jayce and viktor league of legends biography comparison
done by yours truly in like june this year way before arcane was released posted almost verbatim from a thread i did because i don’t want to look at it again enjoy
Alright!! So this post isn’t meant to extensively cover all the intricacies of both of their lores, since we’re just looking at their biographies and neglecting other essential texts (such as their colour stories, Blitzcrank’s lore, etc.). What I want to accomplish today with this thread is to hopefully(??) kind of highlight the insights that can be gleaned from a comparison of their lores, as well as how both of them function as unreliable narrators and what this could mean for their characters :3 I suggest reading their biographies for yourself first since I’ll probably forget to give a general description of what’s happening, plus it’ll also help you come to your own conclusions.
Viktor’s Biography
Jayce’s Biography
Disclaimer: I’m not a “loremaster”, nor do I have a “degree” in “anything”, so take everything I say with a generous helping of salt.
But before we really look at the biographies, there are some things which have to be understood (=｀ω´=)
We must recognise that their biographies are tinted by their biases and personal perspectives of their situation, though it is not a direct transcription of their thoughts and views. In essence, what we see is what they presume is happening.
HOWEVER, the second essential realisation is that because of this, Viktor and Jayce are unreliable narrators. This becomes obvious once you’ve really compared both accounts to each other. One of the scenes where this is more apparent would be their confrontation in Zaun, with the crystal.
So now that you hopefully believe me in this regard, let’s go in!!
Since this is a comparison, I’ll kind of just neglect the first few paragraphs introducing them. I suppose the only significant things you’d catch by comparing the introductions before their meeting would be their respective reactions to recognition and prestige.
Viktor’s “surprised” and “thrilled to be singled out” vs. Jayce being “utterly unsurprised” – although both of them are remarkably unsociable people, with Viktor being preoccupied with his work and Jayce being Jayce, Viktor has a lot of… hm, pride isn’t the right word, Jayce has that too. Viktor likes recognition and praise, then, while Jayce is probably immune to its effects (though it is still important to him), growing up as he did.
Here’s how they introduce each other:
It’s apparent that there’s this tragic dissonance between how Viktor views their relationship and how Jayce views their relationship as can be seen from Viktor’s “insufferable genius”, “flamboyant and arrogant” and “never truly became friends” vs. Jayce introducing Viktor as the only person who was his equal, and that he “expanded Jayce’s intellectual horizons”. This is a recurring trend throughout both biographies, which I’ll talk about once I cover more of everything.
Now we move onto Blitzcrank! More specifically, the theft of him.
Okay so like there’s Quite A Bit to Unpack Here. First of all I think we have to assume that in general Blitzcrank is… not around for this? I can’t glean any insights on this from Blitzcrank’s lore because that side does not mention Stanwick at all. In fact, out of the three champions mentioned here, Viktor’s bio is the only one to contain a recount of this event, which is really irritating but does reveal some things in the way that negative space highlights the subject of a painting, which sounds really pretentious but you know.
Before I talk about Jayce’s omission, there’s something fun here– “further widening the rift between them.” The thing is that prior to this there is no real mention of any sort of “rift” or disagreement, apart from in Viktor’s introduction of Jayce where Viktor denounces him as, in short, an arrogant piece of shit, so I can only take this “rift” to refer to either their inherent disconnect as Piltovan v. Zaunite, or as “logical and thorough” vs. “flamboyant and arrogant.” Either way, it’s important to Viktor that you understand that he and Jayce are separate, and are not friends. Can’t say much on Jayce “refus[ing]” to speak up, again because only Viktor’s lore mentions this event, so we only have his (biased) perspective.
Anyway, I know it’s common to theorise that Jayce just didn’t speak up because something something you can’t beat the system, and that theory has some merit to it, but looking at the lack of anything my judgement is that most likely Jayce just… did not think much of it? Like he has no reason to really find it significant because it doesn’t impact him that much, and probably didn’t realise how much it impacted Viktor as he only develops non-hypothetical empathy later in his bio. He was probably busy doing something that day instead of refusing out of malice. Doesn’t hurt Viktor any less though.
