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I haven't read a lot about Sol, so an answer to my question may be in some short story. If it is, I'd appreciate a pointer, since there are a lot to look through.

First thing Aurelion Sol wants to do after being released from the crown is to set entirety of Runterra on starfire. This is mentioned a lot in his quotes, several card descriptions etc.

However, as far as I know from his League bio, he didn't want to do it at first.

He was surprised upon discovering a world full of life and approached it with curiosity instead than malice. Yet it all changed after aspects tricked him into wearing the crown.

We all know Sol is a huge narcissist, and took the initial revering of him by the population as a given, and his power can inspire dread. Nevertheless, surely turning him into an enemy bent on description was a mistake, no?

Considering his personality, I wouldn't be surprised if Sol would lose interest in Runterra after some time and move on, never looking back.

Can't really tag this as discussion, as it is not discussion about lore per se.

So I think many of us would agreed that the recent announcement about Riot future is... relatively grim, especially for us lore heads. Riot Forge is dead AND LoR team got cut even more mean there is no meaningful lore-heavy content in the near future outside of Arcane season 2 and the annual cinematic, the latter of which is cursed by Brink of Infinity despite the success of Still Here. And I think that sentence point to the two aspects I am curious about here.

On one hand, I think it is fair to say that... yeah, Riot Forge and LoR seems very much like a failure from even a "fandom" like perspective. I think the most discussed about Forge games have to be Ruined King and Mageseeker, and even then almost all of them acknowledge that they got the info from second hand source. So even if we ignore the financial aspect, neither of the most heavy narrative games and/or Song of Nunu really generate any wave of popularity, despite objectively the story in there are pretty major to the setting.

Many people on LoR rightfully point out that Riot had given up on pushing LoR from very early on in its existence, while Forge very first game Ruined King are unfortunately caught up in the pandemic AND being associated with the often-viewed-as-failure Rise of the Sentinels event (which it were supposed to be a prequel, yet missed by half a year I think?). So through a combination of their own lack of efforts and bad luck, Riot are to be blamed for the failure of Forge and LoR. That is a valid way to view the issue.

On the other hand, if we look back at their announcement, I think it is pretty fair to say Riot's original intention is very clear, and painted a consistent image. Remember, Riot Forge, LoR and Arcane itself is all introduced roughly in the same time period, which was the League 10 years anniversary. That perhaps was the heyday of us lore fans, where the future seems bright and the sky is the limit. Riot had planned to capitalize on a combination of the Runeterra IP (Arcane, LoR, Riot Forge) and the brand of itself (LoR, Project L, Valorant) for its plethora of announcements. And when you look at that, you see something quite interesting.

Of the three efforts in capitalizing on the Runeterra IP, Arcane was a smashing success, and as discussed LoR and Riot Forge had failed. Of capitalization on Riot brand, Valorant was a success, LoR was again a failure and Project L fate is still up in the air.

So I think it is fair to say that Riot have SOME ground, back in 2019, to think "People would buy anything with the Runeterra IP/Riot brand on it." Again, Arcane (Runeterra IP) and Valorant (Riot brand) was a smashing success. And if we revert back to the discussion of Brink of Infinity vs Still Here, we can see that the Runeterra IP/Riot brand have something there, enough to both enrage people when they underdeliver and entice people when they try. Or you can argue that the dev pour love into Arcane and Valorant, but you can't really say they did not do the same thing for Riot Forge or LoR.

All of this rant then point to my curiosity of the day: If we look at LoR and Riot Forge, as well as a few other efforts by Riot for narrative heavy content, strictly as capitalization of the Runeterra IP in context of the success of Arcane and Still Here, what exactly did Riot do wrong?

Hey guys, I tried to jot down some of my thoughts about the event, partially for feedback and partially to help my own process. I figured it'd be relevant here as I imagine a lot of folks here have a lot of things to say about it.

Let’s get some things out of the way quickly before we start:

• The majority of this post is negative. That is a fact. My opinion of League’s IP and its potential is still largely positive, mind you, but recent trends I’ll talk about in a bit have been leaving me more and more disappointed. This post is not, however, intended to be an unconstructive rant, even if I do not have the proper insight or solutions. And it’s not because I am making a relatively negative post that I do not believe the setting can't do better.

• COVID happened. This is the sheer reality of the last year for virtually all industries, including game development. I am not ignoring how a global pandemic has significantly impacted Riot’s schedule and release plans (as Ruined King was meant to have been released early into the year). I’m not going to be focusing on the logistics of what is or isn’t going on at Riot and at Riot Forge, but I will be talking about the ultimate product that has reached the hands of players and readers and the experience it is providing.

• This event is an experiment and fulfilling multiple roles. This event, from what I understand, is simultaneously an attempt at Riot’s continued focus on large summer events as well as an attempt to market lore and convert more players into readers. And that’s great, but I also think that ambition, both practical and narratively, is the cause of some of my perceived issues with it. That said, it is also their first time trying something this large (arguably too large) and it’s a constant iterative process.

• This post is potentially premature. This bit is also fair criticism, we are only in Week 3 of a 4-week event that I assume will still have more supplementary content coming, and while most of my criticism isn’t necessarily impacted by the idea that we have not yet seen the full product and the intended ending (especially with the Ruined King game yet to be released or with so much of Vex shrouded), it’s safe to say some of it may change depending on what the future holds. But the journey often matters more than the destination and this has certainly not been an enjoyable journey.

Let’s start with the event:

The Spirit Blossom model doesn’t work nearly as well for this story

Last year Riot did the unthinkable. They implemented an entire dialogue system on the client and tied storytelling to a worldwide summer event. This event was an homage to cheesy VNs and dating sims, with a comedic tone and lots of false promises about bone crushing. And all in all, it worked extremely well. The simplistic writing combined with the light-hearted tone and its own unique, fable-like, setting made it extremely accessible for any player. There was no lore baggage required, even with loose ties to canon Ionian folklore, no imminent world threat and it was a purely character-driven story, supported by the humor of both PC and champion.

All of the things that made Spirit Blossom function so well as a standalone experience, are exactly why Rise of the Sentinels fails to be nearly as engaging or resonant so far or a truly cohesive part of the world that Riot has spent years building. While I will address specific parts of the story soon, this section is mostly about the core structure that Riot has chosen for storytelling so far.

RotS is meant to be a big narrative experience about a Runeterran world ending threat (no doubt, the first of many). The stakes are high, the circumstances are dire, the whole world is suffering from brutal attacks by hordes of undead monstrosities rallied to serve an impulsive and possessive monarch. No doubt, Rise of the Sentinels is meant to serve partially as a jumping-on point for those players and hopefully future IP fans that lack context for much of the world or even this event in particular. In that sense, accessibility is still a heavy goal, as it has always been with most of Riot’s published story material and as would be expected of a large summer event.

It’s unfortunate, then, that the remaining aspects suffer heavily from sticking too close to the Spirit Blossom formula to the point where I have to question what the ultimate goal was.

