What’s angry, complains about the balance team, and is covered in tinfoil? Why, the League of Legends Reddit community, of course. Well, more specifically, they’re covered in tinfoil hats, and today, one player whipped theirs out to speculate on the next champion in a now-deleted post.
The mods of the subreddit took the post down because of its title, which they cited as violating the community’s “no vague, memetic, or inaccurate titles” rule, which, yeah, it sort of did. The title of the post was “The next champion to be released is named Ighilya.” Even if their theory is interesting, which it is, they definitely don’t know for sure that she’s the next champion, so the title is certainly misleading, if anything.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into the theory itself. Ighilya is a character that was mentioned in one of many short stories on Universe, Riot’s official platform for all things lore in League. The story, called Garden of Forgetting, is about Ahri, and although it isn’t new at all, it definitely raises some eyebrows given what we know about the next champion.
We won’t discuss the specifics of the short story, because the only part we need is pretty close to the beginning, so that’s all we’ll really dissect. Ahri finds herself in a magical garden, where she meets a very strange old woman. The woman has many names, like Eater of Secrets, the Forgotten, and the Witch Gardener, but Ahri refers to her as Ighilya, which means “great grandmother” in her native tongue. She isn’t literally Ahri’s great grandmother, but she’s super old.
So why is this mystical gardener and manipulator of secrets and magic plants a new potential champion? Well, it all comes back to Riot’s Champion Roadmap from earlier this month, where the design team teased the next champion as a “colorful mage.” Ighilya at least seems like some sort of mage, and Ahri describes her in the story as “wrapped in colorful shawls and her eyelashes sparkled with dew.” That’s pretty much it, really. She’s colorful and probably a mage, which fits the extremely vague description that Riot gave.
That’s very far from a surefire thing, obviously, so it makes sense that the post was taken down for the reason the mods explained. Also, the post originally said that this story “basically confirmed” that Ighilya was the champion, which is just rhetoric and far from the actual truth, even if Ighilya ends up being the new champion.
If anything, the post and its theory are interesting, and now we’re wondering what other hints could have been dropped here and there throughout League’s complex lore on Universe. Who knows, Zoe may have been in there months before her reveal. If only we could have seen her coming, then we could’ve prepared for the torture ahead of time.
