Making Arcane "canon" is a bad idea, and probably not actually possible

hello archists and aners my name is TB sky and back in 2014 riot games deleted League of Legends quite literally they did this for the first several years of League of Legends the video game The League was a physical place in the story a grand combat Arena where champions from all over the world fought for honor glory and great rewards voluntarily surrendering to the control of powerful Mages called Summoners the Summoners of course Were Us the players and the League of Legends was the in Universe narrative justification for why a busty pirate mate would be on a team with an Egyptian god an angel a cosmic horror and a scarecrow it was a thin narrative justification for slamming together a bunch of fantasy Trope characters like action figures League of Legends was essentially the Moa fantasy equivalent of a game of Super Smash Brothers but that format had restrictions it would be difficult for example to create a character like aurelian soul in League of Legends back then when you have to somehow justify in lore why a planet-sized star dragon with the power to create galaxies first of all bothers to fight in the League of Legends and more importantly how the hell he could ever possibly lose so in 2014 Riot redcon the universe the League of Legends was unmade and the battle arena of Summoner Rift became definitively non-cannon and this was a big overhaul the game had something like 120 Champions already at the time and many of their stories were intimately and deeply connected to the League of Legends fighting tournament it would all have to be Rewritten and Riot promised to be dedicated and Relentless in their efforts to update all of the affected Champions with new improved and canonical stories it has now been 10 years since that fateful day in 2014 so maybe we should check in with them a decade later to see how it's all turned out let's uh let's have a look through here let me see uh right okay so corki Sho Cho gath cockal Rumble twitch Heimerdinger Talon and Teemo still don't have full character biographies and the biographies they do have contain information which is straight up wrong okay uh twitch's entire character biography can fit into two tweets heimerdinger's biography barely fits into three tweets zillian still doesn't have a single short story to his name and neither does niia Alistar or t okay yeah okay so clearly clearly they they have they haven't quite finished Tiding things up yet and they also haven't done a great job of keeping up with new changes vain was massively changed and for the better after the 2021 Sentinels of light event but 3 years after that her basic biography still has not been updated dozens of characters have not received any kind of updated story content for well years and quite a large number have never received meaningful story updates since the day that they were released into the game and the conclusion that one must draw looking at history is that despite 15 years of Mind bogglingly profitable success Riot has never in its history managed to develop the institutional capacity to either execute a big story retcon or even to maintain and keep the stories of their characters properly updated and Alive their priority is and has always been releasing more and more new characters rather than maintaining and exploring their old characters which is why we now have 167 Champions the vast majority of whom never never receive any kind of meaningful story content one of the consequences of that failure is that getting into League of Legends lore even if you want to is way way harder than it needs to be whether any given short story that you can read which is currently published about a champion is Canon or not is basically a role of the dice whether any character that you like will ever receive meaningful story content is utterly unknowable and most importantly there is nowhere to go if you want want to keep up with the League of Legends narrative years ago now Riot made the Universe website which was meant to be a central repository for all the lore and Narrative of its game unfortunately that website sucks ass everything on the site is dumped into an undifferentiated unconnected vertical pile you can't meaningfully filter its content you can't search for individual stories or Comics by title you can't even filter by writer which is very scummy and content on individual Champion pages is neither chronological nor organized by storyline alternate universe content like KDA and star Guardians is presented alongside main Cannon materials with no real substantial differentiation and if you are a new reader it is functionally impossible to figure out where the hell to start with any of this and good luck by the way trying to use the universe official lore website to find out about the two novels and the Realms of Runa lore book that Riot went to the bother and expense of physically publishing and if you want to experience the Sentinels of light lore event the big Canon lore event that introduced vgo and Gwen and completely changed vay's entire character while good luck finding them on Universe good luck finding the star Guardians visual novel good luck finding Spirit Blossom those things are not archived and Riot doesn't really seem to give a if you have access to them search for them on YouTube I guess the company that made these things can't be bothered to Archive them properly I know for a fact that many people credit my videos about League lore with not only getting them into League of Legends lore but helping them realize that there was League of Legends lore to get into in the first place and every lore focused content creator I know will tell you that their audiences tell them the same thing Riot is catastrophically ludicrously terrible at publicizing and promoting their own IP Universe they do not and have never had any kind of effective strategy for bringing in new fans readers or making the narrative Universe