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Editorial

League of Legends' newest champion confirms it: I've completely lost the plot

Cass Marshall

• 5 min read
Splash art for Demoncursed Vayne, which shows a young woman with a crossbow being posessed by a demon, who grips her head with a malevolent red hand of evil energy.
Image: Riot Games

It’s tough to follow League of Legends lore if you haven’t dedicated your life to tracking the various retcons across each character’s history. It’s an especially tricky task when you consider there are over a hundred and seventy champions, some of which have their own cast of supporting characters who aren’t playable but still exist and inform our understanding of the world. Worse yet, Riot Games keeps releasing new champions, and they all come with their own backstories and plots, which you can find in cinematics, short stories, comics, Webtoon tie-ins, and minigames. It’s a lot.

Yesterday, Riot released a cinematic for the upcoming champion Locke, and it’s official: I don’t know what the fuck is going on anymore. I feel like a detective in a Lovecraft novel trying to assemble a timeline of something unknowable and terrible.

Locke, plot, and two smoking barrels

Let me explain. League of Legends’ lore has been irrevocably warped by the massive success of Arcane, and at some point Riot quietly side-stepped from the existing timeline built up over comics, short stories, and spin-off games and chose to go with the canon established by the hugely mainstream Netflix series, which, sure, yeah, I can see why.

But this means that there are huge swathes of lore that I thought were canon, and now I’m pretty sure they are — at least in part — retconned. The Demacia story was largely established through a series of comics made in partnership with Marvel back in 2019. Those plot threads were continued in The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story and Katarina, a comic published alongside Mageseeker on Webtoon.

Except now that the main, post-Arcane plot has wandered back into Demacia, I’m now questioning whether the above is all canon. Convergence, another Riot Forge game, is explicitly non-canon. In Katarina, we see the Noxian assassin eliminate Demacia’s King, Jarvan III. Except when we see Yunara come to Demacia after the events of the Noxian and Ionian series, she reports to... Jarvan III. 

Oh no. At some point, I forgot how to do long division so I could store more facts about League of Legends lore in my brain. That was clearly a terrible decision, because now everything I’ve absorbed is actively hindering me from enjoying the current cool cinematic.