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My 2 Cents: Lore

Talos of Altmora·3/16/2016, 12:27:42 AM·6 votes·1,429 views

The Lore Of League of Legends has always been a very interesting draw for me. I started playing Moba's a couple of years ago, my first being Dota 2. While it is a fun game, the lore often took a backseat to the game. Which is fine, there is nothing wrong with that. League was different because the characters felt like people. They each had a unique style, personality, and fun gameplay. I soon came to enjoy the storylines in the game, and often wondered how it would turn out. However, it turns out I had joined shortly after Riot's Lore team decided on a choice that was very controversial in the eyes of many of it's fans, and that was deciding that the Institute of War and the in-universe League of Legends was taken out of continuity.

At first, I really didn't care, and while fans on that particular Dev Blog were very quick to show their displeasure, It is practically ignored by the community (at least as far as I can see). However, the lore team seems to think that the stigma will go away, and while I was trying to read some of the old lore and actually getting into it for the first time (I usually just stuck to the character pages) made changes to the lore my fellow players loved.

Now, I joined at a time when Kailista had been released. I came across said Dev Blog article and read it to see what all the fuss is about. Now, I understand what they wanted to do; They wanted to expand the setting and found the summoners restrictive. I agreed with them that summoners were powerful, they managed to stop a potential war, keep Nocturne, Cho'gath, and many other dangerous entities in a some-what controlled state. The thing that stuck out at me was how they said it restricted them when it came to backstory. Every new champion needed a reason to join and remain in the League, and as their number grew, the net result was that over time the world started to feel, well, small, and eventually less interesting.

I tilted my head at that. "Well of course they need a reason to join the League, why would they be there if they didn't?" Then I did a thought experiment and tried to find reasons that champions released after the fact could join the league. Re'sai was captured, Ekko wants to show his vision of Zaun, Kalista wishes to help the various grudge bearers, Bard believes that the League is somehow endangering the universe, ect. Another thing is that they decided to break up the lore and the game. They said that using the lore to explain the game mechanics is restrictive as well. At this point I was very, very confused. They also took the summoner's out of it entirely, which means if their goal was to insure us pesky summoners stayed out of it then mission accomplished.

As I have said, this is largely ignored by the fans. I mean, it's not like Riot could STOP us from saying that the Institute of war is still Canon. Lore (aside from new champion teasers and trailers) became pushed to the background. Depressingly like Dota. Still I thought I had give the new lore for various characters that were being rewritten a chance, but the lore was about three lines long. Then Burning Tides came out, and I thought it was good, for one it hardly changed anything, and it showed me Bilgewater for the first time. The only thing that I disliked about it was Miss Fortune; my interpretation of her from the old lore was a woman who could kill Gangplank as a last resort, but the new Miss Fortune was...not. I was so unhappy that I asked Riot to delete her from my account, and they agreed. Still, I had realized something from that experience; the first of which was that Riot's lore team made a character I once enjoyed into something that disturbed me. The other being that Riot's Lore team has no way to get criticism from us.

I remained silent from that point, but then Targon was getting the same treatment. Except they changed a lot of lore. The New Mount Targon is now a place of aspects. While I thought The New Diana was just okay, Leona had become the very opposite of her character, seemingly becoming just as bad as the rest of the Solari if what I read from it was any indication, but then I came to Pantheon. The main problem with him is that he is not Pantheon, he isn't even the warrior we were introduced to in his story. He is "an Aspect of War", a practical god. Pantheon used to be the "normal" human of Targon. That made him stand out, all he l needed was a connection to the Solari/Lunari conflict, and because he was Leona's childhood friend I thought that when Targon got it's day in the limelight that it would explore it, explore any connections between him and his fellow Targoinans. But to the new lore, He practically has no connections to the others, he was not a warrior who wished to be a baker, he is nothing like his old incarnation.

