I'm tempted to agree with this. I think Lux's perspective in the Lux comic is intentionally biased, since she's a teenager who hasn't personally experienced persecution and Sylas is going after her family due to their privileged status. Sylas is likely supposed to be in the right (at least, until he goes after J4, who at that point was a mage sympathizer).
I don't agree with all the modern Demacian champions not believing in the rhetoric though. Garen and Tiana are clearly in the magic = bad camp.
Oissu!
I've moved it to Rooting for the Empire and rewritten the description. Sylas in unambigously framed as the villain in spite of the genocide, but if TB Skyen proves anything, it's that he's not alone in the sentiment that genocide is the point where you cross a Moral Event Horizon.
The Vengeful Lancer
Is anyone else in favor of cleaning up the Gamebreaker section? I know that this is the YMMV section, but it's starting to turn into a massive pile of Complaining About Champions You Don't Like. That, and the meta game changes fairly often. If we gave a wall of text to every champion who has been considered Over Powered at any point in time, then we might as well give Lo L a page for the trope.
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Seconded. The entire damn page needs a huge cleanup. Some sections are about 3 times the size they should be and the descriptions are getting quite hyperbolic.
Always expect the worst and you can only be pleasantly surprised.
I did some cleanups and separating to other pages, but I wonder if more should be done.
...Look, I'm taking it here because I don't want to clutter the history with a big edit war. I'm aware niels has commissioned lots of that particular pairing's fan art, and I admit, I hadn't heard anything about him mistreating his artists. So? I've seen stuff he didn't have a hand in too. Heck, I rather like it myself, and I didn't know he existed before this year.
Rambling conspiracy theories about how he's somehow singlehandedly responsible for the pair's popularity are just that: conspiracy theories. Trying to collect all the messiness of human experience to a single individual point.
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Do some researches and you'll see by yourself. He is known among the artists community to pay a lot of commissions about his ships and being a total jerk to those who refuse doing it and then spams it everywhere, be it on pixiv, r34 or deviantart. If you give a look at the community, you'll see how fed up people are with this ship being spammed. It is far from being popular. Ask a bit around the Lo L community and those interested in the characters and you'll see how people are fed up hearing of the Zac/Riven. It totally disregards both of the characters, how they act and who they are. If you are interested in the lore, give it a serious look, it's interesting and worth the time.
Edited by Rivy
...As to the lore situation, I disagree. As to the rest, look, that sucks, but at the end of the day this page isn't here to throw insults at individual fans. What we have now is perfectly adequate.
The problem lies in the fact it's not accurate. There's no insults, just hard facts about one guy basically spamming a ship to inflate popularity. It's only this one guy, too, else the ship would have better traction.
I'd be really interested to hear the reasons of why you disagree about the lore and what do you mean by this too. The lore as a whole not being interesting? Or about the way the characters are?
No Ugly Cute for Cho'gath? Are there any other tropers who think he looks kind of huggable? Especially when he dances? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSTI8pRjAlQ
There are problems with this point and the video that shift this trope around. To paraphrase Linkara, there's a difference between having a sympathetic backstory/intentions and actually being sympathetic. It is possible for all the following things to be true: Demacia is an anti-mage despotism, Sylas is justified in his desire for revolt, and the violence he intends to enact on Demacia and the lengths he intends to go to annihilate its leadership (which is in fact is goal; we don’t have anything explaining his intentions/plans once he hypothetically wins and destabilizes Demacia) may go too far.
Violent revolt is a contentious political matter IRL for many reasons, and in this case because the standards in which violence can be “justified” varies heavily between individuals. To say that Sylas is “completely in the right” just because he has solid motivations is such a shallow worldview that misses the forest for the trees in terms of these ethics (there’s a reason Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse is a trope), and the suggestions of this interpretation that Riot is playing favoritism on certain ideals are kind of preposterous.
Like, in a Watsonian sense, trying to make an argument that Sylas somehow isn’t a villain within the fiction of the world is… lame? Sylas props himself as a revolutionary antagonist to Demacia’s leadership and leads an army with the expressed purpose of killing them, including the prince and the king. Whether or not he’s justified is irrelevant; he is treated as a villain to Demacia is because he objectively is.
As for the Doylist sense, that it’s wrong for Riot to depict a justified revolutionary as anything but the “real” good guy, is similarly a very un-nuanced take on how to observe fiction, because it assumes that those who are completely agreeable must be the heroes, while those who are disagreeable must be the villains. Like… characters flaws are not de facto a damning, irreparable thing for its heroes, just as much as they can define characters as villains. Trying to land on the whole “Riot is trying to write a Both Sides Have a Point scenario” is the wrong observation to make, when it’s trying to say that both sides are crucially flawed. It’s really important to note that Demacia’s anti-mage genocide is depicted as an unambiguously bad thing in the fiction, with none of the modern Demacian champions believing in the rhetoric, with several other than Sylas wanting to fight back in their own way. Sylas is sympathetic to wants to fight back, but the actual means of getting there are sketchy and in practice driven by dreams of destructive anarchy, and writing fiction like that is not invalid or unethical, even if it doesn't fulfill the story potential Skyen wants Riot to pursue (not getting what you want from fiction is not de facto "bad fiction").
I was tempted to rewrite this entry as Riot making him Unintentionally Sympathetic… except they are writing him in exactly the way I believe they intended to write this character and this fiction: he is sympathetic in theory, antagonistic and dangerous in his actions. I don’t believe that just because he had a horrible backstory where he was forced to eat rats, that means he’s "completely justified" in publicly humiliating the prince by doing the same thing before executing him and his king father, no matter how much of a poetic spin you try and put on it.
Edited by number9robotic Thanks for playing King's Quest V! Hide / Show Replies