"We wanted to make Skarner's story more horror-based." Then WHY did they changed it? His story of living for eons in isolation with his kind in perfect harmony, only for said harmony being shattered once he woke up with the song of his people being turned into gutural screams as they're being murdered and their bodies and souls harvested by (in his point of view) giant creatures of steel being controlled by the same simians that his kind long ignored is a far more horrifying concept than "the voices in my head compells me to be xenophobic"
respecting old skarner as a character and treating his suffering with the dignity it deserves draws a pretty heavy-handed allegory between Piltover the City of Progress Shining On The Hill Built On The Suffering And Death Of Countless Others, and Riot Games And Tencent The Corporations And The Governments Of The Countries They Exist In
@@washada Its my fear for Arcane rn. Class strife is THE main theme of Arcane and one of the most incriminating evidence against high-class was from them harvesting souls of living beings and using them for their benefit - because that draws a LOT of parallels to indigenous life being destroyed and their culture taken away for the profit of a ''better'' civilization. If they are willing to bury *that* skeleton, I wouldn't be surprised if they all of a sudden decide that ''Piltover/Zaun actually could always had cooperated if the two weren't so stubborn!'' kind of shit.
@@felipecouto1102 only problem with that is that, right now on lore, only jayce kind of knows that the crystals can talk, and seraphine "knows" it's got voices in it but they retconned it into it just talking random gibberish that sounds nice to make her look good. So it isn't capitalism ignoring struggle, it's capitalism not being aware of the struggle at all. For all they know, they are using some cool crystals they found underground. Not even Camille knows, and she's straight up evil.
"I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great great wall on our southern border and I’ll have the outsiders pay for that wall." - Scarner probably
It's funny as hell how literally all of Riot's problems with the lore could've been solved by having one continuity supervisor, or multiple for their different universes, but instead they're doing all these pirouettes of changing stuff everywhere and trying to mash them together. They're just making things harder for themselves (and especially for the writers)
Skarner's closest analogue is probably Volibear. I wouldn't exactly call base-Volibear's concept 'horror', but the idea of a big animalistic deity with a cult of personality that enforces a dystopic worldview certainly can lean into storytelling space that's frightening and/or deliberately uncomfortable. That said, the Volibear comparison really makes the concept of 'skarner horror' laughable, because the Thousand-Pierced Bear is way better at that and they refused to commit to it there, so how the hell will they make it work for a giant scorpion that doesn't even have that going for him?
Volibear does it massively better though because Volibear is actually struggling with his role as a war god in many of his lines. He revels in it, but in quiet moments he questions who he is and what if the world doesn't need him. Skarner is just delusional and maniacal.
I think the 'horror' aspect of Skarner just stems from the fact that you have this mountain-sized kauji scorpion willing to do literally anything, even commit destruction to his own people, just to keep them safe. Imagine being a resident of Ixtal not knowing that there's a ticking time bomb underneath your very home ready to kill you just because you have very different opinion.
I think part of the pain with skarners rework is similar to galio, where literally the ONLY part of their character to make it into the rework is their most surface level details. I still think old skarner lore was more interesting than old galio lore, but they both show the issues of reworking a champ into an entirely different character. I dont think people would be happy if Caitlyn was reworked into a vigilante freedom fighting dude, but according to skarner or galio we can change all of that as long as she was still a sniper wielding ADC. Really not a fan of this type of rework, if you eant to make a whole new character just make that character. New skarner didn't even have to be a scorpion the way hes written, it's just the sole remaining signifier that he is indeed still skarner.
Another note, maybe riot shouldn't have reworked the lore in a way that cuts their primary game out of it. The lore pre 2014 was just excuses for the characters to exist, but the lore post retcon exists entirely outside the world of the main game. Warcraft and 40k have done excellent jobs at extending their lore to other mediums so you can get into them without engaging with the main game. Way better than Riot ever has and likely ever will. But... The main games are still fully implemented into those settings. You get to engage with the world of those settings when playing the core game, and that isn't true with LoL. Story telling has to fit the medium to be a truly great story, riots writers created an amazing world but one that has no connection to the primary game.
I think that One Runeterra is responsible for this change of story, right now they could have kept the pillage of Skarner's people by greedy merchants of Piltover and just change it that hextech crystals are their hearts/eyes/whatever and they leave the rest to rot only for Skarner to find his hollowed out brothers and sisters and that's what drives his paranoia the most and would ACTUALLY set an interesting question: Is Skarner right in the isolationism? After all, they are surrounded by nation in massive civil war (Shurima), void filled wasteland (Icathia), colonialist pillagers (Piltover) and forces of the undead darkness (Shadow Isles)
they won't bring hextech into it because they already completely rewrote the origin of it for arcane. right now we don't even know where it comes from, and i don't think skarner has any chance of being involved on it right now that he's literally KAIJU SIZED. Like he's literally the size of piltover, theres no way he cant just smush them.
New Skarner not letting anyone leave or enter Ixtal, being willing to destroy any who questions this decision, growing more and more parnoid about being betrayed, and genuinely believing himself a loving guardian of the Ixtali while unknowingly being a tyrant, is actually kinda terrifying and cool. Also reminds me of The Endless (2017). What's not cool is how they completely deleted Old Skarner in the name of a canon they cannot properly define or maintain.
As another comment said: I think both could be true! Maybe him seeing these Brackling bodies (those are still canon, he mentions them) hollowed out by Piltovans MAKES him this way.
For the future of his story, if he is traumatized, I agree that Milio could be the solution to resolve the conflict with Qyana, and maybe at the end of this story, Skarner could find Malphite and together they get together to protect the Iskali people while they open the jungle to the world. And it would mean that they could finally be present to help against the void or any other world wide threat
39:40 About Milio, the flame that he carries is from the sister of his grandmother, she was considered a traitor in Ixtal for conspiring against the Yun Tal (or the status quo), all her family was exiled because of that. So Skarner considers he is also a traitor, even if he is just a kid who wants to help people.
Skarner allying himself to millio and his "traitor's flame", because millio cares about "protecting" ixtal more than qiyana, sound like a cool story development. Maybe skarner will attempt yo overthrow the current yun tal, in order to grant millio's order of flame power, as long as he vows to protect his family, "Ixtal"
They already contradicted themselves. Skarner's lore says that him and Ixtal saw how Shurima made the acendants, but other Ixtal stories says that Shurima met Ixtal while they already had acendants. So which is it? Did they or did they not have acendants before Ixtal and Shurima met?
you wrote this wrong or you did not understand... skarner says he saw shurima make the ascendants. ixtal is in a jungle, a very dangerous one. It was still there when shurima made the ascendants, They just later expanded it with magic. So eventually, shurima WITH ascendants meets Ixtal. Whats the error in this? it says literally the same thing. they met after shurima had ascendants.
I'm looking at a bunch of old skarner dev articles from his original inception and this vid came back on my feed. I have no idea why they want the character to *feel* scary. To me what I miss most about old skarner was his somber gentleness that could be roused to protect the brackern that he cared so much for.
Seraphine superfan here - I absolute adore what her story and character could’ve been. I love her lore, her short story where she goes to a quiet cafe after every concert to listen to the crystal. How it gave her advice and mentored her, helping her learn to embrace her empathy instead of closing it off. That’s all gone now. The only two short stories I’ve ever cried at from league are ekko’s and orianna’s, both which are very likely to be non-canon with arcane existing. One canon sucks. We have dozens of AUs for skinlines already. Why can’t arcane be another one of them?
I know! Imagine a pretty pink pop star and a giant rock scorpion teaming up to fight imperialist exploitation! Imagine Seraphine pushing for synthetic Hextech or for mixing Piltovan and Zaunite technologies while she and her mentor secretly recover brackern crystals. It could have been great! Instead it’s “Would you like to head their song?” and then writing out the brackern crystals entirely.
Gods, Orianna's backstory is so, so good. It tackles so many things at once, and really gives us a good sense of both the pros and cons of living in Piltover, and having an empathetic heart, a heart she eventually bequeaths to her father as a parting gift. There's a reason she was one of my first mains in-game, and remains one of my favourite characters despite the dozen mains I've had over the years.
"Kaiju pope of Ixtal" lol. I do think a bit of old skarner is there. Ultimately, the new one is also a tragic character. The Ixtali basically became his new brood, his children, and he spent hundreds of years raising and protecting them. But after everything that happened he became obsessed with the burden of keeping his new children safe, to the point of isolating himself and making his job the only thing he ever does. Which, like to a real human being would, it affects his mental health in a very negative way. So he is also a monstrous, very inhuman character design, with a very human personality and motivation, just like old Skarner. The dude literally has PTSD that feeds into paranoia and the mission he gave himself only makes it worse, as he can hear all the plotting in Valoran and fill his mind with all the worst parts of it. And as time passes, he is less able to distinguish potential evil and catastrophe from harmless or inconsecuential events. I see the dots honestly, and I also think that while the old lore had estupendous potential, this new one could also be very good. It's just anyone's guess if Riot will ever commit to it.
