Crossover Motivation Assassinated · 6:02am Sep 5th, 2014
To anyone who cares, here's a link to the newest League of Legends developer's blog.
Now that that's there, I'll explain why it's relevant to me and my stories. Initially, I was planning on finishing My Little Cryophoenix: Black Ice is Magic and continuing on with an entire huge series of crossover fanfictions with numerous different stories. Ideas ranged from Shining Armor visiting Demacia as an Equestrian emissary, to Shaco causing trouble in Ponyville, and even to Maud Pie finding herself in a blossoming relationship with Malphite. I even had an idea for a huge fic involving several ponies actually becoming Champions and Summoners in the League of Legends. I had written up full kits for an entire team of five pony Champions and everything, plus motivations for every single one of them to be there. And then this developer's blog happened.
For anyone not willing to read the wall of text in the link or the comments below it, let me just pick out the important bits for you (in no particular order).
1: The Institute of War no longer exists. Summoners also no longer exist. They are being retconned completely out of the story.
2: The gameplay no longer represents any sort of story-driven conflict. League of Legends' gameplay is now being completely separated from its lore.
3: In order for this to happen, most of the champions will need to have their backstories and motivations COMPLETELY re-done.
Now I for one believe that Riot can make something awesome out of this train wreck of a decision. And who knows? Maybe I'll finish these stories someday when the dust has settled and I actually feel connected to the world of Runeterra again. But for now, consider MLC:BIiM and any other LoL crossover fics that I was planning to be officially on Hiatus. I just can't motivate myself to merge two worlds I love when the backbone of one of them is literally being completely non-canonized.
On the bright side, however, this will allow me to focus my fanfiction writing efforts on purely MLP related stories. In fact, I have a somewhat cracky shipfic idea that I've been wanting to write for quite some time now. I was originally planning on integrating it with the League of Legends crossovers, but I had also planned to make it fit perfectly as a standalone story. So that one should remain perfectly readable even without the crossovers happening.
Just to clarify, this does not mean that I will stop writing. It only means that I will stop writing about League of Legends. Equestria is still fair game. :P
In fact, I just might dust off one of my other On Hiatus stories to get myself started...
Just because Riot is changing how they mark up their lore doesn't mean that you can't stop writing about it. Personally I love the past/sort-of-current lore of the Institute of war. Even if the league decides to completely retcon Its lore, you don't have to follow their decision.
tl;dr: Write on, whether it's current lore-friendly or not
Lots of stories on this site would be cancelled if the authors felt they had to stop writing because (for example) something in season 4 runs counter to their story based in season 3. "Twilight's an alicorn! But in my story, she's never going to be one. Oh no, it's not canon! My story also relies on the elements of harmony!"
Don't worry so much about that, and tell the story you want to tell. Readers familiar with League of Legends aren't likely to mind that you're using "old" lore.
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True enough, I suppose. I partly blame this decision on the fact that it was made at about 2:00 in the morning. Looking back at it now, I kind of think I sound almost like a child throwing a hissy fit. Part of the problem is that my preferred writing style is to keep things as close to canon as possible and work around it in interesting ways. Honestly though, I probably should just suck it up and keep writing... Either way, thanks for commenting.
Jesus fucking Christ. The absolute LAZINESS here. They went from 'Hey guise here's all this great lore' to 'hey guise we stopped giving you lore so we can find ways to make it better' to 'hey guise there is no lore'.