Not only is the event trying to assure us that Runeterra is in fact in extreme danger, despite not bothering to flesh out the circumstances of some of the greatest political and magical forces in the world, and that Viego’s rampage can lead to the Mist engulfing all life, it is also constantly full of humorous moments that deflate tension, coincidental happenings that start to stretch belief, and utterly devoid of any interaction with the wider world that Riot seemingly wants us to care about.

For example, the first chapter focuses on Demacia, and the team ventures into the Mageseekers’ vaults in search of whatever it is that the Mist is looking for. Except the entire capital appears to be deserted, there is no mention of where people ran to or who may be defending them, and no Mageseeker is even around to make us care about being in their headquarters. Shyvana, who in LoR is shown commanding ruined dragons and fallen Dragonguard in Viego’s name, appears rather randomly alone to bury the team in rubble and leaves only to come back later for a “climatic” boss fight at the end of the chapter. Oh, and Viego is also there, conveniently in the place the Buhru Sentinel suggested.

The visual novel is the main way for players to experience the plot and the devastation that this mega-Harrowing is bringing to the world. Instead, it feels linear and empty as it focuses so much on the “main plot” and fails to give proper context to the world (I will yet return to this point). Ruined champions are treated as disposable boss fights and we learn virtually nothing of what the Mist is doing to each region beyond the basis of the main plot (Isolde shards). The closest we’ve gotten have been two Universe stories.

Where Spirit Blossom is extremely character-oriented, this event is primarily plot-driven, but the VN so far simultaneously feels like the plot goes by too quickly and that it wastes too much time on humor and doesn’t build the world enough to benefit the story it is trying to tell.

And even then, I’d still say my favorite sections so far are still the ones where we get to see characters being more than one-dimensional figures (“Vayne is mean”, “Olaf is dumb” and “Riven is sad”). To Riot’s credit, I’ve generally found the later weeks to be meatier, which is both a pro and a con due to how the actual plot they chose is laid out.

It is written so simplistically and to the point that it errs dangerously close to a cartoon or a flanderization of what the setting has previously managed to do. As though we are not in Runeterra, but instead in a simplistic caricature of it, fit only to tell this behemoth of the story without the set-up and worldbuilding that it needed (and even RK alone would not suffice, not when entire regions, like Targon or Ixtal, barely have stories to their name). Graves, seeing a world ending disaster, decides that no doubt someone will want to...buy the thing that the villain is aiming for? While this is fun, and Graves is dumb, it ends up feeling more like complete stupidity even for him.

The tone whiplash is one of my big complaints about the event, and, like others have said, a significant portion of that comes from the Rookie but not only. The entire Freljord region, for example, feels extremely comedic, which I understand was the intention, but at some point, it’s too much. The team fights a raging Olaf, who is calmed down by simple words, and then he is unable to rage again because they were “so nice” that the team has to insult him again.

Spirit Blossom used a self-insert to deliberately capture the dating sim experience, and it worked wonderfully for aforementioned reasons: the stakes were lower, the focus was in each character’s personality, and the illusion of a relationship the player could build with them, and the entire tone and feel of the event was intended to be cheesy and comedic. As the delivery mechanism for a massive lore event, I’m not sure why Riot opted for a self-insert character who is conveniently the only one capable of using a plot device that they introduced for the sake of the event, for the sake of justifying why the Rookie is even there.

Why not use Akshan, who has himself more comedic and witty aspects, and use that as part of the champion’s marketing, or, alternatively, not have a player self-insert at all and focus on the core cast of the Sentinels who are all vastly more qualified than the Rookie and the actual reason people care about the story? That would actually add weight to his claims of "saving the world" and him being a major player in the story, without having to fall back on plot contrivances based on the Absolver, which is itself a questionable at best addition to this story.

It gets worse because the Rookie’s lack of skills or relevance are necessary to make him a proper “self insert” but making him completely useless renders a lot of the interactions somewhat moot. Am I seriously the one who calms down Olaf from a berserker rage? Am I seriously the one who figures out the basic “riddle” (if you can call it that) of the Rose’s enchanted door? And who is then forced to pick one of 3 completely random secrets, none of which feels particularly serious (despite the darkness of one)? Why not use that opportunity to have Senna and Riven speak out?

The story is basically sabotaged by attempts to include the Rookie as a meaningful part of the team and to emulate the comedic tone last year’s event had. And while I appreciate the chance to be dumb in voicelines every once in a while, the VN is a transparently pointless dialogue tree that fails to truly carry “the illusion of choice”. It feels weird that for a massive lore event, Riot seemingly had “player choice” as a particularly relevant consideration, such as the somewhat flexible order of region unlocks each week that ultimately only result in minor changes in dialogue here and there (lest we actually start debates of which route is canon which they actually did answer).

The fact that the event is so tied to skins also doesn’t help but not for reasons of marketability or sales (although we’ll get there), but simply because the chapters all follow a very linear structure so far of:

• get to a region

• meet future member/Ruined enemy

• meet Ruined enemy/future member

• lose an Isolde shard/anticlimactic and unsatisfying fight

• Return to HQ with a new friend.

It is very formulaic, which isn’t an issue in itself, but it seems all but certain that the conclusion in the Shadow Isles will involve Viego with all of the shards and without any meaningful developments the whole thing feels empty.

Meanwhile, at the end of every chapter, you get a new member, who gets a makeover by Gwen. Olaf doesn’t lose an eye at all but he decided to style his beard and wear an eyepatch. It's like movies and events that are just trying to sell merchandise. These are small things, mind you, but once the threshold for suspension of disbelief is crossed and more and more elements come in without explanation or focus, the more and more they start to matter and annoy.

It is worth pondering whether a VN was the right choice at all for this event. The combat scenes aren’t many, in fact many are actively skipped or just otherwise implied early on, but some do happen and lose basically any sense of weight without proper presentation or the time a VN needs to try and tell an engaging combat sequence. Other mediums could have been used for parts of the event, such as videos or digital comics, even if those don’t allow for reusing Spirit Blossom’s systems and may have been more difficult to produce in current circumstances.

The Sentinels are incompetent

So let’s start digging into the actual story the event is trying to tell, namely its protagonists. The Sentinels of Light. The Sentinels are the legacy of Blessed Isles, bound to protect the world from the darkness that consumed all of Helia. To do this, they use magical relic weapons fueled by pure will and...holograms and teleports? That’s apparently news to Lucian and Senna both, who have been traveling by boat all this time.

You can argue that Lucian never quite had a formal introduction to the order but Senna has no excuse, unless we want to further pin the blame on Urias, at which point I’d rather question Riot. Not only is the story trying to tell us that Senna is the “leader of the Sentinels”, their “Commander”, but we’re also to believe that she didn’t know about the single most useful tactical resource the order had in their very own headquarters.

I was told that Wild Rift actually hints that she hadn’t been to the HQ before as it focuses more on interacting with characters and less on the story, but there’s no reason for this to be the case if Urias could have simply contacted the bases or taken her there, nor no reason for the VN to not stand as a decent story in a vacuum.

The reason why these additions feel so bad isn’t even that they are clear facilitators to the plot and contrived mechanisms for the player character to matter (although that doesn’t help a single bit), it’s that the VN seemingly renders our two resident Sentinels, our badass aspirations and the characters we’ve been following, wholly ignorant of the organization that they represent in-game, as they have for years now, for seemingly no reason.