accessible to them but don't worry Riot has decided that the way to solve all of those problems is to redcon the universe so that Arcane can be Canon and okay it seems like a good thought on the surface right Arcane is popular lots of people got interested because of it surely you can use that as the hook to draw new readers in right well there's just one teeny tiny iny Teensy little bitty problem with that particular strategy which is [Music] that the premise of Arcane and this is the pillar of the show's world building it is the most important and crucial detail about how the world of Arcane works the premise of Arcane is that magic is rare and in fact not only is it rare it is so mysterious obscure and feared that Mages might as well be legendary Cryptids throughout the entire show of Arcane nobody in piltover nobody in Zan and nobody from any of the outside regions ever uses magic there are no wizards no witches no warlocks no scholarly Arc Magus no $2 hedge mes casting simple fireworks can trips on the street corner for a pittance there is no magic in piltover and z and that is why hextech is such a big deal Jace and Victor's genius Master stroke is to harness the forces of the Arcane not through sorcery which is accessible to basically no one but through technology which can be accessible to everyone and the entire plot of Arcane turns upon this technological Revolution being something special something which simply is not otherwise achievable which you know if everyday ordinary people have General access to Magic well it would be otherwise achievable and it wouldn't be revolutionary and there wouldn't be a story and the thing is in run Terra in the main Universe magic is common as dirt magic is absolutely everywhere every third person gets magic rainbows farting out of their [ __ ] when they sneeze magic is the foundation of the world it is as normal and abundant as the air you breathe Mages in the main Universe are still a minority of people but magic itself is endemic it is everywhere and outside of extremely powerful and esoteric disciplines like zillian time magic everyone has experience with it and there's a solid chance that any given person knows a mage or has met one Mages and Magic are normal even in piltover and zon zeri seraphine and Ezreal are all Mages and those cities are regularly visited by Mages and magicians and wizards traveling through the city to trade and exchange knowledge and that knowledge gets archived in piltover's vast libraries every single region in Runa depends on Magic in the frel ort shamans and healers are the social glue that binds the tribes together in noxus blood Mages and battle Sorcerers are the key to their battle strategies in ishal the entire social order is based around command of Elemental Magic disciplines bilge water is protected by the magic of the buru tribe and the shadow Al are a post apocalyptic magic Wasteland sherea runs on sundisk Magic and has several indigenous traditions of magic like ston weaving which is what tiia does Deasia story as a region depends entirely on having a magical underclass to brutally repress and Ionia the first lands are literally the most magicky magic lands that ever magied magic anywhere that's the premise of the entire region which is why the cannon of Arcane and the Canon of run Terra cannot function be reconciled Arcane is premised on Magic being extremely rare and inaccessible and run Terra is premised on literally exactly the opposite so if you want Arcane to be Cannon to the main Universe of League of Legends you have to rcon it you have to say uh uh actually we were just kidding when we said that hextech is the only way for normal people to access magic there's actually there's been thousands of Mages everywhere in the show the whole time Jason Victor just didn't notice them and that's why Victor nearly killed himself and killed Sky while struggling with the Run script on the hex core because instead of talking to someone who knows magic like a wizard or something like even one time during his research he just he just he just went ahead and and and messed with it because he's an irresponsible ignorant [ __ ] I guess and by similar logic silco used Shimmer instead of magic to start his Revolution because uh using magic would be unsportsmanlike in the war against pil over like seriously The Crime Boss revolutionary serial killer didn't want to have a wizard on hand to help him with all of the crime that he was doing these narrative problems compound if you try to integrate these two universes and they are going to compound fast on the other hand if you wanted to rcon things the other way if you wanted the main Universe of League of Legends to become Canon to Arcane then you have to redcon all of it every single region and basically every single magical Champion would have to be fundamentally Rewritten and several Champions quite literally could not exist take Silas for example the entire premise of Silas as a character is that as a child he was taken by the Mage Seekers and used as a human magic detected to arrest and oppress his fellow Mages of which there are many and now he acts as a revolutionary leader organizing and galvanizing the magical underclass of Deasia into violent resistance if arcan and its World state becomes the source of Canon then Silas can't exist because there wouldn't be enough Mages to constitute a magical underclass therefore there would be no need for the Mage Seekers and therefore there would be no one to act as a revolutionary leader for it's a similar problem also for Gallo he was created as a weapon of War specifically in response to the fact that magic is so endemic on the battlefield that a giant magic absorbing Golem was useful if Mages and Magic are not normal then you can't have syus and there would be no reason to ever make Gallo similarly the yordles wouldn't really work in an Arcane Universe in the main Cannon they are magical fairy creatures from a magical subdimension who can casually magically