abraxas application
Suitability:
- As Vi arrives in the Free Cities, she'll be able to identify and assimilate with the most impoverished and downtrodden citizens/refugees. She's the type to lead a rebellion against the rich and will especially resent the monarchy of Thorne and wealthy of the Free Cities, potentially leading her to worsen relations not only between the two but within the class divides of the Free Cities themselves. A visit to bombed Libertas where the recently-displaced are still homeless, struggling, and freshly orphaned would worsen her hatred of the talk of war, and she would be the first with her nose on the ground about the recently missing lower class from all factions.
She knows the worst of war and will do anything to prevent it from taking its toll on those same people. She knows the rich wage their battles and the poor do the fighting and will make seemingly impossible decisions in an instant if she thinks it means she can spare greater bloodshed. This very much gives her a "kill a few to prevent the suffering of many" attitude that allows her to engage with, for example, assassination/decisive battle plots.
She's a fighter through and through and won't be able to resist seeking out some application for her penchant for violence, particularly in the name of defending others. In League of Legends proper, she does eventually become an enforcer/cop in Piltover; with some development, she may also find herself interested in the military if she can somehow manage to overcome her anti-authority streak. As she currently stands, she's much more likely to be a vigilante "for the people" and seek out the like-minded for that exact cause. She may even return to her more Robinhood-like ways where she thieves from the upper class and re-distributes their wealth to those who need it most.
She has a lot of guilt over pretty much her entire role in canon but especially how season 1 ends, and would be (perhaps too) eager to redeem herself by protecting as many failed-by-the-system people as she possibly can no matter the interpersonal risk.
- Being adopted by Vander is the number one thing that changed the trajectory of Vi's life. After witnessing the death of her parents during an Uppercity vs Lowercity civil war, Vi was (and is still to this day) filled with trauma and rage. Vander taught her how to pick herself up off the ground and told her to keep going and keep fighting no matter how the world tried to break her. He reminds her that she has a good heart and, more importantly, to keep it. Her love for her adoptive father is so deep that almost a decade after his death when she's on the verge of unconsciousness during a particularly brutal fight (against a woman who betrayed him no less), she hears his voice encouraging her with the will to pick herself back up.
To Vi, community and family — adopted or otherwise — are everything, and when she lost everyone but Jinx, he filled that role and instilled his purpose and his code into her: never give up, and always fight for the ones who need you the most.
- I've already touched on her moral code above, so I'd like to address the set of standards she holds herself up to: she wants to be Vander. Not only in the sense that she has fierce boxing abilities and a good-hearted nature, but she also wants his power, respectability, and position in their community. She wants people to come to her with their problems so that she can solve them; she wants to be a leader who can help lift their people out of squalor.
It kills her that she was imprisoned for the better half of a decade and was unable to provide those things during the interim — and she places so much responsibility on herself that she's comparing herself to a middle-aged man who had to scrape and scrounge his way into that position. She doesn't realize her failures closely mirror Vander's in his youth: he abandoned and betrayed Silco and led his own uprising that resulted in the deaths of her parents.
Even though she worships Vander, Vi is on the path of his youth and not the peace-keeping mediator of his later years. She's currently continuing the cycle of civil war and perilous class divide — but her deeply empathetic nature won't let her not act, and violence is all she knows. To solve all the problems of her city and fix capitalism is too much to ask of anyone, let alone a deeply traumatized young woman saddled with guilt that she was unable to save even the people closest to her, but in her eyes, that's what it means to be a leader.
- The best way to get along with Vi is to agree with her and see things from her point of view. She's been locked in a cement box with little to no socialization beyond the criminal element; she wants the feedback loop of her worldview going unchallenged. Added on to the fact that she is empirically correct (the wealthy topsiders don't care about the undercity), what she admires most in someone is an awareness of systemic issues and actions, not words, to attempt to rectify them — whether those actions are "moral" or not.
Caitlyn starts naive and sheltered, and Vi only truly begins to accept and respect her after she has repeatedly proven to genuinely want to mediate and bring peace. The only time she can stand being around any council member is when she convinces Jayce to go down below to a Shimmer factory and destroy it. They're aligned for a single moment — until Jayce can't stomach the collateral damage, leading them to almost trade blows until he bolts.
She admires Ekko, who built a community from recovering drug addicts and orphans by finding space, building shelters, and seeing to not only their basic needs but what they need to really live, embodying Vander's work and philosophies even more than Vi herself does. Change is an absolute necessity, and she admires only those who put in the time, effort, and hard work it takes to make the world a better place.
- Vi is absolutely in denial about how much her anger serves her. All of her self-reflective resources have been allocated to examining her own guilt under a microscope; it's the fresh new emotion with which she's been trapped in a cage. She doesn't have the awareness to look back at how her rage issues are the true origin of most of her problems.
When Jinx says Vi is the one who made a monster of her, she isn't lying: Powder was attention- and praise-starved, and it was Vi's lashing out in a moment of weakness that was the final nail in the coffin that would make her willing to dive into Silco's arms. Although all the blame can't be pinned on Vi — she was a parentified child traumatized twice-over — she had a history of anger issues that led to explosive fights between her and everyone around her. She would always defend and lift up her sister in the end, but it wasn't nearly enough to prevent her from having her identity issues.
In the modern day, her aggressive/confrontational way of doing things and the chip on her shoulder keeps everyone at arm's length and further isolates her. She wears it like a shield and is always "act first think later", indulging in her wrathful ways instead of analyzing how they are directly opposed to the kind of leader she wants to be. Regardless of how justified she is in that anger, she'll never be able to develop into anything more than she is without being able to overcome it.
- The Lovers. As a shallow read, Vi is pretty flirtatious and shares both intimacy and vulnerability with Caitlyn, but moreover: defined by their loyalty and form strong bonds with one other person or a group of people, and are willing to do almost anything for “their” people is a perfect fit.
also it's the sixth (VI) sign, I GOTTA KEEP THE THEME
ʜᴍᴅ + ᴏᴘᴛ ᴏᴜᴛ
just like vi, i can take a punch — so let me know how i'm doing!
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