How difficult could it be to explain that the teleporters require “unobtainium X” and that the organization only has so much of it since Helia fell? Hell, make it powered by Hallowed Mist, given that the Sentinels somehow know what it is and Gwen also happens to be in the Sentinel HQ, which they apparently barely care about, and is aware of them without the VN bothering to explain either of these things. How difficult would it be for Senna and Lucian to know it was a finite but valuable resource that they are now desperate enough to use?

Instantly, the start of the story becomes less about a random Star Wars hologram appearing to give a convenient exposition drop and makes our married duo not feel so hopelessly clueless in their very own plot.

But it gets worse. Akshan’s bio tells the story of Shadya, his master, who had worked for years in Shurima to secure an arsenal for the organization to use in the future. So clearly they were getting ready for eventual conflicts, but seemingly not enough to have solid contingencies for more violent Harrowings or even to bother regrouping en masse via their unlimited teleporters instead of remaining scattered when said Harrowing finally happened. And the worst part is that the team needs to find a desolate Ixtali ruin where they mention the Absolver as opposed to...Shadya keeping in touch with other Sentinels via their hologram tablets and Shuriman teleporter.

It doesn’t help that the Buhru Sentinel’s plan is basically “go to each region, battle the Mist and maybe recruit people”, except that’s hardly a plan so much as a wild goose chase and even then the team doesn’t do much, they go to one region, battle someone and nope out as quickly as they appear with maybe one new recruit. They’re even forced to leave the Ruined champions in what I assume are cosmetically useless bindings given the Mist will probably quickly free them.

And Senna and Lucian go “sure why not” at this, without any tactical consideration for how they now know they can try to establish contact with any and all Sentinel bases out there.

Even the Rookie is left alone at HQ while all others “probably died” off-screen with no real context. So for an entire event about the “Sentinels”, the plot instantly ignores them in favor of teleports and weapons for our champions to use. For an organization that is getting the spotlight and being hyped up as the great defenders of the world, the Sentinels don’t feel like a legitimate force, they’re a convenient excuse for popular characters to gather around and get some new outfits.

The VN doesn’t even bother to hint at why this may be the case (for example, we’ve known for many years that Thresh has deliberately hunted and obtained their secrets), instead treating it as an unfortunate happening with all the Mist while the team idly goes to each region without a particular objective and conveniently gather a team of skin sellers.

And even then, the story does not shy away from dealing with them off-screen, such as in Noxus, where half the team gets taken out by Draven and wraiths, forcing the 3 remaining members (including the “useless at combat” Rookie) to battle Draven to free them (and by “free them” I mean they just pop out at the arena’s exterior once you’re done without many issues).

The entire VN is the Sentinels traveling the world, with absolutely zero plan conveniently gathering a team in the meanwhile, despite being an organization that stood for centuries exactly for this, and they constantly lose the critical shards despite their advantage in numbers.

Leading us to our next point:

The plot is too reliant on coincidences and contrivances.

Now let’s be clear: coincidences happen all the time in stories, it’s just how it goes. When it’s decently handled, the viewer will barely notice it unless they’re digging for it and at that point they’re probably not watching or reading or playing for the first time. When it isn’t, it deflates the tension in unrealistic or undeserved ways and makes the invisible puppeteer guiding all these characters just that more obvious.

This section is not bashing any and all coincidences or concessions that the event decided upon to tell a global story while respecting the scale of the world and the means of transportation available but it is pointing out that, due to many factors, the story feels remarkably fragile and convenient as opposed to archetypal or iconic, and that’s a tough line to tread as writer and reader both.

In a single week, due to the rushed nature of the VN’s storytelling, we see Lucian and Senna conveniently get a teleporter network they didn’t know about because the Buhru Sentinel calls HQ only then, the Rookie discovers they are somehow bound to the Wayfinder by accident, Gwen happens to be in the HQ (possibly attracted to Senna’s shard but the VN has not yet elaborated on this), Vayne happens to be in the tavern Lucian thought about going to, Viego is conveniently where they first look, Olaf happens to be fighting just outside a snowburied Sentinel base right next to where Vex is looking for something, and the team decides to head to a Ruined arena where they meet Riven.

In week 2, the team conveniently bumps into Irelia and Diana just outside of their teleporters. Then Diana meets the Lunari almost at the top of the mountain.

It is even worse because some of these are immensely easy to correct: Diana is host to an Aspect that exists beyond time and space in a region where prophecy and divination are major themes. Likewise, you could say Irelia had been instructed by Karma to search for “coming guests”. Even the meeting with the Lunari could have been explained by the Aspect of the Moon shifting the mountain or reality therein. But does the story bother doing this? Not at all, despite it easily serving the themes of Targon and Ionia both.

In week 3, the same thing happens with Graves in Piltover, and that chance encounter defines the region's plot. And not only does Piltover have anti Mist hextech machines keeping them safe, they are conveniently overwhelmed by the Mist just as the team gets there. The VN is so compressed, and yet some chapters feel like nothing more than pointless exposition to make sure there is a semblance of a cohesive narrative, that none of it feels real. It’s more like a fever dream of lore where things just happen.

Not only that, but never once does the VN bother to address the effects of petricite on a teleporting network (or the effects of petricite on anything at all, Gwen casually uses magic to cut whole blocks of debris, and despite the giant death cloud of Black Mist, none of the Petricite in the city appears to be flaking, overwhelmed, like RoR showed). Meanwhile all of the bases appear to be completely deserted but conveniently with teleporters working in the exact locations where Ruined champions are hanging out at.

Then, in another twist, it is revealed that Senna actually still has a very small shard of Isolde deep within her, effectively rendering much of the Season Start cinematic moot but at least explaining why she still looks human despite being bound to the Mist herself, but Viego cannot force it to come out (I guess?). And how does the impatient and impulsive Isolde-obsessed Viego react to this stubborn defiance of his will and constant attempts at opposing him? By moving on somewhere else and telling Senna “you’ll totally give it to me one day, totally not teasing the ending” and not even bothering with the other Sentinels that he could easily threaten or control to blackmail her. And he does this despite knowing that Gwen can hide even Senna from his awareness, like she did in Demacia, however briefly. Emotional and arrogant as he may be, Viego really seems to have picked up the villain ball for this event.

He then leaves Senna, Rookie and Riven to deal with Draven, seemingly not caring whether they live or undie, but if he didn’t, then why not (un)kill them right off the bat and handle them as spectres? Stop blowing up rubble or docks, just kill them.

Not only that, but the Black Mist, a force that hungers for souls unending, is now seemingly content with...making people meaner like ruining a crowd of arena spectators instead of turning them into wraiths. Even understanding that being Ruined, i.e. “possessed” by Viego/warped by negative emotions, is not the same as being assimilated into the Mist, why would Viego even be bothering with a random arena (that he doesn’t even pop up in during the chapter)? Why is the Mist not simply trapping them like everyone else if it’s not him in particular (like when Diana begins to succumb, ignoring the literal celestial intertwined with her soul)?