Babe, wake up! A new "Skyren pops off at corporate Riot for their sheer contempt towards their narrative goldmine of a setting, the writers who crafted it and the people who want to consume and love it" moment just dropped! I kid of course, they are all things that need to be said and it's always good to remind people that it's not the writer's fault that these confusing, wide reaching decisions are made
There's a very funny image in my mind of a story where Milio coming down every few days to Skarner's chamber to annoy him with grand tales about the world outside. Highly embellished but those tales are a constant of his life from now on and a part him would feel bad if this awestruck kid stopped showing up one day.
Riot does have data to support this move towards a single universe. Their monthly visits to their website following Arcane went up by X% but new players went up by less than X%. Riot execs looked at this info and said "They aren't playing because the different characters are too confusing. It can't be the stale gameplay that doesn't appeal to new players."
new players just means new accounts created. so if the people actually didn't create accounts to play, some move may be justified. Idk if uniting the lore makes a lot of sense, but it surely makes it less complicated to get into it if youre not a league player.
there is totally a way to get across the horror theme for skarner, just make him WAY more paranoid and irrationally upset by opposing ideas. basically the flip side of kled, where instead of being funny, make lines where he rambles on into a mumble of paranoia, talking about the outside world as if it were a plague, he's too calm and noble. i wanna feel concerned and kinda scared of what he says and might actually do.
As someone in STEM what you said about something looking like a genuis invention being actually stolen labour is very relatable. A lot of advancements in AI are because these companies exploit people in the global south to label databases; I think it was for chatgtp they even had to flag images containing child porn and gore, which lead to a lot of mental anguish. Yet we think of these creators as innovators, who by their genious managed to create technology above their piers.
I remember James Gunn said he wanted all the DC games, comics, and movies/shows to start fitting together before he very quickly had to walk it back because that’s NOT the way to fix broken lore or stitch the universes together or even how video game or movie development works…. But League lore reminds me of comic lore in that way, where it’s long and sprawling and intriguing but every couple of years it gets a soft or complete reset. DC has been playing with an “everything is canon” approach for a bit which hurts my brain soooo bad because of like, the fact time doesn’t move with comics much despite the kids becoming adults or teenagers and just how many different interpretations of the characters there are… I’ve only been looking at League lore since Arcane, as I used to play wayyyyy back and I think some of the characters are cool. But it’s weird to see that kind of storytelling always crumble. Any big sprawling lore that is shared between multiple voices and IP holders always seems to fall apart, the only thing that changes is just how fast you approach that hyperdeath.
My theory - And what they should have done in my humble opinion. This is a different Skarner. The old Skarner is dead, as the last of his kind and is now used as the last piece of hextech. This Skarner has nothing to do with old Skarner. This way they don't have to try to "fix" the hextech mess.
Actually, most hextech crystals in lore aren't actually prime hextech. they are artificial hextech derived from the actual hextech crystals which are so powerful so they aren't of common use.
As someone who never played LoL but still gravitate around Runeterra as a settings through other means, and as such as someone who don't have any real emotional connexion to Old Skarner, my only real problem here is that I feel we lost something narratively very interesting that unfortunately was never really explored. We gained something else that have potential of course but it just feels bad to realize that the idea of "Hex Tech have its foundation in what is essentially an act of genocide that some of the wealthiest families not only seek to hide but also actively want to continue even tho alternatives now exist." will not be explored. It was a bold idea full of interesting potential. Some characters like Seraphine or Camille could have shone in a story focusing on this. How would Jayce react if he were to learn about it ? How would Zaunites react ? Would Piltoveans try to change or would they put their economical/class goals first and try to save face ? All of these could have been interesting story pitches that will now probably never happen if they don't reintroduce something to fill the hole left by Old Skarner somehow. Of course, it's not a huge deal at the end of the day, Piltover/Zaun have a lot of other narrative stuff going on for them, and Ixtal needed some more substance in a way, but it's just a little bit of a shame anyway. It also solidifies the idea that Riot cannot fully be trusted to tell the stories that the lore seems to allude to, as any of these narrative leads could be retcon. Which also mean that, as someone external to the "Riot Ecosystem" so to speak, I receive this all thing as "don't get too invested in this lore or you could get burn", which is kinda discouraging. EDIT : Removed typos and some of the broken english.
they don't seek to hide it, they literally aren't aware of it. as far as anyone knows, the ferros family just brings the crystals in. shit, maybe even they don't know. i don't think anyone has survived an encounter with skarner to truly tell, and most of shurima is filled to the brim with void monsters
I can appreciate the criticism that Riot did not communicate canonicity. But even if they did, I feel players would engage better with a singular canon than with half a dozen conflicting timelines. Especially when the most recognizable piece of Runeterra lore, Arcane would need to be treated as non canon. Now they are trying to have that meeting, trying to have that direction. It's long past due, but that doesn't mean that One Runeterra is the problem
I do not trust riot to continue with like 80% of the roster, the reason i like riven lore so much because it got progression, but she is a rare case of riot TELLING and not just TELL ONCE methode they have
Honestly my main issue with seraphine is the way the marketed her at the beginning by pretending she was a real person so they could drop the worst Ultimate skin to date. The brakern stuff was wack, but otherwise doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme.
There's another lore related video that a content creator made quite recently, his channel name is Twisted and the video is called "The Current State of League of Legends Lore". It's a really good video that I think you might enjoy taking a look at it. I would love to hear your thoughts on the things he brings up, the video is almost an hour long.
That is a fascinating idea for a character like that. A massive titan of a creature that sees itself as the only thing keeping his people safe from all the horrors of the outside world but at the core it’s born out of irrational fear but who’s gonna argue with a kaiju sized scorpion? There’s one hell of a story there
To me, Earthrune Skarner feels more like what he should be. This sort of Elemental Creature made from Roots, Rocks, and Crystals gives him a nice visual identity. It also could lean more into a lore based on colonialism ideology, with Piltovans travelling to Ixtal and Culling natives in order to collect Hextech crystals to power their progress and advancements. Even if murdering a bunch of sentient beings for literal blood diamonds was too much, they could have gone the route more in line of the Crystals being a cultural thing and the Brackern defending it, think of something like El dorado
I think alternative perspectives of Skarner's story being horror is to take into account the people of Ixtal. From their perspective throughout the generations they witnessed their great protector becoming their prison warden that will never let them leave (I am aware not all of them think of it that way but there are those who do and it would be horror to them). I can see quite a bit of similarities with an abusive relationship where your partner starts great and then they slowly strip away your freedoms and isolate you from others and now any disobedience is seen as a betrayal. So he is the monster from that perspective. On the other hand as discussed Skarner considers the world horrifying and has grown more and more paranoid. It would be interesting to have that story explored, but it would also be interesting to have the story of Nasus, Renekton and Shurima in general explored and so many others, but Riot really does tend to start stories and just not touch them for the next millennium.
The horror! A founder and gaurdian of a meso-american based region wants to isolate his region from the outside while piltovens start to invade the jungles.
On one hand, I feel bad for the writers at Riot. Clearly they are very talented and have many good ideas, but on the other hand, I feel like at some point you have to sit down and actually see what you're working with. And for them unfortunately it's a company that doesn't give too much of a damn about storytelling and a medium that doesn't lend itself to intricate and complex stories. You can't just come up with stuff that would probably take a novel to tell properly for the backstory of one character out of many in league of legends. You're just shooting yourself in the foot with that. Riot is probably _telling_ them that they have almost no limits on their creativity, which ofc they shouldn't because Riot is swimming in money and can make complex stories work, but clearly their actions say otherwise. Sometimes simpler stories go farther than high concept stuff.
honestly what makes it difficult to make stories like this is that their main game is a fucking moba. It's literally the worst medium to tell a story in. You're not supposed to be concentrating in the character, you're supposed to be concentrated in the gameplay and the tools the character work.
8:20 me neither ,_, past few days I being trough a lot of feelings, weird feeliing just because of a fictional crystal scorpion, that I didn't even could say goodbye properly ,_,never get the M7... IDK is just weird...
How i would position the conflict between Skarner and Milio is this: both characters come from a sense of protection. Skarner wants to protect the people of Ixaocan and Milio wants to protect his family and everyone around in general. Where they differ is the extremes that Skarner would take in order to "protect". So where Milio seeks to protect from the perspective of his culture, his family, and his people, Skarner will protect from a perspective of weighing and favoring the whole vs the individual, that he is right, that humans are far too weak to be left to their own devices, and that anyone thinking otherwise is a potential threat. In simpler terms, protection guided by love vs protection guided by fear.
I think everyone forgot the reason why quiyana want to open to the world because she see a rune what rise keep safe and want to go for them... Yeah I am more in the side of the kaiju
Riot really established a league in the world with a competitive scene to the point that it is hard to imagine the game dying (as it's usually normal for a game that old). With the lore, they have the means to make the whole universe. They create part of pop culture in that way. They have the potential to try to create a new big comic world. They could make something big with a lot of comics and books, and in some years the runeterra world could be bigger than League of Legends, the same way that Arcane breached and was a big success with people that don't want to lay a finger in league, the comics and books could make everything grow. But they keep failing to decide on a thing and go through it, when they start a project, instead of correcting what is wrong and perfect it, it's all or nothing, success or immediately abandoned. It's like they plant a tree and cut it next year because it didn't gave any fruit.
