"Everything wrong with Viktor's new lore"

“A mechanized heart never misses a beat, and never falters..." No, a mechanized heart WILL falter eventually. Its usefulness is in its easy repair.

[newloreissues]

My recommendation for you is to read Viktor’s original release lore (aka old lore).

I believe it’s leagues better than anything newer made for him, and it perfectly shows what kind of character he was meant to be.

https://original-lore.tumblr.com/viktor

[newloreissues]

In a manner of speaking (just to make sure the readers remember this is a Morally Grey CharacterTM)

So it says Viktor apparently removed almost all traces of his humanity.

Let’s pretend to not look at Wikipedia’s definition of humanity. He needs to allow himself to smile? Allow? Allowing implies there’s a want and need which is being gated.

Either this was badly written, or it’s written as Viktor’s POV where he won’t admit he actually didn’t remove his emotions. In which case, it means whatever his lore says good about him, cannot be fully trusted as it’s his POV.

[the-glorious-evolution-fanart]

This tells you exactly what is “wrong” with Arcane Viktor. Keep in mind that what the voice actor says here is a translation of what the writers of Arcane had in mind.

“How he is forced to relinquish certain elements of humanity to survive”

One of key things about original Viktor is that augmentation was his own choice. He performed self-amputation on himself as his first patient. Arcane just takes that and throws it into trash because the writers probably either didn’t know how, or didn’t want to include it in their story. They took the character, stripped him of what made him himself, and portrayed him how they wanted to, just to serve their worldbuilding. They used him to fit a role of a poor, frail, ill foreigner from the Undercity.

They needed a character to show how much it sucks to live in Zaun, and they thought “hey, Viktor could fill that role”.

No he can’t and he shouldn’t.

“His relationship with Jayce, with Zaun, with science and hex” magic. Viktor IMO shouldn’t have a relationship with Jayce at all. He was conceived as a separate character on whose formation Jayce had no influence whatsoever. Jayce cannot take Pididly’s place for the simple fact that Jayce is a completely different personality than Pididly, has completely different goals, and is not a Zaunite. Jayce’s formation as a hero of Piltover is dependent on Viktor, but that’s it. It’s not the other way around.

And the vast majority of Viktor’s “science” in Arcane is just literally praying to the arcane magic to save him.

If you already mention Viktor being based on Nikola Tesla, then he should clearly be based on a Serbian man. Not Czech. “A frail Eastern European man”… We are not a monolithic entity of “Eastern Europeans”, not to mention that Czechs are Western Slavs, not Eastern.

Pushing Viktor too far into being “soft, open, vulnerable and soft-spoken” does a massive disservice to his character because he was originally about the contrast of conviction, not a contrast of sensibility. Don’t get me wrong: I depict him as somewhat naive and vulnerable but not to this extent. What I do believe was that he was not portrayed emotional enough. He had a mental breakdown in his original lore because of a traumatic failure, theft and shame, which drove him into depression and anger, which in turn he didn’t know how to control. All of that has been ripped out of him for Arcane.

This is why Arcane Viktor is not Viktor the Machine Herald and he can never be. 

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Viktor’s emotionals before transformation

Old Lore:

It can be concluded that before his transformation into the Machine Herald, he was a naive person who believed in the justice system - he went to court trying to regain authorship over Blitzcrank. He was deeply affected by the theft, so much that he couldn’t bear to be at the college of techmaturgy, so he withdrew as he fell into deep depression.

Viktor’s first augmented patient was himself. He first tested his technology on himself before offering it to others. There are no documented drawbacks to his augmentation.

~~~

New lore describes him as a rather emotionally stunted child who was interested exclusively in learning, so much that he was annoyed by constant moving due to catastrophes affecting the neighborhood, and he saw error in humans from an early age.

He isn’t affected much by the theft of Blitzcrank (at least it makes sense if we take into consideration that he actually didn’t even create Blitzcrank’s sentience in new lore); He is however, significantly affected (possibly read as insulted) when he was kicked out of Piltover’s wealthy Academy. This Academy has a materialistic streak in the new lore, since Piltover is a better standing section compared to Zaun. In the old lore, by contrast, the prestige of the College of Techmaturgy comes pretty clearly from it being the high end of intellectual work in Zaun; spiritual prestige.

New lore states that Viktor’s first augmentation subjects were people other than himself. It was quite a while before he decided to augment himself in the end. He goes through a lot of trial-and-error on his patients, who often sadly die.