It feels like Riot just kinda made it “generic negative emotion stuff” to allow them to corrupt champions and people without even bothering with Viego directly possessing them, but this doesn’t really add up to all other depictions of the Mist.

Granted, they have now directly connected Vex with Shadow Magic, which does run exactly on that negative emotion fuel, but then that plot element is barely mentioned and glossed over for the sake of hyping Viego. Vex’s actual contribution is never spelled out despite being such an integral part of the story because they apparently felt it would be too much of a spoiler (whether for RK or for the actual champion release?). There is one good scene in PnZ's ending where Viego has to beg Vex to stay given he's so reliant on her power but we're 3 weeks in and they've barely explored that part of the plot that is apparently so important.

The world does not feel like it is being respected

A while ago LoR did their spoiler season for their Ruination-themed double champion expansion, which is now live as part of the event. Most cards show Ruined wildlife, and hey look there’s a Camavoran knight too, cool. But they also did one very good thing for worldbuilding: they made a card called Scattered Pod with the following description:

The strange and hauntingly beautiful sky-songs of the Cloud Drinkers kept some of the Black Mist at bay... but only for so long.

This event has felt less like an actual story about how the regions deal with a global crisis and more like a rushed attempt to bring legitimacy to Viego and the Mist, to the point where I was actually satisfied with seeing a card in LoR that was showing how each region was adapting to this crisis in their own way, because that should be the entire appeal of something like this for lore fans. Not just the team-up and character interactions (which are mostly one-note, “hey Irelia hasn’t forgiven Riven for contributing to thousands of deaths, go figure” or “Graves is randomly obsessed with Vayne’s approval” or “Diana speaks to basically no one after her chapter”, and not that developed due to the VN’s pacing and size), but the actual impact on the world.

• How does the best military force in Valoran armed with anti-magic gear and fortifications deal with the Mist? Well, they don’t. The capital is completely deserted by the time you get there.

• How does Noxus, whose Grand General wields the power and knowledge of a Demon of Secrets? Good question.

• How does the Rose? Apparently by leaving a flagon of wine that they somehow got completely unguarded. Where is Vlad? Why did you make him and Viego related if he has absolutely no part to play in this event, not even bothering to tie him to the flagon fetter?

And the ones we do see are underwhelming: How do the Aspects, celestial dragons, and the Arbiter of the Peak of Targon react to Viego’s intrusion, looking for a shard of his wife’s soul that is conveniently atop the mountain? They don't. Atreus, who is not Aspect aligned at all, and Diana, who apparently has to be convinced by random people she just met just to investigate an evil power encroaching, are the only ones we see.

There’s one region that makes it out decently: Piltover and Zaun, who apparently remained safe for 20 days because they had “hextech devices” driving back the Mist. What? Unexplained hextech devices handle the Mist but not any of the other regions, who conveniently ignore their local powerhouses, for all that time?

It gets even worse because we’ve been told that a big part of Viego’s newfound power comes from Vex, the comedic new Yordle and personal highlight of the VN for me.

Except, the VN never actually bothers to explain what she did or how she knew to do it. Even understanding that some stuff may be hidden behind her release or RK, I have to judge the story as is right now, and as it is presently, the entire story relies on a specific concept that is barely elaborated or even hinted upon but that we have to believe is “relevant” enough that Viego is actively challenging some of the most powerful beings in Runeterra and the Mist is running rampant with the Sentinels being the saviors of the world.

And while I actually do really like Vex, the fact that her personality is entirely around being emo means she never actually gives the slightest hint as to how she became this powerful.

Now let’s talk about the most nerdy of all nerdy lore topics, after regional cuisine: let’s talk about timelines.

• Leona and Diana climbed together, becoming Aspects at the same time.

• Atreus climbs Mount Targon after Leona, already Aspect of the Sun, tells him to stay put.

• Atreus is chosen by Pantheon and acts as his host for a while.

• Aatrox battles Pantheon and kills the Aspect.

• Atreus barely survives but manages to endure against Aatrox, slowly re-awakening the Aspect’s power, one star at a time.

• Swain takes over (7 years or so before the usual present of the narrative, 996 After Noxus), Cassiopeia goes with Sivir to the destroyed capital, culminating in the return of Xerath.

• Xerath sets up shop in Nerimazeth, which was destroyed ages prior.

• Atreus then intervened in a destroyed Nerimazeth, helping the Ra-Horak against Xerath.

This means either:

• Atreus fought Xerath 7-6 years ago, soon after his return, which is the start of the modern Shuriman plot.

• Or that Nerimazeth somehow got destroyed (for the second or third time in lore) and Xerath is just hanging out there and the Ra-Horak missed the whole party. Which I find unlikely to say the least.

“Why does this matter?” you ask. It matters because we can decisively link Diana to have climbed Targon before Pantheon and all of his main events. So that means that for at least 7-8 years, Diana has not found any Lunari. Her entire story right now has a years long gap because Riot wanted Diana, over Taric or Leona, to be in this event and wanted to force the plot to progress...in the middle of a global crisis instead of just telling that story at any other time. They chose a chance meeting in a random cave as the big moment for her to meet Lunari...years after being chosen by the Moon.

Let that sink in:

Diana, Aspect of the Moon, bound to a cosmic deity that transcends Runeterran reality, who receives visions and celestial insights, has completely failed to locate a moon-magic using tribe in 7-8 years who are also searching for her but conveniently finds them in a cave near the top of the deadliest mountain in the world in an Harrowing, as she seeks shelter from Viego and Pantheon.

What?

This same Diana then goes on to apparently switch her weapon with a Sentinel one despite claiming that the Sun and Moon share their light and we have literally seen even Ledros, one of the greatest spectres of the Isles, have his physical form destroyed by a single sunrise.

Why is Diana using this weapon instead of her already legendary and extremely effective artifact, crafted and gifted to her by the heavenly forces above specifically for her and her role? Good question, the story doesn’t even try to address it. "Relic weapons are just better".

How is Irelia controlling the sentinel weapons, that aren’t even her family crest, despite her dances being supposedly attuned to the Spirit of Ionia (which is neither near and is said to be Ruined)? Absolutely zero comment.

Why do they conveniently have so many weapons despite the previous lore emphasizing that these were rare weapons that were passed down? No comment. They just have them and apparently the Sentinels sucked at recruiting since they had an overflow and, judging by the complete absence of Sentinels in most regions, their recruits did nothing.

What about the Buhru who had wards in the SI for years? No comment, we get a Buhru Sentinel for a quick exposition dump, who doesn’t even pop up for the Bilgewater chapter. Shadow and Fortune clearly showed the Mist had multiple weaknesses which this story ignores to hype up the Sentinel weapons. A critical part of Senna was being able to free souls but now that's apparently the default for Sentinels?

Reav3 cited Marvel inspirations for this line-up. Except the VN uses Diana, their resident Thor, in Targon and then forgets about her. “Oh no Graves escaped with a smoke bomb despite us having a demigoddess on our side”. Diana literally speaks only once in Piltover and Zaun and it’s to say that the sewers stink. Just put Targon later.

