The bare theses without the proof, if you’re in a hurry
10-minute read
It might end up boring. And seem unfounded in places. Better to go read the full version, really.
No? Okay then.
In Arcane: League of Legends, Jayce and Viktor love each other romantically (Jayce, unconsciously), and this is not an interpretation.
In cinema, information can be graded by how solidly it’s present in the work: Fact → Conclusion → Interpretation → Loose reading.
Facts and conclusions are verifiable and univocal. A fact is a given. A conclusion is the result of a logical operation.
Film language has its own “grammar” and its own conventions.
Any work of art is a coherent sign system that contains every element needed to understand it. The general term for this system: text.
Text set out in film language: film form.
A basic property of animation as a medium: nothing happens by chance. Every last stroke was drawn intentionally by an artist.
In Arcane, the voice actors recorded separately from one another, under the tight control of the directors and showrunners. Like the animation, the intonations in the show are no accident.
An irrefutable fact of film form may not sound loud. The scales of solidity and loudness are independent of each other. The still is a legitimate tool for film analysis. For the analysis of animation, even more so.
Among all the observations of Jayce and Viktor’s behavior, touch stands out. There’s a great deal of it on screen. Affective touch comes mostly from Jayce, but Viktor lets him. Moreover, the Hex arc’s plot is permeated with the motif of “Jayce and Viktor passing something along to each other.” The motif makes an entrance at every turn of the story; it’s a structural support of the plot. And in most cases, the passing involves touch. Touch is part of the plot’s structural support.
The sheer number of touches and the intimate proxemic distance, emphasized by close-ups, sometimes extreme close-ups, create an on-screen image of a relationship that, by convention, doesn’t fall under “just friendship.”
Of course, Jayce and Viktor’s relationship has friendship in it too. Science has established that long-term romantic love doesn’t exist without a friendship component. Love doesn’t cancel out friendship.
Both visually—mostly through pronounced repetitions and editing—and through the plot, the work tells of a Jayce–Viktor–Mel love triangle that Jayce isn’t aware of.
Toward the end of the second season, Jayce walks away from Mel, and they stay friends.
Jayce and Viktor are not brothers. A character mistaking romantic feelings for familial ones is a well-established romantic trope across every narrative medium, a subtrope of friends to lovers (Jane Austen’s “Emma,” “When Harry Met Sally…,” and so on).
Neuroscience views romantic love as the result of two systems: the gonadal circuit and the neuropeptide–dopamine circuit. The gonadal circuit is responsible for sexual attraction, the neuropeptide–dopamine circuit for romantic attraction. These two systems usually switch each other on, but each is functionally independent. Romance and sex are connected, but they operate separately.
A vast number of observations reliably lead to the conclusion that Jayce’s behavior toward Viktor is consistent with romantic attachment—a specific, intense, biologically grounded state (involving the neuropeptide–dopamine circuit) that is, by definition, distinct from “just friendship.”
Another massive set of observations leads to the conclusion that Jayce as a character is a representation of the autism spectrum: an attention tunnel (or hyperfocus), a special interest, stimming, selective touch, masking, sensory overload, alexithymia—all of this, taken together, points to the autism spectrum, leaving no alternative. Hyperfocus plays a part in the plot’s key turning points, and alexithymia explains why Jayce loved Viktor for years without knowing it.
If Jayce’s love is a conclusion drawn from a multitude of observations, then Viktor’s love is a pure given, shown through at least one solid fact: on screen, Viktor confesses his love to Jayce (“It was affection that held us together”).
Of course, Viktor’s love is a conclusion drawn from a multitude of observations, too. One of the loudest: Viktor wears Jayce’s blanket, never taking it off, even after his personality has almost completely dissolved in the Hexcore. Add to that his “In all possibilities only you” in the finale—the absolute exclusivity of romantic love.
The making of Arcane was unusual for the industry: the script and the visuals were created, revised, and honed in one tightly intertwined process. All the while, the showrunners watched every step like hawks. Jayce and Viktor’s love is toned down, but signed off on from start to finish.
The blanket is a powerful and cleverly crafted objective correlative, conveying the emotions of two characters at once. Embodied love as a narrative device.
Through an off-the-charts number of parallels between Jayce and Viktor, the text tells us that they are absolute equals and that their feelings for each other are the same. This conclusion is propped up above all by the many mirror parallels. Mirror parallelism is the device behind, for example, the main turning point in “Eugene Onegin.”
The Mage at the end of time isn’t a being from a parallel universe, not a Marvel-style “variant.” It’s the very same Viktor—our Viktor—and the Hexcorized hell Jayce lands in is the direct future of the Runeterra we’ve been watching since the first episode. The Mage spins time loops one after another, trying to rewrite the outcome. This isn’t Marvel—it’s “Groundhog Day.”
After his resurrection, Viktor falls under the power of the Hexcore, which gradually, by deceit, takes Viktor’s body from him. The Hexcore is the antagonist. Viktor is the antagonist’s captive. These are two different entities.
Back from the future, Jayce acts deliberately and strictly according to the Mage’s plan. He doesn’t shoot to kill Viktor. The plan leads to the rune implanted into Jayce’s body being smuggled into the astral plane, and to Viktor being cleansed with that rune. After the ravine, Jayce saves Viktor and yells at the Hexcore along the way. It’s all spun into a “Shyamalan” twist, and only in the very finale are we shown what’s really going on.
At the end, Jayce and Viktor don’t die on the spot—they are teleported somewhere.
Laid out in chronological order (setting the “Shyamalan” twist aside), the events fit tale type ATU 400 The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife. Jayce is the “husband,” Viktor is the “wife,” and the Hexcore is the villain who has taken the wife captive. In terms of motifs, a relative of this tale type is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
At the end, type 400 is combined with type 313: The Magic Flight. The combination brings a magical maiden and a magical escape: teleportation.