~~~

The emotional backgrounds and behaviours of these two Viktors, in old lore, and new lore, are very different. They are two different persons.

[newloreissues]

What rubs me the wrong way.

Would you allow someone to install a chip into your brain, which would make you unable to disobey your superiors?

People irl are arguing against the potential chips for tracking, let alone mind control.

“If it would save my life, then...”

What if I told you they could have sent a robot down there instead of you? A robot such as Blitzcrank. Surely it’s easier to create a robot albeit smaller, than implant things into brains which may or may not cause death later on:

How unfortunate.

New lore Viktor sees mind-control of humans as brilliant solution for creating efficient workers, but forgets about Blitzcrank, which he made? How does this make sense?

Conclusion: while the original lore said nothing about Viktor’s inventions killing people, mind-controlling them or being faulty, new lore says exactly this. It gives him a motive completely different from the original and has him doing obviously immoral things.

[newloreissues]

Let us return to analyzing the issues of the new lore.

Elements introduced in the new lore can contradict those from old lore (causing the characters to diverge, becoming two different entities); the elements can contradict each other within the new lore itselft, or they can be completely illogical altogether.

[newloreissues]

Starting with the short story, House on Emberflit alley.

https://universe.leagueoflegends.com/en_US/story/viktor-color-story/

I will skip paragraphs where I have nothing to note.

1)

1) While it’s cool to imagine this super cool, mysterious™ cyborg sear his flesh with metal, merge them together, there’s actually no point in doing this. It would only cause horrendous damage to his tissue, and the only thing he would get is a negative reaction to a foreign body. Muscles cannot simply attach to dubious metal augments and create something better. While this is a fantasy universe, there’s no indication of any magic at work here and we should assume that since this character’s focus is on technology, the technology works like the real world one.

The rest will be under the cut!

https://newloreissues.tumblr.com/post/184669558986/newloreissues-let-us-return-to-analyzing-the

2)

2) One could argue these are Viktor’s organs, and he keeps them here so he could analyze them and somehow improve his designs based on this. This was written just for the “aesthetic” reason of cool organ jars all over his house. The thing is, he is not a biologist and dissecting organs wouldn’t help him understand how they function better than textbooks. Metal organs don’t have to be in fluids, because they’re metal. Not to mention that organs certainly wouldn’t be made of metal but instead of other synthetic materials instead. We’re again supposed to turn a blind eye and say “it’s fantasy”. It’s also fantasy how bloody equipment doesn’t cause infection.  And if instead we assume it’s still filthy because Viktor just finished using it on himself, why isn’t he recovering from the use of a drill? We have no indication of miracle drugs existing which cause instant healing.

3)

A bone chisel is used to cut bone. What can he even cut if he was connecting tissue with some augments just now? The order of actions is simply off here. Obviously this was written just for the “aesthetic” reason of the idea of Viktor working on himself.

4)

4) Alright so the tool is rusty. That won’t end in any bad way for sure!

5)

5) “It’s not a toy! It’s an action figure!”, yelled the child. It reads this way. Viktor correcting himself from using those filthy organic words.

6)

6) If you concentrate hard enough, you won’t feel pain? Come on... this is very naive. On second thought, is this sentence implying he somehow removed pain processing in his brain? But that means he wouldn’t feel pain at all instead of it being bearable. No matter how I turn this sentence around, it doesn’t make sense to me.

7)

7) An arm being mechanized won’t help you feel less pain when you’re operating on flesh.

