[{quoted}](name=Lane Cancer,realm=NA,application-id=6kFXY1kR,discussion-id=pp6T7h2w,comment-id=000000020000,timestamp=2015-06-04T04:05:01.552+0000)
I'm interested in your opinion on this based factions god
I'm not familiar with Graham McNeill's work. That said, I do enjoy the 40K loreverse, and while I wouldn't say it's similar to League's lore in most respects, they do both have a certain sense of…I almost want to say cartoonishness. 40K is wonderful because of its absurd excess. ("This guy is a 7-foot-tall transhuman killing machine. His sidearm is an automatic rocket launcher. He is a rank-and-file trooper in this army." and "This is the Imperium. Sometimes it blows planets up due to clerical errors.") League also classically has a certain vibrancy and love for excess.
I should pause there, because some might vehemently disagree. There are people who insist that 40K is in no way ironic, and is just "super awesome". I do not understand these people. Rather, I think 40K is so gratuitously excessive that it itself forgets whether or not it's being ironic sometimes. It's so pure. I love that. You can enjoy it as satire, but it takes itself seriously enough (whatever that even means) that you can also embrace it quite non-ironically. I feel League has some of that, too. You can make jokes about how all the characters are ripoffs, AND THEY ARE, but you can also set that meta-frame aside and just enjoy the vibrant, familiar tropes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe-kGakx3CQ
Please have there be some new lore where a Demacian does this.
(I should probably add, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I've been criticized, I think perhaps rightly, for mixing a liiiiittle too much 40K into the portrayal of Zaun in Factions. Granted, the HexKorps was kind of its own thing, and we did describe it as a deviation from the Zaunite norm: Noxus got wrecked, so Zaun started making its own army, using technology to compensate for a lack of diehard Noxian warriors. But yeah, there were boltguns, and hextanks, and psi-mages who used a Void-tainted serum delivered by injection harness to give themselves mind-rending psionic powers. We probably went too far with that. It seemed appropriate for a "dark tech" setting. Again, though, that was the Zaun of Hextech Revolution; my default ripoff material for Zaun is more Shadowrun. But yes, I like 40K.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko4Q0cgo1N8
Incidentally, this has been one of my favorite "Demacia pump-up" tracks for Factions.
All in all, I'm cautiously optimistic. I suppose my concern would be that I feel the new Narrative is already going way too "dark and gritty", and 40K is indeed the origin of the term "grimdark". There are some elements of the 40K universe that League really does not need more of. The grimdark, the endless bloodshed, the "dark ages" feel…these are all things that work very well in 40K, but are I think a bad fit for League. I like League because it's a vibrant, interconnected, "bright" universe. There's plenty of tragedy and such, but overall, it's a "bright" setting. One of my major critiques of Narrative lately is that it's turning everything into a "dark and mysterious" place. It really annoys me that the new Demacia's view of Ionia is probably something like, "Ah, I have heard tell of a wondrous place called 'Ionia', but it may only be a myth!" I think one of League's great strength is that, rather than bottling these settings up on their own, you smash them all together and make some crazy punchbowl of interactions, with robots and cowboys and knights and dragons all interacting. It's supposed to be a universe where you watch League matches on hextech TV and read newspapers about events happening hundreds of miles away. Where Demacia has a very developed view of Ionia, and vice versa, and the drama comes not from cheap shock value ("gasp! IONIA IS REAL!") but from this rich history ("Oh, yes, the noble Demacians. Where were they when Noxus invaded? More worried about following the rules than stopping those monsters.") that the setting provides.
That said, my impression from this thread is that this person is a very good author, and so I expect he's aware that League is not 40K, and calls for a different approach. Sort of like how Brent Spiner, a comedian, did a freaking amazing job playing the totally humorless Data, I suspect that someone who's written great material for a grimdark universe might prove a great choice to write for a brighter universe. He understands the other side of the range. His darks will be dark, and I suspect he'll also be able to make his brights brighter for this experience.
I also really don't like retcons. That's another reason to be happy about this news. 40K is an established, long-running storyverse. I suspect that Mr. McNeill is aware of how to handle such a storyverse, and will not casually start retconning major elements. (Wasn't there some horrible 40K author who wrote something about Grey Knights bathing in the blood of Battle Sisters or whatever? I think they also made catgirls canon. I admit I briefly panicked when I thought this might be that author, but it appears not.)
EDIT: Matt Ward. That's the name I remember. Matt Ward is not Graham McNeill.
EDIT2: I asked a friend of mine for her opinion on Graham McNeill. She generally likes him quite a lot. She did share a bit of playful criticism:
Well. The thing about McNeill is that he couldn't describe anything to save his life.
If you ask him to describe an orange, he will say, "The fruit was awe inspiring in its splendor of indescribable fruit power."
But she again followed that up by saying he's generally quite good, and in particular has a good sense for world-building detail.
What do you think?