I think if you want a trauma based character in League, they'd need to have the inverse of a Rage Meter. Like, a character who has done horrible things with their powers, so it causes them anguish to use them. Create a Stress Meter, and if it fills to max, the champ shuts down in some way. That's like, my initial proportion after only thinking about it for a few minutes lol
@@Justanothermusicnerdxo Essentially! But with a different motif, and maybe a bigger penalty than being silenced? But that's just me spitballing. I'm sure there's a fun way to make a trauma focused champ
Yeah I never liked the fact that Riot took this very interesting moral angle of what is progress good for if it breeds suffering and how colonialism will always paint itself as better by exploiting others and then pointing at their exploitation as examples on why they are better and then just did... nothing with it. Really struck me as the higher ups not wanting to """get political""" even tho they have Noxus and Shurima and junk, a deep "Oh wait this got too real to whats happening actually in our human world and we cant 'well both sides have a point' it lets just not touch it at all".
they never went with it in lore anyway. i mean, literally 2 characters were kind of aware that skarner even existed, and one of them got retconned (jayce kind of knew and seraphine got retconned)
The real horror is how Skyen somehow managed to alter time to turn a 3 minute 22 second video into a 42 minute video. (This is a joke your insights make me happy) I agree that Riot should get, and hire more, writers to fully tell their stories. All they have now is a beginning and some of the rising action for most of their characters. Writing books for a fandom is a good way to get people invested in lore, especially if those books are good (physical also helps). They could add in game skin codes to the books to make people more likely to pick them up if they wanted.
30:35 I disagree. The best reworks recontextualize the character without changing the core. Nunu, Volibear, Swain, Urgot, Fiddlesticks, and more, they're all still what they were for the most part, but in high definition. Your point about not giving people what they want for the sake of giving something new sounds contrarian to your own reasonings of why you don't like the direction they took with canon and his lore in particular. Also to add about Seraphine's rant: it's literally a meme. Just like she was memed at release to represent all the corporate wrongs of Riot and league of legends, she now represents the whole idea of retconning old skarner out of the universe just so that environmental conflict doesn't paint all the supposedly good or at best gray characters, like Ekko, Victor, Jayce, Caitlyn, Vi (which was actually really smart in core universe, she had an engineer mind, and was much more resourceful, she made her hextech gauntlets out of scrappy ones) and yes, the latest addition being Seraphine, into more conflicted or controversial characters. Without Skarner they will have to rewrite all of Piltover, and all the characters except maybe like Ezreal. Hello to Camille that will be an inferior version of herself, goodbye to Orianna that could be more than just a robot with hints of feelings of former human
An example that I like of a short pocket of existential dread (in terms of Riot never going to work on it, so they should cram as much as they can into it) is from a character from Dishonored, Hiram Burrows. He is a complete piece of shit, and you're not supposed to agree with him or even sympathize when you read his thoughts, but, nonetheless, his diary is available, and when you read it you notice how his paranoia completely warps his notions of everything around him. He literally says he sees unknown dangers crawling up the walls of the castle he serves on, and ends on a note that shows that even when he tried to distract his mind from his paranoia with other things, those eventually failed. Again, you can SEE what it is and its very interesting, making him more then one-dimensional even when he is clearly evil, and i missed that fear from Skarner's paranoia. Its what made Heimerdinger in Arcane SO GOOD, that paranoia over something and being so disconnected from mortals that you sound clearly out-of-touch, cold and even uncaring at times. Skarner sounded so tremendously sure of everything, and its once again another one of those characters that the interactions don't reveal a deeper weakness of or another side of the character (Which is sad, since Volibear, a kinda similar character, actually had that).
I really do think Skarner's new problem is that he's just too huge to make narrative sense. Outside of The Void and ASol, nothing can really challenge him. It would be one thing if he was three- or four-stories tall, but making him the size of a mountain seems like too much.
At this point I feel like narrative should just treat whatever Legends of Runeterra says as the defacto truth. Seems like anybody who tries to make sense of the canon just gets shuffled over to that team so they're not in the way of of the gameplay team.
Think about lol lore makes me sad, because i love Rell, she is one of my favorite characters, and i know her story will never be completed. Her whole deal is that she had her life stole from her, all those years of suffering, so black rose had a weapon against mordekaiser. Is a mordekaiser event happening some day? Who knows? Will Rell be a key character in the event? After the yoric incident, I dont believe so. Is she going to fight the important noxus guys who she seeks revenge? No fucking way riot is going to spent a single character on a champion not that popular. Damn i dont even know if Samira is still seeking her. Its unsatisfying the way villains are handled in lol, because no one can die, never, just like viego, whos trapped in that magic field, until riot decide to go back on him, even tho his story is complete. Feels like comic books where no is really dead, but worst because no one dies at all
But also multiverse is not something that I would want and many other people I think also feel that they wouldn't want that so I'm glad they at least didn't choose a multiverse
I’m still unsure about the “horror” aspect of this character. There’s certainly some inherent unease in a “only I can save this nation” isolationist hellbent on keeping his people safe by any means, but what about that is horror? Skarner not having a short story also doesn’t do anything to help that, because his bio on the universe website is just… what I’ve described. What about this champ is horror, aside from his size?
I liked the old story for it's potential with the whole of Piltover, exactly the way you said it. But I also understood that of all potential old Skarner had was entirely unutilized, and as it stood it existed more of a creative roadblock than a carefully crafted structural conflict to the story of Piltover. For all the hate that Seraphine had, I feel like she's the one that is losing the most with the new story, now having no foil or stakes with any of the other characters of the game while before she at least was the only regular piltovan to get close to the truth of Hextech to inspire a change. (but if it is to be frank Riot absolutely wasn't writing Seraphine as such, so that basically didn't change). My small distaste however comes more from how they framed the story. One could say his old story mirrored Irelia's in a humanizing way, so having one of the first lines be "I always wanted to write a horror character" and "when we looked at Skarner we were like "our time has come"" really sounds like they can't imagine a non-human character being anything other than a monster (that really doesn't help when Volibears participation in Fate's Voyage also was somewhat reduced to just a monster-of-the-week). And while yeah, that's not the vibe they gave for Skarner I am wary that if we ever get the next creature character like Skarner, perhaps 10 years in the future, that it won't be that far of just being a villain
RIP old lore. I loved the old hexcore lore you mentioned in th beginning. I really wish they would try to preserve the interesting lore like that whenever possible. It really is a shame watching them dismantle the stories that made me fall in love with some of the champions in the first place. It's just pushing me further and further away from Runeterra's lore. And yes, the unified canon based on Arcane is dumb. I have no trust or faith in Riot to make good stories at this point.
When you talked about Seraphine I remember mostly of the REAL problem she had at the start, that was the Twitter account faking to be a real person just for marketing on the skin. The Brakern problem existed but was fixed within 1 week, people hatred have no reason now
LoL is simply too big to make a unified lore. The writers have shown that they're incredible for shorter, more contained stories, but it starts to sour the larger the story goes. LoL doesn't have the Marvel/DC crutch of having unlimited alternate universes, it's much better off telling non-canon or "what if" stories. The 2nd Darkin War in LoR is peak "what if", loaded with all sorts of scenarios to use all sorts of characters. But you can't do that stuff now. It's unlikely some characters will ever see a story conclusion. Though at this point it's hard to get progression for anyone to begin with.
Riots storytelling is at its best when both sides are muddy and hard to definitively choose as the "good guys." Arcane being some of their best storytelling is a perfect example of it and seeing them backpedal with skarner is a big step backwards for good storytelling in a universe that desperately needs more of it. Also skarners horror based because he's xenophobic i guess???? As far as in game it doesn't sound like he's ever really fearful of anything but rather his goal is to subjugate whatever isnt his in order to protect icathia. While i get the concept of fear breeding his need to subjugate anything that he distrusts, it's displayed terribly in game and it moreso just comes off as him wanting people to stay out of icathia.
It's actually really easy to choose good guys and bad guys in Arcane. The cops are the bad guys. Policing as a concept is the primary villainous force in the show.
@@3BSkyen I'd argue that the Council is moreso the problem: you could get rid of the Enforcers, but the problems would still persist as the council are the ones who write the rules and regulations. Sort of a, "What's more dangerous: the dog that bites or the person who trains the dog to bite," if that makes any sense. Digressing, I think another problem with Skarner is his size: he's too big for there to be opposition. There is a sweet spot between big enough that they pose a challenge, but small enough that they can interact with the world; like Godzilla or King Kong.
Don’t worry they’ll release him and do nothing with his lore for 5+years That being said they should make milio adopt kog maw It would fit with milio and got make kog maw unique amongst the void born where hey maybe some of them can co exist and become something more that world eating monsters
I definitely don't hate Seraphine, the character, but I do hate everything Riot fucked up on surrounding her. From the weird tweet campaign pre-release to the lore just not interacting with the very brachern crystal that powers her mobile stage/amp, it's just so badly done and Seraphine deserves better than that. She could have been another in a line morally grey hextech wielders, or a sympathetic ally to the brachern, or half a dozen other compelling ideas besides, but no, nearly zero interaction with the lore aside from "sing to unite people" (the ineffectualness of which reminds me of the song a bunch of rich fucks sang together to say, "see, we're in the same situation" circa first year of the pandemic), adding nothing to the actually interesting moral and philosophical quandaries that Zaun and Piltover are *great* at generating through so, so many wonderful characters like Orianna, Camile, Renata, Victor, and others.
