The_Tempest
Senior Member
😬
KT, you're letting your quan!rage complicate fairly linear dialogue.
Yes, Lucian was pursuing Michael before Viktor woke prematurely. Yes, Lucian was intending on hybridizing himself anyway.
But it's only when Viktor does rise and threatens Lucian's plan does Lucian express the need for Michael's blood. He doesn't say "yeah, this'll prolly help against Viktor but I totes could handle the old geezer without it anyway." He says he "needs" Michael's blood "precisely" because Viktor is awake, in play, and growing stronger.
Rise of the Lycans doesn't overrule Underworld, doesn't retcon in it anyway. Lucian still said that shit and the meaning doesn't change. The only way that the line's straightforward meaning and the events of Lycans can coexist seamlessly is if we understand that Lucian's victory over Viktor in the prequel was an outlier that Lucian himself doubted would be repeated.
Your interpretation, on the other hand, requires either dismissing Lucian's words entirely or contorting their meaning so grotesquely as to be unrecognizable.
To recap: Lucian says he needs Michael's blood to defeat Viktor. From that, we can draw conclusions from basic inference. Unless Lucian suffers from crippling dementia, he's unlikely to have forgotten that one time he made Viktor a sword swallower. Therefore, Lucian must have come to the conclusion that such an outcome was extremely unlikely to repeat itself. Which explains why Viktor was confident in assaulting the Lycans' lair personally whereas Lucian was avoiding a fight until he hybridized himself. They both knew that Viktor would win more often than not. That, in conjunction with what all we know about Elders, vampires & werewolves and age, makes it pretty damn clear that Viktor is more powerful than Lucian.
If you disagree, that's fine. But this is all pretty straightforward and I've seen nothing in your posts to suggest otherwise. Until I do, that's all I have to say on the subject.