A Discussion On Star Guardian Ahri
As we all know, Ahri is a champion that gets a high frequency of skins, and the latest batch of Star Guardians is giving her her first Legendary skin. A lot of people are baffled and even a tad upset at this: I want to sit down and jot down my own thoughts on the subject, and hopefully open up further discussion on the subject, as I think this will help players express what exactly we want.
Ahri has a total of seven skins; released with two, one legacy and Popstar Ahri having a set of chromas. For comparison, the highest amount of skins a single champion has I believe is around 10 (Ryze and Annie, though both of these have quite a few skins that are unavailable in some form). Ahri gets a lot of skins, and I think there are a couple of reasons for this:
- Ahri is a popular Champion - It's no secret Ahri has wide appeal, and I myself have always been attracted to her theme and design since she was released back in Season 2. Riot tends to release more skins for Champions that have a larger playerbase, and Ahri definitely counts as one such champion, with a pickrate of consistently around 10% or higher according to OP.gg.
- Ahri has a lot of theme space and good particles - It's very easy to make a solid Ahri skin. Regardless of your opinion on Ahri, every one of her skins is interesting, fun and well-made. She has great particle effects that are easy to read thanks to their unique snappy animations and thus can be tweaked to suit each skin theme. She has a lot of character design space to work with, especially her tails and her orb. And admittedly, she fits a lot of anime-esque skin themes as well given her base design and base inspiration.
So it makes sense Riot would want to cash in on this for not only their own benefit, but for the players' as well. Say what you want about Riot's business practices, but giving Ahri skins in general objectively benefits a lot of players, simply because a lot of players play Ahri. Controversial, I know, because I know many people will mention that more players would ultimately benefit from a wider range of champions receiving skins, and while I mostly agree there is certainly some logic behind Ahri skins. Not only that, but I legitimately like Ahri's skins. These are quality skins that touch on several appealing themes, and coming from someone who doesn't play Ahri, I would love to own any of her skins.
However, given that Riot must be aware of the sentiment that Ahri gets too many skins that other Champions are lacking (Yorick, Viktor and Swain being a few of the worst offenders, along with newer champs like ASol and Taliyah), why did they decide Ahri deserved a Star Guardian skin?
Don't get me wrong, this Ahri skin is gorgeous. Star Guardian is one of my favorite skin lines and this skin is obviously of the highest quality. I like what they did with the familiar and even the voice lines are good. The theme fits Ahri very well, both visually and thematically. Star Guardian skins tend to fit younger, almost always female Champions with some kind of idealistic edge. This new set of Star Guardians evoke tropes like the "Fallen Magical Girl" where that idealistic edge has faded, making Ahri a natural fit. However, I feel like this Legendary quality would have served another Star Guardian better. While I agree Ahri fits this skin line too well to pass up this opportunity, I think Syndra should have received the Legendary treatment, especially considering Ahri's amount of high quality skins.
I will attempt to explain that statement further with the rest of my post. Let's look at what the Star Guardian skin line is.
The original Star Guardian Lux skin was based on Mahou Shojo, or Magical Girl anime like Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura or Madoka Magica. Magical Girls are girls or young women, usually still in school, that receive magical powers (often complete with transformation sequence) typically in the form of friendship fueled powers to combat evil. Lux was sorely in need of a light-hearted skin to match her bubbly personality and to give her some interesting particle effects. This brand new theme fit her perfectly, better than any other Star Guardian ever will. Lux is practically a Magical Girl even in context of League's lore: a light-hearted, positive young woman wielding magic and a staff and promoting the power of togetherness and light in the face of darkness. She ticks all the boxes.
Many entries in the Magical Girl genre have entire teams of Magical Girls, so naturally Riot extended the cast to a full, well-rounded team of personalities and roles (both in game and within the context of the Star Guardian "universe"). Five is a typical number of heroes for not only Magical Girl anime, but many works of fiction with a group of heroes (Avatar the Last Airbender, Power Rangers, Teen Titans, to name a few). This is sometimes known as the "Five Man Band" and you can google it on TV Tropes for more info, but basically it's a group of characters that serve to compliment each other and make for interesting dynamics, relationships and ultimately, good stories. For League, this has the added benefit of covering a variety of Champions in service of a variety of players. In doing this, Riot expanded the skin line AND provided an interesting little backstory for the line, making it even more appealing for the Magical Girl fans.
