GRACE. i come to you as someone who knows 0 about arcane. i am so very curious and i want to hear you talk about viktor and jayce !! whats up with them!! what's their thing !!!
JULIA!!! Okayokay I have been thinking about this ask for weeks <3 Thank you SO MUCH for asking me about my silly science blorbos, I will try to make this not-very-long !!
TO BEGIN! A brief background on Jayce & Viktor!
Here is baby Jayce. He is very small and very innocent and very wide-eyed and we wish him the world. During this time, he and his mother ended up getting lost in a snowy place during a blizzard, and were minutes/hours away from freezing to death UNTIL a mysterious figure appeared out of nowhere—a hooded person who used very mysterious magic to transport Jayce and his mom away from the snowy place.
THAT BEGAN A BIT!!! OF A SPECIAL INTEREST FOR JAYCE!!! He became captivated by the idea of magic—specifically, finding a way to make magic accessible to the people! In this world, only mages, people born with the ability to interact with & use “the arcane” (aka, magic) are able to… y’know, use magic. But Jayce wanted to change that! He saw with his very own eyes what magic could do—what beauty & miracles it was capable of—and he wanted to figure out how to do it again, without needing a mysterious hooded magic user to help.
Jayce pours every Inch of his being into researching and experimenting on magic, trying to figure out how to make it work. He is a very smart man, but um. well none of his experiments ever work <3 He has no real clue what he’s doing wrong and he has nothing to show for his years of work. And yet he keeps trying!! Because he is Jayce Talis and he is very stubborn!!
This is baby Viktor :) In almost every way he and Jayce’s stories are opposite; instead of being born in Piltover, which is a rich, prospering city overflowing with art & science, Viktor is born in the Undercity, a neighbor to Piltover! The Undercity is bleak, poor, and dark, and many people who live there rely on violent organizations to keep them alive. Many people are starving, sick, orphaned, crippled… so on so forth.
Viktor was orphaned at a very young age, and he’s had a crippled leg since birth (I’m pretty sure). BUT he is very, incredibly, extraordinarily smart. Kind of makes me wonder if he’s possibly autistic with savant syndrome… but that is a topic for another day. The point is, Viktor is very very smart, but he is also very very poor and alone.
BUT against all the odds, Viktor grows up & leaves the Undercity, attempting to make a new life in Piltover. Worth nothing that Piltover and the Undercity do not get along despite being neighboring cities; the Undercity folk believe that the people in Piltover are spoiled, selfish, cruel, and to blame for all of their misfortunes, while the Piltover folk see the people in the Undercity as filthy, immoral, dangerous criminals. It was not easy for poor Viktor :( Especially since he had absolutely no support system.
AND YET!!! Viktor does it!!! He becomes the assistant to the lead scientist in Piltover!! His life is better now, much better, and Viktor is very proud of himself :) And yet… he feels as if his talents are being neglected. just a little bit. He’s happy with what he has but he wants to be more than just an assistant. He just isn’t sure… what to do about that.
Flash forward to when the series starts: Jayce and Viktor end up meeting because Jayce’s apartment um. exploded. And the reason for said explosion is partially because of Jayce’s (illegal) science experiments relating to magic, and partially because some Other main characters broke into Jayce’s apartment. But nevertheless, Jayce’s apartment is very exploded, Jayce is very upset, and Viktor is very intrigued.
I will skip over the details but to put it simply, Viktor and Jayce decide to team up! Jayce needs someone a little smarter than him to complete the research, and Viktor is hungry for a chance to do something Big, something bigger than an assistant. So they team up, become science partners, become kinda instant besties, and together they successfully prove to Piltover that magic can be harnessed by ordinary people, and magic can be used for remarkable good :D
Jayce and Viktor are soooooo nerdy and silly. Their dynamic is wonderful and the characters on their own are amazing. THE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT THEY GET!!! THEIR ARCS!!! THEIR DEEPENING RELATIONSHIP!!! AAAAAA!!! So much to say about them. But I think this is sufficient for now :)
And Jayce on his own because the pure Silliness:
He is sooooo silly & stupid you don’t even understand… he’s so <3
And of course the man himself, Viktor:
He is also quite silly. But in a more depressed way.
So yes! Those are my silly science blorbos :) They mean very much to me and!! I hope this all made sense!!
