Key art for an upcoming League of Legends character called Briar leaked online last week, and I have some questions. Briar, first teased as the “hangry jungler” earlier this year, is a very young vampire girl - seemingly no more than 12 years old - with her wrists bound in a kind of torture device/weapon. She’s wrapped in skin-tight spiky leather, and also, her bare feet are on full display.

Just describing Briar grosses me out. Her design, and this key art in particular (assuming it's real) is the product of some very questionable decisions by Riot. Her apparent age, her gothic-dom aesthetic, and the fact that there’s a spotlight pointed at her bare, pre-pubescent feet is at best naive, and at worst intentional pedo-bait.

I’m not reading into things that aren’t there. There’s three highlights in the key art - the brightest parts of the image where your eye is naturally drawn. One is at the top of her shoulder giving her a nice hair light - no issues there - but the second one highlights her bare thigh, and the other is lighting up her feet. This image hits the intersection of at least three different perversions that I don’t care to go into detail about, but you only have to be a little bit online to understand that some unsavory types (aka League of Legends players) might be excited to see a little girl's grippers.

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And don’t give me that ‘vampire are ageless’ nonsense. I’m sure there’s lore reasons that explain that Briar is actually of legal age but she just looks like a child, I don’t care. That’s classic nonce tactics. When you call stuff like this out, people will try to tell you that you’re projecting your own perversions and that there isn’t actually anything wrong with it, but just look at the way it’s been received.

Or actually, don’t look. Take my word for it. The fanart, the memes, and the Reddit discourse has been heinous. Normally I don’t make claims like this without providing sources, but I’m not going to make anyone else look at this garbage. This is a totally expected, completely predictable reaction to that kind of art, and I just have to wonder what the hell Riot was thinking.

I can sort of see where the artist was coming from. The light on her feet emphasize the steaks going through both of her ankles, which is a cool detail. The highlight on her thigh almost draws your eye to the corpse she’s sitting on, but I had to look at it several times before I noticed the body, which is the entire problem. Even assuming the best intentions, the piece is undermined by the emphasis on skin, and her age. It’s an uncomfortable image, and not in the way it was probably intended.

It’s also disappointing because Briar seems like a great jungler. She applies bleed to her enemies and recovers life from the damage dealt by it, and she can activate a Frenzy mode that increases her movement and attack speed so she can chase down enemies and chomp them. Her kit sounds fun to play and very thematic, but that’s all overshadowed by the fact that she attracts creeps and weirdos.

Riot is tuned-in, the people there understand the LoL fan base and internet culture broadly. Surely many people saw this key art. Surely someone thought it was in bad taste. It doesn’t matter what the intention was when the reaction to it was this predictably horrible, and I think Riot could have had a little more tact and foresight before depicting a young girl in such a lurid way.

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