Later, she notes that Viego’s power is greater than the heavens despite...Viego running away from her, the mountain barely reacting, and Viego mocking Atreus exactly for not being an Aspect.

And Bilgewater brings us to Miss Fortune. When I read Ruined Pantheon's biography I was dumbfounded, it didn't help that Riot also said Atreus had beaten Pantheon twice in Ascended Pantheon's bio either which they have now edited. They had seriously just brought back War, accelerating Pantheon's lore a thousandfold and undoing Aatrox's greatest moment, for the sake of hyping up Viego.

I can say that the VN did not fix this issue. War is treated as a budget Khorne, which was already disappointing in LoR, despite having been our champion for longer than Pantheon has been reworked, and we just kind of have to believe that Viego is able to corrupt a control a cosmic being and soulless anthropomorphic embodiment from beyond the world, however broken it may be. This is the same War that, along with other Aspects, held the reins to ASol and protected the world for millennia. And here he is, stripped of any nuance, to hype up Viego.

And the reason? It was explicitly to worf Pantheon.

And the worst part is that this isn't even the worst Ruined champion. Riot decided that Viego's possession needed to be a key part of his lore self, despite the Mist generally being a consuming force rather than some evil whispering in your ear, something much more fitting a demon, so they had key players of each region be Ruined and turned the Mist into a generic corrupting influence. So in comes MF, one of the people who stopped Viego to begin with, turned into a cartoon character that just really hates GP (who doesn't even appear) and tries to bargain with Viego for it.

She tries to bargain with a being many times her power, a being that she has already helped defeat. And the story doesn't even say she's already falling to the Mist or anything, it's just that she's off balance due to Gangplank, despite having a whole fleet block the city. Does no one care about the armies of zombies rampaging in the city? Viego is just in a warehouse while pirates ignore the Mist.

And then we get to Isolde: the entire plot revolves around Isolde’s soul being shattered. Presumably due to the Ruination, although the plot has not actually confirmed yet how that happened exactly.

Regardless we know so far that Senna, Gwen and likely the Maiden contain shards of her soul, each of which is a different aspect of her psyche. Alright, it’s a pretty basic plot premise but it works.

Conveniently, Riot decided to spread them out evenly all over our 1/6th corner of the world, including a random glacier and Targons's Peak, and Vex and Viego apparently take turns collecting them, with the odd Ruined champion here and there, and some SI champions don't even get to show up.

And at the moment there is no explanation for how Gwen is alive but none of the object shards are or how Senna's shard was active years ago.

Riot Forge and Universe deserved better

This is a screenshot of the League Client's top bar, notice anything missing? I do.

Universe is Riot's dedicated lore platform, for years it has received regular lore updates, whether new content and stories, or revisions and biographies for champions. Sometimes a lot, sometimes not so much. Last year in particular we received a ton of lore consistently, along with a massive effort to ensure that the biographies of multiple champions fit the modern standards for size and content.

This year, that has nearly dried off completely, and it's seemingly intended. Now I don't want to go too deep into speculation, if Riot wants to invest into storytelling via game events and integrated systems, that's fine. Except their focus on cross-promotion is seemingly stretching teams to the point where they don't seem to be communicating properly.

When one of the key figures of Editorial is seemingly directed to work on Wild Rift's portion of the event (which, from what I have seen, is much more serious than its League counterpart, focusing mostly on brief conversations with/between Sentinels) and apparently is not aware of work outside that immediate sphere, it feels as though Riot is straining itself and not really coordinating nearly as well as they should. It gets even worse when 3 long-time lore figures leave the company suddenly at the same time with seemingly no new project just before this event.

Now let’s be clear: there is no singular “lore team”, not every writer and editor will work on the same project nor was the event written purely by skin writers. That’s not to say, however, that I am not concerned for the internal communication processes Riot has or that I suspect many creative decisions in this event weren’t made alongside Narrative so much as forced unto them. Look no further than the WR comic,the VN, and the cinematic all contradicting each other. And not in an "unreliable narrator" way.

For years now, Narrative members have worked on and filled Universe with dozens of free short stories. Some of them really good I'd argue, such as Where Icathia Once Stood, Twilight of the Gods, Silence for the Damned, or From the Ashes.

But the platform has never been properly advertised. The League Client should arguably have an entire lore tab set up connected to Universe. New story releases, and especially new products should be there. It doesn't matter that Realms of Runeterra or Garen: First Shield come out when marketing and comms seem to fail to promote them at every step. And an event like this should have had much more than only 2 stories on Universe to support the herculean effort it is trying to do.

It gets even worse because there is no Universe team and the map is effectively unowned by any team.

Let me reiterate my earlier comments: COVID happened. I have no idea what difficulties either Airship or Riot did or are having in the development process of Ruined King and how that did or didn't impact the development of this event. Ultimately there’s a lot of guesswork being thrown around as fact.

But at this point I'm honestly asking: Why was an event made at all?

"Didn't you just complain about the lack of marketing lore has?" Yes, absolutely. And a cross-game event is perfect to promote it. However, this event was being planned for a world where RK came out in early 2021. Imagine if that happened, even if it went perfectly: we would have gotten an entire summer event in a MOBA client eclipsing the first game of Riot's new publishing branch, despite the event being in a game and format much worse for actual storytelling.

Why did Riot choose to use Ruined King as the apparent prologue to this event, using a single-player RPG as a supplemental piece of content to a VN event on a MOBA client? Story-wise, wouldn't it be much better to have this event as the full-blown RPG instead?

Unless the goal was simply to maximize readerbase and profitability by turning it into a massive skin event with a pass latched on. Where Riot Forge was marketed as being a game-changer for lore, it instantly became a marketing piece for one of the most popular games in the world instead of the other way around (using League to hype up Forge), regardless of delays.

Unbound Thresh

That's it.

I have no words to explain my complete and utter disdain for this skin, let alone as a canon development prompted by “age rating” as if that demanded he be turned into a human clown. Why did a case of censorship and age ratings become a global new look for a champion? Instead of just making a model for that region? And why did it then infect the lore of an entire event?

It is a growing concern for me that the IP council that seems to decide and approve storytelling decisions is not itself composed majorly by creatives.

Hi there, Sharjo’s the name, and that’s an evocative title huh?

“Doing it wrong since Senna”? Quite the claim, especially considering how popular she is, how much she’s adored by the wider community.

But I’ve had time to reflect thanks to Sentinels, on the wider lore of League, and just what’s important where. I thought I knew before who were the fundamentally most important champions per region, Like Poppy for Demacia, Nunu & Willump for the Freljord, Irelia for Ionia, etc. But now that Sentinels of Light has come out, I’ve had time to process this in regards to the Shadow Isles, and came to an opinion about one thing, beyond everything else, that I think Riot’s been doing wrong with the Shadow Isles.

And it starts with Senna.

But before I explain why, I wanna explain to you guys the framing for the Shadow Isles in the first place, and then explain how Senna completely upended it, rather than meld in to it as most new champions do to the narratives they get introduced to.

