wildiwaslivid

[thecruelestshe]

Sitting in the kitchen, hunched shoulder to shoulder above the Sunday paper, Viktor and Jayce turn the page. “Oh, look,” Jayce says, “you’re in this one!” He points excitedly to the photo that features only a partial view of Jayce from behind while the camera focuses on Viktor’s face, gazing upward.

“Oh, my,” Viktor responds. “I, eh, see what you mean now. It’s a lot—seeing myself shirtless, in print. I assumed they’d mostly use pictures of you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re the face of Hextech, the ‘Man of Progress,’ and the one with the muscles, obviously. You’re the hot commodity, not me.”

Jayce rolls his eyes. “That’s not true. It’s like you still don’t realize how hot you are, Viktor, no matter how many times I tell you.”

“Well, you’re my partner, you’re obligated to be nice to me.”

“I’m always nice to you, regardless.”

“Not always. You remember the time you kicked me?”

“Oh my god…” Jayce covers his eyes with one hand. “That was an accident!”

“Shoved me right to the floor, you did.”

“No! I didn’t mean to!”

“Nearly knocked me out,” Viktor says, shaking his head sadly. “I could’ve been seriously injured.”

Jayce sighs. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”

Viktor grins mischievously. “Not for a long, long, time.”

🖼️ credit in newspaper edit: @spiralori_

Read chapter 2 of “Less Hair, More Flair: With Hextech!” On ao3! Jayce and Viktor accidentally invent laser hair removal.

⚙️ Rated E, eventual smut

⚙️Chapter 2/7, currently 8k words

⚙️Fluff, humor, lab shenanigans, idiots in love, best friends doing questionable science

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85762921/

[merimerz]

the stakhanovite

[wildiwaslivid]

Viktor Accepting His Own Doomed Mortality After Sky's Death.

Sky tries to tear Viktor away from the Hexcore, but he is either unable, or unwilling (perhaps both) to step away.

She is turned to dust due to not having shimmer in her system, but I'd also argue it's because the Hexcore isn't interested in a third wheel in its situationship.

Viktor calls her 'Sky' after her death, the first time we've heard him say it. Previously, it's all been 'Miss Young'.

Guilt, much?

Guilt and grief.

He understands the Hexcore needs to go, but also what this means for him. No Hexcore = no cure. He tries, but can't do it.

Viktor turns away, and the Hexcore either punishes him for his action, or enacts self-preservation. Regardless, it's making its own decisions and putting them into action.

Viktor heads to the overlook, and contemplates stepping off the edge.

Jayce turns up, and stops him. This is after he's just killed the child, so maybe he's up here for his own spiral? He agrees to destroy the Core, he promises Viktor, but doesn't do it.

Viktor fights to live, until Sky's horrific death. Guilt-ridden, and seeing his creation for what it is, he chooses not to go any further. That's until Jayce happens.

Later, after Viktor sets up his commune, Singed turns up, keen to get his hands on the apex version of Hextech, and to combine it with apex shimmer. Anything to bring his beloved Orianna back.

Singed points out that Viktor's power is dwindling, something Viktor is already aware of.

By telling him to leave, Viktor is rejecting Singed's beguilement, which means he understands that (once again) his time is finite.

That is, until Jayce happens. Again.

So that's twice Jayce could have stopped Viktor from becoming the Machine Herald, and twice he helps bring about its creation. Literally forging Viktor into a weapon.

This makes no sense for the story if Jayce's whole arc is simply bringing about Viktor's demise, particularly when combined with, 'all I want...

It only makes sense if this is the intended destination all along, that Jayce's plan has been to save Piltover (and by extension Zaun) by defeating Noxus and the evolved, but also get his partner back. Ergo, his conversation with Mage Viktor must have been a lot longer, and covered a lot more, than we see. Jayce's goal was to get to the top of the Hexgate, where he has already seen his alternate version, and then speak to Viktor, and try and talk him down from the metaphorical ledge.

During the battle of Piltover, the Machine Herald rocks up to the Hexgates, whilst everyone apart from Jayce is elsewhere, having pulled a sneaky bait and switch.

Jayce doesn't look one bit surprised, although he does look determined.

Cue big fight and flight, then Jayce takes a deep breath, and shuts his eyes, as he kneels into position. Showtime.

The only flaw in this whole plan is that Jayce needs Ekko to Z-drive the Herald into oblivion. Perhaps this is something MageVik doesn't actually know/understand, he's just busy trying to find something that works - that stops him ascending to godhood, destroying Piltover, Zaun (and possibly the world), but also brings Jayce and Viktor together.

[lyovpple]

Hey

[darypeacher]

«Waiting for someone that will never return to you again»

AU, where Jayce didn’t have enough time to do anything at that moment.