Alright so here’s a very obvious example of how their personal biases affect their narration. Viktor’s presentation of his reasoning makes his decision sound almost reasonable (though still unethical, but this thread isn’t about that) while Jayce completely omits the entire backstory, tl;dr-ing it into “construction accidents” which makes mind control sound like a total overreaction. Again, note Viktor’s formality (“collaboration”) and usage of “reluctant” as compared to Jayce’s more friendly description of “working together” (though this is also a general feature of how they speak). Viktor Wants You To Know He Doesn’t Like Jayce At All (And Never Did), and I can’t blame him since this segment is just him talking about how Jayce got him Fricking Expelled. [personally i think it is very adorable for your instinct to hallucinations to be mind control. in a fictional setting, of course. i hate elon musk.]
There’s also something to be said about the diction here. “Jayce warned” sounds a lot milder and less like a snitch than “Jayce reported”, which does shed some light on Jayce’s intentions. In Jayce’s perspective, he seems to have just wanted to mention it in a very by-the-way manner, and didn’t realise the consequences would be so severe? But also “ostracized from Piltover’s scientific community” is a lot milder than Viktor Got Expelled (though it is characteristic for Jayce to say everything in a very nonchalant matter, see: “preventing them from getting tired, panicking, or disobeying instructions from their superiors.” Many of the lines in his bio are meant to affect the manner of the witty cool hero-type, which, I suppose, he is.) Still, he hardly villainises Viktor here, only condemning it as “immoral”.
I sincerely doubt Jayce intended to have “the closest thing [he] had ever really had to a friend” expelled; it’s more likely that he was unaware that the consequences would have been so harsh. And honestly, if it were someone other than Viktor (say, any other Piltovan student) that probably would have been the case. From Viktor’s biography we already know he was on thin ice with the rest of the Academy (that wasn’t Jayce (although he still didn’t like Jayce (their friendliness is entirely from Jayce’s POV))) and we are all familiar with the disdain Piltovans have for Zaunites.
[though if you are not convinced by my words and haven’t really checked out the entire thing with PnZ, check out janna’s colour story which covers it rather well.]
In fact Jayce’s own biography confirms this attitude with one of the beginning throwaway lines.
So with Viktor having an already tenuous relationship with the administration after the Blitzcrank fiasco and his personal beliefs, with being from Zaun on top of all of that, the higher-ups were probably waiting for a reason to expel Viktor. And Jayce remains unaware of all of this.
BUT… SOMETHING INCREDIBLY HILARIOUS I NEED TO BRING UP HERE BECAUSE I JUST NOTICED IT… JAYCE NEVER INTRODUCES VIKTOR AS A ZAUNITE OR REFERS TO HIS ZAUNITE HERITAGE. DOES JAYCE EVEN KNOW THAT VIKTOR IS FROM ZAUN? IT MIGHT NOT EVEN BE A CASE OF JAYCE THINKING OF HIM AS “ONE OF THE GOOD ONES” JAYCE MIGHT JUST GENUINELY NOT HAVE REALISED THIS AT ALL.
Okay I’m back after laughing that off. God. Anyway, Viktor’s significance to Jayce is really quite obvious in his biography, what with the “the closest thing [he] had ever really had to a friend” statement and the becoming worse. He doesn’t hate Viktor, he just thinks his morals and goals are a little… questionable. Another thing I want to note here now that we’re looking at the impact of Viktor’s expulsion on Jayce is that if you really look closely, Jayce is a lot lonelier than Viktor. Jayce is introduced as just one of the students Viktor had worked with during his time in Piltover (though he is quite a bit more special than the others, though Viktor never overtly highlights this, and would probably die before doing so).
Viktor doesn’t really lose much with regard to his relationship with Jayce, seeing as from his point of view, he didn’t really have one beyond the professional capacity. There is no kind of despair at not being able to work with Jayce anymore. After the establishment of his glorious evolution, he clearly has some degree of closeness with his Legends of Runeterra followers (Armed Gearhead’s “H-Hey, it’s the boss man!” can be recalled here, though LoR is typically considered to be more “soft canon” and in some cases, not at all).
Meanwhile, for Jayce, he has just lost the only person who ever understood him. Everyone else hates his guts. Viktor might also hate his guts (though he doesn’t actually seem to realise this). Again, the dissonance in impact and impression. It reads less like two sides of the same coin and more like two iterations of some vaguely defined fairytale, where one is from D*sney and one is from the Grimm Brothers. This divergent stream continues throughout the timeline, so we’ll just move on.
Here are some of my favourite lines from the transition period to the Big Event, whether because I find them extremely funny (1, 2, and 4), or extremely #deep (3).
