With Arcane Season 2 just around the corner, fans are excited to watch the story of Piltover vs Zaun unfold. Season 1 set the bar high with its impeccable animation, storyline, and gray characters. While characters such as Vi and Jinx enjoyed significant screen time in Season 1, others remain in the shadows. One such character is Viktor, Jayce’s partner. While we cannot hit the nail regarding Viktor’s plotline for Season 2, we can surely make an educated guess of what’s to come. Viktor has been a playable champion in League of Legends whose lore has already been established by Riot. Since the show draws inspiration heavily from its source material, we can provide an accurate and educated assumption of Viktor’s plotline for Season 2. Hence in this article, we will talk about the evolution of Viktor and how he will shake up Season 2 of Arcane.
Viktor In Arcane Season 1: Bringing Up to Speed
From Poverty To Piltover
Viktor is an undercity (Zaun) dweller with impeccable intelligence and a keen interest in technology. Viktor’s fervor for invention and technological advancement piqued Counsellor Heimerdinger’s interest, enough to take him as his assistant at the Academy of Techmaturgy. As a person, Viktor is lonely, frail, and physically disabled, needing a cane to walk. But what he lacks in strength, makes up with his methodicalness, logical thinking, and workaholism.
We first encounter him in Episode 2 at the lab of Jayce Tallis where the latter conducted unauthorized experiments. Getting to know about Arcane (magic) and its potential to advance humanity, Viktor joined forces with Jayce. Both worked relentlessly on the project and finally invented Hextech, a means to combine Arcane with technology to make it usable for everyone.
Conflict with Jayce and Incurable Illness
With the invention of Hextech, conflicts arise between the two partners. While Jayce is in the spotlight for the invention, earning him a position at the Council, Viktor is suffering from a terminal illness acquired from toxic, natural gasses in Zaun. Additionally, Jayce, under the influence of Mel Medarda, desires to invent Hextech-powered weapons to defend Piltover. Viktor, sensing a potential misuse of the weapons, opposes the idea and instead wants to invent Hextech tools to help people in need, especially those in Zaun. We also find certain ideological and personality differences between Jayce and Viktor. Jayce is an emotion-driven and pliable individual. Viktor, on the other hand, is logic-driven, relentless, systematic and thorough.
Looking for a way to save himself from destined death, Viktor invents the Hexcore, a self-learning device that allows runes to work in conjunction with Hex crystals. He also replaces his disabled leg with a mechanical augmentation and then seeks out a vial of shimmer from Singed in the Undercity. Then he uses the shimmer variant in exposure to the Hexcore, infused with his blood to power the augmented leg, enabling him to run. Since the healing effect was temporary, Viktor decided to retry, killing his assistant. After this event, Viktor puts aside the Hexcore and his ongoing project.
Arcane Season 2 Viktor Expectations
Viktor’s Return to Undercity and Invention of Blitzcrank in Arcane Season 2
Viktor returns to the Undercity to help people from a catastrophic chem-spill, affecting multiple districts of Zaun. He implants a hex crystal into a disposed mechanical golem that later went sentient and named it Blitzcrank. Later, Professor Stanwick claims to be the inventor of Blitzcrank. Viktor pleas to the Academy Council with sufficient proof all for nothing. He even asks Jayce to serve as his witness but the latter refuses. This incident leaves Viktor with immense sorrow. After parting ways with his invention, Viktor returns to Piltover, looking for ways to fuse human anatomy with Hextech and eradicate human errors. The idea becomes an obsession; an obsession so strong that he resolves to engulf creativity and human emotions, which are detrimental to human advancement. This leads to ideological conflicts with his students and fellow professors.
Viktor Gets Banished From Piltover
As time passes, Viktor becomes even more obsessed with removing human error through technological augmentations. This leads him to join forces with Jayce to improve his diving suits. The enhanced suits will enable the divers to clean the docks of Piltover from refuse and toxic chemical contaminants. But since the heads are left unprotected, fear-induced hallucinations take over the divers, leading to death. As a resort, Viktor designs a specialized helm that gets rid of a person’s fear response to not only save his life but also make him more efficient.
Such an invention spurs conflict between Viktor and Jayce, the former standing for saving humanity from its drawbacks and the latter standing for liberty. Both decide never to work together with Jayce reporting the event to the Academy heads. Viktor, banished from Piltover, returns to his laboratory in the Undercity.
Viktor’s Transformation: Glorious Evolution
Back in his lab, Viktor is taken over by feelings of immense agony, denial, and disgust over the hypocritical actions of the Academy. The anger later transforms into a prolonged depression. He realizes he has fallen for the very thing he is fighting against, i.e., emotion. Further, he also understands that actions committed out of good intentions are driven by human emotion, which leads to fatal errors and hinders human beings from reaching new heights.
To get to the bottom of it, Viktor operates on himself to rid of all possible human emotions. He replaces his heart with the Hexcore, and the emotion-dependent parts of his flesh and psyche with augmentations. Viktor finally evolves into a completely different person, a cyborg fighting for Glorious Evolution – his obsession with eradicating human error and emotions.
Feud With Jayce
Going ahead with the possible plotline for Viktor in Arcane Season 2. One more chemical explosion in Zaun! Hundreds are affected by the toxins! Viktor escorts the affected people to his lab to delay the degenerative effects of the chemicals. He realizes that his lab does not have enough power to implement his rescue plan. So he heads over to Piltover and demands a Shuriman Crystal from Jayce. Since Jayce refuses to do so, Viktor takes it by force and heads back to his lab.
Viktor readies a host of automaton bodies as a replacement in case the injuries on the victims’ bodies are beyond treatment. Amid his operation, Jayce rushes in with his energized hammer, destroying Viktor’s work. Viktor orders the automatons to kill Jayce. The fight comes to a standstill when Jayce hammers down on the Shuriman Crystal, leading to a massive explosion. As an aftermath, all the chem-victims succumbed to their death.
Jayce’s act makes Viktor believe in Glorious Evolution even more. He reasons that Jayce was driven by emotions of revenge and hatred, leading to the death of the ones that he could save. A bunch of chem-induced thugs from Zaun raid Jayce’s lab for more Shuriman Crystals, under Viktor’s orders. However, the raid fails as Viktor and Jayce pursue their separate paths.
Viktor Arcane: A Complete Change in Personality: Then vs Now
Remember Viktor from Season 1? He was a weak and paralyzed yet admiringly intelligent scientist, who used to live in impoverished conditions in Zaun. He believed that good intentions, coupled with a relentless study of techmaturgy could solve people’s problems. Driven by emotions and love for people, he even asked Jayce to destroy the Hexcore sensing its potential to eradicate humanity.
However, now Viktor has completely changed. He is no longer a person with a physical disability guided by emotions. He is much stronger, thanks to his thaumaturgical augmentations. His idea as a scientist of transforming humans into cyborgs is now a mission that he has named “Glorious Evolution”.
That’s the entire story of Viktor according to the League of Legends lore. While we are not sure how intricate the plotline of Viktor for Arcane Season 2 will be, rest assured he will take the fans for one hell of a ride. Do you like Viktor just as much as I do or do you have someone else in mind who is even more powerful? Regardless, if you enjoyed this read, consider subscribing to AnimeMangaToon for more animated cartoon reviews.
