Aesthetic Reasons Behind Kai'sa's Apparently Unnecessary Sexualization

There's been a lot of discussion about how Kai'sa being portrayed as conventionally attractive doesn't fit with the idea of her being a "survivor." In particular, I really agreed with the video by T B Skyen that was linked in another thread here a few days ago. His points are accurate and well presented. In case you haven't watched it, the video is here. His overall point is that Kai'sa does not look like she's been through the things she's stated to have been through in her lore. This isn't even worth arguing over. Neither her appearance nor her personality are remotely plausible for someone with her stated set of experiences. I do, however, disagree with the point of view that this was an incredible, original design that got butchered so Riot could make fap material for thirteen year olds. I think the imagery serves a purpose as visual shorthand for what she does.

I like her design, her overall aesthetic, and especially the concept for what she's supposed to do. The first thing I saw was her splash, and I immediately latched onto the suit, and the idea of an aggressive, agile, high skill cap carry with the tools to succeed in the way Vayne just can't at higher levels of play. I love exosuits and I love champions where the only real limit is the player, and I knew from the second I saw her that that was what she was going to be. Her design still doesn't match her lore, but the gameplay concept was in place well before the lore. I think it's important not to underestimate first impressions, and for someone who is more verbal than visual, they're going to glance at the splash and immediately open the link to the description riot made. The first thing they're going to see is the word "survivor" over and over again, and rightly wonder what the hell Riot was thinking with her design. Meanwhile I open up that page, overcome my momentary confusion at seeing the indomitable apex predator labeled a "survivor," file it away as backstory that's far behind her, and keep reading. While I'm willing to admit that she's not a perfect design by any stretch of the imagination, her problems aren't as bad as they're being made out to be, and are far less damning of Riot's commitment not to unnecessarily sexualize female champions than it would first appear.

On Kai'sa's champion insights page, her designer states that her concept started with the idea of an aggressive, assassin-like marksman. It's also stated that everything about her design is meant to suggest movement. Given this, the modeling team probably started with a similar body shape to Vayne or Fiora, as these champions are also agile, aggressive, and punished heavily for mistakes. Both of these champions have tight fitting clothing, and Vayne actually wears a body suit. When we think of characters outside of league that fit that description, what immediately comes to my mind is Sammus, any of the female warframes from Warframe, Quorra from Tron Legacy, and Black Widow, as well as countless other examples. These characters are all very agile, and most of them have a fighting style that is not only aggressive, but cunning. Predatory. They also tend to go down fairly quickly if they're not able to evade what's being thrown at them. There are both highly sexualized uses of this trope and less sexualized examples, but in general these characters have attractive faces even in the tamer examples. I'm not sure whether the attractive face is necessary, or even important, but it's worth noting that it's the default for characters following this visual archetype, even more so than it's the default for all women in films and games.

Popular culture in general often uses "curvy woman in form-fitting clothing" as shorthand for "agile, cunning, relatively squishy." In the case of the warframes, this still works as cultural shorthand despite their body plan being the only human characteristic they have. That's either a testament to how powerful social conditioning can be, or indicative that portraying cunning and agile characters with that shape may not be as arbitrary as it first appears. Riot using this trope to convey what Kai'sa does isn't really sexualization, or it’s at least not sexualization being done by Riot. Riot is just using a visual archetype to convey information to players. Kai'sa's curves are there for the same reason as with Vayne or Fiora, although they are slightly more pronounced on Kai'sa. While this could be "just because," it's more likely this was simply done to make her animations look right. Her stances and animations in game are much longer and closer to the ground compared to Fiora or Vayne's more upright posture. Maybe that somehow requires her to have more to work with in that department.

In my mind, this isn't an example of Riot arbitrarily sexualizing a character against their lore, it's a case of Riot using an archetype to convey gameplay information and failing to take that into account when choosing lore for her. Is Riot choosing to simply go with an archetype similar champions already use lazy, or just consistent design? Is there some alternative to this visual shorthand? Well, the concept art for the Zaunite character they were considering does a pretty good job of conveying the same thing, but he's male, and he also does it by using another version of the "cunning and agile hunter" archetype, specifically the one seen in Bloodborne. If there is some obvious example of a female character design that conveys the same concept with fewer curves, please correct me on this, but at the moment nothing is coming to mind. This is referring specifically to a design that suggests the "cunning and agile" variety of hunter, not a "ranger" like Ashe, or the raw ferocity exemplified by Rengar. I don't hear complaints about Vayne or Fiora, and many of the other examples I listed are also strong characters in spite of their sexualization, so I think this archetype can be used responsibly, whatever its origins.

