Trying to just sit back and ignore all drama but I learned the funniest thing lmao. Those fucking youtooz figurines sparked a real anxiety party in certain parts of twitter, and people are going from “omg if Riot is actually going to make them canon because Riot is evil, dumb and greedy (I mean true)” to “but this is simply impossible to do, the show has ended and the characters are dead” and I realised. That it’s been almost a year a huge portion of Arcane fandom STILL doesn’n even know about existence of skins ☠️ Tbh I’m genuinely curious about how average Arcane onlys perceive the game. What do they know about it…
I'm somewhat fascinated by the idea of people who only think arcane is canon and the stories cannot progress unless they're arcane...? Riot has said the TV show actually lost them money. Skins, in-game cosmetics and in-game material is the way they earn revenue to finance any kind of adaptation. It's not for nothing that the main producer for league of legends says:
"We don't know what definitively happened to Viktor in Arcane; so like the audience, we have to interpret what the show showed us of Jayce and Viktor's conclusion. Ultimately, the game is a representation of the IP." (1)
You would know if they were dead. This is not what you say about a dead character. You think riotgames hasn't taken notice of jayvik being the #1 ship of 2025 on AO3? Earlier this month the official profile for riot games china (the region that held a whole comic con artist's alley dedicated to jayvik) posted this to market the launch of their #2 top PC game on phones (Valorant) 😭
They have not done this for queer ships they aren't willing to deliver on. And they had PLENTY of superpopular queer ships before, ships they could have sold a lot if they weren't so adamant to avoid accusations of queerbaiting: Lightcannon and the KDA girls had a flourishing nation of femslash but since they didn't intend for them to be gay they weren't marketed like this, and they definitely didn't get shipname branded jewelry directly from the brand.
But you know who was getting tongue-in-cheek posts like this? Season 1 Caitvi, before they ever kissed or were made 'officially canon'. Jayvik currently has as many ingame interactions as other canon queer league ships with old champions like caitvi and diana/leona; I make a distinction here because canon *straight* ships get paragraphs upon paragraphs of ribbing couples' dialogue, even if an old champion is involved they are updated to match with their pair (like lucian/senna), the standards of treatment are different but JV has a whole lot more going on than noncanon fan ships.
And again, Arcane is not their only vehicle of storytelling. They have delivered cinematics, comics and short stories for a decade now. Valorant confirmed a long-running femslash community ship 1 year ago through a miniseries of illustrations. It wasn't on pride month either, it was a surprise social media takeover telling a story over multiple days. Stop expecting only a tv show can continue this story, that's not true!
Social media will do the discourses social media does, but if you're invested in these characters you need to understand the show was one small part of a larger equation. It's like getting into Pokemon because you like pikachu then insisting the games don't matter 😭you don't need to play nor pay for the game but understanding how this works will free you from many headaches.
