So long I've wandered ...

I'm not much of a fan of what they're doing with Riven in this event. A lot of the time her voice feels off - they're writing her less well-spoken than she tends to be - and her actual recruitment feels pretty forced in that written-off-a-surface-level-version-of-the-character way. She reminds me more of her Spirit Blossom AU self than the one in Seams and Scars or Sisterhood of War.

Riven had a home and loving adoptive family in Ionia for a not inconsiderable period of time - her father's still waiting for her with no idea if she'll ever return. The idea that she'd just go "Welp, I guess I can't get back to Ionia" rather than committing herself to doing so no matter what, and having her be reduced to tears over finding a home in the Sentinels just feels wrong, especially when one considers that she's literally in the company of people with a teleportation device that we know will get them to Ionia in due course.

Like ... why not just leverage that? Make it that she's working with them because she's not going to run from the responsibility of trying to save the world and the Sentinels promise they'll eventually head to Ionia where she can help relieve the place and her family with it? Isn't that simple enough to do?

Seriously though Seams and Scars is a nice story (with great art) and I’m sure someone coming at it without my old hangups would never even consider the things that bother me about it.

Riven still represents the best of what Noxus is and could be. Currently she is being tempered and reforged by Ionia.” 

I entered exile to escape Noxus and leave the city behind, but eventually I realised that I simply couldn’t. The Noxian Way, as I had known it, had defined my life and life without it seemed hollow. Pointless. My city had made me who I was and still felt like home to me even though I hadn’t walked its streets for many years. I still believed in the ideals I had been shown there and the way I had seen them abused at Coeur made me miss them all the more keenly. My eyes had finally been opened and I wanted nothing more than to do the same for others, no matter what it might cost me; I wanted them to see that there could be another way. Exile had always been my choice and I finally felt as though I had found a reason to return.

// So this, or more specifically both halves of it, has been added to Riven and Yasuo’s Universe pages respectively. Interesting to consider whether that’s actually hinting at some real progression to come or just them getting some more artwork into the galleries after the Ionia pass.

Old bio: ‘What began as war quickly became extermination [...] It wasn't the glorious combat for which Riven trained [...] terminating the remnants of a beaten and fractured enemy with extreme prejudice.’

New bio: The brutality of the war is summarised as “As this new war dragged on, it became clear that Ionia would not kneel.” Riven does not recognise that the invasion is meant to be “... a complete annihilation of the enemy” until the moment before the loss of her unit to chemical fire.

My fundamental issue with this particular change is that it changes Riven from someone who was utterly dedicated to the Noxian cause, an individual who bore massacres, executed civilians and was certainly aware of the role of chemical weaponry, to someone who just had one bad day. Nothing in her bio suggests any particular darkness in her character - the ‘no ethical pause’ she was once attributed - and she abandons Noxus the moment it becomes apparent that the war doesn’t mesh with her beliefs. That’s not to downplay the massive personal losses she suffered of course, but nothing in the bio tells us of her experience of the war before the single critical incident and it’s expressed as the moment she suddenly realised this wasn’t just another war.

Old Riven was willing to go through hell and become a monster for Noxus for the sake of her beliefs, but the new Riven had her faith in the nation broken the very first time that something went bad.