No Looking Back, Orpheus. You Promised ▋

I'm WHEEZING at arcane twitter's general consensus on this moment

I don't have perfect thoughts on it, but I do want to note that I'm not loving how Arcane handles disability.

Viktor hating his disability so deeply, feeling that it needs to be "fixed" so thoroughly, that he succumbs to ~ultimate eugenics for everyone ~ ?????? fucked up

Jinx's psychosis being a manifestation of her being "unhinged" and encouraging her to act out either to challenge or appease them, and then her psychosis magically disappearing in the "perfect" universe????? also fucked up

Vi's alcoholism and (albeit mild) psychotic symptoms never being brought up....ever???? just created as fodder to make her a more angsty and submissive lapdog to facism????? also also fucked up

Let me have my mad/cripple characters who have their shit recognized as parts of their humanity rather than trauma porn plot or things that need to be corrected or traits indicative of rash violence please

more "Viktor stays in Zaun" AU, i need to figure out the story that goes with this, i'm winging it

You're... you're alive.

This is my love letter to the most beautiful ship I witnessed this year. Cheers to us Jayvik nation 💫

Vi Art

Cr : ClaraDeArte

As much as I love the cold open in 2x9 where Ekko repeatedly saves Jinx from blowing herself up (one of my favorite scenes of the show), Ekko's sudden and impeccably timed appearance feels....a bit contrived. But it occurred to me that there's a possible really cool in-universe explanation for it that I haven't seen anyone suggest yet; namely that Jinx's Hexgem bomb effectively summoned Ekko back from the alternate universe.

Recall in 2x5, in the scene where Jayce returns from his AU. His re-materialization in the main universe is immediately preceded by Salo manipulating a Hexgem "battery" (for lack of a better term) that we see has started to deteriorate

Salo pulls the battery out, starts to carry it away, and then the Anomaly appears and Jayce re-materializes.

I don't think the timing is a coincidence. I think Salo's physical manipulation of this deteriorating Hextech device triggered the Anomaly and Jayce's reappearance at that particular moment.

This is consistent with the first appearance of the Anomaly in 2x3 which appears to be triggered when Heimerdinger touches the deteriorated part of the floor in the same room.

Now, Jayce was at the Hexgate tower when Viktor essentially opened a portal for him back to the main universe with the Anomaly. But what if the other side of that poral (the one in the main universe) didn't open until someone (Salo, accidentally) triggered it or "unlocked" it in roughly the "same" location. In other words, Jayce went from the Hexgate tower in the AU back to roughly the same location in the MU, but the timing of his return was contingent on Salo accidentally triggering the Anomaly at that particular moment.

With me so far?

Ok, so what if something similar happened to Ekko? What if, like Salo with Jayce, Jinx unintentionally "unlocked" Ekko's portal back to the MU with her manipulation of a Hextech device?

Jayce's portal back was at the Hexgate, but Ekko's portal back was in Powder's lab in the AU, which means his point of return would be in the "same" location in the MU, Jinx's lab. Similar to Jayce, the point in time of Ekko's return was contingent on the release of energy of the exploding Hexgem in Jinx's grenade (or perhaps simply her handling of it before exploding it) which inadvertently opened the other end of the portal Ekko had created and was using in the AU.

Meaning that from Ekko's perspective, this

was immediately followed by this

Which would explain how and why he was there at *exactly* the right moment to save Jinx.

So the very thing Jinx was trying to use to kill herself actually ended up helping save her.

Cleaned, edited + upscaled photos from Arcane's Annecy Posters || (source 1 / source 2)

Mel ✨

Only you