Dimension travel and you can't have that in Arcane it raises too many questions so all of bandal's city has to be completely retconed from the ground up and you have to entirely remove and remake the magical power sets of Champions like vagar Vex Kennan and Lulu in short trying to unify the universes of League of Legends and Arcane into one one Cannon no matter which direction you try to do it comes with 10,000 narrative problems all of which would have to be resolved in order to successfully complete a redcon and that's just trying to make Arcane and League of Legends work together if we bring Legends of Runa into this it gets even worse because Mage Mage Mage Mage Mage Mage Mage Mage Mage okay I think you get the point by now Legends of Runa has done greater and more expressive and interesting World building for the world of Brun Tera than anything else Riot has ever done and one of the ways that it did that was by showing us how magic is integrated into every part of life in this magical fantasy world in order to make Arcane Cannon you would have to kill Legends of run Tera everything it has ever done would have to simply be undone now at this point you might be thinking that I am being too fatalistic and negative even if it's a big challenge to rewrite the cannon surely it can't be impossible and okay I will concede that even if I believe very strongly that these two conceptions of Arun Tera are simply too opposite too desperate to be reconciled I'm not a top level professional games writer maybe it is possible maybe a group of talented passionate creatives with full institutional support from one of the most successful game companies in the world could find a way to make it work maybe if Riot commits if Riot puts its resources behind it if Riot gives its writers the time and the space and the the budget that they need maybe it could be done which is why I opened this video by telling you the story of the 2014 still incompleted redcon because what I want you to understand is that for the entirety of Riot games' history it has never never demonstrated either the capacity or the willingness to institutionally support its writers with time creative control and resources and let me tell you what I predict let me tell you what I think is going to happen I think Riot are going to start making the one Rune teror Universe I think they're going to sink a ton of work into it and publish a bunch of stories and products and creative people at the company will put their heart and soul into trying to make something great out of a flawed project and then when the executives get bored or a key stakeholder leaves or some other group of passionate creatives at the company get something new and exciting and shiny off the ground one Rune Tera will crawl to a [ __ ] halt they won't announce that they've abandoned the project because even internally they won't want to recognize that it's been abandoned but as their big shiny redcon fails to produce the exciting revolutionary reinvigoration of the franchise that they want as it fails to generate headlines and hype and as the other departments inside Riot start siphoning away money and staff and attention and Publishing priority it will die it will die quietly and what we out here will be left with is dozens of new unresolved storylines dangling plot Hooks and character arcs that go nowhere and instead of having one Big Shiny unified narrative Universe for the League of Legends IP one Rune Tera will be just another mess for future writers to spend 10 years trying and failing to clean up so in summary The Narrative universes of Arcane and the main League of Legends Cannon are fundamentally incompatible in order to make one of them cannon with the other one or both of them will have to be fundamentally retconned to their fundamental detriment if riot undertakes this project and tries to make it work its history suggests very strongly that it simply is not a company that has the capacity and the competences to pull that kind of thing off they tried a big redcon 10 years ago and they still haven't managed to finish cleaning up after it every big narrative project they've gotten off the ground in the past 10 years has inevitably crashed and burned when Riot's management mismanages it Jace in the main universe is an arrogant self centered and antisocial genius inventor who thinks everyone else is intellectually beneath him and Victor is a reclusive machine obsessed transhumanist who considers free will an obstacle to Scientific progress in the main Universe VI is a cheerful police enforcer half of whose voice lines are about how much she thinks it's fun to violently assault her suspects Jinx is a cackling manic clown princess of crime who mostly just thinks explosions are fun and Heimerdinger is the world's biggest hextech nerd like he loves hextech so much he built a battle dinosaur out of it arcan took those characters and changed them fundamentally and with total freedom until the characters fit the story that they wanted to tell that is why it is so good not because it uses League of Legends Champions but because it effectively doesn't these characters aren't the Champions and if they were the story wouldn't work Arcane was not successful because it is a League of Legends IP it was successful very much in spite of it so redcon in the League of Legends Universe to fit Arcane is like building a really nice chair out of wood and then looking at the forest and saying wouldn't it be so much better if all those trees were shaped like chairs the quality of the chair didn't come from the shape of the tree it came from the craft of The Woodworking the quality of Arcane didn't come from League of Legends it came from the craft of the adaptation trying to turn all of League of Legends into the shape of Arcane doesn't improve the quality of the material it just makes every future adaptation harder to make and every future story harder to tell if you want to tell the story of Talia and kaisa trekking