This is pretty obvious but Cait/Vi is an extremely important dynamic to discuss when building Cait’s character.
My Cait has experience with the ‘outsider’ culture so to speak, basically the stuff outside Piltover upper + upper middle-class society. She’s not a dainty sheriff, even though she dresses like one and wears gloves everywhere she goes (no fingerprints). Her youth was spent hunting and exploring the forests. She just didn’t spend much time in Zaun because of warnings from her parents. Exploring the forests was an acceptable alternative for Cait.
When she first enters the police force, she gets her first real taste of Zaun through running around the districts, filled with the Zaun Gray. She’s used to the clean forest air and Piltover’s efficient air filtering systems. This place disgusts her. The smell is terrible when the air isn’t completely intolerable. Instead of making their infrastructure less stable by resorting to crime, why don’t the Zaunites focus on purifying their air first?
(Obviously Cait knows this isn’t feasible, but her main gripe with Zaun is that it is trying to use chaos to facilitate eventual order. This makes no sense in her mind. She’s very much like my Irelia in this regard.)
When she meets Vi, this changes after Vi tells Cait her stories and times with the gangs that run rampant in Zaun and lower PIltover. Sometimes the life was a necessity and that even though there were people with good intentions, the mercantile hold on resources that flowed through Zaun was so tight that it made things difficult to do things ‘legally.’ The shoddy bureaucracy couldn’t do much there, so citizens had to take things in their own hands.
Initially Cait had thought to reform the political system, but she now realizes that it’s too much of an idealistic dream in a cynical world.
The bottom line that Cait learns from her partnership with Vi is that in order to change the world in your lifetime you have to do be willing to do drastic things to succeed in carrying out your vision. They still differ on how to do things, but without Vi’s perspective Cait would never have pushed for a police force as efficient as it is now. She might’ve just ended up as one of those regular officers who gets disillusioned from her idealism and follows the monotony of the day. Fortunately, Vi’s presence shatters that illusion in Cait and prompts her to act.