8)

8) This continues from 1), it’s incredibly naive to portray augmentation in this way. What can bolts pushed into tendons achieve other than damage and restricting movement? Why would he put skin back over the augments, if the new bio claims he wants to eliminate organic things; so much that he avoids using terms for organic parts (5).

9)

9) And now we come to the pretty shallow philosophy for Viktor in the new bio. First of all, it is untrue that humans halt progress in order to preserve status quo - last time I checked, we have traveled into space, cured many diseases and created mobile phones compared to where we were 500 years ago. Piltover is constantly creating new technology there too. If the author’s intention was to highlight how Viktor’s experiments were being too radical for Piltover, it should have been written differently than this. Instead in an effort to make him speak more generally, and appear more appealing, he ended up looking like a dumbass.

10)

10) This is an improvement on (9), in my opinion only this sentence should have been written.

11)

11) Viktor being a goody-two-shoes offering a kid a drink, to contrast him with Jayce who is a jerk in the new bio. It feels like dressing an old horse in pretty drapes just to try to sell him. Also, a saucepan has a wide bottom because it is used to distribute heat over a large surface. A laser by contrast, has an incredibly narrow surface where it applies all of its power. So it’s counter-intuitive to use a laser here instead of a stove. I can only interpret this laser usage being there simply for aesthetics reason.

12)

12) Considering how Viktor appeared a bit dim-witted thus far, it is hard to tell if he’s joking here or not. He may be commending the kid for wondering if something would solve a problem or not, but it’s unclear if “head replacement” is portrayed as something ridiculous and silly, or something real in the new bios; especially since Orianna’s new bio mentions a heart beating inside a clockwork body, without any note on how it can survive on dry and with no blood. Next, coughing doesn’t always appear because of lungs, but usually because of throat inflammation. If it went onto the lungs, then that’s already a serious illness.

13)

13) Very ironic, considering what’s about to come next.

14)

14) The purpose of fear is to quickly get us out of harm’s way. It is not a limiting emotion if we’re capable of utilizing it correctly. Removing fear altogether should be a portrayal of a bad coping mechanism, aside from it causing more harm than good.

15)

15) We are again shown a dubious augment, this time in a form of beads. What are these beads? Nanobots, considering Viktor is a robotics expert? Most likely not, considering the technological level of Zaun and Piltover. Then what are they? The other option is some sort of chemicals. But, Viktor is not a chemist. It’s not his field to create stuff like this at all.

16)

16) Here we are, from number (13). Oh, this guy is giving drugs to a kid. Children are supposed to have caretakers for this reason among others - they cannot make decisions of this type on their own. It’s really sinister to give this to a child. Viktor could have exited his house, dressed up all scary with a mask and chased away the bullies. “If you ever tease this kid again, I’ll turn all of you into robots!”

So what’s the issue with Viktor instead doing the sinister thing and giving a drug to the kid? Nothing, except it doesn’t make him a saint that his new bio claims him to be.

[newloreissues]

Let us return to analyzing the issues of the new lore.

Elements introduced in the new lore can contradict those from old lore (causing the characters to diverge, becoming two different entities); the elements can contradict each other within the new lore itselft, or they can be completely illogical altogether.

[newloreissues]

Just to say again, the New Lore™ is not completely bad on its own. It’s just for a completely different character. But it does suffer from many illogical things and purple prose.

[newloreissues]

Wrote a Viktor Analysis that I thought I would share

(Did this a few months ago and just didn't really bother putting it on here since there are so many more lore skeptics here than on the League subreddit. tl;dr at the bottom) From his Biography: He devised a chem-shunt helm that allowed an operator on the surface to bypass the wearer&rsq

Just take note of how few upvotes, or how downvoted these posts are. This is because there’s a need to defend new lore because it’s new and longer.

[newloreissues]

Just to say again, the New Lore™ is not completely bad on its own. It’s just for a completely different character. But it does suffer from many illogical things and purple prose.

[newloreissues]

Viktor's *new* (it's literally taken me a year to figure this out) lore revolves around a drug of his own making, designed to suppress fear and...

