Riot, please stop making every unnamed void creature a carbon copy of Vel'Koz
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;
- The Statues of the watchers on the Howling Abyss (One eye, tentacles,)
- The tentacled Voidborn in the Nami comic (One eye, tentacles, similar casing around the eye)
- The void creature who tried to corrupt Ryze in his cinematic (Again, one eye, and tentacles)
- 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.