Hi everyone,
We’ve been keeping an eye on this thread today (and others about Jayce and Viktor), and now that we’ve had a chance to listen to you guys and contemplate your feedback, we wanted to jump in.
Let’s talk about Viktor and Jayce, as we envision them:
We’d like to evolve Viktor into a complex, tormented villain in the League of Legends story, but we also want him to remain the sympathetic – and possibly redeemable – character he’s established to be in his own lore. Tormented and obsessed with the superiority of machines, Viktor is on a slow descent into madness, and he seeks to push his “glorious evolution” – the transformation from man to machine – onto Runeterra at large. His confrontation with Piltover, a place he sees as weak (full of puny-minded scientists who could, after all, be “so much more”) was a step in this direction. The “acolytes” mentioned in Jayce’s bio were not random minions but in fact Zaunite humans Viktor has swayed to his cause (and augmented, of course, with “improvements”). Jayce stood against him, and such opposition is the first setback in Viktor’s plan – something he’ll have to overcome.
Unfortunately, within the storytelling constraints of a bio, we weren’t able to paint this nuanced picture of Viktor as we envision him.
Jayce’s bio is a story about Jayce. This is the way in which the humble inventor became a hero, but it’s also just the beginning of his journey. We wanted to hint at a lot of flaws he’s going to have to overcome: he’s brash, he has trouble with authority, and he’s more than a little arrogant. For example, from anyone’s perspective but his own, destroying Viktor’s lab in its entirety might have been overzealous. Secondly, Jayce ignored the warnings of the Piltover government to strike against Viktor alone, which speaks to his recklessness and arrogance. His actions had the greater good in mind: Jayce truly does embody Piltover’s focus on the purity of science and progress, and Viktor stands directly in opposition to those values. Jayce may have gotten a little bit lucky this time, though. Viktor underestimated Piltover, and thus underestimated Jayce. Things might not turn out so well for the Defender of Tomorrow the next time the two cross paths.
Overall, we want to set the stage for an epic struggle between our two paragons of science in Piltover and Zaun. After listening to your feedback today, we don’t think we quite accomplished that with Jayce’s bio. With that in mind, the Creative team is going to take a look at Jayce’s bio over the coming days and evaluate ways to improve it.
You might think a thread like this would be hard for us to read – but it’s actually incredibly rewarding to hear how passionate you all are about our characters and lore. Thanks for your enthusiastic feedback!
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