(side note: one feature of Jayce’s bio i like (because i am prone to doing it myself, which makes writing Jayce in a comedic casual setting very easy (i say, referring to writing no one has ever seen)) is the short and simple set-up and punchline sentences which occur frequently throughout his internal narration. probably because he was written in the archetype of the genius arrogant isolated asshole. the t*ny stark of league... but i like him better!)
Anyway, the boys are back together!
So let’s compare their descriptions. Strangely Viktor puts himself in a much more uncharitable light than Jayce does, though that seems to be a consequence of glossing over the details. Note how he does (once again) express his actions to be reasonable in how he describes himself to have no other option “but to take it by force”. (“people– in a manner of speaking” is a little Lol, Haha.) And at the end we have the “I am So Emotionless” line of “had [he] retained more than a fragment of his humanity” and “allow[ing] himself” “the barest hint of a smile”.
[BY THE WAY THIS PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH BECAUSE IT JUST FURTHER EXACERBATES THE INCONSISTENCY BETWEEN VIKTOR AND BLITZCRANK BIOS WHICH YOU’LL REALISE WHEN YOU READ THEM AND WHICH I WON’T TALK ABOUT HERE BECAUSE I AM P. O-ED, AS THE KIDS SAY.]
It’s interesting here that Jayce still calls Viktor his “old friend” (again with the one-sided friendship), and still doesn’t reduce Viktor to a tl;dr. (Though, to be fair… you could read this here as Viktor referring to his own monologue as a “simple proposition” but that lacks evidence and is mostly stemming from my understanding of their characters which should be based on the analysis of this biography and not vice versa? So.)
I laughed at the first two lines but it is also very late while I am typing this up. Anyway. I like how Jayce notes that Viktor “had long grown tired of [his] rudeness”... there’d be more to say about Jayce’s acknowledgement of others’ attitudes towards him if I looked at the colour stories as well but I don’t want this thread to get too long. Jayce has this concurrent idea of Viktor as “friend” and Viktor as “lacking morals” (as seen in how he deduces that the GE “probably didn't have a lot of respect for the free will of others”) which makes Jayce’s standards for friendship quite questionable, but we’ll put it to his lack of experience in that department.
Now here’s where the narrators get really unreliable! Viktor’s description of Jayce here really shows a lot of his bias, with words like “vengeful” and “arrogant fool” being thrown around. He doesn’t even mention the apology. Again we get the vibe of “no other option” with how he presents his decision to kill Jayce. The fact that he speeds past what happens also helps in getting you to ignore that he is for some reason able to order around the bodies meant for the people he’s saving, but you know how it is. Anyway, for once, we have two actual descriptions of a critical event!
Things from Jayce’s perspective really do highlight to you how much Viktor obscures in his descriptions (and vice versa, of course). For one, we get to understand where Jayce is coming from (corpses! with their skulls cut open!) and where Viktor is coming from (this guy got me expelled! and now he’s back to ruin things again! goddamnit you piltie!).
But one of the lines that really stands out is “For the first time, it occurred to Jayce that he might have to kill his old friend.” Even now, standing in the midst of this mess, Jayce still thinks of Viktor as an old friend. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that he’d have to kill Viktor, and seems reluctant to do so. Viktor is still quite important to Jayce, though this facet seems(!!) awfully one-sided given the ease with which Viktor gives the order to kill Jayce (or so Viktor says).
I could talk about Jayce’s kind of enlightenment regarding progress in the earlier parts I did not screenshot which just go “something something progress” which contextualises the significance of the line “the progress they fought for in their youths” but in my opinion it would end up sounding like “something something progress” so.
But! Also important! In direct contrast to all of Viktor’s “yadda yadda NO EMOTIONS ALLOWED”, Jayce’s descriptions paint Viktor as an emotive person, who can, in fact, feel things such as “surprise” and “sadness”, and even have human reactions such as “sigh[ing]” and “cr[ying] out in horror”. Given that we have no third account to rely on, I am inclined to put a little more weight on Jayce’s description seeing that most of his untruths come from a lack of understanding rather than an overt desire to manipulate your impression. Also, though Viktor’s voicelines for LoR are more for humour than anything, they do evolve a lot of emotion. But that’s a personal opinion, really.
It is also of note how Jayce describes Viktor’s thought process… clearly Jayce doesn’t believe Viktor has “ensured humanity’s future” so this line comes from what he (or the narrator of his biography, at least) thinks Viktor would think? Also how he describes himself as Viktor’s old friend, which Viktor would have qualms with given, well, everything on Jayce in Viktor’s biography.
