A thread on reddit raised a heated discussion on who the new League of Legends champion might be. The theory is based on a combination of a short story Riot revealed recently and a dev video from the start of the year.
Over the past couple of months, a vast number of different speculations were made about who the new League of Legends champion is going to be. Previously, we covered the theory on why one of the upcoming champions could be Yone - Yasuo's older brother .
According to a new reddit thread , the new champion might be a character mentioned as the Collector in Riot's recent short story named Perennial . To be more precise, the theory is based mostly on a very specific paragraph about the Collector and the Gatekeeper:
"The Collector grew envious of all the spirits that the Gatekeeper had helped find peace, and so he devised a plan. He took two of his strongest, loudest bells and melted them down. Then, over twelve nights, he hammered them into two blades. Into the first, he poured some of his Jealousy. Into the second, he poured some of his Obsession. Then, when spring began, he let the spirits of those swords bloom in the physical realm, and the swords grew from the ground like saplings."
We intentionally highlighted some of the words so that you can easily keep up while we break down why this paragraph is so important in the rest of the article.
Now let's jump back to the dev video released earlier this year where Riot Games' lead producer on the champions team, Ryan "Reav3" Mireles, described the new champions by intentionally emphasizing some particular words.
The first one is a champion who Mireles says the team has recently “dreamed up.” As he is describing the champion, the video jumps to a picture of a tree, which transitions from before to after blooming. He also said that it’s someone new for players to “fawn over” and that they were “split” on if they wanted this champion to be a bruiser or an assassin.
In the image above, you can see some swords on the bottom which might be referring to the sapling swords. In the story, the Gatekeeper is said to be a fox so there is a chance that the Collector might be a fawn? For those who don't know, a faun - or fawn, as it is commonly spelled - is a creature that looks is like a small human with some goat body parts that include legs, ears, and horns.
The thread continues by making the point that the "dream" reference might be a metaphor for the spirit realm. The word "split" could be describing the tree in the image, referring to its before and after state in the blooming process. At the same time, this could be related to the spirit blossom mentioned in the short story.
"Split" could also mean that the champion is going to change from "'before blooming" to "after blooming" of the spirit blossom that was mentioned in the short story, provided that the flower in the image is, in fact, the spirit blossom.
The comment section is backing up this theory, saying that it's pretty solid. They also claim that there were some champions Riot revealed in a similar manner before. True or not, the wait will soon be over as the champion is set to be released this summer.