Context: Riot's Commitment to Originality

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People asked for a tl;dr, so I'm giving you two of them.

TL;DR1: Look at the picture above. Imagine Narrative saying, "We can't read community lore because that'd basically be STEALING." If you laugh, you get the gist of this thread.

TL;DR2: Some people think that Narrative is claiming it cannot read fanfic, look at fan art, or read "specific story ideas" (whatever that means) because of professional integrity or legal liability. First off, I don't think they're saying that. Second, if they were saying that, they would be wrong to the point of delusion. And finally, as this thread explains, there would be something really funny about RIOT GAMES expressing anxiety over using other people's ideas (especially when those people are actively shouting, "PLEASE USE MY IDEAS").

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There has been some discussion about certain Narrative team members expressing a desire to talk more about core concepts and fundamental themes than specific story ideas. Much digital ink (which is apparently a lovely off-white) has been spilled arguing about what these quotes might mean, with some going so far as to infer that Narrative flies into a panic whenever anyone says something more specific than "I think Garen should really love Demacia," and that it's not so much a preference for big-picture ideas as it is a complete ban on the very mention of actual stories or story elements. I encourage us to continue to seek clarification: does Riot have hard-and-fast rules on this? Is it just that they prefer us to talk in generalities? What about using a community-written story to illustrate an idea, e.g., "I think Jax should be a jokey badass, like in this story that someone wrote, where he's talking with Darius and refuses to say anything that doesn't involve an axe pun."

This is a discussion that should happen, no question. But I'd just like to set forth a little context, before anyone gets too anxious about "accidentally appropriating" community lore. This is primarily a joke: the real reasons why Riot shouldn't be anxious about reading community lore (just like they enjoy looking at community artwork or community Champion concepts) is that it's obviously being put forward with the purpose of enriching the League universe. If someone says, "I wish you portrayed Noxus more like this", and Riot then follows that suggestion, it's hard to imagine anyone finding fault with Riot over it. ("I demand compensation! I asked them to buff Renekton by giving him more base HP, and then they buffed Renekton by giving him more base HP!")

No, this isn't even a list of all the League characters who are obviously references to (or straight-up ripoffs of) well-known characters from other media. (Which is fine, by the way. That's kind of the whole point.) I just want to talk about history.

Every few bullet points, I encourage you to imagine Narrative saying, "Goodness! Our worst nightmare is to appropriate someone else's ideas!"

• J.R.R. Tolkien took a bunch of myths about elves and such and created a fantasy universe.
• Gaming appropriated elves, dwarves, orcs, and pretty much everything else to create D&D and various tabletop-esque computer games.
• (EDIT: DG Ashabel points out that there's actually another step here. Games Workshop made Warhammer, a fantasy wargame that rips off Tolkien's settings and characters. Blizzard was like, "hey, you guys did a really good job ripping off Tolkien, we'd like to rip off your ripoff and make a computer game." However, the deal fell through, so they renamed their Warhammer project into "Warcraft" and published.)
• Blizzard made Warcraft. It decided to use "central casting", and most of its universe is just a copy-and-paste from this Tolkien-inspired fantasy trope-stock. (EDIT: see note above; apparently, this was actually a higher-order ripoff.)
• Some fans got together and made a Warcraft (III) mod called Defense of the Ancients (DotA). Most of the characters are stock Warcraft/Tolkien-ish-fantasy characters, with some quirky ornamentation.
• Some members of the DotA community went off and created DotA All-Stars, and then League of Legends. Most of the characters are carbon copies of DotA heroes. Those that aren't are generally instead from some other well-known source.
• League creates a universe. The various factions are not exactly hard to "source". You've got Arthurian Shiny Knights, you've got Arthurian Black Knights, you've got steampunk city, you've got X-Men/Shadowrun megacorp-land, you've got a bunch of monsters who are either Zerg or knockoff Lovecraftian horrors, you've got some Vikings, you've got some mermaid people, you've got Fantasy Egypt, and of course you've also got Fantasy Asia.
• The main novelty is the idea of a "fantasy Babylon 5" or "fantasy European Union": the League of Legends, an international body where states can bring disputes and resolve them through trial by combat. They write in a history of "magical WMDs" to explain the creation of the League, a rather original re-casting of the "Mutually Assured Destruction" scenario in fantasy rather than historical or science fiction context. This is quite intriguing: how might a fantasy EU/UN/WTO/whatever work differently than a sci-fi one or the historical examples, for instance? It's also a great source of political drama, as this fledgling League of Legends struggles to maintain legitimacy and keep the great powers of Valoran from destroying the planet.
• (Riot then decides to retcon that whole League thing.)
• Riot also makes most of its money off of skins, many of which are meant to make a character who's already a fairly direct ripoff from another source appear to be a ripoff from a completely separate source…or sometimes just to make the original ripoff even clearer. ("Hey, what if we took our character who's basically Indiana Jones plus Mega Man, and then made an Indiana Jones skin…and then also a Mega Man skin?" Or, say, "What if we took Dr. Mundo, and made a skin where he's Hulk-green?")
• Some recent characters include a Miyazaki ripoff complete with Mononoke bobblehead minions, a sandworm from Dune, a Greek Fury, and freaking Ra the God of the freaking Sun.

I mean all this quite affectionately. As I've written elsewhere, I think League draws a lot of its strength from its tropeyness. It's easier for people to get into the setting when they instinctively recognize most of these characters. It's an amateurish mistake for writers to obsess about novelty and showing how clever and original they are; great authors know that it's about telling a compelling story and immersing the reader. These characters resonate largely because they tap into such deep reservoirs of cultural understanding. Flash up a picture of (League's) Wukong and people recognize, hey, he's going to be some kind of clever trickster with magical powers, and he's probably from Fantasy Asia.

I can't emphasize enough that I don't mean this as an attack. There's a saying: "Bad authors 'borrow' from others. Good authors steal." The question is not whether Bard is a Miyazaki ripoff, but whether he's a good Miyazaki ripoff, whether Riot is using that character type to do something interesting and immersive. Novelty is nice, sure. But what often matters more is what you do with the trope, archetype, or outright ripoff. You can go construct a fantasy universe completely out of stock Tolkien elements, and then (depending on how you write it) end up with either an awe-inspiring, amazing, even revolutionary work of literary brilliance, or a forgettable knockoff. Replacing elves with "the Yularioni", who are part squid, and sometimes travel through time, and have three arms, and blah blah blah blah, may not only fail to add much, but may in fact be a serious mistake, because now the reader is focusing on trying to understand what these creatures are rather than following the story. Maybe you should drop the six chapters of exposition about how your protagonist fits into Yularioni culture, when the end result is simply "she's magical and immortal, and loves nature"; maybe you should just refer to her as an elven enchantress and, in a single phrase, convey to the reader who this character basically is so you can tell her story, rather than the story of what she is or where she's from. (A more modest version: if you want your characters to eat a small tasty animal that's kind of cute, maybe rather than explaining what a "smeerp" is, you should just say they eat a rabbit, and chalk it up to a translation convention.) So while I might tease Riot a bit, no, I do not think it's a problem that they borrow so freely from other sources. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I myself have spent a ton of time writing League fanfic, so it's not like I'd be in any position to argue against derivative works.)

Although I do indeed mean it affectionately, I've got to add a final bullet point:

• In the midst of a crisis over lack of community engagement, Rioters express anxiety about community members sharing ideas, even when the author of the work is the one sharing it while expressly urging Riot to adopt their ideas, because they don't want to even accidentally appropriate anyone's ideas.

Let's just keep this in context, people.