This is a conventionally romantic plot.
Our brain is always looking for shortcuts that unfold along ready-made schemas. Some of these are well-worn, predictable plot moves. Others are our assumptions about the world. The brain’s shortcuts give rise to cognitive biases. For the viewer, picking up on the love between Jayce and Viktor is complicated by two cognitive biases at once: the Continued Influence Effect and heteronormativity.
Dramaturgical theory views plot like this: the story is driven by the protagonist’s Desire. A single one. The main one. Everything serves this Desire; every event and every conflict grows out of it. In simple stories, the main Desire is the Conscious Desire. In deep and complex stories, it’s the Unconscious Desire. The one the character doesn’t know about.
In the full version, this is a section built with a jeweler’s precision, almost mathematically; everything in it is verifiable from start to finish. It’s huge, and it dissects both the plot and the finale in detail, not just the feelings. The motivation section is the heart of the entire analysis. Squeezing it down to a bare thesis is awful. Go read the full version.
To work out Jayce and Viktor’s main Desires, we apply a clear methodology: a checklist of ten conditions, among them a choice under pressure and what’s put at stake for it. In a nutshell, tossing out 98% of the reasoning: in the finale, Jayce chooses “finish this together” and fights the currents of magic to stay near Viktor. The potential cost: his own life. The Mage stakes his omnipotence and his life. They choose—each other.
Jayce and Viktor’s main Desires are a single Desire shared by two, with a giving side and a receiving side.
Jayce’s Unconscious Desire: to love Viktor romantically and erotically.
Viktor’s Unconscious Desire: to be romantically loved and erotically desired by Jayce.
Essentially, their Desires are perfectly captured by a slightly post-ironic distillation: Desire to desire and Desire to be desired.
Viktor also has a Need: in the theory, this is what a character’s “missing piece,” the “void in his humanity,” is called. Viktor’s “void”: an absolute, indifferent conviction that he is broken—that he is imperfect. This dramaturgical function plays the leading role in the conflict with the Hexcore. And it keeps Viktor from believing that Jayce’s love is even possible (which is why his main Desire stays unconscious).
Viktor’s Need shows us that his storyline at the end of the show matches Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” to an astonishing degree, with him as Kay. Jayce, meanwhile, is Gerda, melting the evil splinter out of him with hugs.
By pure coincidence, this isn’t the first Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that Viktor’s storyline repeats with almost supernatural precision. “The Little Mermaid” brings far more coincidences.
Andersen wrote “The Little Mermaid” at the height of his heartbreak over an unrequited love for another man, his friend. According to Andersen’s biographers, “The Little Mermaid” is a coded story of one man’s love for another, told through a mute female figure. Nothing but a striking coincidence can explain Viktor being the embodiment of that code.
Jayce fell in love with Viktor right away, on the first night. Narrative logic tells us so, and it also names the reason Jayce didn’t know it: besides alexithymia, it’s heteronormativity.
If Viktor had turned out to be a woman in this story, this love wouldn’t have worked. The situation would mean that Jayce wasn’t interested from the start and only woke up at the very end. Not love—an empty shell. The fairy tale of Jayce and Viktor’s love works only because it’s about the feelings of two men for each other.
Jayce and Viktor’s erotic attraction to each other is shown to us in snatches, and fairly veiled at that. But it is shown. What’s more, it’s stitched into the characters’ load-bearing motivation. Viktor’s erotic attraction is there in facts and conclusions from the opening episodes; Jayce’s is a conclusion.
On a symbolic level, the entire story of Jayce and Viktor is a reflection on Plato’s myth of the two halves. The cog and the butterfly lead us to this inference.
The analysis is built on the principle of convergent validity: nearly twenty disciplines with widely varied methods confirm the main thesis. Jayce and Viktor love each other romantically. Proven.
Everything proven is within the work, and no external statement influences it. No one can change what is set down in the text. Neither authority nor the sheer number of statements counts. Neither against romance nor for it.
Outside the text, though, the situation looks like this. Riot Games didn’t expect the show to be such a staggering success and hadn’t built any plans around it in advance. When the show blew up, the decision was made to retcon League’s lore to fit it.
But.
Riot Games is wholly owned by the Chinese internet giant Tencent; about half of League’s audience on PC alone is in China. Chinese regulations crack down on male same-sex love—the Chinese authorities have no quarrel with female same-sex love. According to the available data, League’s audience is 85–90% male. Men have been documented reacting badly to male homosexuality. Retconning the lore of the game champions Jayce and Viktor and rewriting their orientation carries risks. Risks that, on the Chinese side, are practically insurmountable.
Reconstruction: given that Jayce and Viktor’s love in the show is unconscious on one and a half sides, the higher-ups decided to pretend it was queer code; Riot Games gave one of the showrunners a high administrative post and sent him out to deny Jayce and Viktor’s romantic love.
Across six documented public appearances, this showrunner has said things that match neither the work, nor reality, nor his own statements.
No one else among the creators has denied the romantic love outright. And Harry Lloyd, who phrases things divinely, steers the conversation every time so as to bring in detailed images of romantic love and, apparently, avoid corporate disfavor. He queer-codes.
Riot Games, meanwhile, queerbaits—or, you could also say, gaslights—like there’s no tomorrow. They wink, they sign off on utterly romantic promo materials and events, all without officially acknowledging this love. On the one hand, it’s pretty gross and homophobic; on the other, Jayce and Viktor have a killer official romantic duo profile icon, yay.
But none of this in any way cancels out what the show tells us: Jayce and Viktor love each other romantically.
Amen.