Talk:Varus/@comment-34989962-20180328032520/@comment-7709681-20180402210311

I'd personally say is the opposite: Varus' original lore was bad and generic and the new one is much more fleshed out.

Previously he was a soldier amidst of the noxian invasion who preffered to serve his role as the pit's guardian than defend his village and family (which none of them had names, that already tells they're just rhetorical tools, unimportant and existing just to move the plot), village and family are destroyed, he swore revenge and got infected with a substance of unknown origin to get it.

I don't understand from where you get the cosmic horror out of all of this ("Body Horror" seems a more befitting term, and still a stretched one), at this point of Riot's history they nor the community knew what was contained in the pit, and long after Aatrox's release the community began to speculate that was a Darkin.

With the new lore Varus no longer just an underdeveloped archetypical anti-hero vigilante with a dark past based on the death of loved ones, making a faustian bargain to get revenge.

The concept of making them a triad of hosts and making two of them a couple allowed us to see true families, truly named loved ones with identities that actually you'd care if are lost by the war, not because you care for them but rather you empathize with the protagonists' feelings for them, two families of different ideologies that support or demigrate the relationship.

Now the concept of the pit is much more sensical, an aprisoned Darkin that wants to bring back his civilization to life, knowing well that they gave so much and go just utterly exterminated, thinking how unthankful is Runeterra to the Darkin for the gifts they brought to them (without thinking they're invasive and wanted to slave Runeterra), and now retribution must start to recover everything they gave in tenfolds.

Now we have an active reason why to take the leap into such terrible decisions, a loved one is dying of a terrible wound, no competent medic at sight, no one will help for how chaotic the war has gotten, the Darkin can work a horrid miracle, the merging is taken without remorse of consequences to come.

All of this lead to the eventual new inner conflict of them, of who's the dominant will, and how this decision caused the protagonists to be cast into exile by their own families. The short story's cliffhanger of a female Darkin out of Shurima is just a plus.

If I had to say negative points out of the new lore, is that first concept of a homosexual relationship had a mixed reception on the community, likely because Riot took a pre-existing champion rather than a new one for this, so the negativity either came from homophobics or people that felt that the shift was forced LGTB-inclusivity; second is how overloaded and convoluted the lore drop was between the new bio, the short story, the two comics and the video, it shows deep dedication but delivering all at once was harmful, and third was the core concept of the lore itself was shifted, when although most of the old elements remain, now who know as Varus doesn't exists for choosing duty over lore but rather the opposite.