Another excerpt from my jayvik fic that my friend liked
Rain world iterators but they're weird skrunkly bird things
The visuals of Arcane are amazing, but the one personal nitpick I have of them is that they seem to play by the opposite of anime rules. You know how in any screenshot of an anime (not all of them, but a lot of them), you can immediately tell who the main character is because they have the lost interesting (or at least weirdest) character design, like this?
In Arcane, it's the opposite. The most interesting designs are often reserved for characters who never have speaking lines, exist for one scene, or who have a short arc and then end up dying. It's like the further away you get from main character status, the more interesting your character design gets. It's not like the designs of the main characters are BAD, mind you, I think not every character design has to be elaborate to be good and I love several of them, but it's always kind of a pity when an amazing character design appears and you know you're only going to see them for five seconds.
Particularly I'm thinking of the councillors and the chembarons, that guy with the gold jaw, transgender cat lady, fish guy, and probably some others I forgot. I hope in future arcane shows the character designs get weirder, because if they pushed it enough I think we could end up with the wildest cast of characters of all time.
So basically everyone we've seen around piltover and zaun talks with an American accent, right? If I remember correctly. But not Viktor. He has a... Russian accent? I think? But his backstory is pretty clear about growing up in the undercity. So... Were his parents migrants? Did they move to piltover hoping for a better life, but ended up in the undercity? Did they die of the same illness he has? Did they die disappointed?
Excerpt from a Jayvik fic I'm writing
I'm gonna be real. I love detailed worldbuilding as a bonus thing, but the surface level shit has to be different and weird enough first before I can give a shit at all.
Rain world's lore pearls and deep background stuff is definitely something that keeps me interested, but I would care less if the basic premise of the world wasn't, when diluted, a weird fucking creature in a world of weird fucking creatures where the rain is so heavy it kills you, and even if it had never explained any of that it still would have been cool as fuck. In fact, most casual players DON'T get explanation or understand why basically anything happening for much of their playtime because it's deliberately obtuse about it, because it trusts that just existing in the world is interesting enough.
In the best of both worlds we can have both weird cool shit and stuff that explains it, but a lot of people think they can have a boring world as long as they put sooo much effort into explaining the economy and the crops and whatever else, and I'm sorry but unless your surface level world is interesting I actually don't give a shit at all. If I want to look into the details a mundane world it's actually just more interesting to read about real life history.
(Also, if I can read a paragraph about the way wheat grows and is harvested and made into bread and it works almost exactly the same way as your fantasy not-bread crop called daerb, then you haven't done any world building —you've just plagiarised wikipedia.)
I dont go here (star trek) but I have to say I really like ur art :]!!!!!!
Thanks!! I should really post more of it, lmao
My other arcane hot take is that if anyone in the jayvik pair is asexual, it's jayce. Have you ever actually seen that man initiate a sexual encounter in the show? No. He just rolls with it when it happens. Mel kissed him first. He never takes the lead. He's either a sub, asexual, or possibly both. Also? His name rhymes with ace. I rest my case.
My hot take is that Viktor is not ace, or more specifically, that he was never written to be. You can't write a character as asexual if you don't even know what the word means. That would be like serving me a latte with oat milk instead of soy and saying it IS soy because all of them are just Alternative Milks to you. You got the thing confused with another thing because you don't actually know anything about either of them and as such, no, I do not believe either of them informed your writing process at all.
They should make something that teases two male characters being 'brotherly' while not being related at all and having not grown up together and then after minimum three seasons have them confess they were just using the word brotherly because they had some internalised homophobia and didn't know how to put their feelings into words and the only template they knew for describing a strong relationship between two men was familial and then they fuck on screen and get married in that specific order