Riot, please stop making every unnamed void creature a carbon copy of Vel'Koz

DWT12345·8/29/2018, 11:47:03 PM·3 votes·2,868 views

From Gnar's new bio:

Heaving itself up from the newly opened abyss, it bore huge horns, whipping tentacles, and a single eye.

This is basically a word-for-word description of Vel'Koz, except the part about the horns, which confirms that it's not Vel himself. If no two voidborn are the same, it's kind of agonizing when so many of them get mistaken for another. This is literally the fifth time a void creature has been seen/depicted in the lore that bore massive similarities to Vel'Koz, and it comes off as kind of lazy. Before this, we had;

  1. The Statues of the watchers on the Howling Abyss (One eye, tentacles,)
  2. The tentacled Voidborn in the Nami comic (One eye, tentacles, similar casing around the eye)
  3. The void creature who tried to corrupt Ryze in his cinematic (Again, one eye, and tentacles)
  4. The eye in "Lissandra's" story. (One eye, with a ton of emphasis on the fact that it's an eye.)

And now this. When you take everything unique and iconic about a champion and then just slap it on a bunch of nobodies in the lore, it makes the champion themself feel like a nobody, like if another nameless, blonde-haired light mage suddenly showed up in a short story. I get that Riot is moving towards a new direction for the Void, which is fine, but that doesn't mean that every voidborn should share certain aspects that only one actual void champion has. Vel is the only in-game void creature with one eye, so it strikes me as odd that it would be such a staple of void creatures.

As a dedicated Vel'Koz player and a big fan of the character in general, making all of his key aspects commonplace ends up stripping the character of his identity. Vel'Koz is supposedly the oldest and most powerful voidborn besides the Watchers, so when all of the weakling and fodder void creatures look like him, you don't get that impression of him in-game.

6 Comments

Camille Ferrøs8/30/2018, 12:04:54 AM3 votes

They are probably his kind of monsters if this is still cannon like how Rek'sai is the queen of the Xer'sai monsters. Vel'koz might be the oldest and the mightiest of the koz or vel kind of monsters. Also the statues on the map are the looks of the Frozen Watchers that are completely deleted from the current lore.

GreenLore8/30/2018, 1:02:57 PM2 votes

Gnars lore describes the actual watchers who were long known to have a single eye and horns and given that the watchers are inspired by lovecraftian horrors like cthulhu its no surprise that they have tentacles as well.

So in your list of creatures that look similar to Vel'koz you are counting the watchers 3 times(as number 1,4 and this one all describe/depict the watchers).

Also the tentacled voidborn in Namis comic looked quite differently than Vel'koz,its "eye" was just a purple glowing mass that did not even look like an eye and its tentacles looked like seaweed.

mrmeddyman8/30/2018, 10:35:51 AM1 votes

Vel'koz is the oldest Voidborn and was probably made in the Watchers image because they had no reference point.

Vel'koz looked like the Watchers in the old lore (we don't know what they look like anymore)

Your problem isn't so much that all Voidborn look alike then that Vel'koz looks like what people believe the Watchers to be