I guess why the ending of arcane still doesn’t feel real to me and why jayvik moves me so much is because it defies so much of what I was taught to expect by conventional male-dominated, heteronormative narratives. Because at the end of the story, Jayce had everything he should have wanted. Saved the world. Both Piltover and Zaun respected him. He had strength and beauty and the cool magic hammer he’d fantasized about wielding since he was a kid, and his battle scars only made him hotter somehow. And he had a goddess of a woman expressing trust and care for him, and who probably would’ve liked to get back together with him, at least in some capacity. Meanwhile, characters like Viktor are supposed to die at the end. No matter how sympathetic of a villain he is, the gay disabled guy who irreversibly gave up his humanity to be an evil robot is supposed to self-implode. That character archetype is supposed to redeem himself by taking himself out of the narrative so that the hero can get the happy ending. Someone made a great comparison to the Phantom of the Opera, but this pattern is true for pretty much every mainstream story I can think of. Hell, even Jinx sort of did that, literally ejecting herself from the narrative so that Vi can live in Piltover and get together with Cait. Viktor seemed self-aware of this trope at the end. He had closed his eyes, deciding to accept his own lonely demise if it meant Jayce would live.
But Jayce rejects all of that. The story rejects all of that. And it doesn’t even blink twice to do it. Jayce says all I want is my partner back, and he chooses to die holding hands with Viktor instead. And the story says of course Jayce will choose this, because he always loved Viktor and wanted to be with Viktor more than he wanted any of those other things men are supposed to want. More than power, or respect, or sex, or legacy. Just Viktor. Always Viktor. And in the end, Viktor finally embraces that love, accepts and reciprocates it, in allowing Jayce to be with him in his final moments.
It’s so beautiful and it’s so, so queer. Do not come at me with platonic/romantic discourse because I do not care, I genuinely do not care. The story practically sings with queer love. It’s undooming him from the ableist patriarchal narrative so you can exchange magic wedding rings and hold each others’ souls forever in the astral plane. It’s everything I was afraid to ask for from a story because I never thought I would get it. I still can’t quite believe it’s real, and canon, and carved into the very bones of the story. I love it so much.
