‘Arcane’ Never Let This Character Reach Their Full Potential and That’s a Damn Shame

Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Arcane Season 2.

The stories in the League of Legends universe might continue, but Arcane‘s story is finally over. It would be overly charitable of me to say it had a happy ending, but it did give us an ending that was mostly satisfying in how it dealt with each character’s fate. The one potential snag is that a lot of those fates, while plausible and logical for each character, didn’t reach their full emotional impact. This is because the show puts so many storylines on its plate at once that it inevitably lets some plates wobble but rarely fall off completely (sorry, Sevika), and no character is more emblematic of that problem than Caitlyn (Katie Leung). Caitlyn remained an engaging character, both phenomenally voice acted and intimately detailed. Yet, the second season frequently didn’t pay enough attention to her arc for it to stand on its own.

Caitlyn Lets Her Dark Side Dictate Her Actions

Much of Caitlyn’s arc in season 2 is split between her grieving over the death of her mother and learning to navigate her burgeoning romantic connection to Vi (Hailee Steinfeld). This is even more complicated than it sounds, since Vi is the sister of Jinx (Ella Purnell), the indirect murderer of Caitlyn’s mother, and Vi’s whole story revolves around how she just can’t stop living her life around Jinx’s attack. While that initially doesn’t get in the way of the two’s genuinely steamy romance, their respective flawed perspectives inevitably bump heads in increasingly ugly ways. Caitlyn refuses to stop using her grief as an excuse for an increasingly violent witch hunt for Jinx. Vi still can’t decide between her instinctive need to protect those she cares for and personally taking down Jinx in a way that she deems justified. This eventually comes to a head when Caitlyn punches Vi after they argue over Vi preventing Caitlyn from shooting Jinx, which directly leads to Caitlyn accepting the position of authoritarian ruler of Zaun at the behest of Ambessa (Ellen Thomas). For me, these two events form a turning point in Caitlyn’s arc that winds up feeling sorely lacking, and any shortcomings of her arc trickle down from the treatment of these story decisions.

Caitlyn Isn’t Criticized Enough for Punching Vi

First, Caitlyn punching Vi is a violation of their relationship that simply isn’t called out or addressed enough by either party. This isn’t to say that neither of them faces consequences, as Vi punishes herself nightly by becoming a street fighter and Caitlyn throws herself into a meaningless rebound relationship with subordinate Maddie (Katy Townsend). But there isn’t enough reckoning with the idea that an otherwise amazing representation of a queer relationship was brazenly interrupted by thoughtless domestic violence. The two do eventually patch things up, but it’s too quickly resolved by lip service to the notion of who does and doesn’t get a second chance, with no true confrontation about how their relationship will be repaired moving forward or the deeper implications of Caitlyn’s susceptibility to rash decision-making. It’s also never acknowledged how Caitlyn was drowning in misery because Jinx killed her mom, nor how Vi should have taken better accountability for seemingly betraying the promise she made to Caitlyn about taking out Jinx. Arcane is usually stellar at navigating the messy complications of toxic relationships. Yet, the show’s need to keep its overarching plot moving forward meant this dynamic got fast-forwarded to its happy ending by sweeping the necessary but uncomfortable hard work under the rug.

Caitlyn’s Arc Represents Season 2’s Biggest Flaw

This dovetails into the larger issue: there was almost no exploration into Caitlyn’s transformation into a full-fledged fascist, outside the initial shock of the moment. Besides an angry conversation with Vi where she gets called out and then accepts blame for allowing Ambessa to influence her into taking power, there’s no sense of investigation or examination into how people can become susceptible to fascist ideology. The show seems uncomfortable with putting Caitlyn in that position in the first place, as its music video montages past her overtly fascistic actions like wiping out the ChemTech-Barons, preventing us from truly experiencing her at her worst. Weirder still, her switch back to reconciling with Vi is so abrupt that I was convinced her becoming leader was actually part of an undercover plot the show hadn’t revealed yet, except no, it was a very sincere turn to strong-woman theory. The show seems to suggest that you can get over your partner voluntarily becoming a bootlicker as long as they give you something you can benefit from, a bare-bones apology and some superb shower sex, to be safe. Coming from a show that has been so precise in its writing of people doing bad things for good reasons, its handling of Caitlyn’s arc is, at best, sloppy and, at worst, dangerously dismissive of its own strengths.

Caitlyn’s storyline is the one most heartbreaking to examine because it’s emblematic of Season 2’s biggest flaw: its incessant need to prioritize plot over character. With the possible exception of the arc involving Jinx and Vi reconnecting with Vander, every storyline felt short-changed and left barely explored in favor of keeping the momentum hurtling forward. Ekko and Heimerdinger were both left out of so many episodes for plot purposes, Jayce and Viktor had most of their character development saved for the last few episodes, and Sevika had so little to do by Act III that I legit thought they’d killed her off. The writing team still has the skills to give us some top-tier Arcane goodness, like the Ekko-Powder romance in episode 7, but that’s because it was one of the few storylines that was given full room to breathe. Caitlyn’s getting short shrift feels the most damaging because it chose to deal with the heaviest themes, ones most pertinent to our current social climate, and it just plain didn’t have the space or temerity to really dive into the murky waters it threw her into. It’s hard to adjust mid-stream, and it seems Arcane‘s writers had to learn that the hard way.

Stream Arcane on Netflix in the US.

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