Spoilers for Arcane Seasons 1 and 2!

At the time of writing this, it has been around 4 months since the release of Arcane’s second and final season, which is surely enough time for us to ponder its philosophical debates: Do we aim to fix the unjust system by having better people in power, or do we just tear it all down? Can Piltover and Zaun ever coexist? And most importantly: what the fuck is the deal between Jayce and Viktor? 

I’m only half-kidding of course. There’s plenty of time to talk about the political message of Arcane, how it writes its characters, and how Season 2 is a downgrade from Season 1 due to pacing issues and giving its ambiguous questions too clear-cut, simplistic answers. But what I find most interesting is the fervent Twitter debates over Jayce and Viktor’s…cosmic explosion at the end of the series. Some were taking this as the confirmation of their romantic love, others yelling at the first group to shut up because “why can’t male friends just be friends, the yaoi-obsessed fujoshis are ruining everything.” 

I’ll admit, when I first saw that end scene, my first thought was, “somehow this is gayer than the literal gay sex they had on the show”. But, the more I thought about it, the more intricate and confusing my thoughts became. 

So, I’m here, writing thousands of words to settle the debate on the case of whether Jayce and Viktor are more homies or homo, and spoilers ahead, it’s a little bit of both and neither at all.

Let’s set the scene: On one hand, we have Jayce Talis, the Piltover Wonderboy, a symbol of the great innovation the upper city can bring, with Hex portals that he helped establish sending merchants, diplomats, and tourists across the skies to faraway cities in the blink of an eye. He’s the sun, gleaming and bright in his white and gold. On the other, there is Viktor, the undercity genius, who prefers to stand, or rather, hobble behind the curtain, the true mastermind behind Hextech. He’s the moon, quiet and alluring in shades of blues and browns. The contrasting two would come to represent the series’ ever-warring leitmotifs, the cities of Piltover and Zaun.

Oil and Water. 

The True Beginning

A raging blizzard, a boy and his mother on the doorstep of death herself. From the snowstorm, a hooded figure. A spell cast, magic whirring in the air going faster and faster and faster until—

A field of flowers. The acceleration rune dropped in a young Jayce’s hand like a stone in a river, one he wears on this bracelet until this very day.

We start this relationship with a stranger situation than most: with an attempted suicide. Jayce, following a disastrous explosion that blows up most of his lab, decides to quit life altogether, his work going unfinished, only for a voice to speak up behind him, musing on the equations scrawled on the chalkboard. A young man limping on a cane, seemingly interested in the work of the young Talis. 

“When you’re going to change the world, don’t ask for permission.”

He gives Jayce the discarded wristband, the acceleration rune gleaming. Jayce remembers his promise, the reason why he wants to meld magic and science, and asks the man his name.

“…It’s Viktor.”

The show progresses to their academy days, where the friendship between the two blossoms, from sneaking into their laboratory-and-definitely-not-Viktor’s-room together, to continuing to hone their research until their ultimate discovery of Hextech, both men knowing that they just changed the world.

There’s a closeness that’s developed, born out of a mutual love of invention, science, and discovery. They’re equals in intellect, a pairing that works better together than apart, a wonderful emulsion of ambition and research.

But science can never exist in a bubble, especially in a region divided in two. Jayce, the Piltover powerhouse, is thrust into the spotlight as a diplomat since Hextech greatly progresses the city’s economic and military dominance. Viktor, uninterested in the political potential of Hextech, dives deeper into the lab, his health deteriorating as the undercity, Zaun itself, teeters ever closer to the edge of ruin, never even getting to reap the benefits of his own invention. Viktor’s deterioration and desperation drives him towards  Zaun’s messier, bloodier chemical wizardry, even working with the disgraced Zaunite “scientist” Singed to try and fix his leg with a dangerous mix of Hextech and Shimmer. Unfortunately, his lab assistant Skye gets caught in the crossfire, and quite literally ripped apart by the Hexcore. 

Jayce and Viktor saw the same premise, Hextech’s potential to help, but drew different conclusions about it. Jayce only saw Hextech as progress, a tool for infinite good and infinite profit for Piltover specifically. Viktor, however, realized Jayce’s perspective for what it was: naivete. Hextech wasn’t a perfect savior, it was a tool that could be wielded to heal, and most certainly could be used to hurt, as seen by Piltover’s direct and indirect suppression of Zaun, and the many deaths that followed which led Viktor to wish for the destruction of the Hexcore. 

And throughout all of these terrible moments, not once did these bastards properly communicate with each other. Viktor continued to retreat to darker paths, beginning to believe in humanity’s imperfections and tendency towards violence through the end of Season 1 and Season 2, thinking that Jayce, his supposed kindred spirit, has simply abandoned him. But Jayce is thinking the exact same thing: he wonders why Viktor would disappear for days at the height of Hextech’s innovation. He rushes out of Mel’s quarters to help his sick partner and realizes his inability to see the fuller picture much too late, as Jinx’s rocket bomb blows apart the council room, and what little that remained out of Piltover and Zaun’s relations. 

