In his culture-defining article, ‘Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny’, RS Benedict writes of the infamous shower scene in Starship Troopers (1997): “No one looks at each other. No one flirts. A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.” Nearly 30 years later, endless Twitter threads unwrap and repackage discourse about the necessity of sex scenes in movies and TV shows. “What I want from sex”, you slur drunkenly into David Lynch’s ear, “is narrative utility.” It feels like somewhere along the way the entire mediascape has collapsed into that asexual Drake meme. I find it all incredibly trite—as if perversion isn’t what drew us to the idea of capturing a moment and holding onto it forever in the first place!

This is not to say that there aren’t tasteless sex scenes, or sex scenes made in bad faith, or sex scenes that simply aren’t very good. This is also not to say that sex scenes don’t require nuance, that they can exist stringless and without excuses: the best scenes are ones that are somewhat allegorical, accentuating the broader themes of the story by debasing them. As Chappell Roan very helpfully provides, we are often left wanting for that one sex scene that’s in Mulholland Drive (2001). This particular scene heralds an indisputable consensus of necessity—among teenage boys, lesbians, and film critics alike—because of its ability to adhere to and disrupt conventions simultaneously. When Betty asks Rita, “Have you ever done this before?” and Rita responds, “I don’t know, have you?”, the shock of the wall set up by the clichéd question being knocked down is perhaps more pleasurable for viewers than the sex that follows.

The second and final season of the animated Netflix series Arcane: League of Legends (2021) dropped this past November. Despite my initial reservations regarding the subtitle, some light propaganda (i.e., my friends sending me edits of protagonist Vi to songs from a 2012 indie sleaze playlist) was enough to convince me to watch. On the surface, the show centres around an escalating class conflict, the opposing sides manifesting in the two districts of a city, Piltover and Zaun. The class allegory is distinctly unsubtle, with ‘topsider’ Piltovians referring to Zaun as the ‘undercity’, which is, of course, located beneath Piltover. After failing to get support from Piltover‘s governing council for her plan to restore peace to Zaun, an exasperated Vi turns her back to Cait and says, “Topside and bottom, oil and water; that’s all there is.” Unrelenting dichotomy; red and blue, chaos and control. That’s all there is.

Despite the glaring clarity of this visual and textual contrast, there’s a running joke in the fandom that Fortiche—the French animation studio that developed the show—essentially dropped in the political symbolism without cluing in the writer’s team. Seems a likely thing for the French to do, but I won’t pretend to understand what passes through the red telephone between writers and animators. Whether or not the two creative teams were working in tandem throughout, as a viewer, it’s impossible not to notice the disjunction between the two seasons in terms of the statements they attempt to make—or, in the second season’s case, whether an attempt is being made at all. This chasm is most prominent in the show’s utilisation of sex scenes.

There are two sex scenes throughout the run of the show, the first in S1E5 between Mel and Jayce, and the second in S2E8 between Vi and Caitlyn. The dynamic established between Mel and Jayce before the scene takes place is layered; Mel is an aristocrat with significant political power, while Jayce is working class within Piltover’s context, needing patronage to fund his scientific research. This imbalance becomes evident when Jayce’s work is threatened and Mel, as a member of the council, contributes to the decision to bar Jayce from his ‘Hextech’ research, which leads him to attempt suicide. During their courtship, Mel tells Jayce, “The Medardas usually only take from the world. We’re not often in the position to give anything back.” Jayce replies, “I couldn’t have done it without you.” It’s both cheesy and not, because no, he—a blue-collar student who almost lost his career and life in one fell swoop—couldn’t have.