I’ll start gathering what other people came up with on their own. Cause if so many notice problems, then they couldn’t have been imagined.

[newloreissues]

Actually, here’s a better-phrased answer to the previous ask.

The new lore tries to convince us that he’s a saint, but what it actually shows us is sinister.

[newloreissues]

galenabise

Personally I kind of disagree with your opinion because I like the idea of trying to make him a good person but I equally respect it because you have fairly solid and coherent arguments and I like to see the different points of view about this theme

Stick around.

What I try* to write here is evidence that the new lore doesn’t try to make him a good person. It makes him a very bad person, something the old lore didn’t even get close to.

[newloreissues]

“That would benefit everyone”.

There are many instances of him helping people which don’t actually paint him as a good person:

Hundreds of lives

Within a month, zero accidents, his inventions common in Zaun

Do you see this?

It reads like some sort of cheap propaganda, by now he should have already elevated all of Zaunite people. Yet Zaun is still a shithole where people die every day from all kinds of poisons and accidents. The stories don’t match, and this is emphasized by the fact that new bios from Jayce and Viktor are confirmed to be from their own points of view, aka unreliable. Therefore all these people being saved in Viktor’s new lore, cannot be evidence of him being a good person.

(why didn’t people move out of Zaun years ago, even to Freljord if they have to. It’s understandable that they can’t move to Piltover, but there’s a lot of land around)

It forces down our throat that he “wants to help people”, yet all of this sounds so sinister - his patients die, you go to him only if you’re desperate, he got expelled from Piltovian college because his work was immoral, seeking to eradicate free will, creativity and human spirit.

He sees humans as the source of all error in the world, and seeks to turn the universe into some sort of cheap clock which can only operate as a primitive mechanism. This reads exactly like some sort of cheap sci-fi.

In new lore Viktor cares more about being in a Piltovian academia than about people who he willingly dragged to death. He now is thrilled to learn from his failures - his patients’ deaths about “merging flesh with metal”, yet not yet augmented himself. Yet the writer makes sure to tell us “he wants to help people, trust me” using misdirection to convince the readers this is the truth.

And the saddest part is, most of the readers believed it.

The Old Lore made it perfectly clear that Viktor as a student tried to clean Zaun. Augmentation was not on his mind whatsoever. How do I say this with such certainty? Remember the reason he turned on himself in the old lore? The reasons were:

- To revolutionize his field

- To free himself of depression and jealousy

- To never have anyone else steal from him again.

He made himself into his own invention.

He didn’t have the slightest intention to spread this beforehand. It only came after he realized its potential.

[newloreissues]

Characteristics or details or whatever they could be called; that are present and explicit in the new lore, but are NOT present in the old lore:

- Viktor physically tampers with .... emotional centers in the brain? Physically suppresses them

- His patients die

- He hires chem-augmented thugs

- He gives kill orders

- He keeps organic skin over artificial parts (???)

- He has no idea how to create artificial sentience

- He uses chemistry and biology

- Decorates his flat with organs in jars

- His work is immoral, only the last measure for the desperate, and got him expelled from college

None of these things are present in the old lore, but it’s easy to assume they’re there as well, because many could be grafted onto the old lore if one was inclined to think in this direction. Do I have to point out how half of these are illogical, the other half makes him into a mediocre “scientist” or are outright villainous actions.

[newloreissues]

In the old lore, Viktor withdrew from the College of Techmaturgy in Zaun on his own. He was destroyed that much.

Now he gets expelled... because his work was deemed immoral, Jayce refused to stand on his side. You know, apart from the idiotic insertion of this pointless friends-to-bitter-enemies cliche, this new lore is jarringly similar to the story of Doctor Doom and Mister Fantastic. Now, we all know Viktor was partially inspired by Dr. Doom, but this now is just ridiculous.

Dr. Doom’s college experiments were deemed immoral, he was expelled, he blamed Mister Fantastic for it.

Why Riot Why

[newloreissues]

A tie-in to my previous post. Look at this anger.

It’s like the current worldbuilding team didn’t even glance this.