China, Summer 2022. It’s Week 1, Day 1 of the League of Legends Pro League (LPL). China enjoys the largest professional League of Legends division of anywhere in the world, consisting of a whopping 17 teams, compared to the typical 10. This necessitates the LPL to begin their competitive seasons, typically, a full week earlier than all other regions. With time left to prepare for their own regional competitions, professionals and enthusiasts the world over are watching, ready for an early look at the meta that will come to define the last half of their competitive year, and the final push for a spot at Worlds.
Due to COVID restrictions in China, the LPL teams still play in isolation. Team cams look much more like PC cafes than stadiums, showcasing mostly empty rooms bordered by clean PC setups and surrounded by heavy, upholstered curtains. The coach and assistant coach walk a circuit as they give advice and orders alike throughout the pick/ban phase, trailed closely by a masked referee. There are no stands, with no fans to fill them and hold up their neon signs; there are no jai ho!s being shouted. But the odd scene of this exciting day is overshadowed by something much stranger:
In the second match of the day, returning world champion Edward Gaming locks in Vi.
Vi has not been competitively viable at this high a level of play for nearly seven years. And despite buffs she received, this pick isn’t really due to Vi’s individual power, either. Opposing team FunPlus Phoenix had chosen Ezreal as their ADC (attack damage carry, AKA ranged physical damage carry) and would soon choose LeBlanc, a magic assassin, as their mid laner.
To keep things short, Ezreal and LeBlanc are two of the slipperiest bastards in League of Legends, and any game plan against them has to involve holding them still. Ezreal had already been locked in, and the threat of LeBlanc hung over Edward Gaming as they chose their own mid laner, Ahri. With three of their five champions selected and containing no reliable hard crowd control, Edward Gaming had to choose a jungler that could do the job and then some, as they’d already begun to build a very aggressive team composition.
Vi was the perfect choice. She’s a decent bruiser — equal parts attack and defense, a true fighter — with the ability to jump over small walls, excellent for flanking opponents or setting up ambush plays. But the real reason you pick Vi is due to her ultimate ability. It’s a targeted dash with complete displacement immunity for Vi, meaning that she literally cannot miss. All she has to do is point and click on the right target, and she dashes to them with no way to be stopped, straight through any blink or dash or invisibility cast after the fact. The only escape is killing Vi mid-dash or somehow making yourself untargetable, an option unavailable to both Ezreal and LeBlanc in this match. When she reaches her target, Vi knocks them into the air for 1.3 seconds; more than enough time for her teammates to follow up with more lockdown and damage. Against a team even half as coordinated as Edward Gaming, getting hit by Vi’s ultimate is a death sentence.
It’s called Assault and Battery.
Well… not anymore, actually. In October of 2021, just over two weeks before the release of Netflix’s Arcane, it was renamed to Cease and Desist. Another of Vi’s abilities was also changed at this time, from Excessive Force to Relentless Force. Riot Games is normally quite rigorous with their patch notes, but these two renames are completely undocumented. Strange!
In the teaser trailer for Arcane’s second season, Vi appears bedraggled and moody as ever as she officially joins the Wardens, League of Legends’ steampunk NYPD. To say that queer social media was aflame would be an understatement. Shock. Horror. Our beloved babygirl dyke — a cop?! As a longtime League of Legends player and a lesbian, it’s difficult to describe the mix of schadenfreude and pity I felt. It was like watching a starving Wile E. Coyote lick a painting of a cartoon ham, or a 2015-era AO3 author hopeful that Stucky would become canon. At a certain point, you start to believe ignorance must be voluntary.
Champions in League of Legends have dozens and dozens of barks — short, often contextual voice lines — that they utter as they walk around, use abilities, spot certain champions, and even as they’re picked and banned before the game begins. Vi has had very few (if any) changes to her classic voiceover since her initial release in late 2012. I haven’t played much Vi in my life, and it’s usually not possible to hear character barks in competitive play over the commentators. But, the excellent voicework from Cia Court, the constant repetition of most lines in League, and the unique color of Vi’s writing makes them quite memorable. There are at least a dozen I can rattle off the top of my head.
On pick, she utters her most iconic line:
On ban:
There are all her little random lines while she’s walking or punching:
There are her jokes and taunts:
Unlike her Arcane co-star Caitlyn, who received a visual and art update, lore rework, and fully redone voiceover including dozens of new lines, Vi has been the same for well over 10 years. The reasons for this, while never directly stated, are very clear.
