Kindred - some cool thematic notes

So, I have to say, I absolutely adore what we've seen so far of Kindred. (And not just because I like ADCs late game but play them atrociously in lane!) It's absolutely wonderfully put together, and the interaction between Lamb and Wolf is fabulous.

I wanted to share with the community some of the interesting things I've spotted so far, thematically, about the Kindred. They play really interestingly with a lot of familiar concepts, but give a cool new twist on them that I think really does make them unique to Runeterra.

First, I think that this is the first time I've seen someone really flesh out the idea of "Death as the hunter". The familiar portrayal of death, at least in Western culture, is the reaper man with his scythe. While we do have some figurative uses of a similar idea - "the jaws of death" - and death-heavy archetypes like assassins are often associated with hunting, the personification of Death itself as the hunter is new to me. However, the existence of the association makes it an intuitively appealing idea - it's familiar and reasonable enough that most people react with interest, rather than confusion. Or, to put it in terms I've seen used elsewhere, it's only one intuitive leap away from what we've seen before - while still being unique enough to require that leap.

The concept of Death as the hunter actually meshes very well with Death as an animal - hunting death in animals matches up very nicely with death patterns in humans, actually. It usually takes the weak, the old, and the sick quietly (an aspect that seems dominated by Lamb), while when an animal hunter kills something healthy, it is more likely to be a bloody battle for resources or territory (possibly dominated by Wolf, though he has more of an emphasis on chase than battle?), rather than the "natural"/expected death of a prey animal - that is, death by natural causes, taking the weak, vs death by bloody accidents or war taking the young and strong.

The second (very obvious) key thematic aspect of the Kindred is their duality, building out of the idea of Death the entity as being lonely. I feel like I've seen it before, but I'm not quite sure where - the closest I can think of is Discworld, particularly in Mort, but that's more wanting-to-be-human than loneliness. The idea of Death as lonely builds easily off of the simple realization that nobody wants to see Death, and our empathy with that, and the Kindred exist from a solution that has a fairy-tale sort of sensible nonsense to it - "he took an axe and split himself in two". Their duality springs from their origins as one entity, which is precisely why they are so different - when they split, aspects of the balanced original went primarily to one of the Kindred, leaving little for the other. The shared masks communicate the duality really well. I've got a lot less to say about this one, but I think overall it's handled super well.

Some notes that I'm interested in but less clear on -

1. Lamb and Wolf are animals, but they aren't just animals. They have some aspects of being slightly more advanced - Lamb's anthropomorphism, the masks, the use of a weapon. Are these evidence that humanity is projecting itself onto its death, even as it imagines death as animals? Remnants of the old Death that split himself to create them? Not quite sure.

2. They're ancient, but are they ancient as a collective entity (that is, both their current incarnation and the pale man with dark hair), or is the incarnation of Lamb and Wolf also ancient? If Lamb and Wolf are also ancient, then that implies that they, as spirits, either don't really exist or are affected by changing perceptions of them - I suspect that if they were unbelievably ancient, there would not be split by a sturdy axe. Sturdy enough axes to make sense for that take time to develop, I'd think.