Riven Emote: Why?

Emotes are art, I assume, so, I suppose this should go here.

Back when she launched almost 5 years ago, Riven was one of the few female champions in League that was not overly sexual in her representation. As stated in Riven's ORIGINS interview, "Many female champions in League were scantily clad and pretty sexualized, so this was a chance to deepen League’s portrayal of female characters. 'I was passionate about Riven being a female because she’s a badass and she’s covered up,' RiotManton says." However, this passionate perspective apparently only lasted until Riot determined they could actually make money by giving in to the community desires to put Riven into a fetish outfit, and take some of those covering clothes off, and Battle Bunny Riven was born.

Since then, Riven's image has been almost synonymous with Battle Bunny. It's in a vast majority of her fanart (including the unseemly kind because it's definitely a fetish skin), and is also the most popular skin to cosplay (possibly due to ease compared to her other skins, but I digress). The problem for me, and why I'm writing this, is that Battle Bunny Riven is not what or who Riven is. And, I feel the new emote that's been shipped to PBE only goes a step further in demeaning and damaging Riven's character. In addition, Riven's emote (to the best of my knowledge anyway) also seems to be the ONLY skin featured in an emote, and it's the skin that least represents her character and personality (a trend that's seen way too much in fanart to begin with, where all other characters are in standard attire, except Riven).

To be honest, I'm not exactly looking forward to emotes in League in general, mostly because the system gives players yet another way to taunt and terrorize other players ingame with repeated flashing of something, just like mastery emotes do now. It's yet another means of psychological warfare to get people to tilt, even if that's not the intended use of the system.

But when it comes to Riven's representation in the game, I feel this emote is a step in the wrong direction. Ever since Battle Bunny went live, Riot has been trying to repair the damage done, I feel. Every skin released since then, more or less, has been representative of the strong, powerful woman she is, with the exception, possibly, of Arcade Riven, but even then she's basically a video game heroine, and that works well enough. Dawnbringer Riven was amazing as well, showing that even if she's made to look distinctly feminine, she can still be powerful, regal, intimidating, a force of reckoning. And that's great.

But this emote sends mixed messages. And while the emote itself is not directly sexual, it does call back to the skin itself, which does harm to who and what she should be. Alternatives could be literally any other Riven skin, if Riot wished to use a skin. They could even use the championship Riven skin, as that one, supposedly, is supposed to be the skin with the highest winrate linked to it. But out of all the skins she has, the one chosen was the most damaging one, and, in my opinion anyway, I feel it was the wrong choice for the character's representation within the game.