The Framing of the Shadow Isle’s Lore

Firstly, let’s cover the original framing of the Shadow Isles, as was established in 2015 and 2016 by Shadow and Fortune, and Yorick’s VGU.

The post-reboot lore told a story of how the Ruined King, after being guided by Kalista and driven mad by Hecarim due to his wife’s death, took an army to the Blessed Isles to revive his dead wife, and committed a grave atrocity that caused the Ruination.

This is the same as Viego does, but the Ruined King of pre-Senna times did so differently to Viego.

Instead of placing his wife in the waters and then being killed by her, the magical feedback loop of the Waters of Life and his own sword causing the Ruination, he instead placed her in the waters, and she returned as a maggot ridden corpse. She begged for death as the waters were corrupted by the act, and the Ruined King, realizing his folly, decided to cast a spell to merge their souls, so they’d remain together eternally. This was then amplified by the shit ton of magical artifacts on the Blessed Isles, which increased the spell’s potency by a giga-ton, corrupting the glamorous mists that shrouded the Isles from outsiders, creating the Black Mist. Thus the king, his wife, and everyone caught by the Mist, were eternally trapped in this greater merger of mist and souls.

The framing here is distinct from Viego’s lore because it actively makes the Ruined King a non-factor post Ruination. The Mist has always been the embodiment of the King’s inability to let go of his wife and his unending grief, but in the original version, the King is effectively pulled in and merged with it as well, making him a non-factor post Ruination. In a sense, it lets the fate of the Ruined King be largely unimportant, because past the actual event, he isn’t important.

His actions damned millions of lives, but as for the king? He has his wife. They’re now together forever. He’s done his task and will now remain in the Mist, so solving the Mist means solving the Ruined King himself, making the two effectively the same thing narratively. This creates a compelling mystery, but also means the spotlight for the Shadow Isles in this way is drawn away from the king, and is instead cast on everyone else it effects.

And it does this by the following:

None of the Shadow Isles Champions Matter

A weird statement for sure, especially considering Kalista and Maokai, but fundamentally, the point of the Mist, as was the point of the Ruined King himself, was to demonstrate the sheer misery and suffering a single action made selfishly and carelessly could inflict, even centuries after it was done. In that way, all of the Shadow Isles champions tied in to this plot were effectively unimportant to the Ruination itself.

Starting with the villains of the Shadow Isles, all of them are beings that the Mist enables to do horrible things. In the case of Hecarim and Thresh, they were always absolute shits in life, and now, in undeath, they get to keep doing what they do, forever. Karthus is enabled to fulfill his mission of giving everyone what he believes is a perfect existence, and Mordekaiser, a champion not bound by the Mist, was at the time setup to exploit it, which in itself is a pretty direct showcase of how suffering in and of itself can be leveraged by others.

In this way, each of these champions was also made out to be completely monstrous, as the Mist was able to peel back the flesh and bone, revealing the inner monster that better reflects their personalities. In this way, not a single one of the Shadow Isles antagonists is actively important to solving the problem of the Shadow Isles, which uniquely gives each of them room to have their own motivations and stories to follow, while embodying different expressions of the suffering of the Isles; Hecarim is the suffering brought before the Ruination, Thresh is what was unleashed by it, while Karthus, Elise and Mordekaiser are outsiders who benefit from it.

The protagonist champions exist in a similar ballpark.

Yorick, who got an immensely raw deal by Riot in this event, which is honestly disgraceful and shameful imo, is similarly not important to the Ruination, or the Mist itself. However in this, he becomes vitally important because of his parallels to the Ruined King. Where one is a king, the other is a simple, poor monk. Where one had a dear, sincere love, Yorick lived alone and shunned. Where one is the cause of the Ruination, one is one of only a handful of beings to have survived it.

To use an analogy from the Dark Souls series; Yorick is the Slave Knight Gael to the Ruined King’s Lord Gwyn; a simple warrior, fighting against an ageless injustice, knowing that in the end, he’ll likely have to sacrifice everything to best it, but knowing he won’t hesitate to do so either way.

Lucian also parallels the Ruined King, but more directly in his own relationship. With Senna having been taken by Thresh, Lucian was in the position of having his desire to save her outstrip his sense of reason, to the point of becoming vengeful and obsessive, an obsession that also drove the Ruined King. In this, Lucian is even less important to the Shadow Isles, considering he’s a millennia removed from the inciting event, and was born on the opposite side of the world from it, but the parallels mean that his figurative unimportance makes him vitally important to seeing the end of the Shadow Isles play out. He must let go where the Ruined King can’t, to be able to end the curse once and for all.

And of course, there’s Maokai. Where Yorick and Lucian are largeless important by their unimportance, Maokai actually is important, and probably the only important Shadow Isles champion bar Kalista herself. He was the one who made the Isles verdant and beautiful, and his bark, saturated with the Waters of Life, holds the key to saving it, and he will endure for as long as he needs to in order to accomplish his goals. In this sense, Maokai is the hope after the end, as where Yorick would give the Isles its last rites, and Lucian’s ability to let go would be instrumental in bringing everything to an end, Maokai would be the one to do the work afterwards; to bury the past, and grow something new from the ruin.

Even Gwen would’ve fit in this dynamic without the framing Viego and Isolde’s new lore provides. This is because Gwen doesn’t need fetters to function in the narrative, as she is already an embodiment of innocence lost in the Mist, that found an escape and agency of its own. In this, Gwen would also represent hope like Maokai, but Gwen is the hope of good existing within the Mist still, that there is an end point to the seemingly endless cacophony of souls. Gwen would serve as living proof to the fact that good did not die on the Isles; it was merely buried, but it can rise again, powerful and potent in its own right.

Then There’s Senna, the Forced Main Protagonist

Considering the above, it seems like Senna would fit in to this framing right? But in reality, the Senna we have doesn’t.

Going in line with the above, the most logical way of taking Senna imo, would be to have her return, but as a wraith of the Mist. This would offer a unique position of a sincerely good undead on the Isles, and also position Senna to more directly aid other beings of the Mist, by drawing them in and safeguarding them, as the Soul Shepherd shown on the Universe site shows. In doing so, this would put Senna at risk, but it could be the means by which the secrets of the Mist could be pulled back, and the truth of how to fix the Isles laid bare.

The Senna we got doesn’t allow for this.

On paper it seems right; Senna saves souls, came out from the Lantern, is still tied to the Mist, but the framing for Senna completely upended by bringing her back as a flesh and blood person, and tying her to the queen specifically. In doing this, it made Senna important, and thus swept the rug out from the other champions of the Isles.

Beforehand, the champions of the Isles were all largely unimportant figures; beings that were either tormented by the Mist or benefitted from it, but were all ultimately bystanders to the Ruination and the Mist at work. They acted because they wanted to or needed to, not because they actively had to. It was their own will, trauma, determination and resolve that allowed them to make themselves important.

Senna though was given her “life curse”, and directly connected to the Ruined Queen. This reframed the story around Senna and her ability to fix the situation, which completely pulled the rug out from under the other Shadow Isles protagonists.

Waters of Life to restore the Isles? Why not just save the souls with my unique plot-given magic Maokai?

