Thread by @Sharjamon

Ok I mentioned this but didn't explain it so lemme explain what actually happened

"The League of Legends Lore Retcon of 2014"

🧵Thread incoming, buckle up peeps🧵

https://twitter.com/Sharjamon/status/1620363282069716992

Ok so first, to provide some context, what was League lore like BEFORE this?

The original concept for League's lore was that the Rune Wars had decimated Runeterra, and threatened to destroy it completely, and so to combat this, the Institute of War was formed

This organization basically worked with established nations to resolve politics through magic gladitorial arena matches rather than war, since war = Rune Wars = dead world

To this end, Runeterra's nations would have Summoners and Champions represent them

Summoner's were League's actual players, while the champions are of course the playable characters. Summoners would bring forth a chosen champion to fight on the "Fields of Justice" for the sake of whatever the politics of the day was in Runeterra

Back in the day, regions were WAY less populated, and way more champs were just unique or off in some random corner of the world

Example: Anivia, Nasus, Renekton, Kayle, Morgana, Malphite and Taric were all aliens, summoned during the IoW's early days from their home worlds

Lore back in those days was dispensed in 3 forms primarily

The first were champion bios, really short compared to today's standards. The second were champion Judgements, where the champ was judged by the IoW to become a champion. These were short stories published to LoL's forum

These were meatier, but also could get a bit weird.

Case in point, Miss Fortune's

All of these are on the League wiki under "Judgement" if you wanna read through them. Some were alright tbh leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Judgment#…

The third way was the Journal of Justice; an in-universe newspaper written by Summoners of the IoW (who were themselves representing the actual irl writers)

leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Journal_o…

The JoJ ran for a good two years, and covered 3 major storylines in its time:

The Unification of the Freljord, which would serve as the foundation from which the Freljord was later structured around

The second battle between Noxus and Ionia

And the Kalamanda Incident

The Unification of the Freljord was interesting because, back then, there were only 2 native Freljordians; Ashe and Nunu. This arc brought Tryndamere, Gragas and Anivia in to the Freljord's roster via lore update

It also introduced Sejuani and Lissandra as npcs

The Ionia Noxus rematch was a thing that the reboot would reframe a lot, but basically entailed Ionia having lost rights to several territories of its own to Noxus, and fighting in League to get them back

This was decided by an actual League game that's still on youtube I think

The item "Ionian Boots of Lucidity" was made in commemoration of Ionia's victory, so if you've ever wondered about this item, that's why it exists

The third storyline was the Kalamanda Incident, which was the big Demacia vs Noxus storyline that eventually led to Swain ruling over Noxus

It also served to end the JoJ, in and out of universe

The in-universe justification was that Swain had collaborated with people in the IoW to do his coup and this whole debacle, and the JoJ was used to do it, so it got shut down

The IRL justification was the writers wanting to explore new avenues of storytelling

Past this point, which ended in early 2012 just before Darius was released, champions only recieved bios for lore; judgements were phased out, and the IoW was mentioned less and less. Champion teasers also changed from short comics to single art pieces, example: Skarner vs Rengar

Then at the end of 2012 there was a large scale retcon done to the Shadow Isles with Elise's release, which also involved an update to the Twisted Treeline map. It had formerly been in Zaun. This retconned a few of champs to be Shadow Isles champs, including Karthus and Morde

Then in early 2013 they made ARAM, making it the Howling Abyss and doing a full revamp of the Freljord with Lissandra's introduction, reframing the Unification plot from before as a 3-way conflict between the tribes, while also retconning Udyr, Trundle and Olaf to be Freljordian

This further shifted things away from the IoW, but despite concerns and complaints from the playerbase about that, this was never addressed, for reasons that became apparent later

From then on champ teasers got quite a bit more involved, and biographies got longer, until the start of 2014, where bios disappeared entirely for new champions, replaced by what we now call "Colour Stories". Vel'Koz and Heimerdinger were the first to get this treatment

This also recieved flack from players, as while these were ACTUAL short stories with some meat to them, there was no backstory given for the champions, leaving a ton of questions in the air

