Welcome back to Behind the Scenes: Power & Control! In our recent Reel Relationships blog, we explored how Arcane draws us in with a story of survival, longing, and connection. It follows a motley crew of compelling characters in a colorful cast, inviting us to see how trauma shapes even the strongest among us.
Today we will be focusing on a particular romantic relationship within the show’s setting. Vi and Caitlyn are one of the most compelling couples in the series; they are raw, tender, and hard-won through adversity. But beneath the surface of the magnetic tension, there are dynamics worth slowing down to examine.
This blog moves beyond the screen to examine how power shows up in relationships. This isn’t to flatten something engaging and beautiful into a cautionary tale, but rather to highlight important dynamics within a relationship that people might not otherwise name.
Content Warnings: intimate partner violence, incarceration, parental loss, institutional violence, systemic abuse
The article below contains spoilers for both seasons of Arcane. Tread with caution!
Separate Ways, Worlds Apart
From the very beginning, Arcane makes it clear that Vi and Caitlyn come from very different worlds, and it never lets us forget. The first episode opens with Vi as a child, experiencing the formative trauma of losing her parents, forced to stand strong for her little sister. It goes on to introduce us to the Undercity, where Vi grew up, where survival is the only currency that matters. She is scraping by in a community that Piltover, the illustrious cutting-edge city above, has already written off. Here she learns that people with power don’t protect you — they cage you. By the time we encounter her as an adult, she is behind bars in a prison cell.
In contrast, we first meet Caitlyn in an illustrious upper-city apartment, where she has arrived with scientist and fellow primary cast member, Jayce. We quickly come to learn that her family is a sponsor for Jayce’s research, as Jayce himself is an immigrant to the city with lower social standing. Caitlyn resides in a mansion with a family whose name opens doors, whose decisions shape policy, and whose resources are not available to just anyone. She has chosen to be an Enforcer — Piltover’s equivalent to a police force — though the show makes it clear that this is an unusual choice for someone of her standing.
There is no better place where the power disparity between these characters is highlighted than their very first meeting. Caitlyn gets word of a dangerous criminal held in a local prison who can help her with a risky case. On her way to the cell, she is given multiple warnings about the prisoner’s aggression. When she arrives, she is confronted with the pacing, restless Vi — our first view, as the audience, of a grown Vi, after being introduced to her via her backstory. The first thing Caitlyn ever does for Vi is unlock a door that should never have been locked in the first place.
It is also worth naming what Caitlyn represents in that moment, and for most of the show, beyond her family name. She is not just the wealthy elite — she is an Enforcer, which means she carries not just class privilege but legal authority. She can detain. She can arrest. She represents the very institution that took years of Vi’s life. Their relationship does not begin as two strangers at a meet-cute; it begins with one person holding structural power over the other’s body and freedom.
The fact that Vi chooses to trust her anyway says everything about Vi’s capacity for hope. It also says something about how much her choices have cost her. The institutional power imbalance doesn’t stay static, either. By season two, at Caitlyn’s urging, Vi herself has taken on an Enforcer role. It’s a shift worth sitting with, in terms of what the relationship asks of each person’s identity and sense of self, and especially interesting given the media history of equating butchness with physical enforcement.
The asymmetry is baked into how the show frames them from the very beginning, before they’ve ever said a word to each other. One of them has always had power. The other has spent her entire life on the receiving end of an abuse of that power. There is no escaping the fact that Caitlyn’s family helped build the institutions that caged Vi and destroyed her community.
This gap never disappears due to their care for each other. Power imbalances rooted in class, access, and social capital often shape relationships in ways that are easy to overlook, especially when the love within is sincere. But questions about who holds more options, whose needs feel more urgent, and who has more to lose if the relationship ends are just as relevant in our modern world as they are in Zaun and Piltover.
At its core, unhealthy relationship dynamics aren’t always about conflict or cruelty. They are often about one person gaining or maintaining power over another, sometimes without either person being aware that it’s happening.
Control Does Not Always Look Like Control
One of the most difficult parts of recognizing power and control is that it rarely arrives with an announcement. Instead it develops gradually, shaped by behaviors that can be easy to reinterpret or dismiss. This is especially true when we are looking at dynamics shaped by trauma.
Vi spends years in Stillwater, surviving a brutal prison after losing her family and watching her community collapse around her. She learned to lead with her body, to absorb the hits and keep moving. Vulnerability was never safe. Needing was dangerous. She became someone who protects, who pushes through, and who doesn’t ask.
Caitlyn, for her part, grew up having her needs managed and her independence constrained in the name of family expectation. She is raised in wealth and social standing, trained to move through rooms that were built specifically for people like her. But she also must learn to suppress what she wants and to earn connection through usefulness and care.
In real life, these patterns can look like devotion. One person stepping forward to handle everything can read as strength. Pouring yourself into someone else’s healing can read like love. Over time, though, these patterns can shift. What once felt like protection can become control over how someone carries their pain. What feels like care can become a role someone plays in order to remain “needed,” rather than a need that both people share.
Control can sound like concern. It can look like protection. It can even feel like love.
