Happy Valentines !!!!

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Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”

Gossiping with your girlfriend✨

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Sometimes I want to join arcanetwt because the community is more active there, but then I actually see the conversations happening there and go “nope”.

I know that the animation studio wanted to desexualize the female characters in Arcane as much as possible which as a radical feminist I can appreciate. But as a Sevika fan, taking away the chest tattoo boob window crop top combo is actually really fucking unfair to women

Some thoughts on Mel and Ambessa from Arcane :)

Anon this one's for you (I was originally going to put this in my answer to your ask but it got longer than I expected so here we are lol)!!

I LOVE Mel. And not just because I'm a raging lesbian ☝ She's genuinely a really well written character. She's so intelligent, not to mention manipulative (especially in s1), and it's so impressive how she utilizes that to get what she wants. I didn't really care for Jayce very much in s1 either, so whenever Mel convinced him to do what she wanted I was just sitting there like "yes queen play him like a fiddle. 😍" That aside, she genuinely has a good heart, and I appreciate that the writers let those two facets of her character coexist without defining her by one or the other. I also really enjoyed her getting more agency in s2 (or at least in act 3, I suppose, since she was effectively taken out of the game so to speak for the first couple acts)—and her actions/success became less dependent on Jayce as well which was nice. Her fighting with Cait against Ambessa was SO good omg

Speaking of Ambessa...she's also such a cool character. I can't say I like her as much specifically bc of how she took advantage of Caitlyn and her grief + status in s2, but at the same time, it makes total sense for her character and that doesn't make her any less of a great villain. In fact, that's a large part of WHY she's such a good villain. But her extremely tactical and planned takeover of Piltover aside—she's a cunning warlord and just as manipulative as Mel, but she's also a MOTHER, and words cannot express how much I enjoy the fact that that's treated as an integral part of her character instead of an afterthought. She isn't depicted as weak because she's a mother, and while she personally does feel weakened by her children (particularly Mel), it's only out of her love for them. Plus, at the end of the day, the final battle showed us that even her love for Mel wouldn't impede her lust for power, so her role as a mother doesn't cheapen her ruthlessness either. FANTASTIC stuff. Side note, but I also loved her bond with Rictus.

Ambessa's also honestly really similar to Mel. If you switched out Mel's softness/morals for an extremely strong love of family, you basically get Ambessa, and I think that's part of why they clashed the way they did. They're both incredibly intelligent, and so so skilled at manipulating any situation in their favor, influencing others, and taking power, and I imagine those are shared qualities that Ambessa loved and Mel loathed for a long time. Meanwhile, Ambessa's unshakable principles (eg. Fox vs. Wolf mentality) simply didn't allow her to fully accept Mel's empathy, just as Mel's empathy for others made Ambessa's cruelty seem intolerable to her. But they still loved each other to the end, and I adore that. Mel holding her mother as she died because of her, Ambessa finally recognizing Mel as what she deems to be the perfect leader in her dying moments....ohhhh they're so complicated.

People saying melvika is an out of nowhere pairing because they never met in canon like yeah, sure. however

Have you considered the themes??

Both of Mel and Sevika’s season 2 arcs involve them making very nuanced and impassioned appeals to morality. Sevika especially spends act 1 & 2 in this really interesting position of physical weakness; having to rely on verbal argument to bring the undercity together and failing because of it. We see her pleas for unity repeatedly fall on deaf ears despite the obvious experience and thought behind what she’s saying.

Enter: Mel. You know who also spends most of season 2 getting her appeals to morality shut down? That’s right! <3

Mel is interesting in the sense that she remains the only noncombatant character in the main cast right up until the last two episodes (even as a mage she’s not. a fighter at all - girl keeps passing out). Deescalation is always her first instinct and Sevika is repeatedly shown to be a single warning before a fight type-character.

This means, at minimum, any confrontation they have would be an argument & not a battle. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but in arcane?? It’s a fucking miracle.

Mel can be convinced through verbal debate which is something Sevika just does not encounter during the show; both characters kinda fulfil a specific need the other has narratively. I think a lot about the line in Mel’s flashback “Kino says war is a failure of statecraft.” -> it’s a defining line for Mel’s character in general, but it’s interesting for melvika in the sense that I think Sevika agrees. Sevika uses physical violence as a form of resistance against state violence, but she’s not a soldier. She views citizen violence as a method of showing the state’s failures to itself.

There’s SO much to be explored thematically about melvika & the nature of physical violence, it makes me a little insane. Mel has only ever encountered it as a hunt; invading armies and conquest. Sevika views it as a form of communication and beyond that - resistance, as the only avenue left to stand against oppression. Mel needs to learn that war isn’t the only thing that hurts people, her upbringing as a Noxian has skewed her perception of violence in general.

I think the Arcane fanbase as a whole is very quick to clock Mel's manipulative tactics & condemn them without ever asking themselves why it is she acts that way. They either go 'problematic girlboss go queen' or 'what a horrible conniving bitch!' and move on, and it's been bugging me for a while.

Mel is the daughter of a Noxian Warmonger, raised in a 'might makes right' sort of environment that encourages violence as the means to settle conflict. The strong are always the winners, the losers must die. What made Mel such an outcast is primarily her resistance to such violence. Mel, at her very core, doesn't want to hurt people. We see this when she insists to her mother in that flashback to her childhood that they should spare that girl to "show the people that we are merciful," as she puts it.

To Mel, manipulation is the only way to avoid violence. Being too directly honest, not appealing to people, can be dangerous. It can lead to bloodshed. And if you look at things through her perspective in that sense, it's kind of obvious why she's constantly utilizing her cunning to get her way- because the only other way would actively put lives in danger. Mel's conniving nature is quite literally a coping mechanism that's followed her to Piltover, fortunately for her that makes her a very formidable politician.