The only leylines I care about are those of a black mage! I shall eat every AoE in the game if it means that I get to stay in them to deal more damage!
imo skarner in arcane would never work cos the show implies all magic is done by using up the magic within magic crystals, this is how it's portrayed when jayce and him mom are saved by a mage, he couldn't just teleport them away he had to use up a power of a crystal, which would imply that not just piltover but all magic users exploit skarner's race, including jinx bcos of fishbones, so now the whole metaphor of piltover's progress being exploitative and that tying into the class war is out the window cos zaunites would be just as guilty of that. that's why it's kinda necessary to get rid of skarner's old lore if arcane is the main source of lore now
yeah, the guy who saved them was in freljord too. how the fuck did he get one of the crystals??? it was a tiny shard too. do they just go and get those? and how did jayce get so many anyway?
I think uncomplicating the source of hextech does make Skarner’s lore less interesting, but I do think the issue of keeping the tech immoral is that it does suggest an end game of other characters giving up their powers for moral reasons which is not really in line with what they would want for ‘main characters.’ I think the pushback to Seraphine especially was probably what prompted it. I don’t know if morally grey is always inherently better for narratives, especially when it feels so incredibly evil. I don’t even know if it’s morally gray. I just don’t understand why hextech had to be what it was used for. There are so many other things you can use crystals for. Why did that part of the lore need to change?
This is (almost) completely irrelevant to the matters being discussed but I can't take it seriously how they took this ancient magic civilization where everything is so different they made an effort to name everything in a new pseudo artificial language that sets it appart from everything else in that worlds, and threw in a giant scorpion named Skarner, which came from a race named the brackern. Like, his mother's name and his clan even have some non-standard characters, and then there is Skarner. I wonder if they'll go the Volibear route and give him other names that better match his lore or just completely ignore rhe discrepancy.
I do think this is the worst rewrite in League Lore. They wanted The Arcane gang (Who I love in both incarnations) to be Uncomplicated Good Guys™ when they are living in the literal Industrial Revolution City with Exploitation included, so they hard to trim the Namestone mining... It is as bad as if they took out Twilight of the Gods or Where Icathia Once Stood just to make Shurima more pleasant From now on, to me, Skarner and the Brackern where fully erased from Runeterra. This is a very different character, and should not have the same name, so I'm gonna call him Skorror forever. Specially bc the Yun Tal storyline was not incompatible with the Namestones: they could have a magic cristal on their back, and Skarner's brood could haver been mined while he was away in Ixaocan. Ixtal is already a region being actively exploited for resources by Piltover
I admit I'm part of the problem when it comes down to people saying "They changed Skarner because of Seraphine" although when I say that it's more of a joke, making fun of Riot's track record when it comes down to throwing ugly or monstrous champions under the bus to highlight pretty, new champions. I should probably be more clear that I'm joking when I comment things like that, though because some people seem to legitimately believe that.
I have no idea why, but I got unsubbed from you. Which sucks because I love these vids! I can't wait to see what you thin of the next Frieren episodes too :)
eh when he feels like it, remember, he does this reaction channel on the side for fun, he has stated that the moment it starts feeling like a job with responsibilities he will drop this channel. So ya know, just be patient and maybe dont pressure him about stuff so it can just remain the fun on the side channel :3
Skyen needs to get over the canon changes. To literally anyone even moderately interested in picking up the story of Runeterra, the previous system was impossibly awful. I have never been turned off from a games lore as much as I did with league due to their rejection of making anything canon. There’s a million sub universes and on top of that the biggest story telling vehicle ever introduced was also not canon. Why should anyone get invested into a story where nothing has consequence, there is no consistent world, and there’s a near infinite amount of alternative universe characters in contrast to the “canon” one.
idk Marvel seems to have fans. And DC. And Star Wars. And Warhammer 40k. And Transformers. And people still like Sherlock Holmes stories. Star Trek is doing pretty good. And fanfiction is one of the most popular forms of literature that have ever existed.
@@3BSkyen Most the mentioned franchises are experiencing a steep decline in public interest and revenue and many people cite the over-abuse of multiverse writing. I would say that is also evidence of the general public not enjoying the lack of a consistent story. Personally, I am in the audience who does not enjoy those medias because of its multiverse usage, but even those who do enjoy it have found it to be excessive, which league certainly falls into.
I've decided to stop playing League because of the recent pull back on storytelling from Riot - and it just strikes me that at the beginning of this video, they get the writer to say 'and all the excitement that (Skarner's story) brings for Runeterra and LoL'. I hear that and I think 'you mean exactly zero excitement? Because it will never be progressed in any way?'. I'm so happy that you've branched out to other content, because I expect that in the next year or so there will be very little of substance to comment on from Riot Games - and I really love to hear from you.
Honestly i think Skarners old lore was ass. You cant have a whole region of your world be based literally run on the torture of innocent souls, like some argent energy shit, while telling complex stories with heroes and villains and nuance and drama. Seraphines whole vibe was ruined by the subtezt of "shes burning the souls of orphans" and thats one thing because seraphine was fun to hate. What about Ekko? Zeri? Viktor? I know Runeterra started off super grimdark but if they want to tell engaging stories in an MMO they need some sort of break
The way old Skarner played with the idea of this monster character actually being very humanised, tragic and worth a lot of sympathy as a victim of capitalist hell was such an interesting concept that could play with how a lot of people allow their desire for aesthetic likeability to influence their perspectives on eg. racial and ecological issues for the worse. Like how people interact with other cultures with a wary distrust as though it is so alien and weird that it makes the people that live there unable to be empathised with, or how people are more than happy to get behind saving the pink dolphin but turn up their nose and revel in the death of various 'ugly' species like ecologically crucial insects. Skarner IS THE archetypal 'ugly', a nasty bug with a funny craggy face and utterly alien biology, but still a living creature going through so much pain. That ugliness contrasted with his tragedy made him an interesting possible avenue to explore those ideas. Even if you throw out the uncomfortable genocide aspect because it's something you're not willing to engage with while giving it the depth and care it deserves as a topic, there was still something valuable to that core concept of a tragic ugly character that I feel is lost in making Skarner another big cool monster. Just feels like a waste.
"We wanted to make Skarner's story more horror-based."
Then WHY did they changed it? His story of living for eons in isolation with his kind in perfect harmony, only for said harmony being shattered once he woke up with the song of his people being turned into gutural screams as they're being murdered and their bodies and souls harvested by (in his point of view) giant creatures of steel being controlled by the same simians that his kind long ignored is a far more horrifying concept than "the voices in my head compells me to be xenophobic"
respecting old skarner as a character and treating his suffering with the dignity it deserves draws a pretty heavy-handed allegory between Piltover the City of Progress Shining On The Hill Built On The Suffering And Death Of Countless Others, and Riot Games And Tencent The Corporations And The Governments Of The Countries They Exist In
to be fair, now you can treat him as an organic version of something like HAL 5000
@@washadaon that note its still wild to me that Newsies is a Disney property. with it being explicitly pro-union and all
@@washada Its my fear for Arcane rn. Class strife is THE main theme of Arcane and one of the most incriminating evidence against high-class was from them harvesting souls of living beings and using them for their benefit - because that draws a LOT of parallels to indigenous life being destroyed and their culture taken away for the profit of a ''better'' civilization. If they are willing to bury *that* skeleton, I wouldn't be surprised if they all of a sudden decide that ''Piltover/Zaun actually could always had cooperated if the two weren't so stubborn!'' kind of shit.
@@felipecouto1102 only problem with that is that, right now on lore, only jayce kind of knows that the crystals can talk, and seraphine "knows" it's got voices in it but they retconned it into it just talking random gibberish that sounds nice to make her look good.
So it isn't capitalism ignoring struggle, it's capitalism not being aware of the struggle at all. For all they know, they are using some cool crystals they found underground. Not even Camille knows, and she's straight up evil.
Aaaaah! Scarner is a horror champion because he’s an extreme, extreme conservative!
I get it!
"I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great great wall on our southern border and I’ll have the outsiders pay for that wall." - Scarner probably
volibear:
@@ungulatemanalpha skarner is a conservative in the modern sense whereas Voli is moreso a brutal anarcho-primitivist
Ain't that like Udyr too or am I misrembering?
@@bobtheball5384 udyr is conservative by proxy to volibear
I am extremely bothered that Skarner's bio doesn't mention void at all, despite it being a big thing in his voicelines and promotional material.
It's funny as hell how literally all of Riot's problems with the lore could've been solved by having one continuity supervisor, or multiple for their different universes, but instead they're doing all these pirouettes of changing stuff everywhere and trying to mash them together. They're just making things harder for themselves (and especially for the writers)
The horror of Skarner's story is that he's a giant scorpion, and Riot thinks scorpions are vewy scawy 😢
Scorpions are, in fact, a litle scawy
Scorpion scary? I more fascinated on them.
