#jabbertalky

i.e. mel's abilities felt like such a plot contrivance because we didn't see her develop them, we didn't see her learn from them, and we didn't see her use them for much other than ex machining other characters out of death blows. they really did her character a disservice by making her so powerful without having her grow into — or learn from — her power

as for ambessa, i really liked her as a villain, but i would have liked her better if we had seen the kind of threat that the black rose posed to her family. it's not really enough to make hand-wavey claims that they wanted mel and that kino's life was the price to keep her safe. this is a character who is ostensibly motivated by kinship (and power, no doubt, but also by family ties), but we kinda, like, don't really see what moves she makes that demonstrate that? or at least, i don't see how fucking around with piltover's and zaun's affairs could provide any benefit to her and her family, since conquest didn't seem to be her endgame. it's clear that the black rose was the biggest threat to the medardas, and it seemed like this threat is what drove a lot of ambessa's maneuverings, but i didn't really see how ambessa's feud with the black rose intersected with zaun/piltover relations beyond just "oh hey these people have the sci-fantasy equivalent of nukes and some fucked up little scientists... this could be useful for an imaginary war with some spooky magic people who don't really do much to move the plot"

idk, i think i ultimately felt disappointed by the medardas's role in the story because it felt like the story needed a problem to push things forward and needed a solution to tie things up, and ambessa and mel were just two characters who could be yoked to those problem/solution chariots in order to keep the show's urgency intact and keep the pace from faltering. their story would have probably been super compelling if it had the room to breathe and the time to be explored (and i do wish to be in an alternate timeline where we got a medarda-centric season or a spinoff or something), but it didn't do much for me, personally, shoehorned as it was