this body? It's a question of what makes us ‘us’ - body? mind? soul? everything at once? something else? There are multiple metaphysical answers to that. Arcane tried to be meta with Viktor's Messiah arc but it falls flat in the end. He basically became transhuman three times! (after getting out the goop; being in the astral plane where he exists beyond flesh and its ‘limitations’; and at the end when he became the alien Machine Herald). And he doesn't speak about the experience! His body is hyper-visible but he doesn't speak about it (apart from ''I can feel my body eroding'' in S1) at any stage of the drastic changes he goes through. We get to watch him go through them but he doesn't speak in his voice, doesn't speak about the pain. That's crazy. (I'm not getting into the transhumanism part of his LOL Lore and what it could mean, but I firmly believe it still should have been a part of Arcane Viktor's story, we prolly would need one more season to explore everything I suggest, sigh)
What Jayce shows when displaying the marionette is a sacrifice on an altar - Viktor’s character and all of Zaun were sacrificed by the narrative and creators for the sake of a generic plot where the good guys (actual oppressors) have to fight the big bad (actually oppressed) who’s going to end all of humanity. This ignores the reason Viktor even does what he does - the root of it all is Piltover's necropolitics and the establishment that doesn't allow social change.
It's even exemplified in Vi and Cait staying together - Cait loses an eye but so what, she still gets rewarded by the narrative. She isn’t held accountable for her actions and gets a girlfriend whose trauma isn’t explored by the writers at all. The implications of Vi’s relationship with a former cop and fascist aren’t addressed, and it’s considered romantic by the creators and many fans. Sorry, but I can’t ship CaitVi the way I used to. My lesbian heart is broken, but I can’t in good faith consider this ship as anything but romanticization of abuse and a complete lack of class consciousness on creators' part. I wanted Cait and Vi together, happy. But not the way it turned out in the final version. Fanfiction writers you're my only hope for fixing this.
In the end the person who gets to tell the story is Cait, the Piltie and an enforcer turned dictator, who embodied the oppressive practices and the status quo which thrived from inequality and militarism of the police. The winners tell the story, people like Jinx, Silco and Viktor are painted as villains when they actually had reasons to rage against the Piltover's machine of bigotry and hatred fueled by greed of the privileged.
Viktor's name was removed from the Hexgates’ blueprints, he was forgotten as he feared he would be, he wasn’t grieved by anyone. Necropolitics at its finest. And that makes me fucking sad and pissed off. He deserved so much more. Yes, Arcane is a tragedy and all, but Viktor's arc in S2 is astoundingly OOC and destroys the core themes his story established in S1. And the ending he gets, even though he’s with Jayce, gives a very off-putting message. Sorry JayVik nation, I’m one of you, but the writing is as poetic as it is problematic.
This story is so centrist, pro-establishment actually, and not as subversive as it promised to be. It treats rebellion as an aesthetic and sacrifices characters from the oppressed group in order to uphold the power of the oppressors. Because to show that political change is possible they’d have to acknowledge what's wrong with the system, how it involves real people, how affects such as anger can be justified as political motivation, how abjectification, Othering and violence destroy people and their entire worlds.
This destruction, the senseless waste and conflict Viktor speaks of, that's what happened to Powder/Jinx and Vi in the 1st act of S1. We saw what happened on the bridge, with Vander and Silco's anger that went further and further. The main story started with a group of kids robbing a wealthy apartment because they needed things, they needed money, they were Zaunites taking from Piltover because these kids were growing up 'knowing they're less than them'...
I needed Viktor's and Vi's traumas to be talked about by them, in their own voices. They needed to speak about their pain. Too bad if CaitVi and JayVik wouldn’t work as ships then. That would be the real thing. A tragedy. They'd split because the political climate and differences in values was impossible for them to reconcile. Either that, or the Piltover cast had to admit their wrongs and actively help their loved ones in Zaun’s rebellion. And it should have happened not only because Jayce loves Viktor and Cait loves Vi, but because Jayce and Caitlyn see the inherent value in Zaun’s freedom. Cait saw Ekko’s community in S1 and still became a fascist. Jayce heard Viktor’s stance on weaponization of their work and saw the real consequence of Piltover’s oppression while witnessing Viktor slowly dying, being so destroyed by everything he even considered suicide. And Jayce still built weapons. And this is the real tragedy - Cait and Jayce could have been actual allies. But we don't live in the timeline where such a story was told.
We got a promising S1 with a really compelling premise (Silco they could never make me hate you) and then it got fucked up (I'm getting ''Tokyo Ghoul:re'' flashbacks). The threat isn't the government, it's the stigmatized group acting out because they’re pushing back against the oppressors. The person whose actions are deemed evil is a Zaunite aided by the foreign warmonger. It shifts our focus to outside forces (Ambessa) influencing Piltover and scapegoats Viktor as the ultimate danger. The Other, not a radical one. The reason he became the Herald in Arcane was his internalized bigotry perpetuated by the government and society of Piltover. It wasn't Viktor becoming a Zaunite Killjoy because he wanted to. But that would be the right thing for him to do, to reject the people, places and symbolic structures that rejected him. To embrace the status of Other and re-invent its meaning for himself without changing himself fundamentally. I’m so mad y’all, if you couldn’t tell by now. Linke i live in your walls
If you start a story about oppression then commit to it, cowards. But that was never the writers' intention, centrist bs shows and it’s not a good look.
They character assassinated basically everyone because the writers wanted a cliche ending. It was enjoyable but not compelling. It was visually stunning, animation, as they say, fucks severely, voice actors did an amazing job, the emotional layer was quite touching (altho emotional moments didn't feel earned), the music really slaps (Renegadeeeeee, Stromaeeeeee), Viktor’s looks were so tea they killed him 3 times. But in terms of writing? It’s a disappointment. In terms of storytelling and cultural meanings? I think you got my idea, nothing could stop me from overintellectualizing this show.
That being said, I love Viktor even though I've got a lot of critical thoughts on the final version of his arc and the message the creators give on disability rep which is... not coherent. Not good sometimes. But for sure Viktor is complex and very important as a disabled character in popular media. And I will love him until the day I die and then some.
Why did I write this? Idk. Perhaps because I can't shake off the feeling that Arcane writers touched so many important philosophical and social/cultural concepts but didn't do enough research or commit to the premise and lost an important message. I wanted to analyse it because as Garland-Thompson said: representation shapes identity and lives of real people. I’m happy to see how many people love Viktor and feel represented. I'm glad to see people enjoy him while being critical. His story is complex, there’s many points to be made, my take is only one of many, so… the answer would be that we need more disability representation that involves actual disabled people’s voices in the creative process. It’s their experiences and opinions that matter.
TL;DR Viktor’s arc in S2 is a trainwreck, I mourn what could have been. He’s one of the characters ever tho, important for creating nuanced disability representation. There’s a ton of themes needed to be further explored. Implementing culture studies and philosophy into Arcane took me over a week to research through my notebooks from Uni. The writers of S2 had almost no idea what they wanted to say about anything other than maybe: 'riots are cool, but actually overthrowing the government is a bit much'. Is Viktor still an icon, a legend, a moment? Come on now.
This is a draft of my PhD and THAT’s all. Anyway,
Viktor you'll always be famous to me