Butch, Femme, and the Power Within
One of Arcane’s praiseworthy aspects is its dedication to depicting queer relationships through a genuine lens. Vi and Caitlyn are an excellent example of such a dynamic. Butch and femme are far more than aesthetics. They are identities, ways of moving through the world and relating to your body, your strength, and the people you love. Like any relational dynamic, they carry their own internal power maps that are worth naming with honesty.
Vi is a butch in the truest sense. She is body-first. She absorbs. She protects. She expresses her love through action, by stepping in front of danger, by throwing the first punch, by being the one who shows up physically when things fall apart. Her emotional world is carried in her hands and her back rather than her words. This is not a flaw, but it does not come without a cost.
In contrast, Caitlyn is femme, and she is precise, composed, strategic. She navigates through presence and body language, through social intelligence and social standing that Vi simply cannot access. Her power is real, but it tends to be made invisible precisely because it does not look like power. Femmes are frequently underestimated, their influence overlooked and their strength misread as softness.
But here’s what that dynamic can quietly produce: butch partners often absorb a disproportionate share of protective and emotional labor without ever being asked. It becomes assumed: the role of the fixer, the shield, the sturdy one to lean on. And when that’s the case, it becomes harder and harder for the butch partner to express their needs, to be someone who can be held rather than holding, who can be soft rather than strong, who can ask for help without feeling like it’s a failure of identity.
For Vi, this is compounded by everything her trauma has taken from her. She is not only scarred in a physical sense; the world around her has reinforced the message that needing makes you vulnerable to losing. The roles of “butch” and “survivor” become layered on top of one another until it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Meanwhile, femme partners can often find themselves pouring care into someone who will not (or cannot) receive it. That caregiving is also a genuine form of love. It can become a way of holding on, of earning a place, of staying needed when staying wanted feels uncertain. When that begins to happen, care starts to function less like a gift that is willingly given, and more like a tether to keep attachment in place.
Neither of these patterns makes a person the villain. But both of these patterns create a dynamic where one person is always carrying and one person is always tending, and that kind of rigidity — even if it looks like devotion — is worth examining closer.
Recognizing the Pattern
One of the most helpful ways to understand power and control is to look at patterns rather than an isolated moment. A single interaction might not raise concern on its own. But when behaviors repeat, escalate, or work together to limit autonomy, a larger picture becomes clear.
Tools like the Power & Control Wheel help with this. They shift our focus away from individual incidents and more towards overall patterns, helping us ask not just “what happened,” but “what has been happening consistently.”
For Vi and Caitlyn, some patterns worth examining might be:
- Who tends to carry the protective role, and does it feel chosen or assumed?
- Who is more likely to name a need aloud? What makes it harder for the other person?
- Does one person’s trauma make it difficult to receive care? Does the other person know that, or are they left to guess?
- Do differences in class and access shape what each person feels free to say, ask for, or walk away from?
There is no right answer to any of these questions, but they are worth considering within a relationship dynamic, if both parties wish for an equitable partnership.
Rethinking What We Are Taught
Our media plays a significant role in shaping how we understand our relationships. In shows like Arcane, emotional intensity is elevated, protective instincts are romanticized, and the weight of a character’s trauma is often framed as part of what makes their love story so compelling.
These portrayals are not inherently harmful. Arcane does more thoughtful work than most, and butch/femme dynamics are rare enough on screen. But when they do appear, they tend to arrive in these familiar shapes: the stoic protector who won’t let anyone in, and the devoted caretaker who loves harder to compensate. Both are heavily mythologized in queer media, held up as romantic archetypes rather than examined as patterns. When we see Vi shutting down emotionally and Caitlyn pouring herself in anyway, the narrative frames it as beautiful perseverance. It rarely asks what it costs Caitlyn to keep reaching, or what it would mean for Vi to finally let herself be caught.
When someone’s guardedness is framed as brooding depth, it becomes difficult to recognize when that same guardedness might be keeping a partner at arm’s length. When sacrifice is framed as devotion, it becomes harder to ask whose needs are consistently going unmet. When control is framed as protection, it becomes harder to name when we see it in our own lives.
When Power Is Shared
When our relationships are grounded in equity, they feel different. There is space for both people to have a voice, make decisions, and maintain a sense of self. Boundaries are respected, not challenged. Support exists without control.
In practice, this can look like:
- Being able to name a need without bracing for a response
- Being able to receive care without feeling indebted
- Being able to hold different amounts of social or financial power without that difference shaping the relationship
For Vi and Caitlyn, it might look like Vi being allowed to be soft without it costing her something. It might look like Caitlyn being honest about her privilege rather than working around it. It might look like both of them saying, “I don’t really know how to do this yet,” but staying in the room anyway.
Healthy relationships are not defined by perfection. They are defined by balance, which is an act that takes work.
Why Does This Matter?
Understanding power and control allows us to see beyond surface-level behaviors and recognize the deeper dynamics at play. It helps us identify patterns earlier, support others more effectively, and build relationships that are rooted in respect rather than imbalance.
It also reminds us that these dynamics are not always obvious. They can be subtle, gradual, and deeply embedded in what we have been taught to accept as love.
By looking behind the screen and within our own lives, we create space for something different: relationships where power is not performed as protection, but shared as a choice.