Arcane has always been a queer show. Since its debut in 2021, it has been lauded for its compelling characters, progressive themes, and a world that is equal parts fantastical and grounded. Now the final season has come to a close, fans are celebrating the relationships of some characters while mourning others. I sat down with one of the defining voices behind it to explore how two particular lesbians came to be.
“We knew from the very first week in the writer’s room that we were going to tell Caitlyn and Vi’s story,” writer, producer and story editor Amanda Overton tells me following the final act’s premiere on Netflix. “They were going to be our OTP couple for the entire series, and we all knew we had two seasons to tell that story. We were able to map that out over the course of two seasons to make them, from my point of view, like every other straight couple I’ve ever seen. You know, that gets to be that OTP.”
‘OTP’ in this case means official true pairing.
Amanda Overton Told A Queer Story In Arcane That She Wanted To See
Ever since Caitlyn and Vi met on the opposite sides of a prison cell in the first season, fans have gravitated towards them as two strong, queer characters who were destined to be together. But like any love worth fighting for, studio Fortiche didn’t want to make this journey an easy one. “It takes the whole series for them to get together,” Overton adds. “And they have to go through the hardest possible things you can throw at them, and they have to start the furthest away they possibly can in order to come together.”
When I ask Overton exactly what sort of older stories inspired them, alongside those she wanted to see queerness permeate within, we fall down a rabbit hole of shared admiration.
“God, I played so many video games,” Overton tells me. “Tomb Raider was probably the first where I was like, ‘a girl who is a hero with guns who can solve puzzles!’, but she was overly sexualised for the male gaze and all of that at the time. And getting to play Mass Effect and create your own adventure and have that queer relationship with Liara if you choose, that was such an unlocking experience for me. I adored Mass Effect for that reason; for the complicated world, the scope, and just for the characters. You cared so much about all the characters in that game. And then, of course, I sobbed my way through [The Last of Us] Left Behind.”
Overton also talks about the desire to see Star Wars from a female’s perspective, something that would only come to pass decades later with The Force Awakens and Rogue One.
The Last of Us’ tragic expansion might have had more of an impact on Arcane than I first thought, with Overton adding: “I was just at the beginning of my storytelling career as an assistant on True Blood, and I was like, ‘Yes, this is what we need more of!’ I’m gonna do it!’ and when I got the opportunity on Arcane to tell that story I’ve always wanted to tell, it was such an honor and a huge responsibility.
“And I had the support of the entire team around me. Constantly, Christian [Linke] and Alex [Yee] would empower me, or defer to me, and even the entire team over at Fortiche all came together to make that story what it is. I’m so happy everyone connected with it because I just poured my heart and soul into it.”
The idea of her heart and soul is key to what makes Caitlyn and Vi work. “This is what I’ve been dreaming for,” Overton admits. “I still write stories for my 16 year old self. I love video games. I love big sci-fi and world-building shows, but I so rarely saw myself in those spaces. And if I had seen myself more in those spaces, maybe I would have come out sooner. I would have had an easier journey. That is a huge motivator for me, driving me to tell these stories and trying to get representation into those spaces.”
Caitlyn And Vi’s Sapphic Romance Was Planned From The Very Beginning
After learning that CaitVi was canon from the very beginning, I decided to take Overton on a walk down memory lane, or perhaps a casual stroll through a fruit orchard was more befitting.
“Because we knew all this from the beginning, when I wrote that scene where they meet at the end of episode four, or episode five in the brothel, all of that was setting up to where we always knew we were going. Like all the little touches. One of my favourite notes Christian gave me was during episode six where Cait and Vi lean in. She’s giving her a potion to heal her wounds, and she holds her face. They hold their faces together. And Christian was like, ‘I think they can hold that pose a little bit longer’ during the animatic phase because he wanted the animators to have time to give that reaction she does of being flustered, because she is attracted to this woman.”
Overton makes specific mention of the queerbaiting allegations the show faced following its first season. To me, it often felt like people were afraid to read between the lines, preferring immediate gratification over the slow-build payoff we finally got by the end.
