about how viktor, at nine or ten years old, was traumatized by his mentor because of his mentors obsession with stopping bodily death. about how viktor, twenty years later, realizes how dire of a situation he’s in and suddenly understands that obsession due to his own circumstances. about how he thinks jayce, his best friend and partner in his life’s work, will understand him trying to save himself.
about how he never tells jayce what he’s going to do because of jayces warped view of undercity residents and how that tears an already growing rift between them. about how he understands singed but ultimately is nothing like singed because when sky gets vaporized, viktor is torn apart and heartbroken. a life was taken in his risk taking. singed would have viewed that as a necessary sacrifice for science, the way he viewed rio as a project and not a living creature.
about how viktor has to come to terms with his own human error in such a gruesome and terrible way, and how revealing that is about his ethos as a character.
I think a lot of people start to conflate viktors morale and personhood with that of singed as he goes down a path that is still destroying him even if it prolongs his life. and I can’t wrap my head around that because he is nothing like singed. is he desperate? yes. but the key difference between them is that viktor understands the value of a life.
jayce didn’t understand. but I don’t think singed did either. even in trying to save his own life, viktor remained selfless, because his motivation for staying alive was to have a lasting positive imprint on the world. even as the machine herald, everything he does is pure in a strange and sort of messed up sense. he wants to forward humanity so that it doesn’t suffer by its own hand.
anyway, his motivations as a scientist and singeds are wildly different in this essay—
howl and sophie have a divorce era (weedkiller day) but it lasts less than 12 hours because those two are obsessed with each other and sophie can’t actually leave him
I swear, Jaycs has been joking about unnecessary details for all those ten years that he and Viktor have been drifting from enemies to lovers to rivals to friends again, to lovers and to “I’ve known this moron for half my life, he’ll be lost without me”.
