Reviews of all the League of Legends champions is a future project idea; maybe something to start once we're at least caught back up to Gen 4 on the reviews being brought over to this new Neocities site, but. Screw it, this is a hot-off-the-presses thought and I want to stick it out there rather than sit on it forever and a half.
If you at least follow League of Legends, you might know that Skarner, after losing a poll multiple times and after multiple delays when he DID when the poll, is finally getting his visual-gameplay update! Huzzah! And as you can tell by the title of this article, we don't feel very "huzzah" about it. But to get into why, we're gonna have to talk about how Skarner used to be.
His first insertion into the canon was nothing outrageous. He hails from a race of sapient scorpions with crystalline carapaces, and they were a very old people that were around until the Rune Wars happened and left their land uninhabitable for them, so they hibernated deep underground for centuries until the world was more suitable for them again. A mining operation awakens Skarner, who then meets up with the Institute of War, which give him a slot on the roster of League of Legends(tm) and now he has political sway to make the world some vague metric of "more habitable for his kind". If you need an excuse to have a playable giant crystal scorpion in the game, sure, that works.
Then the big universe reboot of 2014 happened, and with the Institute of War/The League of Legends itself ejected from Runeterra's canon, basically a ton of champions also effectively got ejected from canon, Skarner being one of them. He had a paragraph-long blurb that amounted to his old lore, now claiming he's from "Shurima, somewhere, I guess." and that being all there was to him for a while. But eventually, they fleshed out his backstory significantly.
It began with much the same beats, sapient crystal scorpion people, now with a psychically interconnected consciousness that allowed them to share memories and experiences between individuals via song, but still having the parts where they were driven deep underground in the wake of the Rune Wars nearly destroying the planet's surface and hibernating until the situation improves. Sounds familiar so far.
Where it diverges from his old story is how Skarner was abruptly and aggressively awakened by the pained psychic screams of his kin, all being massacred and mined alive for the gemstones that act as their brains - turning out to be what Hextech crystals of Piltovan invention are made out of - and Skarner goes on a rampage trying to stop the damage being done, but being too late, as he is now the last of his kind. All because Brakern brains were really good batteries. And now he scours the world trying to find all the magic crystals stolen by Piltover to at the very least try to reunite the collective part of his kin's consciousness. Kinda toned up the tragedy, huh?
And sure, I'll admit, Skarner isn't the best looker in the League. He has all the chunkiness of LoL's early roster and I have a hard time disagreeing that he hardly looks like a sapient creature so much as he looks like a mook from an MMO that gives a rare drop if you kill enough of him. But I think at least in the context of this new lore, that kind of is the point?
Obviously there's themes of indigenous people being brutalized and taken advantage of, but in the context of Skarner's Brakern brethren looking like scary scorpion monsters, The Gamer crowd does have a tendency to view video game mooks as nothing more than some neat loot to be claimed or EXP to be gained, even monster races that in and of themselves seem sapient right down to making their own tools. To that end, I would say the most major modification I would make to our moody mate here would be that he looks a little more deliberate. Decorated with jewelry, clothing, SOMETHING to give the suggestion of a culture there. But either way, does give the vibes that maybe video games could do with some second-guessing before they go mauling the monster population.
So that finally brings us to the NEW new Skarner. His visual update is finally here, and. Well, he looks a LITTLE more decorated, I suppose. The gold paint on his carapace is a nice touch, though there could definitely be more of it. But I do like how his face is a lot more overly creepy and crustacean. But otherwise, this design makes me feel very... whelmed. Like, sure, it's a little cleaner than old Skarner, but it somehow stands out even less than his old design did. Old Skarner did weird things by not 100% adhering to arachnid anatomy, and the colors, while cartoonish, pop a lot more.
New Skarner is just. Somehow even more unremarkable as a scorpion design. He's been de-crystallized, and to compensate for looking a lot more normal, he just. Has three tails now. Yay? If anything, this design somehow looks MORE like a meaningless mook to be mauled by the millions. This COULD play into his character themes, though! So maybe let's take a gander at his backstory...
And, well. They moved him to Ixtal, a move I agree with, since it befits him a lot better than Shurima does. But here, he's now one of the Yun Tal, the ruling class of the recluse nation. That's... quite the departure, for sure. The only thing really pointing to him having any notable nobility originally was how he was apparently one of the leaders of the Brakern in the very first iteration of his story. Continuing, he's also upset about the notion of Ixtal having any contact with the outside world whatsoever, with Ixtal having become separated from the world outside its borders because of those gosh darn Rune Wars in the first place. Like, I can see the parallels there, but... really? They made him a Build The Wall guy?
I'm absolutely fine with characters that politically disagree with me existing, but. Skarner, though? A guy who was previously a victim of a fictional genocide? Does there not seem to be a conflict of these two characters here? Because it really does feel like Skarner died and he got replaced with another giant scorpion who also happened to be named Skarner.
When we started getting more reworks along the lines of Gangplank, Akali, or Jax; ones that sought to advance the character rather than hard reboot them, I was hoping that was gonna start to become more of a norm, and maybe such a thing could've happened to Skarner, because his story added a lot of texture and intrigue to the world. This advanced magic battery technology invented by the hyper-capitalist upper class that is Piltover? Turns out, ridiculously unethical! What's that going to mean for the story of Piltover? Will Skarner be able to single-handedly upend Hextech technology? What will happen if Piltover, one way or another, absolutely HAS to give up Hextech?
Well, as it turns out, there's never going to be a conclusion to that story. The closest thing we're getting to a conclusion that story is the friggin Seraphine debacle, where this character portrayed as a super-empath was apparently too tone-deaf to recognize the magic gemstone battery she was able to talk to was a tortured sapient mind that was forcibly removed from its body to be plugged into a magical noisemaker. But hey at least she gets to sing about how we should all be friends and hold hands!
To say the least, I'm not impressed with the rework and what it did for a character I had a soft spot for. But what really was the tipping point where I decided to make this was this little video giving insight into the changes made to Skarner.
Now, of course, I'm not blaming any one author for what happened to a character I like. This is just my opinion out of thousands and I'm just criticizing the end product; Skarner himself and the reasoning behind him being what he is. But? Really? Skarner having to cope with the trauma of psychically experiencing his entire race being mined alive and being the last of his kind wasn't a good setup for some existential horror, but a politician afraid his citizens are getting too woke for him to control apparently is?
Like, there's SOMETHING there, especially in portraying a twisted fascistic ruler as a monolithic kaiju monster because, hi, speaking as a trans woman, that's often what those kinds of people feel like! But why Skarner? This could've been a completely new champion and I would've hardly even noticed. Even other hard reboot champions that got VGUs like Sion, Fiddlesticks, and Galio held onto their core idea. Sion is still an undead murder machine, Fiddlesticks is still an unearthly horror cobbling together a physical form, and Galio's still a guardian construct built by a guy named Durand.
This VGU just makes it feel like the only part of Skarner that mattered was that he was League's Scorpion Guy. ):
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