At least for me, Riot's attempts at visual shorthand worked. I took one look at the splash and immediately understood her gameplay identity. I think that level of clarity is an accomplishment that completely vindicates the design half of the lore/design conflict.

That being said, I do think this was something of a missed opportunity. Her visuals fit her very well if you look beyond the lore. A few details could be changed to make it better, but the real missed opportunity is her personality and VO. They just feel dissonant and bland. The personality in particular just is not believable for her lore, and voice lines and VO at least had to have been done after her lore was hashed out. I've put my thoughts on exactly how I would've liked to see these done, but it's long and a lot of it is really specific to my tastes. You're welcome to just skip to the end. The first paragraph is about visuals, the second is about her personality, and the last two are about whether she should have scars and how she should've been presented to players to minimize confusion about her identity. Other than that, no need to read further to respond to what I've said.

Thoughts on what could have been done better:

The champion gets a lot from her current appearance, but I do still think it’s lacking something. I think the part of the suit that covers her stomach and sides is really boring compared to the rest of it. It's really thin looking, the iridescent scales thing it tries for doesn't look great, and taken together it just doesn't look nearly as cool as the rest of the suit. I also think the heavier looking leg pieces could come up a little higher, ending just below the top of her hips, instead of at her thighs. This would make the design look less sexualized without compromising the aesthetic. I’ve heard some people saying the suit doesn’t look organic, but I think the suit definitely has an organic look to it, but it's still a suit, not a creature that can survive on its own. This is how it’s supposed to be. I don't really get how people are reading it as not being organic. It could just be that I'm used to seeing weirdly textured metal and thinking of it as organic due to playing Warframe. I'm kind of neutral on the exposed skin. If it really makes her look that much more human, then fine. If it’s not nessecary, it shouldn’t be changed it by making the V-neck shallower. The current angle the bottom of the V-neck has is an angle that crops up other places in her design, and changing it to a less acute angle would take away from that. It should just be directly shifted up so that it doesn’t come down as far, and also doesn’t show as much of her shoulders to preserve the angle. I have no problem reading the PROJECT champions as human, and no problem reading Kai'sa with her helmet on as a human in armor. The helmet clearly isn't her head. It’s far too angular and metallic to be mistaken for that. Ultimately, I don't care, because I play with the helmet on anyways. I also wish her upper arms in the splash art weren’t so spindly, that's a pet peeve of mine and I think it bugs a lot of other people too.

Her personality is probably the part of her that makes the least sense. I'm not upset that we don't have another champion with edgy backstory and VO; quite the opposite, I'm almost willing to overlook how little sense it makes just because it's nice not to cringe at every line. But really, she's way too friendly and mentally put together for someone who spend years with no human contact, fighting constantly against abominations from a dimension that makes even the craziest of bad trips seem tame by comparison. I kind of expected her to be desperate for companionship after all those years in the void, but to be too spacy, otherworldly, and non-verbal in her thinking for meeting that need to be easy. That would also provide a convenient explanation for why she's viewed as a monster. Maybe she's physically unchanged, but the real changes are to her mind. She would still have all her human values, but substantial differences in cognition. I think getting out of the void with only a strange, half-psychedelic way of perceiving and making sense of the world is more than you can reasonably hope for after interacting with the void for that long. This might even be an interesting way to experiment with having a neurodiverse champion. The void is a weird, abstract, conceptual, almost mathematical dimension. Perhaps in the void concepts can exist free from any specific implementation of them, unlike physical reality where concepts are leaky generalizations used to describe similarities between collections of particles. Adjusting to there once again being specifics of things would be quite a shift. Perhaps the only reason she was able to survive the void in the first place was due to her already being more comfortable with abstract concepts than the imperfect physical objects they represent. Perhaps this is even why the suit was able to bond with her. I know Riot wants her to be human, but someone who thought like this would definitely still be human, and it's actually pretty insulting to imply otherwise. I’m aware that she technically didn’t live in the void, but honestly exposure to the things that come out of it should be bad enough on its own. As mentioned, Malzahar and the fish thing didn’t go into the void and still came out mutated. Prolonged exposure to void-related things during a critical period of neurological development leaving her untouched because of the suit is just absurd. I think if it was done this way it would be believable and relatable, and not simply make you want to scream "Oh god I'm sorry!" every time she opens her mouth. Her current voice over also has too many long lines and not enough interactions. I'm just throwing a guess out there, but I think a lot of Kai'sa's current personality comes from not wanting her to be too similar to Vayne. Vayne's personality is best described as "paranoid paranormal vigilante," and if Kai'sa was also paranoid as a result of her experiences, that might be encroaching on Vayne's territory. This should neatly avoid that.

