Boards›Story, Art, & Sound

Concerns about Viktor's New Lore

Candleguard·1/27/2017, 10:01:34 AM·5 votes·1,643 views

So like a lot of people on the boards right now, I've been a huge Viktor fan for a long time, and was absolutely thrilled when his bio and story popped up today. And in a lot of ways, it was fantastic. It emphasized a lot of the things about Viktor that made him such a compelling character - a brilliant scientist devoted to the improvement of humanity and the lives of everyone, who after being misunderstood and condemned for years, gave up his own humanity in order to pursue his goals. The bio also did a good job of building up to Viktor's ultimate conclusion that human emotion and illogic were the problems of society and technology (while ignoring the passion and creativity of humanity that inspired Viktor in the first place).

I really love that the more sympathetic side of Viktor's character is being pushed, but in doing this, I noticed what I think is a major part of Viktor's story lost in the updated story - his tragedy. One my favorite aspects of Viktor was that he was a man driven by honorable intentions to an extreme which replaced the man with something new and unsettling. The new bio touches on that briefly, saying how his passion for helping people became an obsession with the Glorious Evolution, but it doesn't evoke the same sense of loss and horror that his original transformation implied. The Glorious Evolution isn't supposed to be JUST glorious - it's supposed to horrify us in its inhuman logic, in the way it ignores and destroys what really makes us alive - just like it destroyed Viktor. A hint of that can be seen in the short story - the way Naph confronts the bullies makes me wonder how far things would've gone if they didn't run - but it chooses to focus on the empathy and good intentions of Viktor, and failed to show how radical and inhuman his "experiments" could become.

(There's also a problem that in the process of making Viktor [ironically] more human to readers, they turned Jayce into a COMPLETE asshole, rather than an asshole with a heart buried somewhere deep down, but that's a different issue.)

And that may be where my real complaint is. With as little story as we got, the image of Viktor I had originally made me love the man he was, and fear the thing he became - and that was great! He may not have extinguished all of his humanity (the remnants of his frustration and ambition seemed to still drive him), but it was important for me to accept that Viktor wasn't just a misunderstood scientist anymore - that Viktor was dead. A vital part of him was gone, lost within the depths of his new mechanical heart. Now, he was a machine, driven by logic and efficiency to a frightening extreme. As much as I felt for him, he WAS a villain, if an incredibly sympathetic one. That may sound like heresy to the other Viktor fans who for years have (justifiably) defended his actions and his cause, and I understand that. But that was part of what made his story so great - we knew that in a way, he was right about humans being the flaw in the design, and that the world he envisioned of an augmented existence for us all had merits to it. The way he went about it was just a step to far, a perfect example of doing the wrong thing for all the right reasons. The way it is now, it's hard to find the wrong in anything Viktor is doing - and is that the right way to take the character? Should we forget that everything great about emotion and free will is also seen as a flaw in Viktor's "better world", not just the fear, frustration, and pain he sought to remove in the stories we got?

All of this said, I still think the lore update was great, and was important in sharing with us the part of Viktor we all had always hoped still existed in him - compassion and a desire to help people. Seeing the way he views the world now and how he thinks and acts with limited emotional input was also very enlightening. Moving forward though I hope we don't lose the darker aspects of his character - a man who has embraced the machine, and won't stop until everyone else has done the same.

4 Comments

krOne1/27/2017, 2:41:40 PM5 votes

I highly doubt Riot would completely fuck over one champion just to make another look better. I actually have a good idea about why Jayce and Viktor are the way they are. I wouldn't trust Viktor's lore as pure fact since it's intended to portray him in a positive light, much so like Jayce's. There's a lot of moral ambiguity between both characters and their conflict.

Both Jayce and Viktor have wildly different views on the future, that's for certain. Jayce wants to deal with practical problems humanity faces, and Viktor wants to deal with the inherent problems humanity faces such as emotion.

To further this, both Jayce and Viktor embody exactly what the other wants to eradicate.

Jayce wants to further progress in Piltover and maybe even Zaun, making life easier for the people around him. This requires cooperation. Viktor is the opposite of this: he's a potential threat to the peace, causing a perceived regression of human ethics and a perversion of technological (techmaturgical) advancement. Through Jayce's eyes, Viktor is an exceedingly binary character who is unwilling to compromise, and must be stopped before destroying the society that was carefully cultivated over likely centuries.

Viktor wants to deal with inherent problems, ridding the people of fear, anger, and other emotions that hamper productivity and progress. He wants to improve (or "evolve") the people physically and mentally so they can achieve literal perfection, becoming naturally immune to all diseases, mental illnesses, and other biological setbacks. Those under him would also, theoretically, be immortal. Jayce is exactly the kind of person Viktor wants to rid the world of. He's an overly emotional and ridiculously biased person who actually detracts from peoples' productivity with his mere presence. He's a bully, he's arrogant, and he's egotistical, all of which fall under Viktor's checklist of inferior biological processes.

However, Jayce is without a doubt the "good guy" here. The Glorious Evolution attracts those totally into it and makes everyone else absolutely repulsed by it; there's no in-between (adding to Vik's binary nature). The Glorious Evolution was, ironically, created by Viktor when he was in a state of extreme mental instability, which makes his own creation a product of his imperfection. This hypocrisy is what Jayce wants to eliminate.

The only difference is that the reader is able to sympathize (maybe even empathize? idk) with Viktor more than Jayce. Which is interesting because by all accounts Viktor is the bad guy. It creates conflict knowing that the party you can better understand is inherently wrong and dangerous, while the party you dislike is a key asset in defending humanity's future and preservation.

So, if we were forced to pick sides here, those who side with Viktor would do so because they think he's a misunderstood person with good intentions. Those who side with Jayce do so knowing that good intentions does not mean good action, and that Viktor, along with the Glorious Evolution, has to be struck down for a safe future. They may not like Jayce as a person, but they know that when it comes to the bigger picture, Jayce is correct.

The Anagram King1/27/2017, 1:45:21 PM2 votes

I agree. I made an entire flurry of threads when we saw Jayce's lore, advocating for Viktor's personality to remain intact. His tragic fall, his crippling depression; the realisation that what he was doing to himself could, in fact, benefit all of society.

I mean, I'm aware that a large number of people are happy that he's a 'good guy'; but it was never about that for me. He was ambiguous, and_ potentially_ good - but also potentially bad. And unrelateable. And scary. Scary enough for entire cities to praise Jayce for beating him up.

I also loved the radical ideology shifts he went through as a man; culminating in a concentrated effort to strip himself of emotions, completely, in the depths of depression and on the edge of madness. But now it just feels like the next logical stop in the Evolution Train. Jayce was a jerk, and VIktor got fed up. Depressed for "weeks", the story said. Oh my, how jarring. Do you think he's gonna be okay?

I've come to accept the fact that quality of character wasn't the argument here, no matter how much I wanted it to be. It was character alignment. And Viktor's 'good' now, so everyone loves it. Oh well. :P

WitchQueen Annie1/27/2017, 10:18:02 AM1 votes

I for one, am saddened Riot didn't take this opportunity to turn him into a "Dr. Doom"

LostFr0st1/27/2017, 10:19:26 AM1 votes

I think they put in just the right amount of wrong tbh. What do you think that kid is going to do when that thing runs out? And what about if those people he was saving did end up with their consciousnesses transferred to the golems. How would society have treated those people afterwards? They left a lot for us to think about, but it's hidden and Viktor doesn't mull on it anymore since he removed that part (or he just never thought of those things at all).