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One of the biggest villains in League of Legends lore is getting a new skin that turns back the clock on his evil deeds.
Last night, some of the new skins heading to League of Legends' next patch appeared on the testing server. Among those was a skin named 'King Viego', a cosmetic for the sword-wielding champion introduced to the game last year. While the character, also known as the Ruined King, traditionally sports a shock of white hair, a ghostly crown, and a distinct bad-guy demeanour, the new skin offers a very different look.
In his new skin, Virgo wears a very real crown, as well as a kingly garb and a notable soft-boi expression. Down on one knee, he looks tenderly up at a woman in front of him whose hand he's holding. That woman is Isolde, Virgo's in-lore wife, whose death is responsible not only for his transformation from anime hero to anime villain, but into one of the biggest threats facing League of Legends lore.
Hundreds of years before the current state of LoL's confusing narrative, Viego was king of the Blessed Isles, a beautiful and peaceful region of the game's world. After his wife took ill, however, he desperately sought a cure for her ailment, but Isolde eventually succumbed to her sickness. In one last attempt, Viego plunged her body into a sacred, healing pool at the heart of his kingdom.
That one action immediately destroyed and corrupted the Blessed Isles, turning them into the corrupted and ghostly Shadow Isles, a region that remains a blight on Riot's entire world. It also transformed Viego into his undead state, but did nothing to sate his attempts to bring his wife back to him. In undeath, he continues to seek Isolde even at the expense of the rest of the world, and his efforts are a key pillar of Riot's storytelling. As well as an in-game lore event called The Ruination, Viego's efforts have surfaced in the wider League of Legends franchise in the standalone game The Ruined King, and in an upcoming book also called Ruination.
A single skin is unlikely to prove Viego's redemption. In fact, it's almost certainly tied into that novel, which releases next month. Nevertheless, it's an interesting choice, as Riot rarely opts for cosmetics that hark directly to characters' backstories or evolving narratives. In fact, other than those cosmetics released specifically for the Ruination event, some of the most recent such skins date all the way back to 2015.
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