The Void: Solving Lore Issues [Lore & Champion VO Suggestion]

The Void is a place of unknowable nightmares and hideous, otherworldly denizens. It's also the home to some of League's most ill-fitting champions.

See, the issue with the Void is that creatures from it are inherently single-minded, and often of limited sentience. This makes them fall flat as characters: instead of nuanced, relatable characters like we end up with fairly one-dimensional creatures. Cho'Gath lives to eat, and eats to live. Vel'Koz makes snide remakes while gathering knowledge, and does little else. Rek'Sai doesn't speak, and conveys nothing appreciable other than being a big monster.

These are the sorts of things that serve as great NPC characters (Herald, Baron, in-lore enemies, etc), but not as great champions. They lack the compelling hook we as players (and as humans) require to fall in love with. There's a good reason that some of the most popular void characters (in-lore, not in-game) are the humans -- Kassadin, Kai'Sa, and Malzahar all connect with the void in ways we can understand and appreciate as more than in-game entities that it's fun to stomp around as.

We want to capture the fantasy of unleashing these devastating creatures on Runeterra, which is fine, but we need a hook to make them not just another faceless monster of the week.

#So what can we do about this?

My suggestion revolves around the following quote from the Void's lore:

It is a force of insatiable hunger, waiting through the eons until its masters, the mysterious Watchers, mark the final time of undoing.

Denizens of the Void realm itself are construct-creatures, often of only limited sentience, but tasked with a singular purpose—to usher in total oblivion across Runeterra.

I feel we should embrace the monster-of-the-week feel, but express it through the eyes of the Watchers. Each champion would communicate telepathically with a present, speaking entity (likely a voice with echoes and multiple harmonics implying multiple entities), and express itself verbally as an animal like Rek'Sai might. These things aren't humans, after all -- they're monsters through and through.

Take Kha'Zix, for example. Instead of being a void-bug with a few dozen lines about eating people and evolving and not much personality behind him, he's a void-corrupted creature from the jungles of Runeterra, and the Watchers are pleased with their new toy.

His external voice lines become a bunch of insectile clicks and screeches, and his internal monologue becomes a dialogue between Kha'Zix (K) and the Watchers (W). And -- and this is the important part -- they respond to him. They egg him on. They talk about him as if he were a prized experiment. He's a creature of limited sentience, but they're invested in him, both as a toy and as a source of new information about the world they seek to destroy. Every Void creature becomes not only a monster-of-the-week, but another piece of insight into a powerful extraplanar entity that has motivations and desires and reasoning, even if it's not something we can understand.

Thoughts? I think this might give a distinct fantasy (and a unique but thematically shared fantasy, which is kind of cool) to the void monsters -- that of being an incredibly powerful entity with this immensely destructive beast at your disposal, watching as your creation destroys a puny, unprepared world. And isn't that what we all really want out of Cho'Gath?