http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100821100304/leagueoflegends/images/c/cd/MapofValoran.jpg

I've spent a genuinely stupid amount of time and energy on the League lore universe over the past couple years. Until a few months ago, I was extremely pleased by this decision. It got me out of writer's block, because the lightness and, well, derpiness of the League universe melted away my anxiety about writing: "come on, it's a story about freaking LEAGUE lore, just write, it's fine". It connected me with a community of other lore fans. And hey, people actually read what I wrote, and said they enjoyed it, so I like to think that I wasn't the only one who benefited from this decision. It meant a lot of jokes from my friends about working two full-time jobs, but I felt it was worthwhile.

http://i.imgur.com/v310XA7.jpg Pictured: A Zaunite techno-Summoner, 333lom, preventing conflict and constraining characters. Look at her! Art by 333lom, a community member.

I am far from the only one.

Was it a mistake? It might have been.

http://i.imgur.com/8WXE9Sb.jpg I sometimes prefer to think that Riot is genuinely ignorant of how much its community has invested in its lore.

I think I'm still glad that I chose to get invested, but suddenly, I have real reservations. I've spent a ton of time exploring and developing a world that has now several times been retconned and reworked beyond recognition. Riot was always kind of mercurial about lore, redoing Champ backgrounds and such, but nothing like this. There's sort of an implicit understanding between a universe's authors and the community, implicit within the invitation to get immersed, that the fantasy walls will hold, even if some furniture gets moved around. Here, Riot doesn't seem to hesitate before sledgehammering major pieces of its setting.

I don't know why they're doing this. My lead theory is that they want to make more Runeterra games, and consider themselves to be back in the "blank slate" stage.

Whatever their rationale, clearly they think it outweighs the decimation of the lore community and their (our) years of investment into the setting. I'm not quite saying I want to go back in time and take back my decision to start Factions or read the Journal of Justice. I'm just saying that the stress and anxiety that those decisions have brought me are serious enough that it's not any easy call.

The Great Retcon was just the first punch.

http://i.imgur.com/VwNfxO6.jpg Garen (constrained horribly by Summoners) strikes through the Great Barrier, clearing the path for a Demacian assault on Shurima, triggering an international crisis. This will stop making sense when they release the new map and there is no Great Barrier between Demacia and Shurima.

Retcons are about the worst thing you can do to a community. There's nothing that breaks immersion or invalidates prior community creations quite the way retcons do, especially sweeping retcons.

Let's take a brief inventory of Riot's larger retcons:

• The League of Legends. Riot retconned the League of Legends from the lore of League of Legends. Let that sink in.
• Summoners. Riot also retconned us out of the universe.
• The layout of Valoran. Though they haven't released a replacement map, they have said that the current map is no longer canon. After retconning the League, and Summoners, this was about the most continuity-breaking retcon they could pull.

We no longer have a connection between the game and the storyverse. We no longer have a presence in the universe. And we no longer even know what the world looks like.

So place your bets: is this the last "last time"? Or are they going to keep their serial retcons coming? Have they written off the League universe? Are they just trying to bang together a marketable Runeterra setting?

The retcons aren't just killing the community. They're killing the heart of the lore.

http://i.imgur.com/xh7eul8.jpg More art by 333lom. It shows a yordle scientist at the moment of her great breakthrough at Piltover Academy, which may or may not exist tomorrow.

Maybe Riot's giving up on having a story for League, and is banking on a new media empire with this Leagueless Runeterra at its center. Even if that's their goal, I would question their decision: what a setting needs is a certain magic, a certain internal chemistry. I think, for all its faults, the old League universe had that. This new League universe? It's pretty hollow. It's overproduced and hollow. It does everything just right, hits all the authorial buzzwords and media reqs, but it has no heart. It's like a Hollywood movie: the product of a truly painful volume of highly paid talent, gone over a thousand times with fine-toothed combs looking for any hints of a "mistake", venturing nothing, risking nothing, surprising no one, inspiring no one.

If I'd started League a couple weeks ago, I'm pretty sure I'd never have started writing League stories or becoming invested in the universe. I'm fairly certain I'd never have started Factions. There's nothing here that inspires. Nothing novel or interesting. Just a bunch of well-produced intro-marketing pieces for new Champions and skins.

The original League universe was stupid as hell sometimes, but it caught the eye. I mean, a fantasy UN created to prevent the world's destruction through magical WMDs, an interconnected fantasy universe with newspapers and ray guns and knights all crashing together into one surreal metropolis: these are eye-catching ideas. The new Runeterra? "Here's Ekko. He is from a place called Zaun. It's basically Shadowrun with some extra mutants. Now watch him exercise his agency to confront a difficult challenge and emerge from the experience having grown as a person." It is absolutely the way to write a character story. It is correct. It is professional. It is dull as hell. The original characters in League didn't have such well-produced backstories; their backstories were crazy grab-bags of random events and flashes of personality. But the idea of all these characters, most of whom were ripped off from one place or another, joining the League together and meeting one another? Whoa. That's kind of a neat idea. What if a frontier sheriff and an Arthurian knight ended up crossing paths? I can work with this. No individual faction in Runeterra is particularly interesting, either; they're all rehashes of standard fantasy tropes. But putting them all together on one planet? That's pretty freaking interesting. That gets my attention. I can write stories about that. That's fun.