Firstly, Vi is a mess. Her entire character is that she’s a sexy, alt bombshell police girl who is far above the law. Her police brutality vacillates between edgily humorous and righteous (i.e. it’s good that she beats people all the time because the degenerates deserve it). The schtick wasn’t that funny in 2012 and was aging pretty poorly by 2020, as League began to position itself as something to be taken more seriously. Furthermore, it doesn't match up with Arcane Vi in the slightest, nor the contemporary Riot Games trying to improve its image from the shepherd of the most toxic gaming fanbase on the planet. When it comes to reworking Vi, the baby has to be thrown out with the bathwater, and it would take a lot of work — most of which will be shouldered by Arcane. After all, why bother doing all this work in League when you can wait for Arcane to wrap up its second season and just declare that canon? Why conduct simultaneous rewrites and risk further inconsistency?
Secondly, Vi sucks. Although all champions are subject to the ebbs and flows of the meta, Caitlyn, at least, frequently finds her way into it. ADC is already the role with the lowest champion population, and Caitlyn is the prototypical ADC — she’s good at what ADCs do with no other bells, whistles, or gimmicks. Vi, meanwhile, is a victim of the turbulence of the jungle role. Anyone can be a jungler in the right patch, which has the state of jungle in constant flux — but Vi, unfortunately, struggles to adapt to any other role. She’s not that good at what she does, and worse at everything else. Players are astronomically more likely to see and hear Caitlyn than Vi, so it doesn’t make much sense to prioritize Vi’s lore accuracy. This is especially true when you consider the relatively small demographic that this would serve: new League of Legends players joining the game because of Arcane, and specifically those who intend to play as Vi.
That being said, they’re going to have to rework Vi eventually, and it would seem that they’ve finally committed to it. In October 2023, Riot confirmed in a developer update that League of Legends’ lore was going to be completely overhauled to erase inconsistencies and bring all of the different champion stories and comics and voice lines and games into one universe, one united vision of canonicity. There’s a very strong implication therein that, after years of waffling back and forth, Arcane in its entirety will be canon going forwards.
This will be the third time that League of Legends lore is going to be completely overhauled to erase inconsistencies and bring everything together into one united vision of canonicity.
Back in my day, Wukong was simply The Monkey King. Joining League of Legends in 2011, he served as the Sun Wukong-inspired fighter mandatory to all video game character rosters. He was, ostensibly, a monkey anthro. He has a furry face, a tail, hands for feet, and an ape-like gait. Ahri, one of League’s most famous and popular characters, was a nine-tailed fox; a spirit with the ability to shapeshift between fox and human. Visually, she’s a pretty standard foxgirl: a beautiful anime woman with fox ears and nine tails. Nami was a straight-up mermaid, living in the depths of the ocean and unable to assume a more humanoid form. Rengar was a giant cat man — arguably the most standard furry in the entire game — based directly on the Predator, the alien antagonist from the 1987 film of the same name. Nidalee was a mysterious survivalist living in the fantasy-Indian jungles, so in tune with nature she could shapeshift into a cougar at will. Udyr was an ambiguously Pagan hermit who could channel animal spirits to enhance his physical abilities at the cost of his humanity.
Now they’re all “Vastaya,” a magical race of beings descended in part from the spirits of the land.
The Great Retcon of 2017 was a turning point in my enjoyment of League of Legends lore, in the sense that I stopped enjoying it. I changed my in-game status to “The lore is bad,” spurring many chat conversations I still remember fondly. It would remain that way for several years until the passage of time necessitated a change to “The lore’s still bad,” which would, without fail, earn a chuckle from friends new and old.
The source of my disappointment is, ironically, a lack of creativity and variety. Ironic because League of Legends is nothing if not an unoriginal biter. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that League has no original ideas, its origins as a clone of a mod of a Blizzard game conceived by two businessmen — not developers, designers, or artists — could be theorized without knowledge of the game’s origins. League of Legends’ original champion roster features such stand-out designs as angel, fallen angel, minotaur, scarecrow, werewolf, and samurai, among slightly more interesting ones, such as evil little girl or Gambit from X-Men.
