I can’t remember exactly when it started with League of Legends, but some time ago the classic “Why is every girl a barbie-proportioned stripper?” question started to pop up. Despite arguments on the other side of the fence (“What about Poppy?”), I think the argument holds a lot of weight. The diversity of female champion design in League of Legends could be described as falling anywhere on the scale between “tragic” and “nonexistent.” I’m going to try to avoid getting into the argument much because, frankly, it’s overdiscussed by a group of people who aren’t serious about it and underdiscussed by the people who really care. What interests me is the range of responses Riot employees give as reasons for continued stream of bimbos.

A good place to start is at this thread, which is where I got the image above. The interesting thing here isn’t that the champions tend toward slutty archetypes, but more that the body type is exactly the same, regardless of tier. This was a much more interesting analysis to see than the typical “OMG LOOK HOW BIG HER BEWBS ARE.” I would love to see a witch/hag champion that has some crusty old woman flavor. I also love the silhouette of a large, ogre-ish woman in the top right.

The really weird parts of this discussion come courtesy of Riot employees, like Ricklessabandon, who says, “while i’m totally okay with seeing variety in form, i don’t really like the idea of having diversity just for the sake of having diversity. that is to say, i wouldn’t want an old chick just because there are too many 20-somethings in the roster–that’s not a good reason in my opinion. i’d want an old man/woman only if we had a good story concept and the best fit happens to be an older person. the main problem i’d want to avoid is aesthetics replacing part/all of a champion’s character, and i think that’s harder to do when you set out to create a character for the sake of adding diversity to a roster.”

What he neglects to address is that the roster is almost exclusively 20-somethings, and that for the most part there is no character design that backs this trend. Why wouldn’t a woman capable of wearing full plate mail be a little thicker in stature? Would trained warriors really be such waifs? Annie, one of the few characters that bucks the trend, is also one of the few characters for which there is actually a character-driven reason behind her aesthetics. That’s to say nothing of the fact that story doesn’t really have a place in League of Legends. I’m not saying character design/flavor isn’t important – it is – rather that Riot shouldn’t be waiting for a cool “story” to design some different champions.

I’m going to leave a link to another thread through CLGaming’s redtracker because it will allow you to see the original post and IronStylus’ red response. This also contains links to two Kotaku articles that are worth a read if you’re interested in this stuff. I’ll end my discussion here, though. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Image Credit: Lunakuneko on the official forums