Suffering from Same Face Syndrome problems where, like, if you took away the shield and told me this was a Morgana skin, I would have no way to prove you wrong looking just at the character design.
It’s what happens when you systematically stylize the hell out of faces for the purposes of hitting a lowest common denominator. It also doesn’t help that we can’t even go by stuff like relative muscularity or body type, although in this case under all the costuming, body type wouldn’t help that much anyway.
And it’s so frustrating because even if you look JUST at “top ten sexiest celebrity white women” or whatever, you find a substantial range of difference in jaw line, lip shape, nose shape, eye shape, cheekbones, proportions, etc. etc. etc.
Much less than the general population, and photoshopped to hell and back in most publicished pictures, but even within the very narrow aesthetic range of idealized beauty there are ways to create variety and differentiation. You can tell Kiera Knightley from Emma Stone or Natalie Dormer, Emilia Clarke doesn’t look indistinguishable from Scarlett Johansson. You wouldn’t even lose out on the character being conventionally beautiful if it’s so fucking important that every single goddamn one of them be that.
What is frustrating about this old and dead horse, which I will never stop kicking no matter how much it stinks, is that I know for a goddamn fact that Riot’s artists can do much better than this, and often try to. It is the relentless erosion of the corporate feedback process that both sands away every interesting differentiator in the art that’s created, and that conditions artists to only pitch the safe, middle-of-the-road ideas because they learn what gets accepted and try to anticipate the changes they’ll be asked to make anyway.
On top of which, remember when Sivir had a front tooth gap in her new splash art and the subreddit shit and pissed their pants about it so hard that Riot eventually had to change it because they thought it was “ugly”? Remember when Katarina got a new splash art with a face that accidentally had some personality and a bunch of crying pissbabies ruined that for everyone as well?
I really don’t blame the artists for not wanting to pitch anything more bold, but I sure as shit blame the company for failing to protect and support their creative staff.
So often a skin comes out and the character doesn’t have something as defining as Leona’s shield, making accurately identifying them far harder than it should be in a game about offering unique champions. Female characters get this problem so much worse and often for all the reasons Skyen outlines.
