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Yordles, Demacia, and just what the hell are timelines anyway?

Ryugi Kazamaru·12/9/2015, 2:44:56 AM·3 votes·1,113 views

A warning to all who enter here. What will follow are the crazed rantings of a madman, lost to logic and reason, trying to grasp at straws to make sense of all the piles of information to form some sort of idea regarding everything that Poppy's new lore brings to the table, as best as I can describe it. There will be walls of text, and disjointed thoughts, so, read at your own risk. Or you may yet find yourself in this strange pit of world-building hell I call home.

Topic One - Yordles live for centuries.

What? Where did this come from? I mean, okay. That's cool. I really have no problem differentiating yordles from your typical human or whatever other races may yet exist on Runeterra. It seems every other champion these days is adding some newfangled species or entity into the world that didn't exist before. You know, true demon spirits, actual godlike spirits, things that reign over space and time, teenagers with casual timetravel, the usual... Not that those are bad things, except maybe teenagers with casual time travel because that's just asking for trouble. It just doesn't McFly.

But yordles were already pretty differentiated from the other races. Eccentric, spunky, magically inclined and gifted with ties to the natural energies of Runeterra. Also, they have crazy machines that apparently work, and are some of the most advanced things on the planet, despite looking like something a child drew or built out of Legos. That's a pretty solid identity, so, this long life is very confusing. And I find myself asking "Why?" and that leads to my second topic.

Topic Two - Yordles live for centuries but are total airheads.

I don't need examples for this, do I? Throw a dart at a board with yordles on it and you'll hit a yordle who has their head in the clouds in some way, except Teemo, because he's knee-deep in shrooms, and Veigar, because he needs to BE knee-deep in shrooms and relax a bit. But I guess I'd be grouchy too if my evil plots were FOILED BY BIRDS. But honestly, time passes more quickly via perception the longer you live. When you're a child, half an hour is an eternity, but as an adult, it seems like nothing, because your perspective on the passage of time is relative to how long a time you've experienced. So, yes, for a yordle who is seriously living for CENTURIES, a human lifetime is nothing.

But with that long life comes a lifetime of experiences, wisdom, and knowledge. Each day your brain collects and stores things, and as far as we know, unless you get a disease like alzheimers, or suffer breakdown due to aging (which a naturally long-lived species wouldn't at these kinds of times), we don't know a true limit to the data your brain can actually store. So, really, if all yordles live extremely long lives, like Poppy, who doesn't appear to be old by any means, especially when compared to, say, Heimerdinger, yordles should, generally, be very very wise and experienced. Also, longer ages means much slower evolution, so...just how old is Gnar's species supposed to be? We're literally talking millions of years at that point, realistically, and part of me feels Riot's internal timelines (assuming they at all exist in any concrete way) probably don't go back that far. So, why the heck are all the yordles so...inexperienced and childish?

Topic Three - Why are they all so "childish"?

One hypothesis is that yordles may have the CAPACITY to live long lives, but often don't. They live wacky lives filled with magic and explosions and inventions and cupcakes, and that's a dangerous world without counting any natural predators. They're small, and survive mainly by, apparently, their wits. I can cite apparent yordle ingenuity, so they aren't dumb. Their connection to magical energies may also give them an advantage, but just about everyone/everything on Runeterra has SOME connection to magical energies, so, that may be a moot point. So, it's possible that every single yordle we know and love, except Lulu, Poppy, and POSSIBLY Veigar, are fairly young. Because of their small size, maybe they reach sexual maturity faster than larger animals, but live longer to have a chance to make more offspring. So, maybe yordle families are pretty large. But, if they don't get killed off, then yordles would dominate the world due to incredibly long lives and a short gestation period. Runeterra would literally be "Yordle Land."

But there's another hypothesis too. Poppy's lore says that a yordle without a purpose is pretty pathetic. So, maybe all these long-lived yordles do is toil away on their "purpose" whatever that is, and they do it SO MUCH that they are completely oblivious to everything else around them. Poppy seems to meet that, even so far as to be oblivious to the fact that HER OWN EXPLOITS have created the myth of a legendary "Slayer". And Heimer? He's obsessed with getting back to his work. Rumble is obsessed with his work too (and Tristana). Teemo is obsessed with scouting (and shrooms). Ziggs is obsessed with explosions and making them. Lulu is obsessed with the color purple and squirrels and having fun. They all have a drive that pushes them, and possibly to the detriment of all else. So, while they may be absolute savants in their chosen path, they are clueless or mediocre at other things, because their "purpose" drives them to obsess over it so much. They're spontaneous because they're also impulsive So, they can live long lives, but still be derpy adorable yordles, because other than their purpose, they don't get out much. Which reminds me about Demacia...

Topic Four - Demacia, and by extension Poppy, are HOW OLD?

So, J4 is estimated to be in his mid thirties, and was supposedly a teenager after Demacia and Noxus stopped fighting at some point. That's from old lore, so it's probably being used to prop up a wobbly table at Riot HQ. 8/8 sarcasm aside, we can estimate that J3 is probably a reasonable middle-aged man in his mid to late 60's. His father, J2, who rescued Xin Zhao, then Viscero, from Noxus (note - HOW BLOODY OLD IS XIN AND WHY ISN'T HE GRAYING?), was probably around 60-80 when he died, assuming he didn't go the way of good ol' J1, who got turned into mulch by Sion. So, adding those ages up and assuming that J1 was old enough to bear a son in J2 when he got head-popped, we get an approximate ballpark estimate of the Lightshield lineage being roughly 150 years old, give or take because the old timeline was hilariously convoluted and Annie wouldn't be a child if they followed it to the letter... That's also assuming, of course, that literally every king named all their sons "Jarvan" and that there we none in-between that got handily left out of the lore, but that's somewhat unlikely since Sion's and Xin's lores are fairly clear about those things, and Swain's lore pretty handily spells out some things about J4.

