Some thoughts on Varus' new lore

I for one, like it. It's pretty well written (although there's certainly some rather narmy dialogue here and there. "It's... Too... Strong..." Indeed) it captures a nice story I think, and going for the Vengeance and Hate VS Love and Letting Go angle has some interesting narrative potential. I'm a HUGE sucker for narratives where a vengeful angry bastard learns to let go, which given Varus' whole... 'you genocided my race' thing, it would probably take a hell of a lot for him to get over it, but Val being able to completely let go of his hatred for noxians is interesting. I would also love to see the Darkin as a little less... 1 dimensional angry murderhobos, and this seems to be the best chance of that happening.

All that... being said.

I do think that this story would have been serviceable in a non-Varus context. With new champions. Varus' Old lore was never a huge love of mine, but It was conceptually a solid story. While I think that if this story existed as a different champion altogether, It would step on Varus' narrative toes a bit, but not enough so I don't think it's justifiable to have it be another champion.

It's too late now (dope music video and all) to be changing things, but I think riot should take notes on this one. People like certain characters-- Identify with them-- and Varus has some pretty identifiable traits, such as being a family man and his regret of choosing duty over love. To throw it all away wholesale and rebrand it as a gay couple in a three legged race in a pair of demon pants comes across as callous toward the people who loved Varus for what he was.

I won't gripe on about how they ruined his character since I personally find new Varus' character both more interesting and can play towards similar storytelling concepts, I do think riot needs to take a more sympathetic look about how EXISTING fans of a character (no matter how scant or shallow their lore may currently be) would feel about the new lore. Above anything else, it could turn off potential fans of a character because they were forced to lose another character to get it. I'm sure this new Varus would have been fantastically received if it didn't leave old Varus in the dust in the process, and hope we can avoid these types of narrative problems in the future, as we go on to learn more about the reworked lore of new characters.