#jayvik

[pinabunny]

Absolutely adore Jayce tilting his head to look at Viktor's face even when Viktor's back is turned 🥹

[simperius]

It should have been Jesus running around with Adam doing second coming shenanigans and philosophizing about The Big Stuff and experiencing modernity and regular life and friendship etc. while Aziraphale and Crowley are forced back together in order to look for him and wind up hashing out their differences from before while being endearingly useless to the broader mission, slowly falling back into their Earthly rhythm, addressing The Kiss and clumsily figuring out how to express and accept their love for one another until the two plots converge in an absurd high stakes climax where the Messiah and the former Antichrist implore above and below to embrace their own free will and acknowledge their self-imposed shackles, thereby freeing all beings alive dead and otherwise from an unending cycle of shame and judgement

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

My thoughts about the Good Omens Finale

Note: I do not wish to convince anyone of my opinion or be convinced of theirs, I just want to write down how I feel about the finale. Also, I've heard that the creators are getting some hate messages, omg? Please if you have a slightest inclination to do that or to be mean to someone because you disagree with them then log off the internet and go for a walk... try to find a rainbow, feed peas to a duck ❤.

Simply put... I hated the finale. During while some things felt quite rushed I was thinking that it's because of the 6 episodes to 90 minutes shortening and even if it won't be perfect it will still be worth it because of the ending. And then came the scene in the bookshop with God and Satan and our ineffables after which they... died. And then we saw some two human clones who looked like them ending up together.

...

Crying, I couldn't have believed my eyes. The finale killed Aziraphale and Crowley and all the characters we came to know and love and replaced them with some random people who looked like them and we are supposed to care about?

Have I really just watch Soho struggle, learn that Mutt have died, Nina and Maggie had to leave, and people there were barely hanging on to be given a bit of hope by Jesus so they would be erased and this wouldn't matter at all?

I can't even start to begin to describe how much this is not Good Omens that I love. My words fail me and I am left stuttering and waving my hands erratically.

Not starting again but fix what we have has been an important point of Good Omens. Same as Job and his wife don't want some new children but the old ones. But somehow replacing the Earth is the ideal ending now?

The finale is trying to convince us that it's better because now there won't be any Hell and Heaven with their influences, but the big part of Good Omens was always that the humans do have their free will unlike most angels and demons - and all the big events on Earth like World Wars or Spanish Inquisition are created by humans, no matter how many coins Crowley glues on the pavement. If this was truly a problem then even a God's edict that from now no direct influencing people would do (not that we have that much reason to believe that there was that much influencing going on in the first place - most demons and angels kept to their dominions and Aziraphale and Crowley had The Arrangement), Aziraphale and Crowley could have been left on the Earth to make sure no such things was happening. But no, let's throw this all out, kill everyone and start over with real dinosaurs this time because it will surely be better... or will it? The humanity without Hell and Heaven seems the same to me in the ending. Hmm.

The whole scene with the God and Satan (what happens to him? who knows) where God calls Aziraphale lazy felt very very weird.

My brain is completely baffled why I should care about some random two men that look like Aziraphale and Crowley when I just saw my ineffables die. It's not them. It's like someone killed me and cloned me. I would not be very happy about it. And I know that some people like to say it is at least an imprint of them because they created the universe and they find each other in every universe over and over but nothing like is stated there, it is just wishful thinking of a broken heart imho. Aziraphale and Crowley are dead after Aziraphale spend years trying to make Heaven better and Crowley spent years in depression...

...which is another thing of itself:

Crowley is an optimist. (so seeing him in the finale makes me want to put the gif of from The Godfather: "look how they massacred my boy" here :D)

I hate this trend where you have an uplifting funny movie/season/book/something and you see that it is successful and people love it because it gives them comfort and hope and you go "oh but what if we make it drama where suddenly our characters full of hope and energy are depressed and see dying as the only option because surely that is what the fans of the original material appreciate". Fuck that.

I can't help it but the finale doesn't feel like Pratchett. At all. Perhaps there is a reason for that:

I have decided that I will consider only the book and S1 the canon in my head (perhaps with occasional visits from Bildad, Muriel or Furfur ;)). But I simply can't take this ending into my heart.

I have been waiting for the Finale to find out if it rekindles my passion for Good Omens, which sort of died away after the info about NG came out. I'm afraid it hasn't and I don't plan to update this blog much more anymore, perhaps sometimes if I see something that I want to share but I am not sure how much. Thank you for following me all these years, it's been a blast ❤.