Im more scared on those infectious worms than scorpion, snakes, or spiders.
Thats cause scorpions cant give money to Riot 😰😱
@@SunItzal poisonless scorpion is not scary
Yeah I’d bang a scorpion
Skarner's closest analogue is probably Volibear. I wouldn't exactly call base-Volibear's concept 'horror', but the idea of a big animalistic deity with a cult of personality that enforces a dystopic worldview certainly can lean into storytelling space that's frightening and/or deliberately uncomfortable.
That said, the Volibear comparison really makes the concept of 'skarner horror' laughable, because the Thousand-Pierced Bear is way better at that and they refused to commit to it there, so how the hell will they make it work for a giant scorpion that doesn't even have that going for him?
kinda like how HAL 5000 was scary, i guess? or 1984?
he's very similarly capable
Volibear does it massively better though because Volibear is actually struggling with his role as a war god in many of his lines. He revels in it, but in quiet moments he questions who he is and what if the world doesn't need him. Skarner is just delusional and maniacal.
I think the 'horror' aspect of Skarner just stems from the fact that you have this mountain-sized kauji scorpion willing to do literally anything, even commit destruction to his own people, just to keep them safe. Imagine being a resident of Ixtal not knowing that there's a ticking time bomb underneath your very home ready to kill you just because you have very different opinion.
I love these spontaneous rants in the middle of a video
Quality content 10/10 would recommend to friends and coworkers
I think part of the pain with skarners rework is similar to galio, where literally the ONLY part of their character to make it into the rework is their most surface level details.
I still think old skarner lore was more interesting than old galio lore, but they both show the issues of reworking a champ into an entirely different character.
I dont think people would be happy if Caitlyn was reworked into a vigilante freedom fighting dude, but according to skarner or galio we can change all of that as long as she was still a sniper wielding ADC. Really not a fan of this type of rework, if you eant to make a whole new character just make that character.
New skarner didn't even have to be a scorpion the way hes written, it's just the sole remaining signifier that he is indeed still skarner.
Another note, maybe riot shouldn't have reworked the lore in a way that cuts their primary game out of it. The lore pre 2014 was just excuses for the characters to exist, but the lore post retcon exists entirely outside the world of the main game.
Warcraft and 40k have done excellent jobs at extending their lore to other mediums so you can get into them without engaging with the main game. Way better than Riot ever has and likely ever will. But... The main games are still fully implemented into those settings. You get to engage with the world of those settings when playing the core game, and that isn't true with LoL.
Story telling has to fit the medium to be a truly great story, riots writers created an amazing world but one that has no connection to the primary game.
I think that One Runeterra is responsible for this change of story, right now they could have kept the pillage of Skarner's people by greedy merchants of Piltover and just change it that hextech crystals are their hearts/eyes/whatever and they leave the rest to rot only for Skarner to find his hollowed out brothers and sisters and that's what drives his paranoia the most and would ACTUALLY set an interesting question: Is Skarner right in the isolationism? After all, they are surrounded by nation in massive civil war (Shurima), void filled wasteland (Icathia), colonialist pillagers (Piltover) and forces of the undead darkness (Shadow Isles)
Absolutely, and I can tell it'll only get worse from now on
they won't bring hextech into it because they already completely rewrote the origin of it for arcane. right now we don't even know where it comes from, and i don't think skarner has any chance of being involved on it right now that he's literally KAIJU SIZED. Like he's literally the size of piltover, theres no way he cant just smush them.
New Skarner not letting anyone leave or enter Ixtal, being willing to destroy any who questions this decision, growing more and more parnoid about being betrayed, and genuinely believing himself a loving guardian of the Ixtali while unknowingly being a tyrant, is actually kinda terrifying and cool. Also reminds me of The Endless (2017).
What's not cool is how they completely deleted Old Skarner in the name of a canon they cannot properly define or maintain.
As another comment said: I think both could be true! Maybe him seeing these Brackling bodies (those are still canon, he mentions them) hollowed out by Piltovans MAKES him this way.
@@Trockenmatt no, they aren't
On Riot not paying attention to their own lore: Imagine if Seraphine's voiceline upon encountering Skarner had been "wait... I know your voice..."
and maybe that could just be the start of it, slowly building up throughout a match (*‘ω‘ *)
For the future of his story, if he is traumatized, I agree that Milio could be the solution to resolve the conflict with Qyana, and maybe at the end of this story, Skarner could find Malphite and together they get together to protect the Iskali people while they open the jungle to the world. And it would mean that they could finally be present to help against the void or any other world wide threat
i really is very insulting to the fans, i feel like all my investment in league's lore for the past 8 years has been trown into a trashcan
39:40 About Milio, the flame that he carries is from the sister of his grandmother, she was considered a traitor in Ixtal for conspiring against the Yun Tal (or the status quo), all her family was exiled because of that. So Skarner considers he is also a traitor, even if he is just a kid who wants to help people.
Skarner allying himself to millio and his "traitor's flame", because millio cares about "protecting" ixtal more than qiyana, sound like a cool story development.
Maybe skarner will attempt yo overthrow the current yun tal, in order to grant millio's order of flame power, as long as he vows to protect his family, "Ixtal"
I always thought, that milio's traitor flame referred to the fact his grandma had the same power and she was also a traitor
Having Milio and Skarner being on the same side would be kinda funny actually
They already contradicted themselves. Skarner's lore says that him and Ixtal saw how Shurima made the acendants, but other Ixtal stories says that Shurima met Ixtal while they already had acendants.
So which is it? Did they or did they not have acendants before Ixtal and Shurima met?
Oh yeah, there's that too.
Welp, guess that's what happens when the corporation themselves claim "lore is discardable".
you wrote this wrong or you did not understand... skarner says he saw shurima make the ascendants. ixtal is in a jungle, a very dangerous one. It was still there when shurima made the ascendants, They just later expanded it with magic.
So eventually, shurima WITH ascendants meets Ixtal.
Whats the error in this? it says literally the same thing. they met after shurima had ascendants.
I'm looking at a bunch of old skarner dev articles from his original inception and this vid came back on my feed. I have no idea why they want the character to *feel* scary. To me what I miss most about old skarner was his somber gentleness that could be roused to protect the brackern that he cared so much for.
Seraphine superfan here - I absolute adore what her story and character could’ve been. I love her lore, her short story where she goes to a quiet cafe after every concert to listen to the crystal. How it gave her advice and mentored her, helping her learn to embrace her empathy instead of closing it off. That’s all gone now. The only two short stories I’ve ever cried at from league are ekko’s and orianna’s, both which are very likely to be non-canon with arcane existing. One canon sucks. We have dozens of AUs for skinlines already. Why can’t arcane be another one of them?
money unfortunately always has the upper hand
I know! Imagine a pretty pink pop star and a giant rock scorpion teaming up to fight imperialist exploitation! Imagine Seraphine pushing for synthetic Hextech or for mixing Piltovan and Zaunite technologies while she and her mentor secretly recover brackern crystals. It could have been great!
Instead it’s “Would you like to head their song?” and then writing out the brackern crystals entirely.
Gods, Orianna's backstory is so, so good. It tackles so many things at once, and really gives us a good sense of both the pros and cons of living in Piltover, and having an empathetic heart, a heart she eventually bequeaths to her father as a parting gift. There's a reason she was one of my first mains in-game, and remains one of my favourite characters despite the dozen mains I've had over the years.
"Kaiju pope of Ixtal" lol.
I do think a bit of old skarner is there. Ultimately, the new one is also a tragic character. The Ixtali basically became his new brood, his children, and he spent hundreds of years raising and protecting them. But after everything that happened he became obsessed with the burden of keeping his new children safe, to the point of isolating himself and making his job the only thing he ever does. Which, like to a real human being would, it affects his mental health in a very negative way. So he is also a monstrous, very inhuman character design, with a very human personality and motivation, just like old Skarner. The dude literally has PTSD that feeds into paranoia and the mission he gave himself only makes it worse, as he can hear all the plotting in Valoran and fill his mind with all the worst parts of it. And as time passes, he is less able to distinguish potential evil and catastrophe from harmless or inconsecuential events.
I see the dots honestly, and I also think that while the old lore had estupendous potential, this new one could also be very good. It's just anyone's guess if Riot will ever commit to it.
Babe, wake up! A new "Skyren pops off at corporate Riot for their sheer contempt towards their narrative goldmine of a setting, the writers who crafted it and the people who want to consume and love it" moment just dropped! I kid of course, they are all things that need to be said and it's always good to remind people that it's not the writer's fault that these confusing, wide reaching decisions are made
There's a very funny image in my mind of a story where Milio coming down every few days to Skarner's chamber to annoy him with grand tales about the world outside. Highly embellished but those tales are a constant of his life from now on and a part him would feel bad if this awestruck kid stopped showing up one day.
I like Skyen's rants, they're fun.
Don't look at it like new canon, look at it like revisionist history.
It basically is revisionist history, if we're gonna be honest.
Can't let that morally atrocious past get in the way of making money, after all.
