Thoughts on them meshing the Acrane and League lore? I am really unhappy with the decision because it means some of my favorite champions will be completely reworked. I honestly just wished they kept the two separate. I also think it's a horrible move on a story telling front, too, because now the Arcane team will be restricted by canon which is what made Arcane so fun and good in the first place. They got to experiment and explore characters and I am terrified for the future of Arcane after this decision.
Overall, I think it was a horrible decision and I can only hope they decide to go back on it, but I highly doubt it. Apparently Riot just really hates its writers and it's lore community lmao
It is a really, really bad decision, yeah. Arcane’s greatest strength was arguably that it could tell good and interesting stories about its characters entirely unburdened by 13 years of shambolic canon MESS from the main game. Its version of Viktor simply could not ever have happened if Arcane had to respect canon, it could NEVER have done what it did with Singed or Heimerdinger or the Void.
The way they’re trying to solve that is by saying “okay, ARCANE represents the canon now, and we’ll change THE MAIN GAME to suit it” but that just creates exactly the same problem the other way around. Now the canon of the main game (and Legends of Runeterra and the Forge games) is going to be completely fucked by being forced to be shackled to whatever Arcane wants to do.
Arcane is predicated, it is a huge and important central part of its canon that magic is rare, that it is incredibly special and unusual, and that spellcasters and sorcerers are essentially fucking cryptids to the rest of the world. That is WHY being able to harness magic through Hextech is such a revolutionary technology, because it makes magical power accessible not just to the very few, but to the world.
But hang on a fucking second, the premise of DEMACIA AS A REGION is that magic is common, that it is normal and abundant and plentiful enough that the magical population of the country can launch a full scale insurrection to claim their rights.
The Demacian storyline requires it to be true that mages are commonly born into ordinary families, that everyone in the country knows someone who’s a mage or someone whose kid or cousin is a mage, and that mages and magicians are commonly understood to be living in various states of hiding all throughout the country as a normal part of their communities.
And before anyone goes “yes but Piltover was founded to get away from the destruction of the Rune Wars so…” remember, so was Demacia, and it was founded inside a forest of magic-suppressing petricite trees.
Which means if Arcane is the central fount of canon now, Demacia… simply cannot exist in that universe. Not in any way that we would recognize it. And neither can any of the other regions, really. If magic is rare, mysterious and unknown to the vast majority of ordinary people, then Shurima doesn’t work. Bilgewater doesn’t work. The Freljord doesn’t work. Not as they exist currently.
So either the main canon gets CATASTROPHICALLY retconned to hell to suit Arcane, or else Arcane has to very awkwardly retcon its own foundational premise to be like “uuuuh actually magic is normal and common in far away places in the world and everyone there is totally chill about it, and it’s JUST Piltover that happens to randomly be founded in a place where mages don’t get born and also they never travel to Piltover and also nobody from Piltover ever travels to places where mages are common.”
Like, there simply is not a good way to merge the world state of Arcane with the world state of Runeterra as a whole without completely destroying important parts of either, and what gets me is there isn’t even any real benefit to fucking doing it.
Seriously! What’s the benefit? What does anyone get out of doing this? The only actual tangible benefit is that it will eventually (after like five years of constant retcons) be slightly easier for people who watched Arcane to understand what’s happening on Summoner’s Rift, which… who cares? The whole point of Arcane is that it expanded the reach of Runeterra to people who don’t give a shit what League of Legends is! People who watched Arcane aren’t going to tune in to Worlds and be like “oh my god that’s Viktor getting a pentakill! That’s the blorbo from my show, hooray, I am going to buy SKT T1 merch about it!”
This decision reeks from a million miles away of executive bullshit. It reeks of some bro in a graphic tee under a suit jacket wearing ugly $1000 sneakers being like “we should totally unify our brand appeal under a single consolidated IP umbrella to maximize audience engagement metrics” without any creative understanding of why different storytelling works for different mediums and you can’t just find-replace a few keywords to turn 13 years of MOBA canon into TV show canon.
It’s such a fundamental failure to understand that there is POWER in telling different stories in different mediums. Fucking Disney+-ass MCU-brained brand thinking is what it is.
Who Neuvillette is as a character absolutely explodes my brain whenever I think about it too hard.
He is the original dragonruler of the world that was vanquished by a foreign entity. He gets reincarnated in the form of a member of his own vanquisher’s people and is given the position of the chief judge in their society. But instead of using his societal role and strength to enact revenge, he develops a sense of compassion for his usurper’s creations that is so powerful it makes the skies themselves weep whenever he is confronted with their pain. Like are you kidding me. Are you fucking kidding me
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