A Commission For @waezi2

Mel crumbs lol

i need this daily routine prescribed to me more than anything else

hand study as an excuse to draw mel

Made a mel x sev x lestet oneshot ⭐️⭐️⭐️

She’s literally 3 apples tall

actually have so many thoughts & feelings about ekko arcane

he really lost his entire family, found a tree, and went fuck it if the tree can make it so can we and started a whole community/revolution about it. he is the figurehead of a whole little sect of a society fresh out of his teens. what the hell dude

his best friend/childhood crush became a crazy murderer and he was mostly fully on board with the idea of getting rid of her but then he finds a world where she is happy and goes fuck it im helping my universe's jinx get there too

he is so incredibly present-oriented for someone whose powers are going back in time, he doesn't want powder back even after seeing the universe where powder is happy, he wants jinx in this universe

he's an optimist and a realist he is finding the possibility of life and joy and then doing absolutely everything he can towards that end, but he won't sink the effort into something he doesn't see as possible. he doesn't want to help vi "bring powder back" when they first reunite because he's in the present where powder is gone, but the moment he knows it's possible for him and jinx to work together and be happy and whatnot he finds her and gets repeatedly blown up for his troubles. and like. he watches her try to kill herself over and over again just for a chance to talk. he throws a bomb at god. he flips off a cop as a kid. ekko my beloved no one is doing it like him and i hope his funky little tree lives forever <33

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.

It should be a way bigger deal some other party figured out how to construct their own version of shimmer, and by some other party, I mean Noxus.

The only person who had access to new shimmer was Lest, and Lest's people belong to a branch of the vastaya that live within Noxus' territory.

The most worrying aspect of this version of shimmer is that it's been modified to create tattoos on its users.

We've already seen Viktor's own experiments with runes and shimmer in the first season.

And now we know from the Ambessa book that not only are rune tattoos a real thing that mages use to modify their magic in Mel and Rudo's case, but the Black Rose is also actively trying to create their own rune warriors out of mages AND non-mages. In fact Jinx’s shimmer altered body shares a lot of similar abilities as the rune warriors in the book, right down to the super speed, enhanced strength, and improved endurance, with side effects more reminiscent of the chemtank soldiers.

This kind of development is such neat twist to the finale, because it all comes back to what Ambessa said, "weapons cannot be unmade and they are always used". Piltover may have forcefully dearmed Zaun from its shimmer and even put it's own hextech on the back burner, but that isn't the end. The arms race is still going on, Piltover's just put itself and Zaun out of commission.

nobody’s life is getting guarded when miss medarda is out and about

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.