Riot does have data to support this move towards a single universe. Their monthly visits to their website following Arcane went up by X% but new players went up by less than X%. Riot execs looked at this info and said "They aren't playing because the different characters are too confusing. It can't be the stale gameplay that doesn't appeal to new players."
new players just means new accounts created. so if the people actually didn't create accounts to play, some move may be justified. Idk if uniting the lore makes a lot of sense, but it surely makes it less complicated to get into it if youre not a league player.
there is totally a way to get across the horror theme for skarner, just make him WAY more paranoid and irrationally upset by opposing ideas. basically the flip side of kled, where instead of being funny, make lines where he rambles on into a mumble of paranoia, talking about the outside world as if it were a plague, he's too calm and noble. i wanna feel concerned and kinda scared of what he says and might actually do.
I was literally just thinking this. Erratic ramblings to himself on first move, startled or almost feral on attacking etc.
and maybe less like a hype man for himself filled with arrogance towards this idea
As someone in STEM what you said about something looking like a genuis invention being actually stolen labour is very relatable. A lot of advancements in AI are because these companies exploit people in the global south to label databases; I think it was for chatgtp they even had to flag images containing child porn and gore, which lead to a lot of mental anguish. Yet we think of these creators as innovators, who by their genious managed to create technology above their piers.
I remember James Gunn said he wanted all the DC games, comics, and movies/shows to start fitting together before he very quickly had to walk it back because that’s NOT the way to fix broken lore or stitch the universes together or even how video game or movie development works….
But League lore reminds me of comic lore in that way, where it’s long and sprawling and intriguing but every couple of years it gets a soft or complete reset. DC has been playing with an “everything is canon” approach for a bit which hurts my brain soooo bad because of like, the fact time doesn’t move with comics much despite the kids becoming adults or teenagers and just how many different interpretations of the characters there are…
I’ve only been looking at League lore since Arcane, as I used to play wayyyyy back and I think some of the characters are cool. But it’s weird to see that kind of storytelling always crumble. Any big sprawling lore that is shared between multiple voices and IP holders always seems to fall apart, the only thing that changes is just how fast you approach that hyperdeath.
My theory - And what they should have done in my humble opinion.
This is a different Skarner. The old Skarner is dead, as the last of his kind and is now used as the last piece of hextech.
This Skarner has nothing to do with old Skarner. This way they don't have to try to "fix" the hextech mess.
They kill Skarner. And Seraphin is using him. But.... She can clearly hear him, and He finnaly explain her Everything
Actually, most hextech crystals in lore aren't actually prime hextech. they are artificial hextech derived from the actual hextech crystals which are so powerful so they aren't of common use.
As someone who never played LoL but still gravitate around Runeterra as a settings through other means, and as such as someone who don't have any real emotional connexion to Old Skarner, my only real problem here is that I feel we lost something narratively very interesting that unfortunately was never really explored.
We gained something else that have potential of course but it just feels bad to realize that the idea of "Hex Tech have its foundation in what is essentially an act of genocide that some of the wealthiest families not only seek to hide but also actively want to continue even tho alternatives now exist." will not be explored. It was a bold idea full of interesting potential. Some characters like Seraphine or Camille could have shone in a story focusing on this. How would Jayce react if he were to learn about it ? How would Zaunites react ? Would Piltoveans try to change or would they put their economical/class goals first and try to save face ?
All of these could have been interesting story pitches that will now probably never happen if they don't reintroduce something to fill the hole left by Old Skarner somehow.
Of course, it's not a huge deal at the end of the day, Piltover/Zaun have a lot of other narrative stuff going on for them, and Ixtal needed some more substance in a way, but it's just a little bit of a shame anyway.
It also solidifies the idea that Riot cannot fully be trusted to tell the stories that the lore seems to allude to, as any of these narrative leads could be retcon.
Which also mean that, as someone external to the "Riot Ecosystem" so to speak, I receive this all thing as "don't get too invested in this lore or you could get burn", which is kinda discouraging.
EDIT : Removed typos and some of the broken english.
they don't seek to hide it, they literally aren't aware of it. as far as anyone knows, the ferros family just brings the crystals in. shit, maybe even they don't know. i don't think anyone has survived an encounter with skarner to truly tell, and most of shurima is filled to the brim with void monsters
Just imagine a redemption story pairing where malphite shows skarner the beauty of the world outside and it helps with skarners trauma
I can appreciate the criticism that Riot did not communicate canonicity. But even if they did, I feel players would engage better with a singular canon than with half a dozen conflicting timelines. Especially when the most recognizable piece of Runeterra lore, Arcane would need to be treated as non canon.
Now they are trying to have that meeting, trying to have that direction. It's long past due, but that doesn't mean that One Runeterra is the problem
I do not trust riot to continue with like 80% of the roster, the reason i like riven lore so much because it got progression, but she is a rare case of riot TELLING and not just TELL ONCE methode they have
riven is a rare case of "she's related in some way to Yasuo and his lore is long as fuck we need to make her lore as long to compensate"
Honestly my main issue with seraphine is the way the marketed her at the beginning by pretending she was a real person so they could drop the worst Ultimate skin to date. The brakern stuff was wack, but otherwise doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme.
It seems like Skarner is a more jaded version of Heimerdinger in arcane
Riot turned a genocide survivors story into that of a tired old boomer
Seeing Skyen be this mad at riot is so relatable, riot is such a mess oh my god, everything about this company is a mess
There's another lore related video that a content creator made quite recently, his channel name is Twisted and the video is called "The Current State of League of Legends Lore". It's a really good video that I think you might enjoy taking a look at it. I would love to hear your thoughts on the things he brings up, the video is almost an hour long.
This is more than 40 minutes for a 3:22 video, so you're basically asking Skyen to make another 13 hours of content? XD
That is a fascinating idea for a character like that. A massive titan of a creature that sees itself as the only thing keeping his people safe from all the horrors of the outside world but at the core it’s born out of irrational fear but who’s gonna argue with a kaiju sized scorpion? There’s one hell of a story there
To me, Earthrune Skarner feels more like what he should be. This sort of Elemental Creature made from Roots, Rocks, and Crystals gives him a nice visual identity. It also could lean more into a lore based on colonialism ideology, with Piltovans travelling to Ixtal and Culling natives in order to collect Hextech crystals to power their progress and advancements. Even if murdering a bunch of sentient beings for literal blood diamonds was too much, they could have gone the route more in line of the Crystals being a cultural thing and the Brackern defending it, think of something like El dorado
Love those 100% cannon KDA spells in LoR
Rip bloodstone diamonds in the city of progress
I think alternative perspectives of Skarner's story being horror is to take into account the people of Ixtal.
From their perspective throughout the generations they witnessed their great protector becoming their prison warden that will never let them leave (I am aware not all of them think of it that way but there are those who do and it would be horror to them). I can see quite a bit of similarities with an abusive relationship where your partner starts great and then they slowly strip away your freedoms and isolate you from others and now any disobedience is seen as a betrayal. So he is the monster from that perspective.
On the other hand as discussed Skarner considers the world horrifying and has grown more and more paranoid.
It would be interesting to have that story explored, but it would also be interesting to have the story of Nasus, Renekton and Shurima in general explored and so many others, but Riot really does tend to start stories and just not touch them for the next millennium.
The horror! A founder and gaurdian of a meso-american based region wants to isolate his region from the outside while piltovens start to invade the jungles.
On one hand, I feel bad for the writers at Riot. Clearly they are very talented and have many good ideas, but on the other hand, I feel like at some point you have to sit down and actually see what you're working with. And for them unfortunately it's a company that doesn't give too much of a damn about storytelling and a medium that doesn't lend itself to intricate and complex stories. You can't just come up with stuff that would probably take a novel to tell properly for the backstory of one character out of many in league of legends. You're just shooting yourself in the foot with that. Riot is probably _telling_ them that they have almost no limits on their creativity, which ofc they shouldn't because Riot is swimming in money and can make complex stories work, but clearly their actions say otherwise. Sometimes simpler stories go farther than high concept stuff.
honestly what makes it difficult to make stories like this is that their main game is a fucking moba. It's literally the worst medium to tell a story in. You're not supposed to be concentrating in the character, you're supposed to be concentrated in the gameplay and the tools the character work.
8:20 me neither ,_, past few days I being trough a lot of feelings, weird feeliing just because of a fictional crystal scorpion, that I didn't even could say goodbye properly ,_,never get the M7... IDK is just weird...
How i would position the conflict between Skarner and Milio is this: both characters come from a sense of protection. Skarner wants to protect the people of Ixaocan and Milio wants to protect his family and everyone around in general. Where they differ is the extremes that Skarner would take in order to "protect". So where Milio seeks to protect from the perspective of his culture, his family, and his people, Skarner will protect from a perspective of weighing and favoring the whole vs the individual, that he is right, that humans are far too weak to be left to their own devices, and that anyone thinking otherwise is a potential threat. In simpler terms, protection guided by love vs protection guided by fear.
he is from a person fascinated by the world to hating it.