So, let's put that into perspective. We're on the NA Boards, or at least I'm posting from the NA side, and the good ol' US of A isn't even 300 years old yet. In fact, our bicentennial was back in 1976, and we're looking to hit 250 years in 2026. And I'm a very eccentric 28-year-old So, really, we know almost nothing about Demacian history, especially considering how we JUST MET ORLON in Poppy's lore, and that guy founded Demacia. Imagine Poppy hanging out with George Washington or Benjamin Franklin, and then suddenly walking into your local game store looking for "heroes". That's basically the kind of time we've got going on here. Also, the Demacian people seem a wee bit dense (this comes as no surprise to the Noxians, who are also dense) since you think someone would actually tell the story of the pint-size pulverizer with a magic hammer, or see her do some of these things over the CENTURIES she's apparently been alive. So, honestly, because we don't know how old Poppy is, we don't know how old Demacia is, and because we don't know how old Demacia is, we have no idea how old yordles can actually live besides a happy ballpark of "a really long time, okay?" And we still don't know why Heimer looks so old, and Poppy and Trist so young. Lulu doesn't count because "Glade Magic that is Totally Different from Normal Yordle Magic, okay?" Also, good lord what does this mean for Lulu? HOW LONG WAS SHE GONE? If yordles live centuries, and she was lost to the Glade long enough for no one to remember her...

Questions hurt brain... I need to lay down.

2 Comments

Sharjo12/9/2015, 3:26:11 AM4 votes

I'ma just ramble on for a while, see what I can come up with. Bear with me here.

So yordles likely evolved in to a form reminiscent of modern yordles a few thousand years ago, back when the Frozen Watchers were taking over Runeterra with their Iceborn armies. These yordles had digitigrade legs, a primitive language, culture, could use tools, had tails and tusks. At this point we see the first example of a yordle with extraordinary powers, and we can extrapolate from this that yordles weren't always magical beings, but gained magic that became a part of their very beings from birth. Gnar is the first example; a yordle who has enough magic in his veins to tap in to some ancient genes and transform himself in to a hulking monstrosity; a creature from which all yordle kind is descended from.

Yordles seemingly live for long periods of time, but given its magic fuelled there's a caveat; they need to have a purpose or they might just start withering away. Yordles find their purpose in just having a good time, and have happy, joy filled lives that fill their need for a purpose. This leads to a culture of beings who are upbeat and happy pretty much all the time, with a few outliers here and there. Having always lived alongside humans they came to know of human culture and how they worked, and in more recent times found that humans were advancing their grasp of metal to create powerful weapons capable of great destruction. Yordles, with a little helping of their magic, set about creating their own forms of these weapons, but made them for whatever the had in mind at the time, concieving magically powered turrets, biplanes, bombs and mechs that humans took notice to.

Piltover, a city just getting started in the world, sees the potential here and opens the door for yordles to come in to their lives, with the promise of a life filled with purpose; the purpose of progress through invention and development. Together human and yordle ingenuity births techmaturgy; a technology fuelled by magic, and Piltover flourishes as a result. Zaun, a city that was getting started like Piltover, is abused by some of the more influential Piltovians as cheap labour and a means of developing things cheaply and for a profit, not for progress. This immediately sends alarm bells for the yordles and they avoid the city of Zaun like the plague, birthing a divide between the two cities that only widened as time went on.

Yordle ages are odd to think about, but given Kindred has nothing to say to yordles despite the fact Riot would've had this yordle lore nailed down before those two were released, it likely means yordles can die and aren't doing anything unnatural by living long lives. I'd say it's likely that yordles have a finite lifespan that just elongates depending on how they live their lives, with that purpose in life giving them a much greater time to live. Heimerdinger might just be a yordle who's lived for a super long time through constantly having a purpose to his existence, but even then he's old enough to be showing signs of age.

Timeline wise Mordekaiser probably reigned before Demacia came to be, and Poppy was probably born in the interim between the collapse of Morde's empire and Demacia's founding. Given the fact that Sion was_forgotten_ in Noxus he has had to have been dead for centuries, putting the reigns of Jarvan the first and second many years apart, to such a degree that it's highly unlikely that Jarvan the first sired Jarvan the second. What happened for the monarchy of Demacia in that time is unknown, but we can extrapolate that Jarvan the first's eldest probably rose the occasion, or perhaps his wife did if his children were too young. Of course if he died with no heir then rule would have fallen to the noble houses, potentially leading to a lot of internal strife. Over all I personally think that Demacia was founded somewhere between 400 and 600 years ago, came in to conflict with Noxus about 200 to 300 years ago, and has had many kings and queens who weren't Jarvans.

Hopefully that was something to somebody. I didn't answer a lot of your questions Ryugi, but I put together some thoughts that might be along the lines of accurate? I dunno. Just putting things together right now.

Tesla Effect12/9/2015, 3:11:28 AM1 votes

All of this can be explained by magic, and the innate magic all yordles have, which may be beneficial (long life spans, magical abilities, much creativity ) as well as detrimental to them (emotionally sensitive, emotionally driven which causes them to not think logically).