As for not having scars, a champion like Kai'sa is supposed to rely on not getting hit. Katarina is much the same way, and her scar is a reminder of a major past failure. Any scar Kai'sa has should signify something. It shouldn't be from her encounter with the voidling, since she has the suit from that. Perhaps she was attacked while she was attempting to speak to a group of humans? Maybe she was attacked as a result of miscommunication and doesn't understand why they were friendly one moment and attacking her the next. That would make for an interesting story, and an interesting point of internal conflict in Kai'sa; her desire to be loved and accepted against her desire not to make herself vulnerable. If we made it a point in the lore, scars would be really cool, but don’t just add them for the sake of making her look grittier.

So, why do we have the idea in mind that Kai'sa is a "survivor"? Her backstory has her surviving in the void for years, sure, but the real reason that specific word "survivor" comes up is because it is the word riot used every time they try to describe her. That's simply not a good description of her. It takes a backstory which is little more than a weak excuse for her to existence concocted late in her development, and blows it up to be bigger than the actual concept she was designed around. This isn't entirely the fault of the people writing her announcement and champion insights. It's very difficult to tell someone what she actually is in a way that doesn't drift into gameplay terms or comparisons to other works. Try describing the PROJECT skin line in a way that accurately conveys what it is without using the word "cyberpunk" or a comparison to any other film or game. Now go watch PROJECT: OVERDRIVE. Go read The Bird and the Branch, and then try to picture a video champion trailer for Taliyah that conveys a tenth of what that short story did. Some things are explained better with words, some things are best explained with visuals. This champion would undoubtedly have had a better reception if what she was was properly explained via some sort of visual medium. I get that not every champion can have a release video, but I think this really would have been the place to use one. I think a video of her fighting a big void creature would be pretty easy concept-wise and perfectly sufficient. The music would serve as another huge opportunity to convey the speed and driving rhythm behind her playstyle, and how that served as the inspiration for her aesthetic more than anything else.

TLDR:

Kai'sa was meant to a cunning and agile predator well before she was given lore painting her as a survivor. On the surface, these identities don't seem to conflict, but when you consider what visual shorthand is commonly used for "agile and cunning," you end up with a character whose backstory says they should be lean, battle scarred, and shell-shocked, but can't easily be shown as such without giving up an aesthetic that communicates her gameplay. Why she's so friendly and sociable after what she's been through is anyone's guess. I think this was a failure by riot to choose a suitable backstory or voice actor/lines for a champion whose aesthetic was largely dictated by gameplay considerations, and the way she is presented in her champion announcement as still being a "survivor," rather than the fearless and cunning predator she now is, did nothing to mitigate that. I think properly showing what she's supposed to be would have been a lot easier with a video than with these descriptive essays we were given. The design is fine visually, the personality, lore, and presentation are where the problems lie. She's sexualized, but it's to fit an aesthetic, not because Riot saw an opportunity to make fap material for thirteen year olds and just couldn't help themselves.

Let's have a discussion about what other aesthetics might work to communicate the same ideas. I admit I'm partial to designs that utilize this aesthetic, but I'd like to think it's more than just the sex appeal. I'll do my best to be objective in considering whether a suggestion would still read as the same visual shorthand while avoiding sexualization. Let's be specific in our examples where possible, so we can go google what the character looks like.