What if Tahm Kench is connected to the Ruined King?

Ghiefelstein·7/4/2015, 1:39:16 PM·3 votes·1,920 views

The teaser video for Tahm Kench shows a gambler who marries a princess. And he loses everything because of his gambling addiction. The story is about royalty and an unhealthy desire that leads to ruin, so could Tahm Kench have something to do with the Ruined King? Let me tell you my theories.

Tahm Kench is obsessed with royalty. He calls himself the king and he has hungers that ain’t easily fed. He is a picky eater. The demon wants to devour the princess, one of the rare meals that leaves him satisfied. He just needs someone to let him in, and that fool is a random greedy gambler. He leaves him at a palace of chance (yes, a palace) and makes sure the gambler marries his meal.

In the next part of the story we have a ‘hungry beast’ as a metaphor for a gambling addiction:

Now when that hungry beast finally did arise: the family screamed and fought. And although the Gambler tried to cast him out... it ate the gifts, and house, and gold! For its hunger? Nothing satisfied. "Please, not now, not this time!" the bride did cry. The beast's response? To her it purred, "This hunger's a burden, but it's the last time, I swear. So please, forgive."

Tahm Kench is a demon. In the Q&A it was said that a demon is a powerful, supernatural being with an agenda. We don’t know what Tahm’s agenda is exactly, but he has hungers fed by a princess. He also wants to cause the maximum amount of sorrow. What happened to the Ruined King sounds like the work of the same demon. So here are my theories:

  1. The Ruined King was the father of the princess in the story. He wanted her to be his successor. But Tahm Kench intervened and destroyed the whole family through a gambling addiction. The king was devastated by the loss of his daughter, so he started messing with the powers that govern life and death. Like Kalista said: "Once, he was a noble king, until grief overcame his reason. In the end, it was not his blade that stole our lives."

  2. The Gambler himself was the Ruined King. After his marriage to the princess, they became king and queen. Just as everything seemed to go well, the addiction came back. Please, not now, not this time! The meal was finally good enough for the demon. He keeps calling her ‘the bride’ to hide the fact that he only eats queens. The Gambler was left as a Ruined King and cursed the Shadow Isles with another stupid bargain.

  3. The story of the Ruined King is separate from the video. He was just another royal meal for the River King, because of his unhealthy desire to control life and death. The demon Tahm Kench offered him a bargain for a small price. The deal led to the curse of the Shadow Isles. Now that’s a way to achieve maximum misery for the world.

Thank you for reading! What do you think? Did Tahm Kench have anything to do with the Ruined King or am I just seeing things that aren't there?

EDIT: I just saw that a thread about this was already created a little more than two weeks ago, so credits to them.

7 Comments

cool1657/4/2015, 2:38:43 PM2 votes

highly unlikely. the ruined king is connected to the shadow isles tahm is with bligewater. And he wast ruined because of tahm but because of something else.(necromany i think?)

Narasimha7/4/2015, 3:19:49 PM2 votes

Eh, sounds like BIT too much of a stretch. You may as well say "Tahm had a hand in causing Shurima's downfall so that he could feed on all the despair it caused."

Ebonmaw Dragon7/4/2015, 3:25:40 PM2 votes

I thought the same... mainly because a princess needs a kingdom with a King in order to be a princess... and there are only 3 kingdoms in Valoran: Demacia, Freljord and the Kingdom of the Shadow Isles.

Varalessia7/8/2015, 7:26:19 AM1 votes

Well, a quick look at the wiki would reveal that the Ruined King, driven mad with grief over some unspecified loss, (Presumably his wife or daughter) ordered his court mages into the sacred forest with him and found a magical spring. Court mages drank deeply and he ordered them to shatter the barrier between life and death. We can only assume they succeeded in some fashion and the shadow isles became what we see now. It's presumed he died in the shattering.

With a story like that in an already sparse landscape lore-wise I doubt that they'd throw a bone like Tahm into the mix.