Boards›Story, Art, & Sound

Please don't go with the PBE lore for Full Machine Viktor

Opop·8/21/2019, 1:16:24 AM·12 votes·6,106 views

First of all, I want to thank whoever is responsible for working on the skin bios that have been put up, they go a long way to make the skins be more more immersive, or at least they are an entertaining read that make up something nice to talk about with other lore enthusiasts.

Sometimes however I believe some of the skin bios end up in a bit of an odd situation, like with Phoenix Quinn becoming a silver age style super hero, or Lord Mordekaiser becoming a DnD sorta character, still, there wasn't much explaining about skins like those so their story was free to mold.

However, sometimes the skin bio ends up rather different than the original pitch, like how Tyrant Swain ended up going from Swain's ''moment of glory'' as he became the ruler of Noxus and ended being Swain's ''downfall'' skin, in which the Demon takes hold of him (this is somewhat understandable given that Swain's lore from 2012 was pretty different than the one he got in 2018).

Regardless, I wanted to bring up the last point for a reason.

On the PBE, Full Machine Viktor just got a skin bio, which reads as follows:

Full Machine Viktor: "Created from the same circuitry as the Full Metal champion, Jayce, Viktor was cast into the tunnels beneath the robot fighting arenas to serve as a janitoribot-- while his twin was groomed for glory, simulcast en español. Upgrading himself with the cast-offs of the destroyed, he has sworn la venganza."

Now, I can understand that the Full Machine skinline is not exactly meant to be serious (this is clear by listening to the voice lines from Nunu and WIllump-Bot) however, Full Machine Viktor did have a documented pitch way back before this lines was established as one of fighting robots.

http://kirstenzirngibl.blogspot.com/2012/01/viktor-fullmachine.html

In this blog (for the skin development) it's described as the following.

Model: ''After years of perfecting his augmentations, Viktor has succeeded in fusing his soul with an efficient magical humanoid machine. He is made entirely of various metals, and no organic materials. Magic is bursting from within him, and his design is a lot more refined, while retaining the fantasy grungy feel.''

Splash Art: ''This skin shows the future of Viktor, where he has replaced all of his humanity with machinery. He is "complete". He should be portrayed standing grand and majestically, Lord of the machines! In the background is something almost like a throne room made of hextechnological machinery. The technology in the background should follow a similar style to what you see in his costume design, kinda chunky and heavy and not too sleek or hightech.''

As such, the idea behind Full Machine Viktor is that of Viktor in his ''moment of glory'', that is, Viktor after becoming a ''full machine'', completely upgrading himself to perfection, just as he wanted With the current lore bio not only is he ''janitor bot'', he's also made of scrap metal, heck there's even a part that mentions him having faulty programming that makes him speak in spanish.

I know it's just a silly blurb of text with absolutely no relevance to any future piece of writing, but for the reasons that I mentioned above that make me really appreciate skin bios, I feel like this one is just disheartening for a character that I love so much.

9 Comments

Ebonmaw Dragon8/21/2019, 1:27:37 AM7 votes

What the hell? This makes 0 sense and it's kinda offending me as a fan of Viktor who owned that skin AND speak spanish... Like... Seriously what is the conection between spanish and Viktor?

AND "LA VENGANZA" IS WRONG, the correct way of saying what it say is: "he has sworn venganza." (el ha jurado venganza.) no one would say "el ha jurado la venganza"

Heck, that lore does not even make sense even if we dont count those details. If Viktor was "Created from the same circuitry as the Full Metal champion" then it would make no sense for RiotCorp to not use him in the Full Metal Robot Fighting League, since he was made with the same tech as the guy who "dethroned Pantheon and won the hearts of audiences worldwide"

Just keep the Full Machine away from the Full Metal.

Vartius8/23/2019, 3:07:51 AM6 votes

Also, Full Machine wasn't part of that skinline. Most of the skins there are Full Metal, not Full Machine. FM Viktor is its own thing that got shoehorned into an unfitting skinline, and also shoehorned in another Jayce reference, because Viktor's only defining character trait apparently has to be his rivalty with Jayce. Great.

Also the spanish... I like to believe that it wasn't meant to be a minority-with-low-wage-works joke and it was just about faulty programming, but... Why spanish of all languagues? Wouldn't something slavic make much more sense ? Still the bottom line is: it's a poorly executed joke either way.

Arcyvilk8/23/2019, 7:32:01 AM6 votes

It's such a misplaced change... Full Machine Viktor represents him achieving the pinnacle of his Glorious Evolution, him finally merging his soul with a machine. Now you try to change him achieving his ultimate dream into a janitor bot, and his ultimate goal from merging with machine, to outcompete his twin Jayce? What? Viktor's defining trait is not his rivalry with Jayce, it's his obsession with Glorious Evolution and Full Machine Viktor represents what he is trying to achieve.

Please don't allow this change to go live, Riot. It's a huge mistake to downgrade Full Machine Viktor like this. Besides this skin already has its lore.

#JanitorMains

The Anagram King8/21/2019, 7:55:20 PM5 votes

Why is it that Riot can't touch VIktor without making him worse in some obscure way?

I swear, if they had just stopped touching him after his first rework by Solcrushed (who was an absolute godsend), he would have been perfect. His bios keep getting dumber - replacing cool stories and themes with 'zany' robot villain/outcast tropes.

Like a remedial writing class, I swear.

TheMachineHerald8/23/2019, 3:07:54 AM4 votes

I'm Spanish and I'm honestly still trying to decipher what is the meaning behind the Spanish bits on his description, since (as someone else had pointed out before) it's not even properly written, and the whole idea of relating a janitor job to Spanish stuff may... be a slightly out of place joke. If it was intended to be a joke, of course, since I really want to believe it's simply some translation error.

Other than that, I don't have much else to add, as the main post sums this up. I feel like most wouldn't mind a lighthearted skin having some sort of silly lore, but to take a skin that was supposed to represent the pinnacle of Viktor's evolution and to turn it into something so degrading, that feels quite different

Hexmage8/23/2019, 3:24:53 AM4 votes

Precisely what I've (and other users of the #JanitorMains hashtag on Twitter) have been saying. I agree wholeheartedly about how skin bios often seem to twist or otherwise change the concepts that they originally were made to represent - yes, much lore has been retconned in the past years, but it seems disrespectful to cast aside what the creators were told to design for. (Blacksmith Poppy comes to mind: another lore skin - after all, in her original lore she was a blacksmith's daughter and helped out at the smithy - that's been put into a line that the original designers had no idea would exist. At least hers makes thematic sense!) The Spanish, as others have said, is incorrect. I'm curious to see how the joke (which I'm still not sure what it is. Is it a joke about Spanish telenovelas? About how Viktor can only receive the Spanish channel to watch Jayce? Why Spanish?) is translated - if at all - into other languages. Why is it included at all?

Why take a skin that was meant to be Viktor's crowning achievement and turn it into a scrap-scavenging janitor joke of a character?