League of Legends is overflowing with small curiosities that allow you to discover more about the champions of the Rift – and yet many of them go unnoticed. In fact, Riot Games uses many tricks to transmit information here and there on this or that character, and more often than not they stay under our noses for months, even years, before a more experienced than average player suddenly realizes it.
And this is the case of Renata Glasc because, in her splashart, the artists of Riot have chosen to represent her in a very specific way, using a well-known technique in the world of cinema.
Blueprint Value: Psychopath
Indeed, Renata appears low angle — a bottom-up angle chosen so that the subject gives the impression of dominating its environment. This technique is very often used in the cinema as well as in the world of video games to emphasize a hero or an antagonist, so that he seems bigger and more powerful than he is. That said, Riot has also associated this plan value with a small aesthetic detail that makes all the difference: we indeed perceive Renata througha puddle that reflects his body and face.
Although this may seem trivial, it actually says a lot about the impression Riot wants to convey : this shot value, coupled with this technique of reflection, arouses a very particular effect since the spectator perceives Renata via the gaze of another — a bit as if he saw her through the eyes of one of his victims.
And besides, Renata isn’t the only League of Legends champion to have received identical — or at least similar — treatment. Another Rift Psychopath appears in his splashart via an interposed image: Jhin.
Although the thing is a little different with the Virtuoso, we find the same idea: the desire to present a character from an angle that tells a story beyond the pixels. In Renata’s case, one is transferred behind the eyes of one of her victims; in Jhin’s case, we are sometimes an invisible spectator of the scene, sometimes the champion himself.
This broken mirror somehow represents the madness of the champion, whose mind is scattered in several pieces – and we have the impression, precisely, of being an integral part of this madness, as if we were one of the voices who whisper to Jhin…
It’s frankly a crazy and absurd story – the kind of behavior that seems to fit perfectly with the image we have of League of Legends players: a technique to manipulate the statistics of a game… just to fool Riot.