I think everyone forgot the reason why quiyana want to open to the world because she see a rune what rise keep safe and want to go for them... Yeah I am more in the side of the kaiju
That discord ping at 10:01 though
Ah yes Skarner my favorite horror themed character
*patiently waiting for him to start helluva boss*
Milio: I only want to make my family proud of me :)
Skarner, apparently: Christ you are extremely fucking selfish die
Milio: I am 12 years old
Riot really established a league in the world with a competitive scene to the point that it is hard to imagine the game dying (as it's usually normal for a game that old). With the lore, they have the means to make the whole universe. They create part of pop culture in that way. They have the potential to try to create a new big comic world. They could make something big with a lot of comics and books, and in some years the runeterra world could be bigger than League of Legends, the same way that Arcane breached and was a big success with people that don't want to lay a finger in league, the comics and books could make everything grow. But they keep failing to decide on a thing and go through it, when they start a project, instead of correcting what is wrong and perfect it, it's all or nothing, success or immediately abandoned. It's like they plant a tree and cut it next year because it didn't gave any fruit.
Piltover didn't need the souls in hextech to complicate the notion of a shining utopia on a hill. Zaun itself does that.
Remember to take care of your mental health everyone 🥰
One of Skarner's abilities should have been to build a wall
Never trust Skyen when he says he won't go on a ramble/tangent on a topic
Just teasing, I love your rambles Skyen :)
I think if you want a trauma based character in League, they'd need to have the inverse of a Rage Meter. Like, a character who has done horrible things with their powers, so it causes them anguish to use them. Create a Stress Meter, and if it fills to max, the champ shuts down in some way. That's like, my initial proportion after only thinking about it for a few minutes lol
… rumble?
@@Justanothermusicnerdxo Essentially! But with a different motif, and maybe a bigger penalty than being silenced? But that's just me spitballing. I'm sure there's a fun way to make a trauma focused champ
Yeah I never liked the fact that Riot took this very interesting moral angle of what is progress good for if it breeds suffering and how colonialism will always paint itself as better by exploiting others and then pointing at their exploitation as examples on why they are better and then just did... nothing with it.
Really struck me as the higher ups not wanting to """get political""" even tho they have Noxus and Shurima and junk, a deep "Oh wait this got too real to whats happening actually in our human world and we cant 'well both sides have a point' it lets just not touch it at all".
they never went with it in lore anyway. i mean, literally 2 characters were kind of aware that skarner even existed, and one of them got retconned (jayce kind of knew and seraphine got retconned)
The real horror is how Skyen somehow managed to alter time to turn a 3 minute 22 second video into a 42 minute video. (This is a joke your insights make me happy)
I agree that Riot should get, and hire more, writers to fully tell their stories. All they have now is a beginning and some of the rising action for most of their characters. Writing books for a fandom is a good way to get people invested in lore, especially if those books are good (physical also helps). They could add in game skin codes to the books to make people more likely to pick them up if they wanted.
30:35 I disagree. The best reworks recontextualize the character without changing the core. Nunu, Volibear, Swain, Urgot, Fiddlesticks, and more, they're all still what they were for the most part, but in high definition. Your point about not giving people what they want for the sake of giving something new sounds contrarian to your own reasonings of why you don't like the direction they took with canon and his lore in particular.
Also to add about Seraphine's rant: it's literally a meme. Just like she was memed at release to represent all the corporate wrongs of Riot and league of legends, she now represents the whole idea of retconning old skarner out of the universe just so that environmental conflict doesn't paint all the supposedly good or at best gray characters, like Ekko, Victor, Jayce, Caitlyn, Vi (which was actually really smart in core universe, she had an engineer mind, and was much more resourceful, she made her hextech gauntlets out of scrappy ones) and yes, the latest addition being Seraphine, into more conflicted or controversial characters. Without Skarner they will have to rewrite all of Piltover, and all the characters except maybe like Ezreal. Hello to Camille that will be an inferior version of herself, goodbye to Orianna that could be more than just a robot with hints of feelings of former human
An example that I like of a short pocket of existential dread (in terms of Riot never going to work on it, so they should cram as much as they can into it) is from a character from Dishonored, Hiram Burrows. He is a complete piece of shit, and you're not supposed to agree with him or even sympathize when you read his thoughts, but, nonetheless, his diary is available, and when you read it you notice how his paranoia completely warps his notions of everything around him. He literally says he sees unknown dangers crawling up the walls of the castle he serves on, and ends on a note that shows that even when he tried to distract his mind from his paranoia with other things, those eventually failed.
Again, you can SEE what it is and its very interesting, making him more then one-dimensional even when he is clearly evil, and i missed that fear from Skarner's paranoia. Its what made Heimerdinger in Arcane SO GOOD, that paranoia over something and being so disconnected from mortals that you sound clearly out-of-touch, cold and even uncaring at times. Skarner sounded so tremendously sure of everything, and its once again another one of those characters that the interactions don't reveal a deeper weakness of or another side of the character (Which is sad, since Volibear, a kinda similar character, actually had that).
How does a political entity headed by a monstrous Kaiju function? What are the actual logistics of that?
It's funny how they don't speak about this when yea, its weird af but could be easily fixed, just copy Mothra's whole schtick
I really do think Skarner's new problem is that he's just too huge to make narrative sense. Outside of The Void and ASol, nothing can really challenge him.
It would be one thing if he was three- or four-stories tall, but making him the size of a mountain seems like too much.
At this point I feel like narrative should just treat whatever Legends of Runeterra says as the defacto truth. Seems like anybody who tries to make sense of the canon just gets shuffled over to that team so they're not in the way of of the gameplay team.
Think about lol lore makes me sad, because i love Rell, she is one of my favorite characters, and i know her story will never be completed.
Her whole deal is that she had her life stole from her, all those years of suffering, so black rose had a weapon against mordekaiser.
Is a mordekaiser event happening some day? Who knows? Will Rell be a key character in the event? After the yoric incident, I dont believe so.
Is she going to fight the important noxus guys who she seeks revenge? No fucking way riot is going to spent a single character on a champion not that popular. Damn i dont even know if Samira is still seeking her.
Its unsatisfying the way villains are handled in lol, because no one can die, never, just like viego, whos trapped in that magic field, until riot decide to go back on him, even tho his story is complete. Feels like comic books where no is really dead, but worst because no one dies at all
But also multiverse is not something that I would want and many other people I think also feel that they wouldn't want that
so I'm glad they at least didn't choose a multiverse
Riot: "Lots more opportunities for stories"
Also riot: "He's so paranoid he literally hides in a cave at all times"
that... is litterally not what his story is about
I’m still unsure about the “horror” aspect of this character. There’s certainly some inherent unease in a “only I can save this nation” isolationist hellbent on keeping his people safe by any means, but what about that is horror?
Skarner not having a short story also doesn’t do anything to help that, because his bio on the universe website is just… what I’ve described. What about this champ is horror, aside from his size?
I liked the old story for it's potential with the whole of Piltover, exactly the way you said it. But I also understood that of all potential old Skarner had was entirely unutilized, and as it stood it existed more of a creative roadblock than a carefully crafted structural conflict to the story of Piltover.
For all the hate that Seraphine had, I feel like she's the one that is losing the most with the new story, now having no foil or stakes with any of the other characters of the game while before she at least was the only regular piltovan to get close to the truth of Hextech to inspire a change. (but if it is to be frank Riot absolutely wasn't writing Seraphine as such, so that basically didn't change).
My small distaste however comes more from how they framed the story. One could say his old story mirrored Irelia's in a humanizing way, so having one of the first lines be "I always wanted to write a horror character" and "when we looked at Skarner we were like "our time has come"" really sounds like they can't imagine a non-human character being anything other than a monster (that really doesn't help when Volibears participation in Fate's Voyage also was somewhat reduced to just a monster-of-the-week). And while yeah, that's not the vibe they gave for Skarner I am wary that if we ever get the next creature character like Skarner, perhaps 10 years in the future, that it won't be that far of just being a villain
RIP old lore. I loved the old hexcore lore you mentioned in th beginning. I really wish they would try to preserve the interesting lore like that whenever possible. It really is a shame watching them dismantle the stories that made me fall in love with some of the champions in the first place. It's just pushing me further and further away from Runeterra's lore.
And yes, the unified canon based on Arcane is dumb. I have no trust or faith in Riot to make good stories at this point.
When you talked about Seraphine I remember mostly of the REAL problem she had at the start, that was the Twitter account faking to be a real person just for marketing on the skin. The Brakern problem existed but was fixed within 1 week, people hatred have no reason now
LoL is simply too big to make a unified lore. The writers have shown that they're incredible for shorter, more contained stories, but it starts to sour the larger the story goes. LoL doesn't have the Marvel/DC crutch of having unlimited alternate universes, it's much better off telling non-canon or "what if" stories. The 2nd Darkin War in LoR is peak "what if", loaded with all sorts of scenarios to use all sorts of characters.
But you can't do that stuff now. It's unlikely some characters will ever see a story conclusion. Though at this point it's hard to get progression for anyone to begin with.
11:54 Preach it!
Man, I'm so glad I'm not invested at all with LoL or any of Riot's canon. I just watch your content because it's neat.
