From the original thread, moved from Story & Art:
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I was painfully reminded of this:
http://www.talesofvaloran.com/?p=235
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Haha. Yeeeeah, that comic always makes me so sad. Being a Summoner is pretty rough in the post-Great Retcon continuity. Which is part of why Factions lore doesn't follow it, even though we usually try very hard to fit with even the most awkward retcons, e.g., explaining Gangplank's change from theatrical "Yar har I'm a pirate!" to grimdark "I'll VERB your BODY PART!" by saying it was a deliberate attempt to make the League's member-states underestimate him as a backwater buffoon.
I think of it as something of a cheap shot on Riot's part, and so I felt somewhat justified in taking a cheap shot of my own in response:
“REHT’KON AL TRAZARA! INVOH REHT’KON KADORES REHT’KON!”
(…)
Down the corridor, the same voice that had chanted the eerie invocation began to scream incoherently.
Miss Fortune settled back, resting one hand on her hip. “He’s safe in his cell,” she scoffed.
The lunatic voice drifted back into intelligibility. “REHT’KON! REHT’KON!”
Dame Therese eased up from her fighting stance. “So he is.” She looked back to Xin Zhao. “Tis only the mad Summoner, Thomas Gnox. His cell holds fast.”
“There are no Summoners! There IS no LEAGUE! No Summoners! No League! No! No! No! There never were!”
One of the guards sheathed his weapon and shook his head. “What madness is this?”
Dame Therese returned her borrowed weapon to its owner. “They say he stared too long into the sky, when the Void came. A fine Summoner, once. An esteemed brother of the Riotous Fists Clan. To have fallen to such black villainy…the sight chills my blood; yea, twists my guts.”
Summoner Thomas Gnox. Yes. Xin Zhao recalled the panic and commotion, which had reached even into this jail, when his dark plot had been exposed. An Icathian bio-hex, enchanted into the great nexus of Summoner’s Rift. Had the scheme not been thwarted, it was said that it would have latched onto the minds of the next Summoners who came to the Rift, from there spreading through the aether from one Summoner to the next and to the next, incubating for days before erupting all at once with lethal effect.
The mad Summoner’s palms slapped the stone of his cell.
“Never were! There never were!”
His voice broke into sobs.
King Jarvan III exhaled a deep sigh, bringing one shaky palm to his head. “That poor man is insane.”
I mean, that actually allows League to keep both lore traditions going in parallel, sort of like what Star Trek did with the new movies. For example, maybe the Rune Wars never happened in the current Riot canon continuity, or happened very differently. A lot would look very, very different in that timeline: no League, less interaction between nations, differences in Champion backstories, and so on.
I acknowledge that it's a bit silly, perhaps, to make a big deal over whether "something really happened" or "something really exists" in the context of fiction. Of course, it's all pretend, however much we try to suspend that disbelief. But it does sting a bit to have a favorite universe, into which you've become immersed, suddenly altered, especially when the alteration specifically removes "you" from that universe. So, silliness notwithstanding, I prefer to think of it as a timeline fracture rather than an "erasure". As far as I'm concerned, all the old lore still "happened".