The new Leagueless Runeterra? You can't say it's bad as such. You kind of have to agree it's good. But it's not inspiring. It's got no soul. It's too freaking careful for a soul. There are no derpy gaps or plot holes within which a quirky kind of magic can develop. It's all hammered-down, tightly-sealed "product". Even if all Riot wants to do is start stamping out more games, books, movies, and merch, this new Runeterra doesn't have the heart to sustain it.

I'm reminded of what I think may serve as a cautionary tale: Wars TCG. It was a customizable card game, like Magic. It was created by the same people who did the awesome original Star Wars CCG. They lost their Star Wars license, so they made their own setting. It was filled with art, music, lore. Much of it was quite high-quality. They really broke the bank. And it failed, not least because, although everything was done right, you cannot reliably create magic. Sometimes a setting springs to life. Sometimes it doesn't. It's perhaps also not unlike the Star Wars prequels compared to the original trilogy. It's hard to predict whether a creative work will really take off and thrive, but inasmuch as these things have rules, one rule seems to be that derpy, slapped-together, somewhat frantically constructed settings have a higher likelihood of coming to life than overproduced Hollywood ones. George Lucas running around with a handful of underpaid crew members going "OH MAN WE HAVE LIKE FOUR WEEKS LEFT SOMEONE GET ME SOME BATTLESHIP MODEL KITS AND A SHINY METAL ROBOT SUIT OH FORGET IT LET'S JUST REMAKE A KUROSAWA MOVIE WITH LASERS" in the desert produced something magical and memorable. George Lucas sipping coffee in front of computer screens, surrounded by hundreds of millions of dollars of technology, talent, and shiny-eyed staff eager to pour all their hard work into making one tiny piece of this project absolutely perfect produced something eminently forgettable.

http://40.media.tumblr.com/126717f6169a5f5c0b078e69fa62a099/tumblr_mngeu7Ng0Z1rwthleo1_1280.png Another heartfelt piece of community art broken by Riot's casual blank-slate retcon. From Becoming a Summoner.

The original League lore was smacked together on a tight timeline with a primary objective of "give this game a story". That's an awkward, difficult task. And it brought out some crazy leaps of creativity. Slapping down totally standard, and (with all due respect) not terribly well-executed fantasy tropes onto this rocky, bumpy, awkward foundation produced some remarkable innovations, by necessity. It also produced some cracks and gaps which needed filling. An engaged, enchanted community is very willing to pour its love out to fill in those little imperfections. (Again, Star Wars: it's full of half-built allusions and apparent contradictions, which have been embraced by the community and transformed from mistakes into gems. "A Kessel Run in 12 parsecs? Let's figure out why that could possibly make sense. Hey, what if there's a big black hole?") But now Riot's ripping up that rocky foundation, sanding it smooth, and pouring sparkly shiny product on top. Naively, one might think that removing the awkwardness will make it better; take out the strange and leave the good. But it doesn't work like that. It's a living, interconnected thing.

Riot's like Johnny 5 trying to "RE-ASSEMBLE" the butterfly or grasshopper or whatever it was. You can't smash a living thing to pieces and then put it back together, expecting it to return to life. Complex organic systems don't work like that. Re-rolling your setting is a really risky move. The old Runeterra had some kind of spark of life. Riot's pulling a Wars TCG now. There's some chance that new Runeterra will develop its own spark, but the odds don't look that good.

The diehards are dying. This should concern Riot.

http://static.tumblr.com/aidcuae/7JXm48ntx/lileyx_chan_comission_by_gladosy-d472gtt2_copy.gif More community art broken by Riot. This example from the Becoming a Summoner site.

Anyone who has stuck with Riot's loreverse for this long is pretty crazily dedicated. When we start saying "screw this, I wish I'd never cared about your stupid universe", that should be a cause for concern. I'm pretty sure the top-level people think about chroma packs and such about a thousand times more often than they think about lore. Riot as a company seems to still have an "oh yeah, there's lore or something, right?" attitude. But I think we're finally at the point where even the diehards are, well, dying. If there's a time for Riot to have some serious qualms about what it's doing with its storyverse, I think it's now.

If Riot wanted to be decent about this, they would have, perhaps years ago, published a simple letter stating that they were closing the League universe and making a new one. Stringing us along like this was a dick move. To be honest, the main thing that keeps me going is sheer bloody-mindedness, mixed with a not inconsiderable amount of anger. I'm not sure how much longer that will last.

That's where I am. I am saying that I'm going to sneak off in my little bits of free time to write fanfic based on the old Runeterra with some other diehards who don't want to die just yet. Underneath it all is the truly insane belief that there's enough magic in the old Runeterra that this scrappy band can produce better, more compelling lore than whatever the giant clanking Riot machine can churn out. Understaffed by a thousandfold, underqualified beyond comparison, underfunded by an essentially infinite multiplier, but we think there's something special in old Runeterra and we think that can be enough. We're going to take the stone they rejected, the League, and make it our cornerstone. This is certifiably stupid. It isn't going to work. I can't see how it can end but badly for us, and yet I also can't see a way to make myself not want to do it. Let's at least go out tilting at windmills.