Riots storytelling is at its best when both sides are muddy and hard to definitively choose as the "good guys." Arcane being some of their best storytelling is a perfect example of it and seeing them backpedal with skarner is a big step backwards for good storytelling in a universe that desperately needs more of it. Also skarners horror based because he's xenophobic i guess???? As far as in game it doesn't sound like he's ever really fearful of anything but rather his goal is to subjugate whatever isnt his in order to protect icathia. While i get the concept of fear breeding his need to subjugate anything that he distrusts, it's displayed terribly in game and it moreso just comes off as him wanting people to stay out of icathia.
It's actually really easy to choose good guys and bad guys in Arcane. The cops are the bad guys. Policing as a concept is the primary villainous force in the show.
@@3BSkyen I'd argue that the Council is moreso the problem: you could get rid of the Enforcers, but the problems would still persist as the council are the ones who write the rules and regulations.
Sort of a, "What's more dangerous: the dog that bites or the person who trains the dog to bite," if that makes any sense.
Digressing, I think another problem with Skarner is his size: he's too big for there to be opposition. There is a sweet spot between big enough that they pose a challenge, but small enough that they can interact with the world; like Godzilla or King Kong.
Don’t worry they’ll release him and do nothing with his lore for 5+years
That being said they should make milio adopt kog maw
It would fit with milio and got make kog maw unique amongst the void born where hey maybe some of them can co exist and become something more that world eating monsters
I just love how unreserved you are with your rants and critique of Riot!!! Halfway through the vid rn and had to stop to get out the popcorn
I still think he looks way too much like a crab
I definitely don't hate Seraphine, the character, but I do hate everything Riot fucked up on surrounding her. From the weird tweet campaign pre-release to the lore just not interacting with the very brachern crystal that powers her mobile stage/amp, it's just so badly done and Seraphine deserves better than that.
She could have been another in a line morally grey hextech wielders, or a sympathetic ally to the brachern, or half a dozen other compelling ideas besides, but no, nearly zero interaction with the lore aside from "sing to unite people" (the ineffectualness of which reminds me of the song a bunch of rich fucks sang together to say, "see, we're in the same situation" circa first year of the pandemic), adding nothing to the actually interesting moral and philosophical quandaries that Zaun and Piltover are *great* at generating through so, so many wonderful characters like Orianna, Camile, Renata, Victor, and others.
The only leylines I care about are those of a black mage! I shall eat every AoE in the game if it means that I get to stay in them to deal more damage!
You didn't get horror from the giant rock scorpion? ^^;
The community post said skyen went on a long rant
You lied
The video is less than an hour long
I’m disappointed, skyen (joke)
imo skarner in arcane would never work cos the show implies all magic is done by using up the magic within magic crystals, this is how it's portrayed when jayce and him mom are saved by a mage, he couldn't just teleport them away he had to use up a power of a crystal, which would imply that not just piltover but all magic users exploit skarner's race, including jinx bcos of fishbones, so now the whole metaphor of piltover's progress being exploitative and that tying into the class war is out the window cos zaunites would be just as guilty of that. that's why it's kinda necessary to get rid of skarner's old lore if arcane is the main source of lore now
yeah, the guy who saved them was in freljord too. how the fuck did he get one of the crystals??? it was a tiny shard too. do they just go and get those? and how did jayce get so many anyway?
I think uncomplicating the source of hextech does make Skarner’s lore less interesting, but I do think the issue of keeping the tech immoral is that it does suggest an end game of other characters giving up their powers for moral reasons which is not really in line with what they would want for ‘main characters.’ I think the pushback to Seraphine especially was probably what prompted it. I don’t know if morally grey is always inherently better for narratives, especially when it feels so incredibly evil. I don’t even know if it’s morally gray.
I just don’t understand why hextech had to be what it was used for. There are so many other things you can use crystals for. Why did that part of the lore need to change?
This is (almost) completely irrelevant to the matters being discussed but I can't take it seriously how they took this ancient magic civilization where everything is so different they made an effort to name everything in a new pseudo artificial language that sets it appart from everything else in that worlds, and threw in a giant scorpion named Skarner, which came from a race named the brackern. Like, his mother's name and his clan even have some non-standard characters, and then there is Skarner. I wonder if they'll go the Volibear route and give him other names that better match his lore or just completely ignore rhe discrepancy.
Skařner
There, fixed /s
Always good to hear youtubers lose their minds at corporations
I do think this is the worst rewrite in League Lore. They wanted The Arcane gang (Who I love in both incarnations) to be Uncomplicated Good Guys™ when they are living in the literal Industrial Revolution City with Exploitation included, so they hard to trim the Namestone mining... It is as bad as if they took out Twilight of the Gods or Where Icathia Once Stood just to make Shurima more pleasant
From now on, to me, Skarner and the Brackern where fully erased from Runeterra. This is a very different character, and should not have the same name, so I'm gonna call him Skorror forever. Specially bc the Yun Tal storyline was not incompatible with the Namestones: they could have a magic cristal on their back, and Skarner's brood could haver been mined while he was away in Ixaocan. Ixtal is already a region being actively exploited for resources by Piltover
Skarners horror are foreigners 👻👻👻👻
Wasnt seraphine hate because she was created to please china?
Surely no one is harrasing that writer based on her appareance on socials, right...?
Sort the dev video's comments by newest
i miss my main
:c
I admit I'm part of the problem when it comes down to people saying "They changed Skarner because of Seraphine" although when I say that it's more of a joke, making fun of Riot's track record when it comes down to throwing ugly or monstrous champions under the bus to highlight pretty, new champions. I should probably be more clear that I'm joking when I comment things like that, though because some people seem to legitimately believe that.
I have no idea why, but I got unsubbed from you. Which sucks because I love these vids! I can't wait to see what you thin of the next Frieren episodes too :)
More Frieren when?? 😭😭😭😭
No, less Frieren, how are we going to make it last until season 2 otherwise u.u I am not prepared for no more Frieren, he can take his time.
eh when he feels like it, remember, he does this reaction channel on the side for fun, he has stated that the moment it starts feeling like a job with responsibilities he will drop this channel. So ya know, just be patient and maybe dont pressure him about stuff so it can just remain the fun on the side channel :3
Skyen needs to get over the canon changes. To literally anyone even moderately interested in picking up the story of Runeterra, the previous system was impossibly awful. I have never been turned off from a games lore as much as I did with league due to their rejection of making anything canon.
There’s a million sub universes and on top of that the biggest story telling vehicle ever introduced was also not canon.
Why should anyone get invested into a story where nothing has consequence, there is no consistent world, and there’s a near infinite amount of alternative universe characters in contrast to the “canon” one.
idk Marvel seems to have fans. And DC. And Star Wars. And Warhammer 40k. And Transformers. And people still like Sherlock Holmes stories. Star Trek is doing pretty good. And fanfiction is one of the most popular forms of literature that have ever existed.
@@3BSkyen Most the mentioned franchises are experiencing a steep decline in public interest and revenue and many people cite the over-abuse of multiverse writing.
I would say that is also evidence of the general public not enjoying the lack of a consistent story.
Personally, I am in the audience who does not enjoy those medias because of its multiverse usage, but even those who do enjoy it have found it to be excessive, which league certainly falls into.
I've decided to stop playing League because of the recent pull back on storytelling from Riot - and it just strikes me that at the beginning of this video, they get the writer to say 'and all the excitement that (Skarner's story) brings for Runeterra and LoL'. I hear that and I think 'you mean exactly zero excitement? Because it will never be progressed in any way?'.
I'm so happy that you've branched out to other content, because I expect that in the next year or so there will be very little of substance to comment on from Riot Games - and I really love to hear from you.
Skarner lore is going to be xd, but the bar looks dope
Ur so based having John Oliver in your recommended -- that episode is really good too btw
Honestly i think Skarners old lore was ass. You cant have a whole region of your world be based literally run on the torture of innocent souls, like some argent energy shit, while telling complex stories with heroes and villains and nuance and drama.
Seraphines whole vibe was ruined by the subtezt of "shes burning the souls of orphans" and thats one thing because seraphine was fun to hate. What about Ekko? Zeri? Viktor? I know Runeterra started off super grimdark but if they want to tell engaging stories in an MMO they need some sort of break
The way old Skarner played with the idea of this monster character actually being very humanised, tragic and worth a lot of sympathy as a victim of capitalist hell was such an interesting concept that could play with how a lot of people allow their desire for aesthetic likeability to influence their perspectives on eg. racial and ecological issues for the worse. Like how people interact with other cultures with a wary distrust as though it is so alien and weird that it makes the people that live there unable to be empathised with, or how people are more than happy to get behind saving the pink dolphin but turn up their nose and revel in the death of various 'ugly' species like ecologically crucial insects. Skarner IS THE archetypal 'ugly', a nasty bug with a funny craggy face and utterly alien biology, but still a living creature going through so much pain. That ugliness contrasted with his tragedy made him an interesting possible avenue to explore those ideas. Even if you throw out the uncomfortable genocide aspect because it's something you're not willing to engage with while giving it the depth and care it deserves as a topic, there was still something valuable to that core concept of a tragic ugly character that I feel is lost in making Skarner another big cool monster. Just feels like a waste.