Season 1 represents the beginning of Jayce and Viktor’s partnership. Where one could make the argument that it’s merely a bond of science, which certainly is a key part here, there’s a greater tie: because Jayce and Viktor are so representative of the conflict between Piltover and Zaun, their relations expand to a more metaphysical plane. Piltover and Zaun are truly like jilted lovers, their immense lack of communication being one of the main reasons why their divide is upheld and their ability to co-exist peacefully is nonexistent. In other words, it’s like a situationship where you care about the other person but unfortunately, you’re not that good at expressing your own emotions so you start drifting off from each other until the other person gets hurt and all the emotions come flooding back but by then, it’s too late. And don’t get me started on Hextech, because in what world is floating together with your homie in a shimmering sea of light and Hextech that you co-invented isn’t at least a little bit romantic? The introduction of the Arcane will be focused on further in Season 2, and it’s really what cements the ambiguous nature of their relationship.

In the aftermath, as Jayce emerged unharmed from the explosion thanks to Mel’s emerging powers, Viktor is driven close to death, forcing Jayce to implant the Hexcore directly into Viktor, essentially creating a Chrysalis and mutating Viktor even further into his purple, William-afton-esque form. Viktor’s realization that Jayce never destroyed the Hexcore, the very thing he believes could destroy the world, compounds with all his other fears, and he leaves Piltover altogether. 

Viktor, by this point, now having seen the imperfections of humanity, now resolves to be the one to heal humanity with his new powers and formerly dead-assistant-now-turned-corporeal-assistant at his side, quite literally becoming a Jesus figure and forming a commune, though his “idealism” wouldn’t end there. He becomes a cult leader, obsessed with the idea of creating a better humanity, becoming further and further radicalized as Noxian corruption and dirty politics show the brokenness of humanity. He feels entirely justified in creating all these mind-controlled robots in order to erase human imperfections. He calls this the Glorious Evolution. And to his credit, he nearly succeeds. This Viktor, changed by both Jayce and the Chrysalis,  has seen every possibility: he knows the truth. This world is imperfect. His human heart, consumed by the blackest despair, found true strength, enough to remake it as he sees fit, and none shall defy his will. He has the world, has Jayce, in his clutches, the Glorious Evolution is near—

An unknown variable, the boy who shattered time throws an overloaded time machine in Viktor’s face, shattering that cold mask. And at last, Jayce can reach through.

Throughout Season 2, Jayce goes through a truly massive journey. His odyssey in the apocalyptic future world primarily revolves around understanding the true depth of what he has done to Viktor, the realization that his Hextech led to more pain than progress, and that Viktor had to suffer through that pain alone. In other words, Jayce crashes out over his situationship in the mostly empty apocalypse, akin to those scenes in rom-coms when the male lead realizes the error of his ways and turns up to the female lead’s house with a boombox, only in this case, replace the house with the infinity of the star-filled Hexspace, and the boombox with a magical rune that holds a lot deeper symbolism than one might expect.

After all his trials, after all that suffering, Jayce’s conscience is clear, no longer filled with naivete or violence. The silence of the void is no longer cold and oppressive, but now hopeful, a chance to reach out a warm hand to Viktor in its infinite expanse.

“I thought I wanted us to give magic to the world. Now… all I want… is my partner back.”

Viktor, of course, is shocked. Appalled.

“Why do you continue to persist? After everything I’ve done.”

And Jayce shows him, not just through a handhold, but through a hug, the reason why he cares, why he persists, it’s—

The True Ending

The same hooded figure that gave Jayce the acceleration rune, the one that saved him from this cruel world, the one that inspired him to invent Hextech with Viktor it’s—

Viktor. But it’s not the Viktor of the present, it’s the Viktor of this future, alone in this alternate reality in which his dreams were realized, his instrumentality a success. He stands vigil over a broken mechanical puppet that holds Jayce’s mutated hammer, his last tie to humanity he severed, now offering a chance to our Jayce to rebuild it.

“I thought I could bring an end to the world’s suffering. But when every equation was solved, all that remained were fields of dreamless solitude. There is no prize to perfection. Only an end to pursuit.”

Flashes of different runes dropped into the young Jayce’s hand, spinning and spinning until stopping at the acceleration rune, gleaming as it falls—

The acceleration rune. The very same rune, we realize, that the mysterious stranger, that Viktor, gave Jayce in the very first episode. It was a closed loop. Viktor gave Jayce the hope in magic used to start Hextech, which would then lead to Ekko’s creation of the time machine using an inversed acceleration rune, the very one that allows Jayce to break through and Viktor to find peace. From their first meeting until their final moments, their fate was already woven within the fabric of time and space, a path that each would follow to their completion, every single time. 

