So, if a champion says they have done something, does that make it true?
On a more specific note I am getting mixed signals from people in the community about if Aatrox actually says what he means or if he is "an unreliable narrator."
So, is Aatrox actually worshiped as a god?
For the most part they are. The only non-canon quotes are the interactions with other champions and Items. Their general quotes such as those during the walking animation, kills etc are real.
BUT what your question depicts is FROM WHAT TIME they are. Aatrox maybe isn't worshipped now, but he certainly was at one point in the past, having been created by and fought for the heavens of targon if I correctly understood the lore.
So the question isn't whether or not they are true, but to what frame of time they apply to.
I mean, he most definitely was when he was Ascended, like all the other Ascended were. And honestly a lot of Aatrox's quotes are how he personally feels about being imprisoned and how it affected him, that seems pretty reliable. The rest of Runeterra would probably disagree. Honestly the only quotes I consider noncanon for Aatrox are his 'sillier' interactions like "There was a memo Varus, there was a memo!" and stuff like that.
some are cannon some aren't and there here we have chaos...is it cannon is that cannon , that is not cannon..No ! that is cannon and on and on and on
I don't see why they wouldn't be. They're supposed to represent champions' thoughts or statements to other characters in the hypothetical situation that they met.
Only quotes that are out of character are non-canon.
Aatrox used to be an Ascendant of Shurima, which for all intents and purposes means that the answer is yes. Aatrox and the other Ascended were literally sometimes called 'god-warriors' before they went mad. He's not deified anymore, obviously, but he was once revered as a sacred protector of Shurima, thus he is "a god reduced to a prisoner."
On the topic of quotes as a whole, it's safe to assume that a good majority of quotes in-game are canon (excluding obvious joke taunts/lines.) The only real instances of an unreliable narrator in the game are Aurelion Sol (he claims that the stars are his work alone, when we know there were other Star Dragons) and POSSIBLY Illaoi (because the true nature of Nagakabouros has become a lot more dubious since the Nautilus rewrite and Pyke reveal.) For the most part though, yes, champions do reference canon events in the story through their lines.
Every champion is an unreliable narrator. None of them are unbiased or omniscient. Some quotes in-game are hypothetical (item and champion special interactions, death quotes, etc.) in that they haven't happened, so they're not canon events or meetings in-universe.
Aatrox was an Ascended, confirmed from several sources to be called god-warriors. It's believable that Aatrox was worshiped as a "god" in the same way that any high-tier Ascended would have been. After becoming a darkin, he was probably feared and hated as a destructive, cruel being more than worshiped (a relationship depicted in Twilight of the Gods). What Aatrox himself says in-game is almost certainly the rose-tinted nostalgia of an eons-old, fractured mind that basks in the vague memory of its former glory.
I think its a mixed bag, some aren’t like Rakan’s kill quotes vs Xayah but some probably are Swain’s soul quotes. I think it really depends on how realistically a champion would encounter another, like Aatrox’s taunt vs Kai’Sa, which was only written because Odin wanted to troll Jag
