Let's talk about Blitzcrank.
Let me be perfectly clear from the get-go: I love League of Legends' lore. I love the little things that make the lore shine. And I love the recent focus on Zaun as having some great people in it as much as it has people like Singed, Mundo, and Viktor. However, I feel like the story/character potential for one character has gone pretty long unchecked. One champion who not only brought forth the focus on Zaun's techmaturgy run amok, but became a public darling because of his own position in it.
Blitzcrank.
From a gameplay and out-of-game perspective, Blitzcrank is almost painfully easy to spot out - the big bad golden robot with the big long arm. He's great fun in gameplay, and everyone knows to give him a wide berth. Yet, as one of Riot's older non-release champions (He was released with Mundo, Malphite, and Janna all the way back in 2009! ) His background, his character, and - indeed - what Riot has done with him seems... painfully scarce.
He has barely more than a dozen lines of dialogue in-game. Half of which paint him more in the light of a classic "kill all humans" robot than the Zaunite breakaway darling who came forward to request personal autonomy.
"But what about his bits in the Journal of Justice?" You say. And I tell you this: Despite being a clever character concept, Blitzcrank was very rarely featured in the JoJs of yore. Those two times? His Fleshling Compatability Service and the time where he whalloped Singed for trash-talking him. Even in those rather meager snippets, we get gleams of who he is, but not from the robot himself.
A heart of gold in a framework of iron and a carapace of steel. A Blitzcrank who stands alongside Zac and Ekko as the representatives for the good that Zaun can bring if it just tries. And hell, considering Blitzcrank's heritage, and who he is, the character actions there are ripe for development.
: The last creation of Viktor before his descent into self-augmentation, and arguably, the reason that the leading pioneer on transhumanism in the League went mad and turned himself in such a state. It's an open secret that Professor Stanwick stole the credit for Blitzcrank - a creation that should have put Viktor on the map in a much more righteous way - and yet, despite Viktor's turn to pushing the future forward by any means necessary, Blitzcrank remains on friendly terms with him. Why? How? Does Viktor resent Blitzcrank? Does Blitzcrank forgive his creator for the path he's taken, or resent him for being the last of his creations before his turn? It's arguably one of the more interesting dynamics at play between characters in the League of Legends, yet never gets any focus time.
The living windup doll. The replacement child for a man gone mad with grief. Orianna is in many ways the Piltovian foil to Blitzcrank - considered a hollow and empty shell and a soulless killing machine by many, we don't see many facets of the Orianna who triess to socialize, to mingle among the rest of society. Is she a true AI like Blitzcrank, or something much more rudimentary? How do they feel about each other? Do they care about the Zaunite vs Piltover tensions? Is Orianna desperately trying to seek humanity while Blitzcrank, in his self-autonomous nature, has achieved what she could not? There's plenty of Aasimovian angles you can take with these two, back and forth. Debating the nature of what makes a robot a robot, a human a human, and can the two ever blur the lines in a way that'd make even Viktor take pause (speaking of. Orianna and Viktor are rivals, yet Blitzcrank is friends with both. How does that work? I'm seriously asking, it seems like a fun thing to explore.)
Singed, in the old Journals of Justice, was the only person to make Blitzcrank angry with his trash-talk. Given Blitzcrank's initial nature as a waste-management robot, and how much waste the Mad Chemist puts out when it comes to developing his concoctions, it can't be hard to imagine these two butting heads, and you can even go further and extrapolate that with the larger societal issues at play with Zaun. Does he hate the people who take science too far and turn his home into such a poisoned and polluted place?
The breakaway self-styled superhero of Zaun. The unholy fusion of Flubber and Captain America. There's no mistaking Zac for anything other than a good guy who tries to right wrongs wherever he can. What do Zac and Blitzcrank think about each other? Zac, in many ways, is a being all his own much like Blitzcrank, but much more open about his devotion to defending the innocent (though, that could be because Blitzcrank has so few and far-between lines compared to him). Despite being a biological weapon instead of a machine, does Blitzcrank find camaraderie with Zac?
I just wanna see Rammus and Blitzcrank actually be bros, man. They seem like a fun duo for easy gags.
And of course, there's Ekko - the Boy Who Shattered Time, the plucky upstart genius from Zaun with a hate-on for Pilties. What does -he- think about Blitzcrank? We know he hates Viktor - but what does he think of the last creation Viktor even made before being rogue?
There's so much untapped potential here. And admittedly, more of it would be brought forward with a proper visual update (I'm not saying Riot please, sometime this year, but...), but sometimes it feels like everyone forgets about the Great Steam Golem being the first breakaway good-hearted darling of the mad science state of Zaun. I just want to see him live up to that. Hell, it doesn't have to be right away, it's just like Blitzcrank says himself...
As long as it takes.
