elegy in which you are the creator in the laboratory // october 29 2023

This is a post I’ve been thinking about making for quite some time, especially due to looking at how my own personal depiction of Viktor differs from what seems to be the general fandom interpretation - especially after the LoR cards released and gave us a few canonical acolytes.

I won’t beat around the bush here: this is going to be about why I personally believe that associating the Glorious Evolution specifically with headcanons about Viktor or his acolytes being trans, or Viktor performing gender-affirming surgeries, or things in a similar vein is a poor decision, and why I don’t include this interpretation in my writings. This isn’t meant to discourage people from writing Viktor or his acolytes as trans, of course - my Viktor is agender, although he’s not aware of it, and it would be absurd to say that his followers have to be cis - but I think it’s important to look at the implications that come from writing Viktor as explicitly someone who helps people relieve and manage their dysphoria through his work with the GE.

Firstly, no matter how you spin it: Viktor’s idea of the Glorious Evolution has always been painted in a negative light. I’ve done my work to portray it as idealistically as possible, but at the end of the day his goals have always been about removing (at the very least, negative) emotions from himself, as well as mechanizing himself and others.

“Desiring both to revolutionize his field and to eliminate the jealous human emotions which festered inside him, he engineered parts to replace and improve his own body... He saw himself as the patron and pioneer of Valoran's future, a future in which man would renounce his flesh in favor of superior hextech augmentations.” (Original lore.)

“He saw human involvement in any part of a process as a grossly inefficient aberration - a view that put him at odds with a great many of his fellow students and professors, who saw the very things Viktor sought to remove as the source of human ingenuity and creativity.” (New lore.)

“Jayce reported the incident [of Viktor creating a device that allowed someone to “effectively control” another person]  to the college masters, and Viktor was censured for violating basic human dignity - though, in his eyes, his work would have saved many lives. He was expelled from the college, and retreated to his old laboratory in Zaun, disgusted by the narrow-minded perceptions of Piltover's inhabitants. Alone in the depths, Viktor sank into a deep depression, enduring a traumatic period of introspection for many weeks. He wrestled with the ethical dilemma he now faced, finding that, once again, human emotion and weakness had stood in his way. He had been trying to help, to enhance people beyond their natural capabilities to avoid error and save lives. Revelation came when he realized that he too had succumbed to such emotions, allowing his naive belief that good intentions could overcome ingrained prejudice to blind him to human failings. Viktor knew he could not expect others to follow where he did not go first, so, in secret, he operated on himself to remove those parts of his flesh and psyche that relied upon or were inhibited by emotion.” (New lore.)

This, when combined with how Viktor has also always been intended as a more villainous character - his visual design language, voice lines, and how he leans into the “evil Russian scientist” stereotype all confirm that - mean that from an out-of-universe standpoint, we’re meant to see his ideas as wrong and misguided. Multiple other champions have lines specifically about how he’s wrong - Ekko calls him “everything wrong with Zaun”, Camille (who is morally grey at best, and a cold-blooded killer at worst) calls his work “quaint”, implying that it doesn’t go far enough for her liking, and Heimerdinger makes the point that without humans, no one will be left to appreciate Viktor’s work. It doesn’t matter if Viktor has good intentions - the narrative tells us time and time again that his path leads to a very dark place, especially in new lore where he’s comfortable with violating free will for the sake of preventing death.

It seems obvious to me that a character who auto-amputates as a way to cope with overwhelming emotions, who decides that emotions themselves are a burden, who is repeatedly described as having an obsession with the Glorious Evolution regardless of lore, who is described as who you go to when you’re desperate in new lore... is clearly someone whose surgeries (at least of himself, where they are implied to be unnecessary - again, auto-amputation) and end goals are supposed to be read as a violation of human nature and dignity. Here we pivot to talking about trans issues in specific.

I’m of the firm belief that it’s not a good idea to associate gender-affirming surgeries, HRT, or any other thing used for transitioning with a character whose surgeries are supposed to be read as a violation of the human form. This plays directly into the anti-trans idea that transitioning is, well, a violation of the human form. It is not a good idea to write the man who cuts off his own limbs to poorly cope with his emotions as a patron of trans rights. It’s drawing a direct parallel between Viktor’s auto-amputations, which we are supposed to read as not only a very bad thing and the product of obsession, but arguably self-harm, with life-saving medical care.

(There’s also the issue that some people seem to assume that transhumanism is, in any way, inherently related to being trans - but that’s a whole other topic that I don’t feel very qualified to write on. I consider myself someone interested in transhumanist concepts, when applied appropriately (i.e. not ending up in eugenicist territory), but I am far from an expert on transhumanist thought. I think it’s enough to say that no, they’re not related. They’re just two things with the same prefix. Please don’t confuse the two.)

In my opinion, Viktor should not be seen as someone whose work is a direct benefit to trans individuals. (Again, not to say that Viktor can’t have followers who are trans. But please, please consider before making him the person that they go to for help with transitioning. The man doesn’t even have a medical degree, and his canonical work is described as being all about function over form. He’s not the surgeon you want.) I don’t think that Viktor’s gender identity, whatever it may be, should be associated with his obsession with the Glorious Evolution - or at the least, it shouldn’t be portrayed as a positive association. (In the sense of Viktor using the GE/his own surgeries as a positive affirmation of his gender... I’m struggling to precisely define this at the moment, apologies.) The GE is, textually, an unhealthy coping mechanism.

(There’s maybe something to be said for a Viktor who has disassociated himself so far from humanity that he no longer considers gender applicable to himself... but please, be careful if you write this. I’m speaking as someone who’s agender: I’m tired of my identity being used as shorthand for someone or something becoming or being nonhuman. I’m tired of people treating Blitzcrank being reskinned as a they/them pronoun user as something revolutionary, if they themselves don’t use those pronouns or aren’t nonbinary. I’m not going to pretend that I’m the arbiter of what people can and can’t write, but I’m tired of seeing myself - as an autistic and agender person - represented solely by unfeeling aliens and machines and whatever else, and being told that it’s good, actually, because any representation is good representation. I’d like for people to be more mindful in what they write and promote, but I think that this is becoming a tangent.)

I guess it comes time for me to defend my own depiction, then, since as I’ve mentioned above I do write Viktor as agender. I admit that I want to see aspects of myself in the characters that I like, but I also strive to be aware of the implications that these aspects may have. My Viktor’s gender identity has absolutely nothing to do with his idea of the Glorious Evolution - he has no dysphoria that he attempts to relieve through his surgeries, he does not see roboticization as a way to move past the gender binary... he doesn’t even realize that he’s not a cis man, because he hasn’t had the time or tools to introspect on that aspect of himself. (He’d be rather confused if you told him that people generally tend to feel as if they’re a certain gender - he’s just... himself.) I’ve written him in this way to try to make it clear that he has always felt this way about himself - that the GE has nothing to do with it - and that it has no influence on his actions as the Machine Herald.

There isn’t really a good way to wrap this up. Again, I am not saying that Viktor or his acolytes shouldn’t be written as trans, nor trying to stop people from writing that - only that their transness shouldn’t be directly associated with his idea of the Glorious Evolution. I think that we need to be mindful of what kinds of tropes that our depictions can fall into, and in this case a non-mindful depiction of Viktor as trans can seen as equating being trans to what’s easily read as self-harm/a violation of human nature. I doubt that anyone genuinely intends this association, but it can be made regardless, and so I prefer to keep the two concepts wholly separate in my depiction.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. I’m willing to answer any questions that arise from this.