#mageseeker

here is my new fanart for War of Hearts, these are all for chapter 9!

I think these are better than the last which i might change later 😅 jsjsj. Read War of hearts its so good👀👀, and if anyone wants to yap about it im always here jsjs

Yes, I did keep Lux's brief crush on Sylas from the comic in my fic canons.

No, that doesn't make her less gay.

Yes, it's fine for a character I'm very much fanoning as a baby lesbian here to have Complicated Feelings about a mentor figure whom she met under very messy circumstances.

Her feelings about Sylas were initially tangled up in horror, shock, rage and guilt at discovering his and other mages' treatment at the hand of the Mageseekers firsthand and her own family's complicity in it. And mingle that with relief, gratitude, at having a mentor who could help her control her magic, a confidant and friend she could trust with this intimate and terrifying part of herself she had to hide from everyone else (except Galio, ofc, but he is a giant statue man, he is sympathetic but cannot contextualize the full messiness of her tiny human feelings)

And Sylas very deliberately using that attachment to try to stoke a rebellious ideology within Lux and win her to his side, plus the clandestine secrecy of their meetings and fear of discovery.

Of course she's going to have a crush, irrespective of any other factors, she's super young at this point of her story and all of that is a lot for her.

But she didn't act on those feelings, they immediately exploded in her face, and she has very rightfully not held onto that crush nor forgiven Sylas his betrayal.

And I never got even a hint on Sylas' end that it was mutual or that he lusted after her in any way. He evidently manipulated her crush to help him escape. He very evidently (as of Mageseeker) felt like shit about that, but in the context of having betrayed his only friend. He doesn't even want to seek her out, knowing she has no reason to forgive him, until the situation forces him to reluctantly ask for her help.

And even then they immediately clash over their rival ideologies. And their eventual alliance against the Mageseekers is more of a burying the hatchet for the greater good, grudging respect scenario. There aren't any shipping crumbs there to be had.

Mageseeker had the perfect opportunity to go all-in on Sylux and, to my great relief, pointedly didn't.

It was pointedly framed as a broken friendship and ideological rivalry, two perspectives on the same cause, with Leilani's third viewpoint representing a 'middle road', and IMO it was much stronger for that and that's why it's my favorite portrayal.

I think to Sylas, she was the only friendly face in over a decade of his horrifying imprisonment. I don't even know if he would be able to process sexual attraction or romantic feelings easily after that level of trauma and spending his entire adolescence isolated in a medieval hell dungeon, if those feelings for her existed at all.

He does see her as a protege, admires her intelligence, strength of character and the potency of her magic, is frustrated by her naivete and unwillingness to stand with him to tear down his oppressors, and coveted her power for his greater goals. But I don't think he feels that way about her. He certainly never shows it.

Lux was just the first person who was kind to him in 15 years. That's always going to mean something he can't put a name to.

And when Lux vehemently tells Katarina that Sylas wasn't 'a lover' but a friend she was trying to help, in the Kat comic, she seems genuinely outraged at the thought. I don't think she's in denial, I don't think she was even conscious of the feelings.

And that's before the big betrayal. So yeah, imo the crush well and truly dead and buried.

YMMV, I'm not here to shit on anyone's ship, but to me, acknowledging that yes the age gap is much smaller and there isn't a parental bond, still, to me Sylas is Lux's Silco.

He's a dark, complicated mentor figure who is deeply important to her story, and I find their dynamic rich and interesting, but I don't ship them. Not every interesting character dynamic has to be a ship. especially between m/f characters. This one's one of those ones where making it a ship weakens it, IMO, because it slips very easily into romance novel tropes that cheapen both of them.

Whereas as a broken friendship and ideological rivalry built around differing views on the same fight for the same cause, it's dynamic and has lots of character building layers to unpack.

Not to mention "LiTtLE LiiIGhT" is still Fiddlestick's quote for Lux, so buried hatchets or not she is obviously still carrying massive trauma from that betrayal. Can't hide your true feelings from The Ancient Fear. God damn.

So no, if my fics keep Lux's Complicated Sylas feelings, or even have her briefly think Ezreal is vaguely cute in his annoying way, it's not meant to be a sign that I ship Sylux or Ezlux or that my fanfic Lux isn't extremely queer and extremely into girls, or rather especially one girl.

Normal

Freljord

Mageseeker

Champions of Runeterra

She’s so…insufferably ignorant and hypocritical, which is obviously explained by her privilege and status at first, but the fact that she retains all that ignorance and entitlement months later? Insane.

Her brother’s friend greenlit the massacre of millions of people and her brother participated in it. A massacre of HER KIND, yet she doesn’t care and forgives both of them with ease, which brings up a number of disgusting implications. Implications like Luxanna being performative in her activism, Luxanna not actually caring for the lives of mages, and Luxanna still being an avid supporter of the upper-class people before the oppressed minority she is part of.

She came at Sylas with incredible vigor for "betraying her", but the betrayal in question was Sylas saving himself from death at the last second by using her magic. Her lack of detailing of what part, exactly, she is angry about, directly implies that she is angry at him for not quietly dying.

Is that what she wanted Sylas to do? Die? In what universe is that a sane expectation to have?

I might get the whole "outing my secret" thing, but with how strongly she holds onto that grudge, months later, it creates an implication that she hates not being seen as Demacia’s sweetheart anymore. That now, when her status as a minority has been revealed, her life will never be as simple and cushy as before.

Is that the kind of person she is? A spoiled brat forced into political activism out of need? She sounds suspiciously venomous about Sylas’s act of self-defence.

And sure, she refused to leave the people she made vulnerable because she though her naive vision of a hidden utopia was going to succeed, but it doesn’t cancel out her other actions, just contradicts them, not to mention that she got state-instituted power from the king himself in the end. A king who changed the law not because committing war crimes against the innocents is bad, but because the woman he was fucking broke up with him, VERBATIM.

What kind of person does that make Lux? What kind of person is she, if she hangs out with rotten people and forgives their crimes, but cannot forgive Sylas’s self-defence and the "audacity" to fight against his oppressors? One of his wards within the rebellion is a child who lost both of his parents, in spite of them being model citizens and hiding their magic. Another of his friends is an ex-Mageseeker who defected because his husband got kidnapped and put into a dungeon, and another is a direct ancestor of Durand, the sculptor of petricide, who was tortured in secret laboratories meant to EXPERIMENT ON MAGES.

Does Lux dislike them too? Does she dislike them for "daring" to be angry after all they suffered?