But perhaps the most compelling aspect of this scene is that it is completely entangled with another: shots of Jayce and Mel in bed are interspersed with shots of the ‘Hexcore’, a living, adaptable byproduct of Hextech, feeding on the blood that Viktor has coughed up. The seduction taking place is palpable in both scenes—a brilliant analysis of the scene on X describes the respective acts as a “consummation” of their relationships. The post highlights how the exchange between Viktor and the Hexcore appears as an emergence of repressed sexuality, not unlike that of Gothic romance. The Hexcore is Nosferatu, Audrey II, the Phantom of the Opera; its vampiric desire for power preys on Viktor’s lack thereof. This is particularly compelling because Viktor often disrupts the soft, low-stakes power play between Mel and Jayce—a Zaunite who is permanently disabled as a result of growing up in the polluted fissures, Viktor is a product of the oppression that they enforce. This is all in line with what is, to me, the most potent (albeit stringless) political writing in the show: “In my experience, no one in power is innocent,” spoken by Singed in S2E5. Really, the sex itself is innocent; it’s the stark reminder of their standing over Viktor that convolutes it. Unrelenting dichotomy: the unavoidable chaos of Viktor’s altercation with the Hexcore, resulting from his lack of agency, contrasted with the active and enthusiastic control in the hands of both Mel and Jayce, simultaneously fortified by and fortifying their preexisting power. Everything is sex except sex which is power, or whatever the gospel foretold. Ultimately, everyone gets their fair share of penance: in a later scene, Mel wakes up alone, and Viktor wakes up in the hospital with a terminal prognosis, a trembling Jayce at his bedside.

The final scene of S1—in which Jinx launches a rocket to the Piltover Council, killing multiple councillors including Caitlyn’s mother, Cassandra Kiramman—directly sets up the Cait and Vi’s dynamic in S2. Vi and Cait start out working together but are soon torn apart when Vi prevents Cait from taking a shot at Jinx. In strikingly quick succession, Cait spits at Vi, hits her with the butt of her gun and ascends to military dictatorship by the end of the episode. In response to Vi’s ‘topside and bottom’ angst in S1E6, Caitlyn had prompted, “What about us?” Though Vi initially shuts this down, it seems to be the only consistent thread that either of their plotlines follow in S2. This isn’t groundbreaking by any means—the phrase ‘opposites attract’ exists for a reason, after all, and the ‘rich x poor’ trope is as lame a horse as any. The romance between the two is engineered to be an embodiment of the dualisms that Vi laments in that very scene: Vi is red, Cait is blue. For this reason, unlike the couples from the romcoms that most often employ these tropes, they are invariably bound to the political terrain that surrounds them. This is the central difficulty of the sex scene; it is all ‘what about us?’ and no oil and water.

There is nothing wrong with the scene on its own—in fact, it’s pretty good, if slightly underwhelming, and adequately considerate of their previously established romantic dynamic in constructing the sexual counterpart. What it also is, like most of S2, is hollow. There is so much potential in the scene to say something interesting about the power dynamics at play, about Vi and Caitlyn as characters, about the steepening conflict between Piltover and Zaun, but it’s instead completely silent. Hot for the sake of being hot. Unlike the plastic sexlessness of Starship Troopers, there is a tangible desire here, just not for anything other than each other. At this point, I’m mostly annoyed at myself for wanting narrative utility from the scene, but it’s impossible not to. The scene demands you to treat it pornographically, though all events surrounding it are anything but. “What about Jinx?!” I yell at Vi on my screen frustratedly. “What about the fact that Cait is still enforcing martial law over your hometown? The fact that she abandoned you? The war raging outside?!!” I already know the answer. An endless echo of ‘What about us?’ and King Princess crooning about American classics, for some reason.

In the final episodes of the season, the citizens of Piltover and Zaun come together in battle against the Noxian army and Viktor, who has been transformed in the Hexcore’s image. Much like the reconciliation of Cait and Vi, there is no preamble, certainly no revolution. It’s all very narratively soft, the invention of a greater, worse evil to unite against to avoid deconstructing the enemy everyone has recognised from the start. No one is horny for this war; they have no heart in the cause, and they’re right not to. When a Piltovian timidly asks a Zaunite, “Have you ever done this before?” as they don their enforcer uniforms, the answer is invariably, “Yes.” The wall stays up. Our clothes stay on.∎