(I still love Good Omens. I am going to The Ineffable Con 7 and I will look forward to meeting you there or at another opportunity. ❤❤❤)

[kattricia]

Beloved if you could tell me more about how Arcane is a tragic romance staged as a geopolitical collapse in six acts i would love you forever. I find your mind so sexy

okay. i’m going to try and say something semi coherent about this, because you, my beloved mutual asked and i? would die for you.

if we’re going to talk about tragedy, we might as well start with jayce and viktor.  in true tragic fashion, they follow the classical arc to the letter: hamartia (a fatal flaw – hubris, idealism, the belief that their creation could save rather than destroy), peripeteia (the reversal – hextech becoming a weapon rather than a miracle. viktor dying, jayce bringing him back),  and anagnorisis (the moment of recognition – when they realize the cost and the damage. viktor seeing what he’s become and jayce saying what he should have said years ago). and the devastating thing is: these don’t happen separately. they collapse inward, spiral together. the tragedy hits hardest because the fall is of their own making – and because it comes too late. 

if there’s anything i’ve learned from my (very humble and very deeply felt) studies in literature and literary history it’s this: romantic tragedy is not just about heartbreak. it’s about the world collapsing as a consequence of love gone wrong. loyalty, desire, misjudgement and betrayal rippling outward into total ruin. arcane doesnt just tell a tragic love story: it tells five. ten. maybe more. the show is a lattice of relationships – romantic, familial, platonic, political – and every one of them cracks in some way. and each crack runs straight through the city’s foundation somehow.

jayvik may be the most overtly mythic of them all. our science husbands, our gilgamesh and enkidu, our cautionary tale about what happens when affection tries to hold up empire  – but they’re not alone. their spiral isn’t the only one.

arcane, in its very structure, ties systemic collapse to personal grief. every conflict begins in a relationship that couldn’t hold. vi and jinx are antigone and ismene rewritten in gunpowder and neon: sisters locked on opposite sides, loyalty twisted by trauma. mel and ambessa are imperial legacy embodied: the exiled daughter who tried to love her new home, and her mother who thinks love is weakness. caitlyn standing between love, lineage and law. ekko mourning a girl who never got to grow up and jinx is the living fallout of everyone else’s failure to protect her.

even silco and vander – two men who once shared a vision of an independent zaun – become enemies, because one believes revolution requires uproar while the other hopes reasoning might still be enough. and in the end, every character is fighting someone they still remember loving once. no character fights in isolation. every blow lands on someone they once believed in. and that’s why the city burns.

because that’s the thing, right? the show treats interpersonal relationships like structural beams: when they crack, the city does, too. the emotional subplots aren’t really subplots at all: they are the plot. hextech was supposed to be a bridge: between science and magic, between piltover and zaun, between a boy who fell from grace and a man who never got the chance to rise. instead, it becomes the wedge. a miracle turned into a weapon, with the miracle workers on opposite sides of a war they helped create. when the marriage of minds ends in divorce, the whole city pays the price. 

and that’s why we don’t have any neat hero-villain binaries, right? what we do have is people trying to claw their way back to something they lost. a sister, a partner, a version of themselves that they could still forgive. but every attempt to go back costs them something new, again and again. that’s the real tragedy, i think: not just the people lost, but that they keep losing the things they’re trying to save.

if you’ll allow me some nerdy indulgence i’d like to go back to jayce and viktor being our gilgamesh and enkidu by way of hextech. radiant ambition meets terminal wildness. they build a future together and then have to destroy it with their own hands. and the thing is: they don’t fall apart because the love fades, (affection is the one thing holding them together, after all). they fall apart because it festers into betrayal and all the ways they fail to reach each other across the gap that’s widened between them. the tragedy isn’t the end (though i really, really wish they had more time) – it’s everything that leads to it. they hit every note of a classical downfall: a shared dream born of light, warped by power, splintered by grief. their fatal flaws (call it hubris, call it desperation, call it idealism) spiral into the kind of break no apology can fix. and yet, in the end, when everything else is gone, they still choose each other. if antigone dies to bury the one she loves, if gilgamesh carves his grief into stone, then jayce and viktor choose to hold each other in the infinite embrace of the arcane in order to stop what they created from consuming everyone else. not to undo the damage but to stand in its ashes and say: no more.

(aristotle once said that tragedy is supposed to evoke pity and fear, and then purge those emotions through catharsis. this post? may have done the opposite. i have never feared more. i have never pitied harder. and i have certainly not been purged)

[wildiwaslivid]

Aziraphale's Promotion to Supreme Archangel

So, end of season 2, The Metatron appears on Whickber Street, menacingly buys a coffee for Aziraphale, enters the bookshop, sends the other angels back to Heaven like naughty children, then whisks Aziraphale off for a chat.

The chat we only see half of, where The Metatron offers/threatens Aziraphale with the offer of the Supreme Archangel position. A role that by Aziraphale's own admission he is ill-suited to. By Heaven's standards, he is not the right angel for the job. So why recruit him?

The only explanation is that The Metatron had plans of his own. This also happens after the 25 Lazari Miracle that had alarms blaring up in Heaven. The logical conclusion therefore, is that The Metatron wanted to split Aziraphale and Crowley up in order to prevent them from deploying another joint Miracle, and derailing the Second Coming, having already seen them incompetently help prevent the End Times in season 1.