But herein lies League’s strength. If nothing else, it’s a product designed for nerds, by nerds. Much like Magic: The Gathering, its neverending nature allows for neverending consumption. Likewise, its positionality as a relatively niche and concentrated hobby encourages one to engage with other hobbies simultaneously — League and Magic fans are rarely just League or Magic fans. They’ve seen every Spider-man film and played half of the mainline Pokémon games. They have active World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV Online subscriptions. They’re k-pop fans who watch EVO and play every chaotic multiplayer game du jour. They play Animal Crossing: New Horizons with their loved ones and bitch about the current state of Star Wars in between matches. My friend group’s decision to play League each night largely depended on one factor: party size. If we had four or six people, we were playing Overwatch instead.
Nerds, with our love of memorization, trivia, and powerscaling, can feel rewarded when engaging with the copycat League of Legends, regardless of our performance in the game itself. There are references hidden everywhere, like in many champion’s dance commands. Ahri does Girls’ Generation’s "Run Devil Run." Infernal Nasus bops smoothly to "Drop It Like It’s Hot," which is in and of itself a pun: Nasus is an anthropomorphic canine and the song is Snoop Dogg’s. Corki does a barrel roll, mirroring a voice line he has referencing the same Star Fox meme. Ezreal does the Hare Hare Yukai dance from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. DJ Sona — herself based on Hatsune Miku — does the uma uma dance ("Caramelldansen"). There are four seemingly unrelated skins which form a tacit gag on internet browsers: Foxfire Ahri, Safari Caitlyn, Explorer Ezreal, and Chrome Rammus; the original Connections. I Leonardo DiCaprio pointed at my screen at the release of Sylas, obviously based on Tai Lung from Kung Fu Panda, one of my favorite movies. There’s the Star Guardian skin line, League’s own personal brand of magical girls. There are references to World of Warcraft, Star Wars, Apple’s iPhone, Bowser, everything Batman, the Loch Ness Monster, Monsters Inc., Gurren Lagann, Pokémon, and many more, to say nothing of the dozens of video game references within the Arcade skin line or the community inside jokes Riot is wont to include from time to time. Noticing and learning these references, ripoffs, and reimaginings is fun. Even disregarding these direct references, League is a toy chest with a massive assortment of weird and wonderful characters. A world where an edgelord ninja assassin fights magical flying cats and zombie spearhunters is cool. League of Legends is peak nerd culture, distilled and incorporated into an endlessly complex and ever-changing video game.
While Magic and League share great similarities in essence here, they differ in the nature of their neverending-ness. Magic is a card game released in sets, allowing characters to grow and change in a relatively short period of time with little extra effort on the part of Magic itself. They’re printing new cards anyways, including those characters anyways, and likely want them to change anyways to keep things fresh (and collectible). If they don’t want too much change, art and stats are untouched while the flavor text is altered to perform some narrative lift without necessitating extra design work. It’s much more laborious to enact narrative change in League.
Playtesting and gameplay tweaks are native to both games, but there’s a huge difference between printing different words and numbers on a new card versus animating a new ability, including the potential need for new sound and visual effects as well as voiceover. A new Magic set could require as little as no new art for any given character, in the event that they decide to reuse the design and recharacterize them with text and gameplay mechanics. A single piece of new art is common, as a new design for the character’s specific card. And while there could be more if they choose to feature said character in multiple new cards, this labor cost still pales in comparison to a game like League’s. On the contrary, a new design for a League character would require a minimum of one new two-dimensional art piece like Magic as well as a new 3D character model. And, if the base or “naked” character design is different enough, the onus is on the developer to change every other 3D model they have, too. Caitlyn, for example, had 12 models and their animations redone because she got a new base face and body. Lastly, while many champions are accompanied by text-based lore like Magic, integrating that lore into the game itself requires voicework. This doesn’t just mean getting one voice actor back into the booth; League is available in 21 languages.
Allowing a character to grow and change in League of Legends is expensive, time-consuming, and complicated to pull off. Expenses aside, it’s difficult to change a character over time without introducing dissonance between their personality and gameplay. But at the same time, it’s hard to justify removing the option for that original playstyle with narrative reasons when gameplay and competition are what drive the game as a whole. None of this is impossible, to be sure, but tough to do and tougher to rationalize — and that’s before you consider the endless stream of new champions clogging up the development pipeline. It’s for this reason that the only time you’ll see a champion drastically changed in League is when they’ve fallen out of step with the game’s overall vision (and are difficult to balance) and are rebuilt from the ground up. This game was never built to serve narrative endeavors, and it shows. Which brings us back to the Vastaya.