across Shara to find a safe home for their tribe that story doesn't really benefit from having its worldbuilding forced to conform with the rules of Arcane yasu's wandering rone and looking for absolution storyline doesn't get any better if you force it to abide by limitations invented to tell a story about steampunk class disparity and family tragedy neither does misfortune's pirate Revenge Quest slowly turning into a political horror story about the corruption of power or Shen and Zed's melodramatic woa sipling drama Arcane got to be as great as it is because it ignored Canon it ignored every established rule of the League of Legends Universe to invent something for itself that supported its own creative Ambitions and if you want another Arcane another adaptation on that level you have to give it that same Freedom trying to fit everything into one cohesive Cannon is Wiki brain it is Cinema Sins poisoning it's an appro coach to narrative which treats World building and lore as a checklist of facts to be followed rather than a creative tool for telling a good story I have a feeling people might ask this in the comments and it is a fair question I've been complaining so much about Riot's plans so what do I think they should do instead and that's a hard answer to give because well this is complicated for all that I give Riot crap for the systemic mishandling of their story universe I don't want anyone to come away from this video thinking that properly managing a story Universe of that size is easy no one person could ever possibly hoped to come up with the one Silver Bullet the one perfect plan that fixes all problems this kind of creative work simply doesn't work that way it's a collaborative process that takes dozens or hundreds of people and even when it's working well it takes a ton of Labor and a lot of time putting me in charge of it would probably make everything worse not better because I am an art critic not a project manager and those are not interchangeable skills skill sets having said all of that with the caveats in mind I will give a suggestion because I don't think the wheel needs to be reinvented here there are models for handling big IPS with expansive universes and I don't see why they couldn't work for League of Legends as well the most obvious one I think is the old Star Wars expanded universe model back in the day before Disney bought didn't turned everything into streaming shows Star Wars ran on a split model of soft and hard Cannon the movies were hard Cannon everything that happened in them was immutable and set in stone the Bedrock of the franchise and surrounding all of that was the soft Cannon the expanded universe where writers and artists were allowed to pretty much run wild as they pleased so long as nothing they made interfered with the main Cannon and on the understanding that if a work in the main Cannon contradicted anything they made it would be immediately considered non- Cannon and nonpresent in the official timeline now the expanded universe model was not without its problems both creative and administrative but it was also an incredibly active and fertile creative space with an incredibly deep library of storylines and characters to engage with and expanded universe content eventually went on to spawn a phandom all of its own the Old Republic setting for example is an expanded universe idea and it got adapted into some seriously beloved RPGs by BioWare and obsidian and that is the strength of this approach to Canon and narrative it creates spaces for new fans to find and engage with the world outside of whatever the flagship product is you could become a Star Wars fan by playing the video games reading the novels or Comics or watching TV shows like the Clone Wars without ever having to touch any of the original movies and I think we can all agree that that is a feature which League of Legends needs very very badly because the Moa is toxic as hell it is a hardcore competitive game where even the Casual scene has a huge mechanical and cultural barrier to entry and odds are pretty good that you'll get called a slur 14 times before you can even manage to pick a main and even then even if you go through all of that your only exposure to the characters and their stories is going to be short voice line barks Splash arts and postage stamp-sized character models running around on the screen it is a terrible onramp to the League of Legends Universe it always has been and it needs to be decentered so what would an expanded universe model look like for League of Legends well first of all it doesn't make Arcane part of the main Cannon arcane instead becomes its own expanded universe where the show is the central hard Cannon and around that you create a bunch of soft Cannon media exploring that version of Runa you make comics web comics novels podcast help you sponsor a miniseries of critical role playing a tabletop game set in the Arcane Universe Arcane fans are first and foremost fans of Arcane not League of Legends they want more of that so give it to them parallel to that you develop or continue to develop the main League of Legends universe create some kind of Flagship product for it something that can serve as the hard Canon core my suggestion would be the upcoming MMO which while it is still far away is the kind of product that can carry a narrative universe and then you license out all of the soft Canon Games Workshop style allow Indie Studios to make games set in run Terra let writers write novels there commission a web comic produce a dramatic podcast create DLC with power wash simulator support an official Deasia versus noxus total conversion mod for crusader Kings do literally anything that puts run Tera in front of more audiences in more diverse forms resurrect Riot Forge make the MOBA and the mobile game as optional to League of Legends fandom as the movies are to Star Wars the main thing is that all of this takes time it takes consistent effort and the Returns on those Investments