Needlessly pedantic about Eve and Succubi

I'm a big fan of folklore. I feel enduring ideas that arose across cultures resonate with people for a reason and make a great jumping off point for character creation in fantasy settings like League's. That said, I also feel inclined to mention something that pretty much 100% will not matter to most everyone.

So.

A succubus.

It's a demon that lures men by being attractive and then feeds on them, right? Well, not really. Not if we're talking the creature from European folklore rather than the D&D monster you'll find in the Monster Manual between Quasit and Vrock. In folklore, the succubus could be lumped into the general category of hags. Things that preyed on sleeping people and were used to explain sleep paralysis and nocturnal emission. A succubus, specifically, collected jizz from sleeping dudes and used it to make demon babies.

Seriously. Because mythology is weird.

The D&D succubus, by contrast, is an ambush predator. Sort of like mimics and ropers. But instead of pretending to be a treasure chest or a harmless stalagmite, a succubus pretends to be an imperiled damsel in distress. Once rescued, when the party Bard tries to fuck her, he gets level drained instead. Poor guy. This image of what a succubus is resonated with players quite a bit more than the old jizz-collector (gee, wonder why) and meme'd its way into basically every single fantasy setting that has arisen since.

Obviously Eve isn't a folklore-style succubus. She really isn't a D&D style succubus, either. She's not an ambush predator that passively waits for folks to let their guard down. If her teaser trailer is any indication, she lures people off with her allure and then reveals her true face, slaying them. As it so happens, there's a class of folklore critters that fits that to a T. They're generally referred to as 'Wild Women' and they happen to be the same class of creatures that the kumiho (Ahri) falls into.

In fact, there's a creature that almost exactly fits Eve's style and I was SUPER excited to see her teaser playing to that. The baobhan sith from Scottish mythology appeared as a beautiful, pale woman in the wilderness who used her beauty to lead men off into wilds. Once they were far from help, she would reveal her horrifying true form and devour them. That kind of maliciousness and allure matches Eve's themes perfectly.

Does any of this really matter at all? Nah, not really. But as a folklore fan it was a pretty big deal to me. Thanks Riot.