On paper, this was a clever move. Uniting every animalgirl, anthro, and furry champion into one race allows Riot to create something unique to League out of existing material, without introducing any art or engineering burden; it’s just text. However, what Riot failed to recognize is that this dissonance is precisely what makes League, League. There are no more mermaids or monkeymen or villages of birdpeople or inexplicably shapeshifting catwomen. Less fun, less mystery. It no longer feels like anything is possible. Just simple, rulebound Vastaya. Other than being boring, this decision forever hampers the game’s ability to introduce someone surprising, cheeky, or referential. From this point forward, champions with appropriate characteristics have to be flattened down into Vastaya for the sake of consistency, and therefore, to make sense of this decision. It’ll just get confusing otherwise.
Which is exactly what happened with the champions that dodged the Vastaya marker for arbitrary reasons. Champions like Alistar (a minotaur), Lillia (a fawn centaur), Tahm Kench (a giant catfish man), and Volibear (a polar bear) are not Vastaya. This… is confusing. Minotaurs aren’t Vastaya because they “likely evolved [sic]separate.” Lillia is fae. Volibear is a “nature spirit.” Ahri is a soul-stealing gumiho and is Vastaya; however Tahm Kench, a demonic catfish, is not. The Vastaya united all characters with a handful of shared traits under one roof with the explanation that they descend from the same spiritual race, attuned naturally with the world and all its magic. But animal spirits, fae, and demons are apparently different things that also fit the same description. There's no way to tell which characters are and are not Vastaya without word directly from Riot Games, who are known to change their minds and, like all of us, make mistakes.
It’s not exactly accurate to say that Riot invented the Vastaya to create something unique to League of Legends for a relatively low labor cost; at least, they’ve never stated or acknowledged such an idea. No, the Vastaya were introduced to help unify the world of Runeterra and make it seem more consistent and purposeful throughout. There's no denying that pigeonholing a bunch of characters into one race will introduce consistency, in a way. Not only was this poorly executed and antithetical to League of Legends’ strengths as discussed previously, but one also has to wonder what property this would work for. The Great Retcon of 2017 occurred over seven years after the game’s initial release, after over 100 new champions had been introduced to the roster. Regardless of the IP and its identity, this was not the time to start thinking about what race some characters are and how they got here. The ship had sailed, the identity concrete. But Riot was determined to change things, and it seems that the team had some very unusual gripes with the direction of Runeterra’s worldbuilding.
“That Darn EvolutionOne of the problems in creating a new race is evolution. It’s a fundamental concept and a subconscious lens we (as media consumers) use to see any organized worldbuilding. It’s easy to ignore it with creatures that are supposed to be purely magical (like demons and ghosts) but it’s hard to ignore the illogic of some classic monsters and races that are supposed to be physical creatures that developed within that world.
Many IPs simply avoid these questions or resort to a simple Deus Ex Machina (uh… Titans made them!) Both of those solutions seemed like cop-outs, and if we want League’s lore to be taken seriously, we needed to approach it seriously.”
The following shouldn't need to be said, but it’s important to be thorough. Fans take lore seriously because it’s fun, they like the characters, and/or they find the universe itself to be interesting. They do not need half-assed evolutionary trees. This is particularly true when the ultimate origin point of those evolutionary trees is not a plant or animal but "the spirit realm." League of Legends is not hard sci-fi and nobody thinks that it is. Runeterra is a high fantasy world, and high fantasy worlds do not generally call for explanation. Magic is not necessarily better when it has rules. At best, this letter may prove that there are a small handful of people who think this way, and every single one of them works at Riot Games.
League of Legends launched with a literal angel champion. There’s a succubus who had a brief fling with Great Value Gambit and now hates his guts. There’s a race of Care Bear-esque fuzzy gnomes. There’s a gorgon and a minotaur and a Spartan. There’s an eldritch realm called The Void (because these are always called “The Void”) that purple monstrosities occasionally visit from. There’s a space dragon god and a living mountain. A gargoyle. A resurrected Egyptian emperor. A robot that does the macarena. Dracula. Frankenstein. Two time travelers. Pirates. Harley Quinn and The Joker. Multiple grim reapers.
League of Legends cannot ever be taken seriously because it is, by nature, deeply unserious. While rich in competitive history and integrity, it’s a silly game about beating the tar out of one another to reach the opposing team’s MacGuffin and smash it and win. It’s chock full of nerdy references and frequently toes the line of intellectual property theft just for the fun of it. And while its greatest cultural impact may be the explosion of esports the world over, it’s also led to loads of shit like this.
