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Orianna Reveck and the Lady of Clockwork

Cynneth··8 votes·1,429 views

The new lore for Orianna is a beautiful written and heartbreaking story. It shows us the life of a young girl and her coming to be more and more machine, the fading of her humanity. This story is not about Orianna though, but about a Piltovian inventor’s daughter: Orianna Reveck.

In the old lore the human Orianna Reveck died in a tragic accident. Her father Corin, driven into depression over the loss of his child, build a replacement. The clockwork machine Orianna should complete the late girls dream and live on forever as the perfect daughter in her father's eyes. In a world where people augment and replace their bodies with machine parts to the point where you have to question whether to call them still men, Orianna has been approaching this very horizon form the other side; artificial life at the brink of humanity. Learning that she is in fact not Orianna Reveck, going through a crisis of identity and searching for her own self. Discovering what it means to feel, how to feel, learning what it means to be, struggling with the concept of life and the world’s reaction to her existence; this could have been her journey. Could she become human? Or was she never more than a soulless clockwork shell, a petty automaton created by an illusional old man? We are never going to know.

I do like the new lore and the story for Orianna Reveck. Her journey is about remembering rather than discovering what it is to be human and coping with her new conditions. I am looking forward to see more of her life, hoping for an encounter with Blitzcrank, want to know more about how Viktor and the Glorious Evolved perceive her. It however marks the end of the Lady of Clockwork as I knew her.

The character that I have come to love is gone. Even so I have been given a replacement I can appreciate and will grow to like, deep inside I will always know this is not my little Orianna and I will always remember her the way she was.

9 Comments

DoktorKaiser6 votes

As an Ori main since season 1, I cant really explain my feeling on this new lore, but I kind of actually like it and when you think about it, it has more sence then the old lore, since I always kind of felt that real Orianna died stupidly and for nothing. Also old lore had to be changed since Ori died in the Tribunal and the robot was made to be a killer. This new one is a person losing everything that made her what she was and transforming into a machine and the old one was a copy of a person without anything human in the first place, they are so different yet I like them both. All in all, I will miss the old lore but I am very pleased with new one as well (although her voiceover is now questionable but I love it pls dont change it, just add more quotes), she feels more likeable, at least its not ruined like poor Viktor :(

Cynneth2 votes

In my opinion having her been human in the beginning is the easy way to make her more relatable. I would have liked to see them going further into the ethics of artificial intelligence. We are already exploring the ethical issues of cybernetics with Viktor’s Glorious Evolution and Camille’s highly augmented body. With Orianna (and Blitzcrank) the question has always been: At what point do they stop being a thing and become a person? Like how characters like GLaDOS from the Portal series or HAL 9000 from Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey feel oddly relatable when their show "emotions". (also I might be reading too much into this, but Fieram from Orianna’s color story could be a reference to the latter one with his favorite bouquet of flowers)

For a machine like the Lady of Clockwork to awake into a state of self-consciousness and her coming to terms with the reason of her existence would have made for a great story in my opinion. Accepting to not be Orianna Reveck but _Orianna _, becoming a person and finding herself with all the hardships associated with this could have made her an even more distinct character.

Maybe my point of view is too exotic in this regard. Riots lore team had the choice between two Oriannas. Both made for a good narrative and in the end they picked one. I can respect that choice and like you I find myself enjoying both representations of Orianna.

midnight oil245 votes

I honestly prefer this one to the old lore. Don't get me wrong, the old lore was great, but it was more or less: "Oh no, my daughter died for an inane reason to make a new champion. Better go batshit crazy and make a new one!"

This new one, however, replaces Orianna with Orianna Reveck, and it works far better. It creates a more tragic decline for both her and her father, as Corin, in his attempts to save his daughter, finds that he's slowly losing her instead. Orianna suffers too, as she's beginning to realize that she's something new, not the same smiling girl that talked to the customers and snuck out to watch the dancers. I almost cried at the point where Corin was taking her to the shows to try to get her to act like her old self, but she would ask to leave because she had already learned everything from watching them.

I find Orianna far more relatable now, as her steady change reminds me of the depression I go through, the steady moving from an energetic (not really in my case) and upbeat person to more of a lifeless husk just chugging along. That's why I love her new lore so much.

Cynneth1 votes

With Orianna this could have been the one time to pull of an Atreus. Build up her character as the young girl, show us her kindness and how happy she is with her father; have her overcome hardships and make us feel the same love Corin has for his daughter. This part could have been like in the current lore for Orianna.

And then take her away from us.

Leave us in despair and make us see the pain that drove Corin into depression. Show us how even his prowess in the field of techmaturgy was insufficient to save her; how his mourning ended in denial as he created the Clockwork Lady, everlasting and able to protect herself. In the old lore this Orianna was the character; her ball a representation of her father’s care and protection. And then it would be Oriannas journey and later Corin coming to terms with the death of his daughter, to finally let go and accept Orianna as who she wants to be.

Her new lore is very touching for all the right reasons and I really like her color story, I just think it would have been possible with the old Orianna as well. Maybe I am a little bit biased due to some stories like the comic Deux ex Machina - God of Mechanical Contraptions I read so long ago.

midnight oil241 votes

That could be very interesting, but could also go wrong very easily. I like this because it does seem similar to my depression, and Reveck losing his daughter more and more as he tried to save her is akin to the brighter side of my brain right now. Basically I just like it because it makes me feel as though Orianna is some representation for me.

GreenLore2 votes

Well the question is: If every Biological part of Orianna was replaced with Machines,then is that really Orianna Revec that we play as? I mean technically you could put the old Orianna completely back together and then have the corpse of the human Orianna next to the mechanical one.

So in a way,Revec did replace his daughter with a machine,its just that he himself did not realize that.

Windup3 votes

[deleted]

GreenLore1 votes

Yup. Overall I think the new lore brings up some very interesting questions about what makes us human(even more so than the old one).

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