Caitlyn As A Symptom Of Piltover’s Violence

Caitlyn as a symptom of Piltover’s violence

No because i need to throw hands with both her haters and lovers.

Mass spoilers for Arcane, season 1 & 2, for every characters.

(post is like 2k words)

(small edit it's been five hours and you guys are so kind and positive?? i love you so much, the conversations are so fun! the reblogs i see u and ily, my ego is soaring! i got more arcane rants coming if u wanna tag along idk lmao)

(thanks a lot is all i mean to say)

Was what Caitlyn did in season 2 act 1 terrible? yes. Does that make her a terrible person? debatable. Is she the best girl ever and above any criticism? also no what the fuck.

What happens to Caitlyn, essentially, is that she loses her mother and burns for justice and vengeance, and is willing to do all she can to reach her goal. Which is not an uncommon arc in Arcane, to be willing to burn it all for your family and getting overwhelmed by anger and loss.

The main difference is the scale and power dynamics. Because the chembarons have their shimmer, Vi has her gauntlets, Powder and Jinx have bombs, Silco and Vander have allies but they quite match each other when it comes to power until the very end.

So why is Caitlyn’s case so apart from the others? Here’s the thesis: Caitlyn is a symptom and the harm she causes is a consequence of Piltover’s domination over Zaun. I will argue for it thank you.

The main characteristic of Caitlyn, in the context of Piltover leading a targeted assault on Zaun, is that she is the one with power. Caitlyn is, first and foremost, a Kiramman. The show’s explicit about the power of the name, because with the name comes respectability, status, wealth. The Kiramman family is a powerful one, that’s why Ambessa chooses her above Salo. Both Cait and Salo have enough hatred for the Undercity to follow her lead if she plays her cards right, but Caitlyn, even if not officially appointed, has the power to exist in the Council’s room. Salo is nothing beyond the Council — and while it gives him power, his own family or personal entreprises are irrelevant enough that we do not know of them — while Caitlyn is powerful even without the Council — she does bypass every standard enforcers recruitment procedures to get Vi in, and thus we are told that she is one of the most important if not the main funder of the enforcers. In a state holding its peace through sheer violence and constant repression (especially after Jinx’s rocket), if one private actor owns your police force, you are at that actor’s mercy (which, yes, does turn on Cait when Ambessa’s soldiers take over).

Most importantly for us, the Kiramman hold one monopoly of power over Zaun. A vital need of Zaun they are the only ones to answer. Yes, we’re talking about the vent system. Caitlyn, in her anger and in her determination to do whatever it takes to get to Jinx, is willing to use every power she has. That includes her rifle and her aim, when she takes the shot at Jinx despite Isha and Vi standing in between, but also the vent system.

And as we’ve said, Caitlyn is going through a fairly usual character arc in Arcane of becoming a monster for love, for family, only to be brought back by love and family (Vander i’m looking at you) (and then that culminated into nothing to serve Viktor’s character arc tihi) (i mean it when i say Caitlyn has an amazing arc). It just so happens that Caitlyn owns Zaunites’ right to breathe. Is it immoral to weaponize it? Absolutely, and we can deplore the lack of political repercussions on the Kiramman in the show but that’s a more general criticism: the audience and the Zaunites are expected to just forgive Piltover to ally against Noxus. We can have sincere grievances about that (i do, and a lot of caitlyn hate comes from there from what i’ve seen) but it’s not a Caitlyn exclusive problem.

The thing is, Caitlyn’s weaponizing of the vent system isn’t the root of Piltover’s oppression or of enforcers’ violence. It’s a symptom of this violence. Cait can weaponize the vents because she owns them, because Zaun’s clean air is her possession. Because Zaun’s vital needs are dependent on Piltover. Cait doesn’t even realize just how much she’s hurting Zaun. She knows she’s gassing them but, and to her credit, it’s a fairly targeted assault (what Cait is doing isn’t terrorism!) but she is a reminder that whatever little fresh air they have, it’s still a mercy from Piltover. Piltover engineers a problem and a solution and holds that solution above Zaun’s head to silence their protest. This is domination, this is the root of that vent system being oppression still: the Kiramman hold Zaun’s air hostage and it took two mourning girls for that hand to cut off the air flow.

Caitlyn makes herself an enforcer of that violence in her grief, and that’s the symptom of a deeply ingrained disease. The root of that disease is always, always the inequalities between Piltover and Zaun.

The violence is the symptom of a system that is critically failing, repression means your governing body is illegitimate, weaponizing clean air is oppression to its finest.

To argue this point a bit further, we’re gonna circle back to Silco and Vander and how their power dynamic influences their behaviors and how their power struggle drives the entire undercity.

