I see so much hate toward Caitlyn everywhere, and it’s almost always justified through the most superficial reading imaginable, like people watched the show through their asses, I kid you not 😭
Here’s what I think…
Caitlyn’s entire character arc is empathy constantly fighting against conditioning, privilege, duty, love, rage, power, and finally grief… and some of y’all still analyze her with the emotional intelligence of a fucking TikTok comment section.
Half the fandom treats her like she’s just Vi’s pretty plus-one. A soft little submissive trophy girlfriend with no reason to exist outside of validating Vi’s pain, embodying her desires, and looking hot while doing it. Like she only exists to fulfill some lesbian fantasy and smile lovingly in the background. Yeah, season 1 Caitlyn is fucking perfect. She is hot and nice and empathetic and sweet…
But then she is confronted with trauma, in multiple forms: abuse, violence, grief… and most of all guilt. She blames herself because “she had the shot” to prevent her mother’s death. And I genuinely think it’s that guilt that completely blurs her perception of everything that unravels afterward and makes her feel justified in acting with such harshness.
And the SECOND she stops being emotionally convenient, the second she spirals, fucks up, acts out of grief, anger, pressure, inherited ideology, trauma, and responsibility, suddenly she’s fantasy Hitler personally committing war crimes for fun 😭
People either want Caitlyn to be harmless, innocent, and submissive or completely monstrous. There’s apparently no space in between.
It’s like they completely missed her constantly trying to challenge her own status and prove that she deserved her place beyond her name and legacy. Caitlyn never saw her privilege as freedom. If anything, she saw it as something suffocating, something that kept her disconnected from the real world and the people suffering in it.
She desperately wanted to understand how things truly worked outside of Piltover’s bubble and genuinely wanted to help the less fortunate. She always had that rebellious streak in her, which is exactly why Vi was destined to fall in love with her in the first place.
Reducing Caitlyn to anything less than that is honestly insulting to Vi too 😭 because Vi could never fall in love with someone ordinary ❤️
And what annoys me the most is that people constantly dismiss her trauma because she’s privileged. As if privilege magically makes grief hurt less. As if being kidnapped, abused by a crazy lunatic who ultimately caused her mother’s death, being manipulated politically, carrying impossible responsibility, and slowly realizing the system she believed in is rotten somehow shouldn’t affect her psychologically because she grew up rich.
Like sorry, but Caitlyn is one of the most nuanced characters in Arcane, and reducing her to either “perfect girlfriend” or “evil cop bitch” is such a painfully shallow reading of her character.
Y’all are pissing me off.