are going to be slow people aren't going to flock to any of this just because it has the League of Legends label on it because that label is associated with the Moa which is toxic the project is to create a new Association Games Workshop had managed to do this for 40K which is no longer Associated at all primarily with the tabletop game and they have built an incredibly powerful fandom through that reassociation League should try to do the same thing this is something that has to be built over years and years and years probably burning quite a lot of money to get it off the ground which Riot should be comfortable with because that's how they built their Esports scene although of course on the other hand the interest rates have risen above hero in the meantime so maybe the vultures that run their executive class don't have the minimum of backbone required to take that kind of risk anymore I will die on the hill that League of Legends actually has amazing story and amazing characters and the primary impediment to the mainstream success of those characters has always been chronic mismanagement at Riot games Incorporated I don't imagine that any of my suggestions here are necessarily actionable doing any of what I've suggested is complicated as hell and I suspect a major part of the reason why Riot reach for the redcon is because that's the only move they think they have the capacity to execute and frankly they might be right about that they might not actually have any other option even though the one they're reaching for is in my opinion really bad in conclusion then the first point that I wanted to make in this video is that the Canon of Arcane and the cannon of Runa cannot be unified without making serious compromises to either or both of the universes my second point is that there are models out there there are approaches to handling the kind of disperate cannon that Riot is stuck with Star Wars does it Marvel and DC Do It Games Workshop does it and there's no reason why adapting a similar model for run Terra couldn't work as well and finally my third point is that what I think Arcane proves is that run Tera is an incredibly potent source for adaptation and that potential is going to get lost if you try to streamline all of that wonderful diverse Universe into fitting the mold of your one big success so far a lot of creative people have sunk a a lot of ours and a lot of passion into making the Rune Terra Universe what it is and I think that Riot games should have a lot more faith in what those people have built anyway that's probably enough of that again I really will die on the hill the League of Legends is host to a lot of great stories which deserve to be read and seen more broadly and the one Rune Terror project trying to make Arcane Cannon to me just seems like a complete overreaction to a single successful project anyway self-promotion time this channel is funded by viewers Like You on patreon especially with the uh the brain turbulence that I've been going through these past 6 months I really appreciate the steady reliable income I get from people on patreon it's genuinely a boon to my stability and mental health so thank you all very much for that if you want to help support the work that I do here you can sign up for a monthly donation or a yearly one with a discount and there are some perks available for you in return for example at $10 and above I will give you character design feedback every month as best I can on any character that you want and all supporters get to join the extra super special secret rooms on the Discord which admittedly are mostly full of the same kinds of [ __ ] posting and socializing as all the other rooms on the Discord but these ones are special because I put a label on them that said so as ever though I don't want any money that you need for yourself and anytime you need to cancel a pledge please don't hesitate to do that take care of yourself first as for others self-promotion well I have a let's play Channel where you know I play video games on there and I've just played through the Final Fantasy 7 remake intermission DLC which is the yui Side Story thing to get ready for rebirth which is coming soon and you best believe I am going to be playing rebirth the moment it drops I'm going to be doing the playing of that game over on Twitch but the vods of that will be archived on the let's play channel so if you want to see that hey go over to those places and subscribe also hey do you like anime uh or commentary on things well head on over to youtube.com/ 3bs because that is my new reaction SL commentary Channel I've been watching dungeon meshy on there a show whose animation is driving me moderately feral because holy some of those episodes and I've also been watching freerun and solo leveling so if you want to watch some anime along with me uh come on over there and I also post reaction videos over there now to game trailers and stuff so like the project L teasers that recently got put up or 2x KO they changed the title that is going to be over on that channel but that's enough self-promotion let's play The Emoji game if you've watched the entire video all the way through to this point put a hammer or some kind of tool emoji in your comment and I will read it and I will put a little heart on it thank you very much for your time and your attention remember to be kind to one another have solidarity with those who are struggling and may the tithes of History wash gently over us [Music] all [Music] n

Channel: T B Skyen

Views: 92,732

Keywords: league of legends, tbskyen, lol, arcane, netflix, studio fortiche, jinx, vi, vander, jayce, viktor, heimerdinger, ekko, silco, sevika, mel medarda, animated series, series, animation, canon, lore, story, backstory, riot games, wild rift, wildrift, runeterra, legends of runeterra, league of legends lore, arcane lore, gaming, video essay, essay

Id: umSU3x7u3H8

Length: 29min 11sec (1751 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 02 2024