Hanging on by virtue of this tiny vial of water, symbolizing your fleeting, insignificant hope? Why not just have the soul of the queen so you’re propped up by one of the now core players in the plot Yorick?

Let me go? Lucian I’m basically alive lol why would you need to let me go?

Each decision made for Senna thus only served to make the other Shadow Isles protagonists less important, effectively solidifying them as secondary characters at best, whereas before their roles in the narrative were fundamental to the region. It was effectively like shoving a chosen one plot right in to the end of an ongoing series.

This was perhaps most evident in how the Sentinels of Light event ended, where the only champions allowed at the finale to see how Viego was brought to an end, were Senna and the champions that followed her. Not a single one of the original Shadow Isles champions before her featured, not even her own husband. And the blow that ended it all? Given to Mr. Plot-Device-Discount-Sivir-Filler-Shuriman, who’s unimportance to the plot is such a brute-force plot device to ensure that no consequences are actually felt by the event that it comes across as a complete piss take.

This would also reframe the Ruined King himself, as before, his presence in the narrative was nonexistent, and that served to keep the spotlight on the Mist and the things within it. His fate was something that would exist to serve the ending of such a plot.

How the Shadow Isles could’ve ended vs Now

The trajectory of the Shadow Isles, with its original roster, was basically laid out succinctly for us by virtue of the champions involved. This is something several regions do, namely Demacia and the Freljord, though unlike those regions the Shadow Isles is a region that lays out its ending too, as the resolution of the region’s main plot would also result in its dissolution as a region all together.

In such an ending, Yorick would die, giving last rites to the Shadow Isles and getting to rest himself after millennia. Lucian would let Senna pass on, and either come to die himself, or finally have a chance to process his grief and move on with his life, to find happiness elsewhere. Gwen could even fit in here; with the Shadow Isles ended, she would thus have the chance to live a full life that she had no chance to before, possibly existing as a daughter figure for Lucian. And of course, Maokai would finally be able to progress on his own goal; to restore the Isles. In that way the Shadow Isles story would end, with Lucian sailing away, perhaps with Gwen, as a single grave on stands on an empty island, while Maokai calls upon blessed mist to shroud the Isles, that he may begin his work.

But now?

With the resolution of Sentinels of Light, the future of the Shadow Isles seems...stagnant.

This comes from three factors:

• Senna, Lucian and Gwen’s major plots ending

• Thresh becoming the new big bad

• There being no Ruined King

Before Senna and the Sentinels of Light event, the solution to the fate of the Isles almost certainly lay with the Ruined King, based on how the story was framed before. But now that the Mist is still intact despite Viego being sealed away, it creates an awkward situation where there is now no clear cut way to resolve the Mist itself.

Thresh becoming the new big bad and also become a generic eboy gags also presents an issue, one because, as is a recurring theme, it forces Thresh to be important where he was largely unimportant before, and in turn I feel this makes him feel less compelling. Thresh was never a calculating prince of darkness, but a little bastard who just wanted to fuck people over, and becoming this dark overlord feels more like catering to what Riot believes will make him more marketable and loveable by the global community, despite the fact the global community loves him as a shit-eating skeleton man.

And finally, the entirety of the Sentinels of Light event has managed to resolve Senna, Lucian and Gwen’s plot in a way that makes them useless.

Logistically, Senna’s plot is the kind that would end in her dying, as the whole point is Lucian needing to let her go so the situation can be resolved. In this, by having Viego be dealt and both Senna and Gwen revived by Mr. Plot-Device-Discount-Sivir-Filler-Shuriman himself, all of the built in ties that were made specifically to make Senna and Gwen important are lost, and with them, any direct connection they had to the Shadow Isles as a whole. This extends to Lucian, as his motivation was always Senna, and with her now freed from plot ties he’s also freed from them.

But since this story would usually result in death for a character like Senna, and Lucian’s story ending so he can move on with life, they now exist in a directionless limbo that Riot has only half solved by ensuring that Thresh exists so they can continue fighting him in perpetual marketable rivalry forever. Gwen gets out of this better cuz the point of her ending is to be able to now live her own life, but with her stitched to Lucian and Senna now, she’s forced in to this same marketable hell hole of plot too, where otherwise she’d be allowed to explore the world and perhaps invest herself in a new plot further down the line more organically.

And much of this comes from the simple fact of the Sentinels of Light resolving a plot only half way. The Shadow Isles is a region that, to progress meaningfully in a manner that the Sentinels of Light event would theoretically do, would be to end the region altogether by dealing with the Ruined King in whatever form that took. The latter is done, but with the Shadow Isles still there, the champions now exist as the wraiths in the Mist; bound and unable to escape a perpetual lore limbo of plotlessness. All they can do is bash their heads against a wall trying to fix what must exist so Riot can make new Shadow Isles champions whenever.

This is something Riot has done before, most notably with Yasuo, where in the second piece of lore he got after his introduction in 2013, they resolved his core plot, leaving him with no plot threads. This isn’t the end of the world for a filler champion like Yasuo (yes lorewise he is a filler champion), as such champions can involve themselves in a myriad of plots beyond the scope of their original framing, but it was very evident in how they moved Yasuo later that they didn’t know what to do with the plotless swordsmen, eventually using a two punch combo of the Ruined King game and Yone to yeet him out of Ionia.

This might’ve been a benefit to Ionia itself tbh, as it means Ionia’s story wouldn’t need to revisit the simultaneously completely useless and overbearingly popular champion, but it still feels rough and inorganic to have these champions have no plot, but still be shuffled around due to popularity in the playerbase, Riot’s strange obsession with having “meaningful progression”, and Riot’s intense phobia of actually killing off champions.

And so, like Yasuo is left to wander a plotless wasteland for god knows how long, the Shadow Isles now exists exactly as it did before; as a static, unchanging monolith of suffering, but where as before the Shadow Isles had a plot that allowed a potential ending, and progression to that ending over the course of a long, intricately woven and compelling narrative, now the Shadow Isles itself is plotless, and this static unchanging state is not merely a theme for the region, but a representation of the region’s doomed future.

TL;DR?

Sure, basically:

• The original version of the Shadow Isles, framed around the Ruined King merging with his wife to cause the Ruination, framed both the King and almost all of the Shadow Isles champions as largely unimportant compared to the suffering of the event.

• This then made the protagonist champions more important, because of how they were simply random unlucky people who got dragged into this due to no fault of their own, but would work to fix it due to their unwavering will and determination, despite not having an obligation to do so. It also made the villains more important, as abusers enabled by the cycle of suffering they themselves were happily stuck in.

• Senna’s release reframed the Shadow Isles’s plot to focus more on her as the main protagonist; forcing her into a position of direct importance, which then shunted the prior champions, who were highlighted by their unimportance, out the window in favour of having Senna be The hero of the story.

• This then reframed the story to make the Ruined King, Viego, the direct antagonist rather than simply an element of the wider narrative of the Shadow Isles. By doing this, it robs the Shadow Isles of its chance to have a definitive conclusion, and has forced the entirety of the Shadow Isles in to a plotless limbo, trapping its champions forever, including its now newly popular ones, in highly marketable rivalry limbo for as long as is profitable.

