Champion Families in LoL: 10 Pairs the Lore Made Relatives

Ten pairs of champions the lore made relatives, counted down by how badly it went for them.

Half the roster is somebody else's brother, and most of those relationships ended in a fight.

Champion Families in LoL

10 Pairs the Lore Made Relatives

Runeterra Lore

Ten pairs of champions the lore made relatives, counted down by how badly it went for them.

Half the roster is somebody else's brother, and most of those relationships ended in a fight.

Runeterra is enormous and its writers keep making it small, because a war between two nations is less interesting than a war between two people who grew up in the same house. Counting down by how much of each pair's story is really about the other one.

#10: Sivir and Azir

A mercenary who takes contracts for money turns out to be the last of the Shuriman royal bloodline. The emperor that blood came from has been dead for five thousand years and has recently stopped being dead.

Neither of them asked for any of this and neither is pleased about it. He needs an heir to put an empire back together. She would like to be paid and left alone.

#9: Aphelios and Alune

Aphelios can't speak, can't leave the temple's service, and is poisoned constantly so that he can do his job at all. His sister Alune watches from somewhere else entirely and sends him his weapons through the moon.

They're the only pair here genuinely on the same side, and it's still bleak. The whole relationship runs through a link neither of them can close, and there's no version of the story where they end up in the same room.

#8: Ashe and Tryndamere

Ashe married Tryndamere to bind two Freljordian tribes together, which is exactly as romantic as it sounds. Both of them understood that going in and did it anyway, and it's the one arrangement on this list that actually functions. She's building a nation. He's the reason people stop arguing about it.

#7: Xayah and Rakan

The happiest thing in this entire post, which is a low bar, and they clear it by a mile. They fight for the same cause, they fight next to each other, and the game hands them mechanics nobody else gets to share.

The interesting part is buried underneath all that. She'd burn the world down for her people and he'd rather it survived, and the two of them have quietly never settled it.

#6: Katarina and Talon

Talon was a street killer the general brought home and raised as a son, which makes him Katarina's brother by decision rather than by blood.

What stays with you is how little either of them will admit to it. They work together, they cover for each other, and both would describe the other as a colleague if you asked. Neither has ever said the word out loud.

#5: Garen and Lux

Garen is the sword of a kingdom that executes mages. Lux is his younger sister, and she has been a mage the entire time.

He knows.

That's the part that makes it work. A man whose whole identity rests on the law, deciding every single day not to apply it, and never once discussing that decision with the person it's about.

#4: Darius and Draven

Their parents died and Darius raised Draven, and what came out of it is a general who takes nothing seriously except duty and an executioner who takes nothing seriously at all.

It's the most recognizable version of the thing on this list. Two brothers who love each other, agree on none of it, and would both be dangerous to anybody who said either part out loud.

#3: Vi and Jinx

Two sisters from the undercity lost everything on the same day and went in opposite directions with it. One went up to Piltover and put on a badge. The other stayed down and started building bombs.

This is Arcane's story rather than the game's. In League's own canon they're an enforcer and the criminal spray-painting taunts at her, and the family part is never actually stated. Neither version has managed to let the other go.

#2: Morgana and Kayle

Twin sisters, both half celestial, who agreed on everything right up until they didn't. Kayle chose the law and burned whatever failed it. Morgana chose the people the law was about to burn.

Neither of them is wrong, which is rarer than it ought to be. League usually picks a side and then tells you about it, and this is the one argument it has left open for a decade.

#1: Yasuo and Yone

Yasuo was accused of a murder he didn't commit. Yone came to settle it, as the older brother and as the better swordsman, and lost.

That's already the bleakest outcome available, and then the story does something worse with it. It brings Yone back, half a demon, wearing the face of the thing that killed him, and points him at the world instead.

So one brother spent years drinking his way through a crime he didn't commit, and the other spent them dead. The reunion neither of them got is the entire emotional engine of two separate champion releases.

The cruelty is that they were never on opposite sides of anything. Put either one in front of the actual facts and they'd have agreed inside a minute.

Conclusions

Again and again, the family is the actual plot. Demacia's law, Noxus's ambition, Ionia's war and the undercity all get explained through two people who grew up together, because a nation is hard to care about and a brother isn't.

It's also why these pairs keep getting the best cinematics. Riot knows exactly what it has, and it has never once let one of these arguments end.

Every one of these pairs sits on our Runeterra lore map, along with the rest of the roster and every other connection the lore draws between them.

For the champions whose stories went wrong without anybody to blame, there's our saddest backstories list, and the ones the lore made far too powerful are ranked in our strongest champions in lore post.

Every ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.