“It’s hard to keep a secret for three years in-between seasons when you know people are worried if it’s queerbaiting, that we didn’t have them kiss in season one and worried that we hinted a lot at [queerness] in the story but were only going to leave it in the subtext,” Overton says. “I worked very hard in the writing to make sure it wasn’t left in the subtext. Christian, at one point during episode five, said, ‘you know this, ‘you’re hot, cupcake line’ we don’t need to have this in the show, we could take that out, and she could just say it with her look.’”
Overton notes that every good storyteller loves to use fewer words, choosing instead to let the visuals do the talking, so every word used has more and more impact. But in the case of this particular line, it needed to be spoken in order to break through years of suppressed queer representation: “But I just thought that queer stuff and same-sex attraction has been buried under subtext for so long that I decided to keep this line in. And [Christian] did, he left it in, and it became one of the touchstones of their relationship.”
Vi calling Caitlyn a ‘cupcake’ originates from League of Legends, but Overton saw it as the perfect opportunity for an adorable pet name – “Let’s use cupcake, that moment from the game, and kind of ‘reclaim the cupcake’ for this sort of attraction between them.”
Caitlyn And Vi’s First Kiss Was Done For All The Wrong Reasons
It’s unclear whether Caitlyn and Vi shared an offscreen kiss in the first season, but their first official smooch takes place in the third episode of the second as they comb the grim streets of Zaun in search of Jinx. During a brief yet vulnerable moment of respite, they fall into one another’s arms. Overton wanted this moment to come out of the blue, mostly so it would leave their romantic bond in a place that nobody, not even the characters, would be able to predict.
“I worked very close with director Christelle [Abgrall] over at Fortiche, and the staging, the framing, all of that came from her interpreting these intentions,” Overton says of the kiss scene. “To me, that kiss, because it comes so early in their arc, was always meant to be the right thing for the wrong reasons. You want to feel really good because they’re finally kissing, but the promise that Vi asks her in her desperation is an impossible ask. Caitlyn responds in a way where she wants this to be true, Vi wants this to be true. Both of them want this to be true, so kissing was their way of covering that up.”
Vi and Caitlyn’s respective journeys throughout the second season are both driven by grief, hate, and insecurity. Caitlyn has lost her mother, putting her on a warpath to find Jinx and to take revenge against the people of Zaun. Vi, meanwhile, has spent her entire life losing the things she holds dear, with Caitlyn being the one constant in her life that she refuses to let go of.
“When you strip away those support networks, and they’re the only ones left in their grief and their pain, you lean into that,” Overton tells me. “Caitlyn wanted to kiss her. She has always wanted to kiss Vi and there would have been plenty of opportunities that were better than that moment, but that moment allowed them to cover the pain and emotions and grapple with the wrongness of what they needed from each other.
“Sometimes that’s what you need to get through life and to heal. I always knew it would be Caitlyn who reached out to Vi for the first time with that kiss. You see that a lot in season one, too. Caitlyn is the one telling Vi this is okay, it’s okay to be attracted to someone. And because Vi is driven by such a fear of losing the people that she loves, it had to be Caitlyn who broke that boundary down for the first time with that kiss.”
But It Was All In Service Of The Ultimate Reunion
After leaving Vi behind at the end of the first act, Caitlyn follows her own path and begins working under the influence of Ambessa to tear down Zaun and turn Piltover into a global superpower like no other. She is fueled by hate, revenge, and a thirst for justice, even when that will inevitably burn down the society she pledged to protect. It’s thanks to Vi that she is able to find herself again and realise she can be her own person, not a puppet pursuing power that will only leave her hollow.
To send this point home, Maddie was introduced as a secondary love interest for Caitlyn in season two. The daughter of a deceased enforcer who follows in her father’s footsteps, only to betray Caitlyn in the show’s final hours as she reveals herself to be a tool for Ambessa. Overton wanted to make her involvement as subtle as possible, while also painting her as a more complicated partner for Caitlyn.
“One of the things I insisted on in season two was, ‘we’re adding Maddie to this as a foil’ because it plays into Caitlyn’s character arc of ‘can I be the Kirraman? Can I be what my mom wanted me to be?’ I didn’t just want that to be professional, it needed to be personal. Like, should I date someone my mom wanted me to date? She was trying on something to see if it fit, and I needed that to encompass all of her and, again, I needed it to be messy and interesting and dark for Caitlyn and Vi. If it was easy, that would undersell the relationship. That’s not what the straight relationships have done in my life which I’ve adored most, so why would I do that for the gays?”