Let me be clear, It's not like a he was reworked like Poppy or Trundle, If they did maybe I wouldn't dislike it as much, but now what little I knew about him and all that potential was gone. He used to be my favorite champion, he was my first main, but now I can no longer go back to reading his old lore without the new hanging in the balance. I found it sad that I prefered the fanfiction more than I like the professional writers at riot. The worst part was that, as far as I know, Riot doesn't get the criticism. Even In that Dev blog we disliked it, comments by rioters were downvoted in the hundreds. That didn't stop them. Where is OUR voice in all of this? I don't want to retcon the League back in, I just don't want riot to abandon it's old stories. Update them sure, but why change them so far? Runeterra is seems to be no place for summoners, yet we are still here.

Please tell me your thoughts on this. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

29 Comments

WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOO3/16/2016, 12:51:10 AM3 votes

Well, Responding to one of your points, Riot's lore team wants to tell more interesting ongoing stories, and having an all powerful institute around just never allowed anything to happen on a large scale. The Harrowing for instance is something that the Institute would never permit, every champ from the Shadow Isles would be destroyed, and that wouldn't be interesting at all.

And Rek'Sai, if she gets captured then what? Where can her story go? It's done, she's captured.

Finally, I think a lot of the people here had their own version of Pantheon in their heads and all were different from another. This was all well and good when Pantheon was a walking movie reference and his more consisted of "This guy likes war, a lot". The baker joke was just that, a joke. Riot decided to flesh out the Targonian into the character they want him to be, rather than leave him to be what he was.

Warlord Dienekes3/16/2016, 1:29:27 AM2 votes

Is he though?

Atreus was very well developed, actually Atreus was kind of amazingly close to what I wanted to see. But what do we know about Pantheon other than what it is? Not it's personality, just what it is? And even then people are confused since some people still seem to think of him as a god, and not the space parasite he is.

Now, even if we go back to the Old!Panth (who I think did have the bare bones of personality, but I won't get into that again) and strip him down to just "he is an amazing soldier for the Rakkor people of Targon," and that's it. Do you really believe that you can't use that as a foundation to tell stories to mean something? War stories can be amazing! War stories can be how we analyze how various people are confronted with the brutality of the world.

And beyond that, he was a Spartan. Just go look at what the actual Spartans were like, you could write a hundred stories just about the Agoge and how that would straight up screw with people. Who is he going to war with? What battles has he fought? How have they scarred him? Does he embrace all of it, is there some part of him that despises what he has had to do on the field? Has he had to commit horrors to win a war? All of this could have come together to create an amazing and memorable character.

Instead they almost did that, named him Atreus, killed him off and gave us a space parasite.

Warlord Dienekes3/16/2016, 12:58:10 AM1 votes

I can think of a few ways you could progress Rek'Sai after being captured: Who captured her and for what reason? Were there experiments on her? Did she get free? How? Is she smart enough to go all Moby Dick on those who captured her?

I do agree with Talos of Altmora on Pantheon though. We may all have had out concept of Pantheon, sure, but I am willing to bet that no one's version of Pantheon was a guy who got possessed by some sort of nigh immortal extra-terrestrial slaver that claims to be a god, but really isn't. There's tweaking a character to make more story potential, then there's completely re-writing what he was. Pantheon was completely re-written.

Warlord Dienekes3/16/2016, 3:15:01 AM1 votes

Well yes, Targon and Greece are different. Because Riot decided to write them that way. Let's be honest, there is no actual reason besides "Riot wanted to" that the setting is in any way like it is. It doesn't make consistent, logical sense it's purely in the realm of "just roll with it logic." There definitely could have been a various mountain groups on or near Targon with the Rakkor being the top dogs of warfare, but they decided to instead make it 3 Rakkor, Solari, and the extinct Lunari.

There could have been more to it, but instead of focusing on the human (or the interesting part in my mind), they instead decided to go a completely different route and focus on body snatching alien things. That route, I certainly know I didn't ask for, but for all I know someone might have liked the idea. It just seems so completely out of nowhere to me.

Photos of Ghosts4/8/2016, 9:24:55 AM1 votes

Why are you downvoted D: