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The fight at the shimmer factory and the boy caught-in-between

The point of the scene wasn't: "Silco enslaves kids. What a monster! (Hurrah Piltover!)"

Instead, what this scene does is blur the lines between the child and the shimmer soldiers when confronted with the Uppercity's oppression.

The child lies amidst the fallen bodies of Undercity fighters...

It all flows back to Piltover

When you think on it, the kids working in the shimmer factories aren't enslaved to do so. Child labour is a tragedy, but this isn’t slavery orchestrated by a tyrannical Silco. The social situation depicted is instead much more nuanced, and the criticism more subtle than it seems. The causes aren't individual but systemic.

For instance, the boy who dies is a chembaron’s son. Factories, of shimmer or otherwise, seem to be a feature of the Undercity’s daily life that a large scale of the Underground citizens experience and work in, indiscriminately of age, sex or social standing, probably out of necessity in an impoverished and oppressed environment. Children mingle and work alongside the adults, without being whipped or physically abused. The conditions are deemed safe enough for the leaders to send in their own progeny for, I suppose, an educational experience, but also so they can fight, in their own way, “for the cause.”

So the Lanes’ child labour system hints at rather realistically complex economical, social, cultural issues of a place that would allow/require/need it, added to an ideological reason when it comes to shimmer factories.

Because, as Vi says (”He knew what he was signing up for.”), everyone down there probably buys in Silco's propaganda and believe they are fighting for the freedom of Zaun, making the weapon that will free them and eventually make this kind of work unnecessary.

(”Shouldn’t children be at school, instead?” Well, duh. I bet you developing the Undercity’s educative system is not on Piltover’s priority list.)

When Silco says that the boy died “fighting for the cause”, I think, in a way, it is true.

The child is the one who raises the alarm and wakes the shimmer guards: his actions directly responds to the enforcer’s rough treatment. He embodies the anger and hatred of the people of Zaun towards the symbol of Piltover’s abuse. Therefore he is the one who calls for the use of violence to answer in kind.

He is also the last casualty.

During the fight scene, even when the soundtrack and the hype reach their paroxysm, some elements announce the fall, make you uneasy amidst the elated display of power from our “heroes”. Hatred and killing intent deform Jayce’s face, while the previously faceless monster is donned a face and an expression, terrified, hunted.

Everything is too wild, too savage, too brutal, out-of-control, too... much. It is the excess that provokes the twist, the display of hubris that precedes the hamartia: the boy’s murder, signifying the end of the fight.

And something very interesting happens with the animation then: the juxtaposition of the shimmer soldier and the child.

This is a prime example on how animation can tell a story: here the circle closes. This motif is complete: kid -> shimmer soldier -> kid.

That frame is fascinating from a symbolical perspective: the shimmer guard disappears, completely drops out of the frame. In his stead, the boy takes the hit. The soldier literally merges with the boy. This juxtaposition, foreshadowed the moment the child calls the guards, reinforced by the first glimpse we saw of the scared guard inside that armour, is completed when the shimmer guard becomes the kid...!

In those last few seconds of the fight, each of those guards is given a face and an identity, in spite of shimmer and armour and inhuman abilities: that of children who have grown desperate and miserable in an environment that has done nothing but heap violence, humiliation and misery upon them.

Each shimmer soldier was a kid of the Undercity once. Every violence the Zaunites commit is born from the fury at the injustice they’ve experienced since childhood. Every violence done by Piltover eventually falls unto the a new generation of innocents, who will pay for the brutality and neglect of Piltover, and in turn yearn for retaliation.

Jayce looks at the victims of the Uppercity's sins, past, present and future, and, to his credit, he understands. Those faces, already resigned and resentful, are the ones he would one day face in a battlefield, and have to destroy. (The monsters they create.)

This episode isn’t about child labour, or at least it’s not interested in depicting it in a simplistic way (whips and chains à la Indiana Jones 2). More importantly, in a subtle way, it serves as a springboard to speak of child soldiering and the gearwheels of violence. Both tragedies are laid squarely at the foot of Piltover, calling out its original sin.