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#The Lab PartnersI think my most enduring "ship dynamic" is "person who is either outright lying to themselves about something or at least has layered themselves in masks/person perfectly equipped to take a proverbial scalpel to them"
The fun thing about The Lab Partners is that neither really fits either role but it’s very obvious which role each of them is not quite fitting. Jayce is never fully comfortable in the role of “mask” and Viktor is too conflict averse to really play “scalpel”.
Actually thinking about it, I think the reason Viktor reads as somewhat grey aro to me is that the “scalpel” role - wanting to peel back someone’s layers, dig as deeply into into their psyche as you can - is so central to what romantic love means to me*, and while I think he very much uses of that way of thinking I think he’d much rather direct it at ideas and mechanisms than at other people. Not that I don’t think he can take interest in people, of course, but they are never a Primary Focus Of Study in that way; he’d rather be able to rely on an easy and intuitive shared understanding with someone so they can turn their focus to the problem he’s actually interested in without worrying too much about the interpersonal level.
This is probably also the reason I never really got the kind of “cold sharp cutting anger” scene I craved for him; again I think he’d be capable of that mode of anger, but it requires responding to conflict by focusing your intensity on the other person and his first response to conflict is not to dig deeper but to shut the other person out and withdraw. If you wanted to get this kind of response from him (which as you can clearly tell I do) you would probably have to create a conflict he feels he can’t withdraw from.
*I recognise this is far from a universal definition; only reason it’s relevant here is becomes he comes close enough to the archetype (that I made up for my own usage) for the way he misses it to feel relevant.
I’ve said before I disliked Jayce making the choice to use the hexcore on Viktor as a narrative choice (separate from any feelings towards him as a person about it on an in-universe/watsonian level) because it simply would’ve been more interesting for me to have Viktor make the choice himself; having a choice made for him removes the potential for the way it happens to tell us anything about him as a person, and the narrative doesn’t even compensate us for that by having it even be about loss of agency/autonomy violation in any particularly interesting way (….even if the rest of this post kind of goes against that claim by outlining what I do find interesting along those lines actually).
That said, there is something very fucky/interesting/appealing to me about the fact that the way it happened felt less like the “autonomy violation because someone decided what they want for a person they claim to care about is more important than what the character claims to want for themselves” trope that makes me see red at either the character doing it or the writers depending on how it’s handled/framed, and more like “trying to respect someone’s wishes while working from an outdated model of what they are”. Viktor did actually want this at one point, Jayce was working from his notes. He changed his mind and Jayce knew that also, but it’s… more understandable than I’d expect it to be to me given my usual feelings about this trope (see “makes me see red” bit) that a single conversation had while someone was clearly in emotional crisis in which neither of you expected to be thrust straight into a much more urgent crisis and expected more time to check that he was sure about it, would not be strong enough certainty to update your model of what someone wants to include “let them die if it comes down to that” when you don’t have any ability to double check with them and you can’t exactly undo that if it turns out they didn’t really mean it. Not endorsing the thought process here, just saying “I get it more than I’d expect to”.
Compounding this is the fact that while Viktor is upset about it, the emotional reaction doesn’t primarily revolve around “this is an autonomy violation” in that he doesn’t so much seem to feel violated on a personal level as consider it wrong regardless of how it feels to him directly - which is why it made sense for him to change his mind so quickly on it once he saw benefits. Him not wanting it was a form of self denial/self punishment and while having a decision you made based on principles rather than on what you “truly” (terrible phrasing but “emotionally” doesn’t work any better here. “If you were considering only yourself”?) want be ignored is every bit as much an autonomy violation it is one that will register differently on an emotional level.
Anyways this was going to be the end of the post but then a new mutual went through a couple of my older viktorposts and reminded me of the existence of this one (thank youuuu) and the reblog is now a fun parallel of “enforcing the will of a model of a past version of you on the present version” versus “enforcing the explicit will of a future version of you on the present version” and. For all [gestures in the general direction of my many criticisms of the writing] I do have to say “guy with clear and defined internal sense of purpose who will only let people close if he can extend them a role in that plus guy outsourcing sense of purpose to first guy so hard he ends up repeatedly representing other versions of him he currently disagrees with to him” IS an extremely tasty dynamic to me.
