[{quoted}](name=The Blue Rajah,realm=NA,application-id=6kFXY1kR,discussion-id=NrV4oMJj,comment-id=0013000000000000,timestamp=2018-01-18T10:25:18.381+0000)
Ahhhhh, I see. I had misunderstood your original post.
I disagree with pretty much your entire perspective. (Not trying to be argumentative here, just offering another viewpoint). Beginning with Demacians being the good guys. They're definitely not. But they're not the bad guys either. I feel like that was the whole point, and goal, of writing the new lore how they did. They wanted to give them depth and shades of gray. In some ways they're the good guys. But in some ways, as you pointed out, they're awful.
And most importantly, I think with the new lore coming for Noxus, they're going to be painted in exactly the same light. Riot has stated that they want to move away from the cliched and predictable good vs evil narrative. Noxus will be awful in some ways (the conquering ways), but good in others. For example, Noxus seems to be a far, far more fair society than Demacia. They're a meritocracy. If you're strong, it doesn't matter if you were born a peasant, you can raise as high as your strength will take you, which would be unthinkable in Demacia's rigid aristocracy. That sort of thing.
I don't think Noxus, or even Swain, will be nearly as bad as you're imagining. Mind you, I do think they'll be bad, in plenty of ways, but not in the almost cartoonishly evil way that you're describing. Of course, this is all prediction, so we'll have to wait and see. But it lines up with Riot's stated intention of moving away from the "Demacia=good/Noxus=evil" paradigm.
Ooh, I love a good lore chat.
So lemme take a step back. I think that League of Legends, like the Warhammer franchise, has a lore that is grimdark once everything is considered on an absolute scale. Few of its factions are sympathetic, and few places there are nice to live in. The vast majority of Runeterrans eke sustenance from the land while their warlords struggle for power and mad mages wreak havoc. An unspeakable apocalypse looms large over the whole planet. This is not a nice place.
So, if I just had to live there, then I would find myself less rooting for the xenophobic, oppressive monarchy than rooting against the bloodthirsty, vicious conquerors it fights. And a special note on them: everything we have seen so far in Noxus suggests that one’s “strength” there is not the ability to contribute to the nation but the ability to subjugate or kill whoever one must to take and keep power. See the comic about Darius.
It is wishful thinking to say otherwise until and unless, as you point out, the Swain rework also completely reshapes Noxian lore from its current cartoonishly evil state. I share your wish to create sympathetic Noxian characters. Riven, for example, tugged at my heartstrings for a moment when I read that she left Noxus because of its chemical strikes, but then I kept reading her story and learned that she still wants to pursue Noxian ideals—just less the mass murder. I wish her story were more elaborate than that.
But back to Swain. He’s a villain through and through. He literally and figuratively backstabbed his way to the top of a ruthless, conquering empire. He eats people. Beatrice is no doubt something hideous just waiting to show its true form and may influence him more than he admits. Only rewriting his story could make him even slightly sympathetic.
These are the most noxian affiliated champions so all have an equal need to be included in the update
(but maybe not to that extent) then I'll play the fuck out of him.