Like many things in Arcane, a second viewing provides a new context to every little animation detail and line of dialogue, including the role of characters like Maddie.
When it came to Maddie’s death, it was something Overton and the creative team toiled on how to execute. “We very, very subtly laid into Maddie because we didn’t want people to see her as a spy from the very beginning. It was very important in episode four that you did believe she was the angel on Caitlyn’s shoulder, and Ambessa was the devil, so you can feel where Caitlyn’s head is at… But she pulled the trigger on Caitlyn which is unforgivable, she would have died. Caitlyn would have died if it wasn’t for Mel, so that justifies her death.”
“If Vi had no one left to protect, she would fall in love”
As Caitlyn stumbles upon Vi in Jinx’s prison cell during one of the final episodes, the two make love in a sex scene that fans had been waiting to watch unfold. But it had to be true to both characters and presented in a way that felt passionate yet authentic. It also flips the script somewhat, with Vi now being more dominant and assertive, finally giving herself permission to feel pleasure and attraction instead of constant guilt.
“What we asked of Vi’s character arc in this season was ‘who would she be if she had no one left to protect?’,” Overton explains. “We strip away everything from her in episode five, and she has to start answering those questions. She starts seeing her sister as an equal instead of a little sibling she needs to protect at that moment. In the last conversation she and Jinx have, Jinx understands that she is the one standing in the way of Vi, of letting her make her own choices in her own life, and gives her permission to do it. It isn’t until then that Vi [realises]. She even says at the top of that scene, ‘I make the wrong choice every time.’
“So with her action of kissing Cait, she answers that question for her and her character arc. She gets to say I’m finally going to make the right choice for me, and this is what I want. And I love when you can have an action like that be the culmination of a character arc. If I had no one left to protect, I would fall in love.”
The scene itself shows sex as being as undefined and complex as Vi and Caitlyn’s relationship, intending to present something fluid, passionate, and playful in a world that so often is dominated by death and destruction. For just a moment, Caitlyn and Vi can be happy.
“We were always with Arcane trying to do things that hadn’t been done before in all elements of the show, like its storytelling and visuals, but specifically for that relationship,” Overton tells me.
“From the very beginning, they were going to be our main couple, our OTP, so I was like ‘their sex scene needs to be better than Mel and Jayce’s sex scene’. This needs to be the culmination of love in our show, and it needs to be shown, and we need to learn about these characters in that moment. Every single beat of that, the playfulness between them, or the gentleness, the vulnerability, the opening up, even finally being able to say this is what I want, this is who I want to be, that is all in action in that scene.”
This Only Ends When You Decide To Walk Away
Arcane coming to an end after two seasons marks a poetic departure for both its characters and the creators behind them. Caitlyn, Vi, Jinx, and so many other champions are only able to grow by accepting that things need to change, and in some cases, that means breaking a cycle that for your entire life has dominated you.
“We really got to say in that Jinx and Silco scene [in the jail cell] what our goal and overall theme for the series was, we were always asking ‘are these daughters going to repeat the sins of their fathers or not, and how do you stop that?’” Overton says. “If you don’t, how do you ever break that cycle? How do you ever stop it? It was important that Silco say those words to Jinx, and everything led up to that moment and that sort of understanding. Either way, [Vi and Jinx] would have to be separated to break that cycle.”
If the cycle wasn’t broken, no matter what timeline or universe Vi and Caitlyn happened to find themselves in, they would never be together. One of them would die, Vi and Jinx would be in a constant sibling rivalry for the ages, or the world would be torn down by dark forces outside their control.
There is a definitive tragedy in Arcane where healing is only possible by letting something go, even if it’s a person you’ve spent your entire life trying to save. Vi not being able to accept parts of her queer identity or be with the woman she loves without such a sacrifice is heartbreaking in itself, but the circumstances behind the ending we received all make sense, whether Jinx survived in that explosion and escaped on an airship or not.