An important thing to consider is that throughout his bio, Viktor never actually tells you in subject-verb-object form how he feels about Jayce. We don’t ever read “Viktor hated Jayce”, no. We just get countless descriptions of arrogance and all the wrong Jayce has done him. Let’s look at this line here.
Jayce is celebrated for killing Zaunites! It’s only reasonable, then, for you to form the image of Jayce as someone in the wrong and Viktor as someone who has been wronged in this facet. There is clearly resentment here, but nothing that he says out loud. It's characteristic of Viktor to present things factually and allow the reader to come to the “obvious” conclusion, while his hands remain clean of the “emotional impulses” like “hatred” which he so markedly detests. And really, that’s the whole essence of Viktor’s biography. He seeks endlessly to convince you through logic that what he is doing is entirely backed by reason, and on further reading, you’ll realise that at some parts, that is very very debatable. His omission of Jayce’s apology further contributes to that image of Jayce as a complete asshole.
I’ll briefly cover the endings before we re-look at everything as a whole.
Again we have the “this is very reasonable” type of explanation. Also the “Viktor thought no more of Jayce.” which I adore.
Yup, so we have this contrast of Jayce just waiting for Viktor to do something, and Viktor continuing to scheme without a single care for Jayce. This is in line with the entirety of both their biographies, with Jayce holding Viktor up and Viktor viewing Jayce with a clinical distaste at best, complete indifference at worst. It feels like after doing a(n amateur) comparison of both their biographies, what we have in our hands regarding their relationship is just a past tragic one-sided friendship, and a current tragic one-sided rivalry.
But we know that both Jayce and Viktor are terribly unreliable narrators. Furthermore, there IS a difference in how Viktor is an unreliable narrator as compared to how Jayce is an unreliable narrator.
With Viktor… he has a personal interest in how you read his biography, how you understand his character. We can tell that Viktor(’s biography) seeks to convince the reader of two (2) things:
First, that he is a sane, reasonable, rational person of great logic and little emotion.
Second, that what he is doing is the best possible option, and is noble and just. (Though this thread isn’t really meant to debate the morality of either side, it is good to recognise that this is what Viktor wants you to think.)
At least one of these things is false. The biography seems to want you to understand this as well, with phrases such as “Viktor told himself” and “in his eyes” that signpost a purposeful alter of the narrative.
Whereas for Jayce... Hm. In my personal opinion he doesn’t have that much interest in showing you a heroic side of him. (God knows he’s not interested in being anyone’s idol.) Half his biography expounds on how much of an absolute asshole he is. Really, anything he omits is most likely something he does not find personally significant or something he genuinely didn’t know, such as Blitzcrank and Viktor’s saving of the Zaunites respectively.
Back to Viktor. You must remember, and this is where I’m going to sound really insane, that it has already become apparent to us that Viktor will, very often, lie. A lot. Whether it is through changing the phrasing of events to make his actions seem completely logical, or completely disfiguring information, you are not receiving the full story. And if I were trying to convince someone that I am a rational and reasonable person, who relies on logic and ignores emotion, I would thus never admit to having these emotional responses. I would never admit to having an emotional connection with someone. I would never admit to having something as pitiful, something as grossly human, as a friend I held close to my heart, and I sure as hell would never talk about the feelings of betrayal after said friend separates me from one of the best places I can express my passion. No, instead I would tell you that he’s an abhorrent person, and I had no qualms with deciding to kill him when it was necessary.
What I’m saying is: it is not entirely out of the realm of reason that, despite everything, the Machine Herald is unable to truly divorce himself of his "weak, ineffective" feelings. Perhaps, Viktor had cared for Jayce more than he’d ever let anyone know. That maybe, just maybe, Jayce was someone important to him, and someone who had hurt to lose.
But on the other hand, it is equally possible that all of these descriptions of emotion from Viktor are the symptoms of Jayce’s own wistful hope that Viktor cares for him, or is still human enough to feel. And that’s a whole other can of worms right there!
Anyway I don’t think I’ll ever talk about the colour stories like this. It might kill me. My only words on those for now is that I find the plotline of “you break into a very nice man’s house and he offers you some very nice cocaine” and these lines below to be very, very funny.
[soft voice] but there’s something to be said, under the humour, of Jayce’s self-awareness in believing that he disappoints people constantly and how that could relate to what he did to Viktor in their university days and–[is k-worded by someone who loves me very much]