League of Legends is goofy and derivative and unpredictable, and that’s what makes it great. It’s unfortunate that Riot doesn’t seem to understand this. Or, rather, that they’ve forgotten.
Welcome to Summoner’s Rift!
Since 2009, these words have greeted League of Legends players as they loaded into the game proper. Summoner’s Rift is the game’s only remaining competitive map and the only map one can play a normal gamemode on. It’s a bizarre name. League’s other maps, like Twisted Treeline and Howling Abyss, tend to have names evocative of their scenery. Summoner’s Rift, however, contains no geographical rift. And what the heck is a summoner?
With League of Legends, Riot made the questionable decision to try and create a PVP game that also made sense in-universe. That is, there would be some sort of narrative framework to explain why these characters were fighting in this location, despite League being a free-to-play game with no progressing story elements to speak of. Introducing a story to, say, Mario Kart to explain why everyone is racing seems misguided. But if Team Fortress 2 could pull it off, then why not League of Legends?
League of Legends’ world, Runeterra, has a long history of violently destructive Rune Wars. As the wars intensified, concern grew that the next would truly destroy the planet. In response, the same summoners who once waged the Rune Wars formed the Institute of War and, subsequently, the in-universe League of Legends. Powerful individuals from all over Runeterra would undergo rigorous combat testing to join the League — some to bring glory to their nation, some to prove themselves, and some involuntarily. The Institute of War would then hold mock battles, with each champion commanded by a summoner, to determine the outcome of political conflicts. Although the system worked relatively well, it didn’t completely eliminate war. In particular, the continent of Valoran where the Institute of War is located continues to see battle, as it contains the longtime enemies of the ruthless Noxian Empire and the martial kingdom of Demacia.
Summoners, as you might’ve surmised, are the nameless, faceless player characters — us. This is why Summoner’s Rift and Summoner Spells are so named, remaining as the last vestiges of the original summoner lore. There used to be more, with many champions having voice lines referencing their commanding summoner. But, these have slowly been eradicated.
This is, largely, a good thing. If League ever desired to tell interesting stories, this backstory would be very difficult to work with, although not a starting point without merit. And even if League had no narrative aspirations whatsoever, it’s more than a little bit silly. The Great Retcon of 2014 absolutely gutted League of Legends’ existing lore to open the world to more possibility. So why, in 2017, did they close it again? And what will be different now, in 2024?
While I complained extensively about the Great Retcon of 2017, it isn’t, in a vacuum, entirely what did me in. Loving League of Legends was — and still is — hard. It’s hurtling towards its third major rewrite, to say nothing of the dozens of champion reworks in the past, the next dozen on the horizon, or the many, many tweaks to champions, voice lines, and lore throughout the years. When the Vastaya hit in 2017, it became clear to me that this was not a universe worth getting invested in. It felt as though the narrative team either had no long-term plans or, perhaps more likely, lacked the authority to secure them. Despite all the developer talk of League of Legends changing and evolving with the times, the vast majority of the roster remains on the fringes, untouched in years save for snippets of backstory and cameos in more popular champions’ stories.
Netflix’s Arcane is unquestionably the greatest step taken towards a real story for League, and yet, it still feels like it could’ve been released to fans a decade ago. Most plot points are extant in these characters’ original backstories, some as many as thirteen years old. However, what’s new has major consequences for both the champions directly involved and those with even the most tangential relations. Keeping up with League of Legends and its expanded universe for years has resulted in little but regret as even basic concepts are changed in an instant. And in this new era of narrative restlessness, even before Arcane and its will-they-won’t-they retcon looming, there’s no way to justify an interest in League of Legends lore. Come back in a few years when they’ve finally gotten their wiggles out and are done changing things for a while; maybe then it’ll be worth spending time on.
Because even Arcane is hard to understand as a jumping off point, as well-received as it’s been. There’s the aforementioned Vi kerfuffle, but also simple facets of characters differ wildly between Arcane and its “source” material. Jayce and Viktor are nearly unrecognizable — not just visually — and look to be diverging even further in season two. Warwick is changed in every way, and that’s after his previous total rework. Noxian champions have to be twisted into less overtly immoral forms than their in-game counterparts to provide interest in a show that both wants to take itself seriously and needs to be liked by a wide audience. And that, really, is Arcane in a nutshell. It’s well-executed, overly serious, predictable prestige television. It’s enjoyable in a vacuum and with a limited interest in the lore, but it just isn’t League of Legends. And this is the path that Riot has set for the foreseeable future — whether they know where they're going this time remains to be seen.