This continued until Gnar, and then, Azir came, and everything fell out of place

Following in the wake of the SI and Freljord revamps was the Shurima update of 2014, brought along with new champion Azir. This was built up earlier due to Sivir and Nasus reworks, and it was basically doomed because of what would come on its heels; the reboot announcement

In Early september, 2014, a devblog was announced, revealing that Riot was rebooting the ENTIRE League of Legends universe. Shurima was just the start of that endeavour. This was mainly to remove the IoW, thus making League's gameplay non-canon, and going from there

They also had it in mind that, rather than giving champions biographies, they would give them colour stories instead, to provide more story content for them

There were some MAJOR issues with this though

The first was that some champions, like Fiddlesticks, Nocturne, the afforementioned alien champions, and every champion's VO that mentioned summoners REQUIRED the IoW to be canon. Without it, they had no lore basis to speak of

And how did Riot deal with this?

They didn't

When they announced the reboot, they basically had nothing prepared bar what had been done since really the Shadow Isles revamp 2 years prior. That meant those champs whose lore was deleted? They were just non canon right now

The second was that Riot's decision to do those colour stories actually ran counter to their tech; They wanted to do short biographies in the client that then linked to League's main website which had stories

Problem? The two drew info from one another. That option wouldn't work

So the world was rebooted, the canonicity of almost every champion was either out the window or highly debatable, and even the Shuriman champs brought forth with Azir had NOTHING to do off of

To say faith in Riot to do lore was lost was an understatement. It was an ACTUAL riot

One thing that did happen positively though was champ teasers ramped up. Of 2014's champions, 5 of the 6 got cinematic teasers

And the more they went on, the more lore filled they got, culimating in pieces like Bard: Mountain and Ekko: Seconds

And then, after around 10 months of a great lore drought, a veritable flood came that revitalized the lore in a small capacity, but did a LOT to restore faith in the community

Burning Tides.

This event, shepherded in with Gangplank's VGU, would rebuild Bilgewater from the ground up, as other events had before, but it did everything right

1. Tons of worldbuilding
2. Fixing the tech issues
3. Bios were being done again and longer than ever
4. Actual story progression

It brought us one of the longest pieces of fiction Riot had ever produced; the short story "Burning Tides", and reestablished Graves, Twisted Fate, Gangplank and Miss Fortune while honouring their pre-reboot selves

It was a slam dunk, it's only real fault being its small scope

By this point, League had over 120 champions, and this event serviced 4. It was a triumphant but very tiny start, but the year would keep delivering from that point on, with the releases of Kindred, Illaoi and the Poppy VGU

Kindred not only got a biography and colour story, but a self contained short story "A Good Death" that didn't connect to anything else, showcasing that Riot could create story content for the sake of itself, with non-champions as a centre point of their narratives

The Illaoi release brought us Shadows and Fortune, which continued the Burning Tides story, while also updating 5 Shadow Isles champions, and including Lucian and Olaf as well

And after the immense work put in by Sion and GP, Poppy set a gold standard for VGUs that capped the end of the year on a highnote, with even a comic for good measure

With that, the structure of League lore for the next 4 years would be established:

New champs and VGUs would get a bio and colour at minimum
Where possible, Riot would touch up regions and their champions with new releases
Other forms of storytelling would come in due course

Though from the end of 2020 and the start of 2021, things have slowed down and Riot seems to have been having problems with actually doing lore. I won't go in the details now, but suffice to say we're suffering a new drought now

But before we cap off, just to REALLY highlight how bad some of the pre-reboot stuff was, lemme introduce you to Blitzcrank's Dating Machine

In this short part of the JoJ, Blitzcrank made a dating machine which matched people together. It paired:

- Ashe with Tryndamere
- Katarina with Garen
- Janna with Bob Nashahago; a writer self insert who was dating Nidalee at the time

Yeah.

Oh it also matched Rammus with a catcus

So if you're ever wondering where THAT archaic meme came from? It's this.

Also this was Bob Nashahago's icon in the journal. This was the man who dated both Nidalee AND Janna

But yeah that should about cover it. There were many small controveries in these various times, like the Jayce debacle, the Udyr debacle, the Trundle debacle and the Fiora debacle, but that's all I'm gonna cover here cuz those ones are much smaller and I've talked long enough