Vander and Silco both benefit from powerful allies. Vander has Grayson, Benzo and his position as bartender of the Last Drop makes him a valued member of the Undercity for Zaunites. Silco has Singed, Sevika and an entire network himself. They are two pillars of Zaun, creating a status quo that they work to maintain (at least their own position of domination) while furthering their own goals: Vander wants to raise his kids, Silco wants the independence of Zaun. Two vastly different sets of goals admittedly and that’s what leads them to reach out to vastly different individuals to help maintain it. Vander seeks out Grayson with whom he strikes a deal, while Silco allies with Singed for shimmer.

And when power suddenly shifts, when the right conditions appear, when the status quo is shaken, that’s when Silco asserts his power over Vander and his domination over the Undercity. Vander is put in a vulnerable position (his deal with Grayson isn’t enough anymore and he’s arrested) and Silco seizes the opportunity, deploys a power he has a monopoly over (shimmer). And after Silco wins against Vander, he can deploy his power over all of Zaun.

The status quo between Piltover and Zaun is constantly imbalanced. Piltover has already won at the beginning of the show and has been asserting, over and over again, through violence and in an abusive fashion, its domination on the Undercity. Caitlyn is like Silco in that comparison, she uses a power over which she has a monopoly (vent instead shimmer), in an unbalanced situation that puts her in the situation of the oppressor.

(And facing her, there is someone who is willing to turn that power against her. Just like Vander using Shimmer to protect his children, Sevika and Jinx using the vents for their own colorful clouds.)

Cait isn’t a poor innocent victim of circumstances but you have to acknowledge context and, in a show where parallels are so frequent, you can’t pretend she’s a completely unique character going through a completely unique arc completely unrelated to anyone else. If you hate her, hate a lot of other people too!

And, as is typical in Arcane, characters are monsters for love, and brought back by love.

And Caitlyn’s arc shows that! Past arc 1, she was lost. Vi had left, Jayce was missing, her mother was still dead even if after all she did, her father was a shadow of himself, the only one she had was Ambessa who was fueling her vendetta to further her own colonialist agenda. Suddenly she was alone, serving as a puppet on top of a pile of gold and too much power she couldn’t control. She can’t call back the gas once it’s out after all, she can’t call back the martial law Ambessa installed now that the resentment is growing in Zaun and that Ambessa is the one holding the reins of enforcers.

That’s why her switching sides was so immediate: when Vi calls her cupcake, she brings the girl forth, before the monster. She gives her love and Cait latches onto it, and uses it to pull herself away from that trap she walked right in. “Why does anyone commit acts others deem unspeakable? For love” & “Is there anything as undoing as a daughter?”: love is forever the way in and out of hate.

I am very disappointed that we never got a proper conclusion to the tensions between Zaun and Piltover. I wish we had witnessed negotiations between Ekko/Sevika/Jinx/a representative of Zaun and the Council, I wish they had gotten control of the vent system, promises of fair trade, independence, something. I wish Caitlyn had been made to apologize and deliver herself the keys to the vent system to Zaunites. I wish for a lot of things about the political resolution in season 2 and the show did not go how i wanted it to. Does deviating from what I wanted inherently make the show bad? No, although I do think it wasn’t the greatest this time around.

I however can not talk shit about the character arcs. Not all are as well crafted as Caitlyn but i will take no more Caitlyn slander on the basis of “she’s a fascist!”. 1- that’s not what fascism is, although she did walk a line close by; 2- she’s a symptom of oppression, and by reproducing she makes herself an agent of it. She weaponises Zaun’s air because she can because she’s in power because she’s the heiress to the Kiramman. Doesn’t make what she’s doing less harmful, but it has to be treated in context. Caitlyn is still a twenty something grieving girl with her entire world shaken up, she just so happens to also be the heiress to an extremely wealthy and powerful family in an oppressive system and every path that opens to her, in the midst of her hatred, brings her to reproduce that domination in the most efficient way she has access to: the vents and the enforcers.

And, yes, by reproducing domination she is also an engineer of it. It’s important to acknowledge that what she's done is bad to put it simply, but do not denature her character to fit a conception of her that is easy to hate. I will put part of the blame on internalized misogyny too, as it pushes us to have less leniency and tolerance for women’s mistakes. No because I haven’t seen half that much hate towards Silco who, reminder, made the Undercity kneel by giving them severe shimmer addiction (engineering an issue and making himself the sole owner of the solution while maintaining it as a form of domination, everyone see where i’m going with this?).

Again, do I wish we’d seen more of the political consequences on Caitlyn of that? Yep, absolutely. But I will not blindly hate on her while ignoring the global context of her actions and I invite you to do the same.

Tell me, do you hate Jinx for her so-called terrorist acts or do you see them as part of resistance against Piltover? You can not see the context when you like it only i’m afraid, and, in an unprecedented show of nuance for the internet, we can understand context and acknowledge moral complexity and still hate someone.

Hate Caitlyn if you want, but do it in a constructed way so we can argue together please! I need to talk about this show so badly, please hate the enforcers and the change in Cait’s character but do so in a well-argued fashion, i beg of you.