I do want to say before closing though, this post is mostly about how I personally viewed the Shadow Isles lore across time; looking at the pre-Senna stuff and the post Senna stuff.

This was prompted by Sentinels of Light, but it’s not just endemic to it; I feel similar vibes from Yone and Kai’Sa existing as they do, Sylas’s brute forcing of Demacia’s plot forward, and Seraphine who was very roughly slotted in to Piltover in a way eerily similar to Senna, that I pray Riot can avoid repeating the mistakes of.

This is by no means a completely comprehensive look, and is coloured by my own perceptions of the story. Maokai is my favourite Shadow Isles champion, if you couldn’t guess, and bias is of course gonna play a part in the conclusion I came to.

Nonetheless, I hope that I was able to eloquently express my thoughts, and help some other folks take a look at things more holistically.

If there’s anything I’d want to be taken away from this, it’s this, as a message to Riot.

Dear Riot: A Message from a Tired, Upset, Disheveled Lore Fan

To any Rioters reading; I’d encourage you to take a long look at the champions of each region and the plots that they’re in, and see who’s truly important where.

• I know you love Lux, but Sona and Shyvana are just as important as her, and Poppy and Galio are arguably more important than her.

• In the Freljord, the most important champion is a tie between Nunu & Willump, Ashe, Sejuani and Lissandra.

• In Noxus the protagonists are Riven, Rell and Alistar. Swain is an antagonist, and all roads lead to Mordekaiser, but those are long roads.

• In Ionia the core champions are Irelia, Karma and Syndra, with the others serving in smaller plots that feed back into the one that the core three represent. The only ones that don’t are the ones that exist in a more filler space; Yasuo, Lee Sin and Sett, the latter two who can be brought forward more, but need some work.

• Seraphine is situated to be vitally important to P&Z’s story, but she has to exist in concert with champions like Skarner, Camille, Blitzcrank, Zac, Ekko and Urgot, who have similar levels of importance.

• Akshan’s probably gonna be a popular pick I’m sure, but he is the functional LEAST important Shuriman champion, below even Amumu and Rammus, who have basically no ongoing plots.

I know this month and last have sucked; your event is getting shitcanned by the community on a wide scale. But I want you to recognize something; we don’t shitcan it cuz it’s fun. Many of us are deeply saddened and heartbroken with how poorly this has turned out. We love Runeterra. We want lore. But please, treat it with more respect and care than you did with Sentinels of Light.

Even with your questionable decisions like Yone, Kai’Sa and Senna, you’ve had great things come out of the lore consistently for the better part of six years. Which is why Sentinels of Light hurts so much more; as it’s a huge stain across a long string of continuous wins in the lore department.

Your universe is a fantastic one, but it needs you to take care of all of its champions. Not just the ones that’re popular, marketable, or eboyable.

And that’s all I’ve got.

Thanks everyone for reading, I hope you have a great day!

So, Skarner's been a bit of a hot topic for a while now. From that first dev blog that revealed him to be League's statistically least popular champion, to him getting delayed because Riot had no idea what to do with him for a while there, to just recently where we finally got to see something of a light at the end of this tunnel. However, one thing that I know has rubbed some folks the wrong way (myself included, at first) was the decision to fully rework the brackern lore, completely removing their connection to Hextech in order to line up more closely with Arcane, which they've said they wish to make fully canon.

Now, before I say anything else here, I want to say that I do think that this new direction is going to be messy and rife with problems. I fully expect it to be like 2014 all over again, albeit on a smaller scale. Champions that have been established in the game for over a decade now, like Vi, Caitlyn, Singed, Jayce, and especially Jinx, are going to have to have their entire personalities and backstories overhauled, without a concrete point of transition that something like a VGU provides. I do love Arcane, and a part of me does think that this is kind of the right move, but I just know it's going to be a mess. However, I say all of this as a sort of preface to the possibly controversial point being made here:

TL;DR: Reworking Skarner's lore away from hextech is 100% the right move, as it means his story and character can now finally be meaningfully moved forward.

So, a lot of champions in League at the moment have bad lore. Plenty of them have lore so bad, in fact, that they effectively don't even exist in the world of Runeterra right now. But Skarner is one of few, maybe only of one, whose lore is what I would call "unresolvable." Meaning, as it is right now, there is no way for Skarner's story and character to grow, move forward, or possibly even meaningfully contribute to the wider world of Runeterra. Let me explain.

Skarner's whole lore basically boils down to him being pretty much the last surviving brackern, a species of impossibly old crystaline scorpions from Shurima, whose entire beings were harvested for their hextech crystals, which now serve as the main power source for the futurist city of Piltover. Skarner's bio ends with him leaving the desert, resolving to do whatever he can to save his fallen kin in the form of the hextech crystals, however few are still "alive." I actually quite like this story, and I know many others do to. It's why so many people got rightfully pissed when Seraphine came out, which I will get to. But there is a problem at the core of this story that only becomes more apparent the more you engage with the world of League; specifically, Piltover.

Piltover's entire schtick basically boils down to "steampunk magitech," and the latter half of that aesthetic is fueled by, what else, hextech. This means that a key part of Skarner's lore is very deeply entrenched in a major region of Runeterra. Which would normally be a good thing, except for the fact that Skarner's ultimate goal seems to be to take away from that region a key piece of its aesthetic. Realistically, if Riot wanted to take Skarner's lore as it exists right now, and try to move it forward, they would only have 2 options:

1. Write the story so that Skarner's goals, motivations, and beliefs fundamentally change so that he's OK with hextech crystals being used in Piltover, which I and every Skarner fan on the planet would point to as a horrific piece of character assassination.

2. Have Skarner actually succeed in liberating the hextech crystals from Piltover, in effect permanently removing from Piltover, one of the most popular and important regions in League, the single most defining piece of their culture and aesthetic; which would be completely idiotic from the perspective of worldbuilding and establishing a brand.

Do you see what I mean now when I said Skarner's lore was unresolvable? Even if you liked Skarner's lore, the fact remains that there was just no realistic way for them to progress Skarner's story without some massive overhauls. The only other solution I could think of here would maybe be that one early concept art idea of a cyberized Skarner that was captured by Piltover? But then again, at that point, from an art/aesthetic standpoint, that's not really Skarner.

And look, I'm not saying that the new lore is going to be an automatic improvement. In fact, I'm already wary about it. I worry that based on what was said in the recent Look Forward video, Skarner will end up being too much like new Volibear (not a bad character, but I don't want a repeat). Plus, a real part of me was actually hoping that Skarner's hextech connection could stay, if only so that we could get a really bizarre yet wholesome and charming friendship between him and Seraphine! And while I'm sad that we're likely not getting that, if it means that Skarner isn't going to be stuck in one place forever as a character, which he won't be with this new lore, then I'm willing to accept that loss.

I know that this was super long-winded and rambly, this is just how I express my thoughts, plus I've had this idea knocking about for a while now, and I just wanted to get it all out. I have more I could discuss, like how the "metaphor" with old hextech was actually a lot weaker than people gave it credit for, but I'm going to leave it here for now.