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Ruined Miss Fortune vs Ruined King Miss Fortune
Ruined Miss Fortune is, to me, a deep disappointment of a skin, for multiple reasons.
The first is the method of her Ruination. Basically: Gangplank isn't dead and Fortune is super duper way the hell extra special scared of him, and so she voluntarily gets Ruined by Viego because he'll give her the power to definitely for sure kill Gangplank this time!
It sucks. The entire scene sucks. The way her characterization is played sucks. She is fully written as a Hysterical Woman™ who is too emotional to see reason and who gets corrupted because she can't handle her anger and fear, and the f***ing visual imagery of Miss Fortune willingly submitting to Viego by asking him to penetrate her with his eight foot Overcompensator Sword is just... good grief, the semiotics of that entire thing are just bafflingly bad.
The second is that if she had to get Ruined there was a much, much more compelling way to do it that would actually relate meaningfully to the core themes of the entire Ruination event.
Viego is driven fundamentally by a tragic loss, and total inability to cope with the grief of death. He lost Isolde and, being the spoiled little hyperromantic princeling that he is, absolutely could not accept that something he loved could be "taken away from him."
Miss Fortune is driven fundamentally by a tragic loss, and total inability to cope with the grief of death. In her case, it is the brutal murder of her mother by Gangplank, and the complicated mess of survivor's guilt and vengeful hatred that has left her unable to ever put her mother's memory to rest.
So... what if we had built some kind of thematic connection between the two characters, a shared form of loss, the connection of which is exploited by the abusive, manipulative monster to further his own goals? What if Viego had said to Fortune "I will bring back to life she who you love the most?" with the absolute insane certainty and sincerity with which he believes he will bring back Isolde?
And rather than MF being the dumbass who gets taken in by an obviously lying man's obviously false offer of power because she's just so scared of Big Bad Gangplank, she gets taken in by a moment of connection and a glimmer of hope, however vain, that the literal worst thing that ever happened to her can undone?
I dunno, given that the entire Ruined King event was thematically about learning to cope with grief, to let go of those who are dead and to stop making other people's lives and deaths about yourself, that seems to me like it would have been cool, actually.
Anyway the third reason is that the skin itself is basically a bland-as-hell "EVIL = SEXY!!!" fanservice skin, which first of all is extremely tame and boring as fanservice (srsly, cleavage and a bit of thigh action? That's the best you can do for a sexy evil pirate queen?), but which also simply does not fit the character story being told here.
Miss Fortune falls for power, she falls for the strength to destroy her enemies, she falls for the power to rule and control. The Ruined Skin looks no more dangerous, powerful or domineering than her Captain Fortune skin, it's just a sexy pirate halloween costume with all the colors turned off.
Now, in the spirit of fairness, there are some production reasons for this. It was not a Legendary skin and Riot puts a hard budget limit on how many actual changes you can make to a design at lower skin levels. So no changing her animation, for example, and only limited changes to her model itself and no changes to its rigging. There was probably a corporate and technical mandate not to stray too far from her base form.
On top of that there is in-game readability. Silhouettes are important for character recognition, and Riot are... usually quite careful about broadly preserving them skin to skin to avoid gameplay confusion. Usually.
So yeah, there's some limits on how much you can do, but if you want an example of what I would consider a good "Ruined" version of Miss Fortune, Riot Forge and the people over at Airship Syndicate helpfully went and made one:
Good feature number one: The Crown. The corruption of Miss Fortune as it is told in the Ruination is that she lets her paranoid lust for power blind her and this allows Viego to take over her mind.
So what do we have here? A crown literally blinding her, mimicking the shape language of Viego's crown, indicating his deception of her and his domination over her mind. That's some good visual storytelling.
It is also Sauron-esque as hell, so it reinforces Miss Fortune as an imperious, domineering, regal presence. Reaver Queen of Bilgewater.
Good feature number two: the chains incorporated into her design, which are just about the most widely used visual shorthand for enslavement and control. Riot L4T3NCY, creative lead at Riot Forge, confirmed for me that this and the blindfolding of MF were both extremely conscious choices in her skin design here:
Good feature number three: Miss Fortune's own pirate aesthetic is entirely supplanted by Viego's Camavoran army aesthetics. There is no hint of the Bilgewater fashion left here, everything that was Bilgwater about her has been torn away, which again is good, solid, basic storytelling showing us that she is mind-controlled and subverted.
Good feature number four: I am definitely reaching here, but I quite like that the hands that grasp her guns are the most wraith-like and corrupted. It is Miss Fortune's grasp for power that is corrupting her, and it is the trauma of the loss of her mother, a gunsmith who is intimately connected to her weapons, which is ultimately the source of the paranoia and power lust that has destroyed her. Is this intentional at all? I have no idea, but I like the idea.
Good feature number five: It is still sexy. Not in as blatantly pin up-ish a way as the base game Ruined Miss Fortune is, but there's some solid Hot Mean Evil Lady appeal in that cleavage and armored bustier. MF has always been a flirty, sexy character (albeit definitely too much so in the past *shudders in League Judgment*), and that aspect is still present here, without being distracting from the character storytelling of the skin.
I think Miss Fortune being ruined by Kevin McKilledbyhiswife of Camavor is a bad idea on the whole, I think it gets catastrophically in the way of her much more interesting base story of slowly being corrupted by the structural violence and brutality of Bilgewater itself, reducing it all down to a "Sad Woman Very Angry About Dead Mom" personal grief narrative (which is honestly a little too eager to paint her desire to see justice done to Gangplank for his crimes as a bad thing.)
But if she has to be Ruined, at least do it with some gosh darn character storytelling as part of the skin. If she has to be Ruined, at least do it in a way that thematically reflects on and interacts with the general themes of the Ruination event as a whole.
Don't do it just for a D-tier generic hot lady fanservice skin.
#league of legends#miss fortune#ruination#viego#the ruined king#ruined king#gangplank#sarah fortune#sentinels of light#riot games#character design#league of legends lore
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Caption: Listen, I’m a little old fashion. I think that the man should pay for dinner. And the other man should pay for the movie. And me, the third man, should not pay for anything, I am poor.]
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milord the peasants are nailing erotic artwork of you and your court jester to the church doors again
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