“In all timelines…in all possibilities…only you…can show me this.”

Viktor, the present Viktor, the human Viktor, realizes his mistake, the cost of instrumentality, and knows what he must do. He tries to push away Jayce one final time, like all the others, like oil separating from water, but this one time, this final time, Jayce refuses. Pulling out the acceleration rune from his wrist, he makes a final promise.

“We finish this together.”

And with that, the two finally reach each other, hands and heads held together. A spell cast, magic whirring in the air going faster and faster and faster and faster and faster until—

A butterfly-like explosion. Two beings absorbed into one rune and disappearing altogether. Time resumed as normal, and the puppets crashed down to earth.

So…is it gay to mutual universal deletion? 

This is where I’m getting controversial here: not really, not in the way that either extreme would want it to be. As I’ve done my best to convey here, there exists a genuine, heartfelt connection between Jayce and Viktor. From the start, we were able to gain a sense of their clashing personalities and philosophies, the conflicts that arose, the failures of their idealism with nothing to ground them, the brutality of their pessimism and violence without the other’s hope to uplift them. The rest of the characters in the show aren’t in any way as important to how this story is told. Jayce and Viktor can exist as an entirely different TV show, an independent story of two scientists with different morals standing in opposition to each other. They truly cannot live without the other, a connection deeper than your average friendship. Their lives and ends are tied to each other in a closed loop of magic, science, and hope. And to a smaller but still important degree, the fact that they’re both men, this open display of their emotional arcs represents the wave of redefining what manliness is, how you express that to your friends, and the stronger connections within male friendships formed as a result. Finally, zooming out to an audience meta-perspective, this relationship archetype, in which two visionaries are driven apart by their personal philosophies leading to direct conflict but with the two making their way back together, oftentimes before their deaths, is extremely common in media, and is basically a full course meal for shippers. The internet simply loves enemies to lovers, and I’m certainly one of them. I’ve seen X-men, Jujutsu Kaisen, Bungou Stray Dogs, Good Omens, Ace Attorney. We like redeemable bastards and personifications of the song “Love Like You” by Rebecca Sugar where you can imagine these characters waltzing together in the infinite cosmos. Believe me, I truly get the Tumblr craze of the innate homosexuality of opposing philosophies and the…intimate conflict and subsequent resolution.

But I can’t, no matter what the other internet degenerates say, call Jayce and Viktor gay, not in canon, not in the way Vi and Cait are gay. I’m not expecting them to have sex in a very dirty prison cell, which itself is objectively a terrible place to do it. To me, Jayce and Viktor’s sort of love and connection is so intricate it defies even the mortal constructs of relationships. It goes beyond the boundaries of sexuality, constricted by our limited human lifespans and our normal human lives. Jayce and Viktor have seen multiple futures, they’ve bridged magic and science, and they exist in concepts that we normal humans back on Earth can only conceive from our own minds. 

An interesting comparison I can make is to Aziraphale and Crowley from the novel/TV show Good Omens, in which their confirmed romantic relationship must be understood from the fact that they are angelic/demonic beings, seemingly untethered from human concepts like friendship, love, even gender itself, which makes their subsequent connection all the more queer (quite literally) to the forces of heaven and hell. They’re not really men, not gay or straight or any of the other labels humans like to use. Hell, that’s why their (spoilers) kiss at the end of Season 2 was such a shock to the audience, because physical affection is explicitly a human tendency. Their kiss shows not only the extent of their feelings for each other but just how much the pair, particularly Crowley, have essentially humanized from their time on earth. And it’s with this same pair of lenses that we can use to understand Viktor and Jayce. While they may have started out as human, the introduction of the Arcane, of alternate realities and higher dimensions, essentially making both of them MORE than human, alters the ways in which they experience and express their love. 

To beings of infinite power, love is subsequently in its most expansive, most conceptual, most difficult-to-understand form. In simpler terms, it’s love as a cosmic horror, where we would need to ascend to that higher plane of existence, of living in all universes and none of them, to truly grok that, and yet, we ourselves are confined to the ground of this non-magical world, restricted to keyboards and pixels on a screen to attempt to understand it.

So what are Jayce and Viktor, Viktor and Jayce? They’re Piltover and Zaun, oil and water. They’re gay, they aren’t, they’re everything and nothing in between. They can never truly be together in the way that we would want them to be, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection, it just means that our opinions are invalid. And that’s where they end up, swirling, warping, emulsifying so fast that we can’t keep up. In the end, we don’t know where they go, nor are we supposed to. They just…are.

Contributed by Biew Biew Sakulwaanadee