My family and I are simple people. In our factory, we made hammers. They were probably used to cut the stones you're standing on right now. / My father put hammers in the hands of the people, and they built this city. Imagine the wonders they could create if we put magic in their hands. / We need to act.
meljayvik week 2022 | prompt: craftsmanship & jayce
I love that Jayce is a skilled blacksmith and craftsman, that he can handle a gigantic forge all by himself while only breaking a few aesthetic drops of sweat, that he's clearly a compulsive tinkerer and probably "upgrades" even the most random tchotchkes for fun (see: the super nose hair clipper). I also love that he's been sketching iterations of his hextech hammer since he was a child, and that we see the schematics for said hammer way back in act 1 when the notion of having to wield such a weapon wasn't really on his radar, at least not consciously. There's something charmingly democratic about how Jayce understands magic. And it's rooted very much in his family legacy, the Talis toolmakers who're responsible for the retractable socket wrench among other innovations that have helped and improved the material lives and realities of Piltovans for decades. It's this same practical, get your hands dirty and do something approach that he brings to other arenas of his life, from the development of Hextech to his leadership as a councilor. Jayce isn't stupid or dumb, which is how he's so often described or handled in fandom discourse. He's just someone who is supremely smart and has always understood that there's a tool or a solution to "fix" or at least ameliorate any problem that he's faced with. Whether it's a hammer or magic, there must always be a way and a means to act, to make things better, to fix, to help.
His journey is about learning that sometimes the "answer" to a big problem isn't so simple, especially when the problem is complex, tangled up and terribly, tragically human. He does start to learn that lesson by the end of the season, and it turns out that his "solution" - the diplomatic peace treaty - is both the most complicated yet simple answer to the issues facing a city on the brink of war and because of that he's the one who comes up with it, not anyone else on the council. Not sure if that's irony even if we know what happens next but it makes me happy all the same.