The only way to extract Aziraphale from the Bookshop was with a big enough carrot - becoming Supreme Archangel, and then being able to reinstate Crowley (something our favourite demon never wanted) to Angeldom. And we all know how that went.

Then we get to season 3, and there is no mention of this big plot point from season 2. It was a large loose thread that went nowhere, and meant nothing. Which means what?

That the incompetent (by Heaven's standards) angel that went up to Heaven, left behind the love of his life, and did it for no discernible reason. Any other angel could have fulfilled the position - no wonder Michael was pissed off. So unless The Metatron just randomly decided to be a dick, it serves no purpose, other than to cause a painful break up lasting years.

Also, The Metatron told Muriel to look after the Bookshop (which is a part of Heaven on Earth), then Aziraphale apparently whisked her off back to Heaven, leaving his beloved home all on its tod, and never even bothering to check on Crowley (although it's implied that Muriel must have done so). This to me just seems so out of character, but then I think Crowley is off too.

Anyway, none of it matters, because despite not wanting the world to end in season 1, it now doesn't exist at all, a decision that apparently came down to just one individual, but was all about free will....

[wildiwaslivid]

[wildiwaslivid]

[wildiwaslivid]

[meadowsofhearts]

concept: Jayce as Gomez and Viktor as Morticia Addams

[wildiwaslivid]

I believe this amazing artwork is by @Ssonetss on X.

Original Reddit post I saw it on (and from whence it has lived rent-free in my 🧠).

https://www.reddit.com/r/jayvik/s/RtsCTasWTF

[wildiwaslivid]

A sky full of stars

Chapter Nineteen: Collage 2

A Jayvik fic, rated M, 19 chapters/?, 116k words.

This is the bigger half of yesterday's chapter, I just felt that 15k or so was unnecessarily chunky in one hit.

Mel goes to see Jayce after her dinner with her mother.

He thinks about all that she's said, and with the words going round and round his head, Jayce finds himself unable to sleep.

Mel returns to her own home, and sometime later, wakes in the night, her subconscious mind trying to make sense of all that's happened.

She tries to catch Jayce’s notice, but his whole attention is focused on Viktor, the god-like being that glows in the centre of the group. Those golden eyes of his flick towards her, they see her suffering, but he does nothing to help. He only smiles slyly at her, then reaches out, and places his hand seductively onto Jayce’s forearm.

Mel’s vision is clouding, the rest of the Council chamber is falling away, and all the faceless people disappear. The rest of the Councillors fade out, and even Jayce is insubstantial, a charming wraith with a plastic smile. The only full-colour individual left is Viktor. He leans forward, so that his sparkly elbows rest upon the table, and cocks an eyebrow, an unkind smirk upon his perfect lips.

She cannot breathe.

Viktor slowly stands up, and shakes his glorious head at her, then he turns away, and strides off into the darkness, a golden halo draped around his shimmery hair. He takes the remaining light with him.

Mel is all alone in the darkness, drowning in air, her lungs desperate for oxygen, and she cannot breathe…

Mel comes to with a panicked gasp, her hands frantically pulling her long hair away from her throat. Her eyes snap open, and for several alarming moments, the dream mingles uncomfortably with reality. She rolls over, drawing her knees up to her chest, fetal-position-fashion. She furiously blinks the hot tears away, and breathes through the sobs, grateful for the sensation of normal lung function. Her weeping eventually stops.

[wildiwaslivid]

A sky full of stars

Chapter Eighteen: Collage 1.

A multi pov chapter, featuring Jayce, Jinx, and Silco.

Jayce’s thoughts are still wrapped up in fog, and he dazedly heads towards his perfectly-sized car – untouched as always – his feet doing their own version of a skip/trip/jog. He gropes for the keys that languish deep within his pocket, and blips the car unlocked.

Gods. He’d had no idea when he’d turned up earlier that the afternoon would unfurl as it has.

He supposes that it just goes to show.

Now that he’s here, nestled in the faux-safety of his sometimes heated car-seat, Jayce takes the opportunity to spend a few minutes simply breathing. 

In through the nose…and o-u-t through the mouth.

The well-practised technique must eventually work, as his heart is now beating at a more normal rate, and the realisation fully settles in that this is where they are now. He needs to let the others know. It's only fair.

He pulls out his phone, swipes to the group chat, and begins to type.

Two sides of the same coin

Caitlyn, Vi, Jayce, Viktor, Mel, Jinx, Ekko, Sky

 11th April

Jayce

Jayce is typing...

.....

.....

The upshot is that Jinx’s bedroom is now an Art Studio (capitol letters, and everything!), and she is creating.

[7thrsd]

1/7

empathy experiment #1: pretend to be asleep