Need to yell about something to someone but it would require both that they know some quasi-personal context about me and a past friendship of mine that exactly two mutuals know about and I don’t really want to share publicly, but also that they care to hear about a fanfic I found which those exactly two mutuals probably don’t and this surpasses my limit for going into people’s dms to report on inane shit they don’t care about. So instead, tumblr post no one has context to understand:
Had to put down a viktorfic and yell for a moment when I realised Jayce and Viktor were doing The Thing (albeit a much less explicitly negotiated version of it) at each other. You know (most of you don’t know & I’m keeping it that way). Me and Former Closest Friend’s Thing. That thing. Holy shit.
From when I was putting together the Viktor Show Cut timestamps
23:51-24:16 brief glimpse of Viktor at treaty negotiations (moment I paused on to get this timestamp had Jayce gesturing at him in a “Will Smith enthusiastically presenting something” meme pose, which is very funny to me)
I’ve decided I need to show you what I mean.
ALT
ALTThe problem with The Lab Partners as a ship is I like them in a “two people click really intensely on one level and slowly painfully realise this does not automatically let them understand each other on every other level, to tragic results” way but it seems like most other people like them in a “destined soulmates” way.
I’ve said before how The Lab Partners dynamic is the “internal confidence vs external confidence” thing but it really does boil down to “guy whose sense of purpose is entirely self contained deciding someone else Gets It enough to extend them a part in that, only to retract and curl back in on himself when faced with evidence to the contrary years down the line” vs “guy who completely outsources his sense of purpose outsourcing it to first guy but also to the world at large and unable to balance the contradictions of that”
another important part of any dynamic im interested in is that both characters need to have a strong textual relation to one another but their narratives need specific goals unrelated (or better uncentered) from each other. if it's reciprocal obsession to the point it's all-consuming their previous goals and ambitions i. do not care. lol
It’s so funny seeing non-science people write scientist characters. specifically when arcane fans write Jayce and Viktor and they’re in the lab just talking about “solving equations.” exquisite.
yo who up solving they equation
In the lab, straight up “solving it.” And by “it” I mean. Haha, well. let’s justr say. My equation
I've said before how The Lab Partners dynamic is the "internal confidence vs external confidence" thing but it really does boil down to "guy whose sense of purpose is entirely self contained deciding someone else Gets It enough to extend them a part in that, only to retract and curl back in on himself when faced with evidence to the contrary years down the line" vs "guy who completely outsources his sense of purpose outsourcing it to first guy but also to the world at large and unable to balance the contradictions of that"
This (the Viktor half of this description that is) is why even though I completely understand why some of my mutuals hate it because it was, frankly, a mess and incoherently written, I do actually think the ending would have been worse without the time travelling Viktor plotline, because at least some version of him had to be involved in making his own mind up, having it be just Jayce would be too contrary to who he is as a person. Jayce can be someone he trusts and allows in, he can deliver a message from him to himself, but he cannot be a replacement for his need to see for himself and it would be a betrayal of the character to simply accept someone else telling him what he’s doing won’t lead to what he really wants without getting a role of his own in that realisation.
Though you can argue about whether “older alternate universe version of you” can be really counted as you seeing for yourself and that gives me fun thoughts about what Viktor’s stance would be on wbg’s iterative personhood and inter-iteration co-operation questions, because this wouldn’t be an antemeridiem viktorpost without yet another obscure crossover proposed.
Don’t expect anyone to have anything but as of really craving it but being discouraged by my attempts at trawling Ao3 tags: please rec me good viktorfic if you know any.
List of preferences (not strict requirements unless I specify they are) under the cut; cut is there largely so anyone who might get their feelings hurt by me saying I dislike certain things in fic doesn’t have to read my preferences.