My rambling about interesting tropes aside (remember folks, tropes are tools, not templates!) my point is that the next 4 Star Guardian skins were selected with some of these thoughts in mind. Lux serves as the obvious leader, Janna is a mentor character, Poppy is the tough guy, Lulu is a little strange and Jinx serves as a foil to Lux. All of these alternate fantasies provided by the Star Guardian skins are in-line with each respective character in some small way. Janna is more mature and worldly despite her relatively young age so she's a great mentor. Lulu is already a little weird so she serves as a good weird youngster. Poppy is young yet tough so serves as a good group tough guy. And then there's Jinx: while she's normally a pyromaniac psychopath, thanks to her legendary treatment she's able to fit a dialed back version of her rambunctious self that suits a Magical Girl setting better. She's still Jinx, she's young and kind of rebellious and crazy, but she's an alternate Jinx that serves an important role of being a foil to the group's leader, Lux. What I'm trying to say is that base Jinx would have made a fine Star Guardian, but upgrading the skin to Legendary allowed them to implement a mini-story arc reminiscent of a Magical Girl show. The Legendary status served the alternate fantasy in some way. Plus, Jinx has some cool animations and particles that were toyed with to make a quality skin.
So what am I trying to get at here? Well, while we don't know the full story, Star Guardian Janna supposedly had a former team that didn't work out. The new generation of Star Guardian skins is meant to be that former team, quite a few SG Ahri quotes support this. To further the Star Guardian mini narrative, they needed another Legendary skin with unique quotes, and Ahri got the honor. As I mentioned earlier, the new SG skins (with the exception of maybe Ezreal being the new guy after this mess started, and not sure what Soraka's role is here) are all takes on a more jaded, darker group of Magical Girls, which often happens to challenge the main set of Magical Girls and create interesting conflict. MF, Ahri and Syndra all fit this description to some extent: younger women who were possibly once idealistic, but experience has made them wise. They question why they have their powers, why they fight to protect people, hence their conflict with the main group. But overall, I think Syndra would serve better as the Legendary skin that spearheads this new chapter.
For one, Syndra fits the main idea better. Visually, she's the darkest colored Star Guardian of anybody, Ahri included. She also serves as visual contrast to both Janna, her former teammate that parted ways after the disagreement, and Lux, the leader of the other group (Ahri's colors match their's almost too well) Second, her base lore reflects this type of arc more effectively. She had untapped potential, the powers that be employed her for a specific purpose, she found she didn't completely agree with that purpose and now actively rebels against it. Thirdly, while some of Ahri's quotes imply that Ahri might eventually be convinced to join forces with Lux's group, it's also implied in Riot's introduction of the skin that Syndra has her own possibly darker motivations ("...Syndra now acts as Ahri’s advisor. But just what are her true intentions?"). This makes her possible villain material, and I would have much rather seen Riot go all out with a "Dark, turned-Evil Magical Girl" theme with a Legendary Syndra, giving her unique quotes befitting of such a character, than what we got with Ahri: a slightly snarky, albeit entertaining, take on a Magical Girl, which I feel we kind of got in-part from the Jinx skin.
On the other side of things, while this doesn't bother me as much as it does many others, Ahri gets a LOT of skin love. The proof is in the pudding: we have this year's new batch of Arcade skins and Ahri obviously has an Arcade skin as well, making it about a year since she got her last skin. She has solid skins at different price ranges, she has a Challenger/Conqueror skin, and I'm sure she'll have many more skins to come. I'm not implying she shouldn't have a Star Guardian skin, just that, given her wide range of skin options, a Legendary skin for any of the others might have been the better choice (my vote goes for Syndra as you know, but she has a decent skin line-up as well, albeit much fewer).
I'll try to tl;dr this: The Star Guardian theme suits Ahri very well. However, given the context of the Magical Girl origins of the skin line AND the fact that Ahri already has a nice selection of skins, the Legendary status might have suited another character better. I'd argue that Syndra would have made an equally interesting choice visually, would serve to give us a very dark, "fallen Magical Girl" take on the theme, AND serve to make their mini-narrative more interesting.
If you read the whole thing, thanks for reading my rambling thoughts! I aim to mainly just voice my own thoughts and feelings as well as try to convey others' concerns. I really am happy about all five of the new Star Guardian skins and think they are a lot of fun, my favorite skin line behind Pool Party and maybe a few others. The fact that I was able to ramble on about them is proof they are fascinating skins. I encourage everyone to throw in their two cents, however big or small, and get a discussion going. Perhaps it might help us get some insight on the general consensus behind our feelings for the skin line are.
(Irelia) - as the leader, color pink? (There's a link to the design concept attached created by xxsmell from twitter, found this amazing idea concept by Elinz's thread "Star Guardian Irelia (Skin Concept!)")
(Riven) - color blue?
(Diana) - color red ?
(Taliyah)) - color green ?
(Leona) - color purple?
