Legends of Runeterra has just revealed their design for Nidalee and… holy shit girl look at you, god damn!
So the first change they've made is to de-halloween costume her. Nidalee with her leg warmers and push up fur bra and oversized bone earrings always came across as basically a… kinda shitty cartoon of an indigenous person, or a "savage jungle woman" halloween costume, which sucked. In the new design, she still shows skin, but her clothes now look like, y'know, clothes, and the big fur collar has visual consonance with her new cougar form, which also, objectively speaking, fucking slaps. Another thing that carries through is her tattoos, which light up in magical green on the animal form.
And of course, there's the cat ears. This design for Nidalee is focusing in so much stronger on her nature as a shapeshifter, that her two forms are intertwined rather than separate, and that one flows into the other. It far, FAR better storytelling for the character, showing her nature through design, and it makes her seem far more magical and powerful than the very ordinary, and by comparison: boring human and cougar form she used to have.
So yeah, chalk up another design win to Legends of Runeterra.
feeling nostalgic and I was going through my League account. so I'm sharing some of my fav splash arts cause I feel like it and I think they deserved to be appreciated and outside the League of Legos playerbase