#medardablr

[melmedarda]

Medarda matriarchs on the beaches of their ancestral home of Rokrund, Noxus.

[honeydewbae]

I haven’t finished Ambessa:CotW yet, but the conversation she has with her brother, Hanek, baffles me.

Hanek tells her to her face that the reason he refuses to help her, his own full-blooded sister, in the succession struggle is because Menelik, their grandfather, thought he was weak and cast him out. So he refuses to get involved with the chaos Menelik caused by not naming an heir.

Ambessa even offers to fully reinstate Hanek into the clan if she becomes the clan head and he says he doesn’t even want that anymore; The damage was done and he’s found his own way now. The lessons are clear: the wounds of abandonment run deep and can’t be erased after they scar, there is more than one way to be strong/valuable, you reap what you sow, etc.

SO WHY DOES AMBESSA LITERALLY DO THE SAME THING TO MEL?? 😭

Ambessa Medarda: Stubbornness level: 100, Introspection level: 2

Universe, please save Mel from repeating cycles of generational trauma. (Her league comic did say that she wants to change how things are done!)

[melmedarda]

HAPPY MEL IS ALIVE DAY!!

[melmedarda]

Unpopular opinion but Ambessa saying "You are the wolf” to Mel as she's dying is quite literally the worst thing she could ever say. It means Mel is becoming who she hates, who she didn't want to be. She's becoming her mother. I do wish that for all Ambessa was about and for Family, she might have said "I love you", but instead it seems the only love in Ambessa's heart was for Kino.

[melmedarda]

“The Medarda family code, passed down through generations since their earliest days as traders on the Shuriman coast, espoused the virtues of both the desert fox, and the fearsome wolf of legend.”

⸻ THE MEDARDA FAMILY PORTRAIT, Arcane S2

[melmedarda]

⸻ AMBESSA MEDARDA, Chosen of the Wolf

[melmedarda]

For a while, the fandom has wondered, what on earth is the gold on Mel's skin? Are they tattoos? Is it armor? Well, all, I believe I know what they are. First, enter Mel's in-game lines:

I believe that the gold on Mel's skin are sigils. Not tattoos or armor, but sigils. We get an understanding of sigils from Rell's bio, that sigils are painfully grafted onto the skin. This would explain the agony Mel was in during her transformation. The more sigils one has, the more powerful they become, because sigils amplify magic. Which is interesting, because the Black Rose has been experimenting sigil magic.

Now you may ask, what the heck is a sigil, and what does it do?

Sigil magic seems to be type a branding, and seeing as Mel's power was awakened in the Black Rose's hands, does this mean the additional sigils she gained were branded upon her by the Black Rose? Just as they did with Rell? Amara mentions that Ambessa stole is more precious than any gold. So perhaps the thing Ambessa stole from the Black Rose were the sigils on Mel's neck, back, and thighs in season 1, and they served to protect her magic, but now they empower it.

This theory makes more sense when you consider how Mel did not have any markings on her skin in the 1.08 flashback. She was not born with the sigils, and I don't believe she needed the sigils to use her powers, she uses them in BS&T to protect Ambessa from death.

However, if her powers were awakened before her exile, Ambessa who before had not known of Mel's powers before this, might have stolen the sigils from the Black Rose in an effort to grant Mel the extra power she might need not only to protect herself, but to serve Ambessa's purposes. ("Your birth, the entire course of your life, was no accident. She hid you because you are that which she covets most: a weapon.")

I do believe the additional sigils (gold on her skin) might have been a Black Rose addition from LeBlanc, especially because after Mel is awakened, her jumpsuit is decorated with thorns. So perhaps, in her awakening, it is Leblanc who brands Mel with the sigils to finish the work Ambessa started. To make Mel into a powerful weapon at her disposal. After all, LeBlanc does comment on how swiftly Mel's talents have developed, which is possibly because of the sigils that helped to channel and focus Mel's magic.

But now that Mel is no longer in league with the Black Rose, I wonder if and when Leblanc will come to collect. Of course, I could be wrong, because these sigils do not resemble anything the Black Rose does. They look more Solari, which might be the kind of magic Mel inherits from her father, if she inherits any magic from him at all. So the sigil could have taken form according to her expression of magic.

And there we have it; my theory of the gold on Mel's skin. If you've gotten this far, thank you for tuning in!

[melmedarda]

⸻ 16/? of mel mondays.