Saddest Champion Stories in LoL: 10 Backstories That Are Genuinely Bleak

Ten champions whose backstories are genuinely bleak, counted down to the one nobody has ever been able to hug.

You've played most of these for years without ever reading what happened to them.

Saddest Champion Stories in LoL

10 Backstories That Are Genuinely Bleak

Runeterra Lore

Ten champions whose backstories are genuinely bleak, counted down to the one nobody has ever been able to hug.

You've played most of these for years without ever reading what happened to them.

League hides an enormous amount of misery behind cheerful splash art and a jungle clear. The champions below are people the story went badly for, and several of them are still in it. Counting down by how little chance any of them had.

#10: Vex

Vex is a yordle, and yordles run on joy. She's the one who can't feel it, in a species where that's the equivalent of not being able to breathe, so she spends her existence surrounded by relentlessly happy creatures she has nothing in common with.

It's played as a joke. Underneath, it's a grim setup. Nothing happened to make her sad. It's her condition, permanently, in a place designed to make that impossible.

#9: Rell

Rell was taken as a child and put through a Noxian program that treated children as materials. Her armor was fused to her (she survived it), and the other children in that building mostly didn't.

What lands is the aftermath rather than the experiment. She got out angry and alone and far too young, and everything she does since is a teenager tearing down the institution that built her because nobody else was coming to do it.

#8: Skarner

Skarner slept, and while he slept his entire species was dug up and cut into gemstones by people who had no idea the gems were alive. He woke up to that as a finished fact.

The scale is so absurd and so quiet. Every crystal in Shurima might be somebody he knew, there's nobody left to grieve with, and the civilization that did it doesn't remember doing anything at all.

#7: Nunu & Willump

Nunu is a boy looking for his mother, and the game presents it as a cheerful snowball adventure because the alternative is admitting what it actually is.

The yeti is the part that gets you. Willump is a monster nobody wanted, the boy is a child nobody's coming back for, and the two of them travel Freljord keeping each other going on a search that the story has never once suggested will end well.

#6: Orianna

Orianna was a girl who got sick, and her father replaced her failing body one piece at a time until there was nothing organic left. He was trying to save his daughter and he built a machine that remembers being her.

Whether she's still the same person is a question the story deliberately refuses to answer, and that's the cruelty of it. Her father certainly thinks so. Nobody (Orianna included) can tell him whether he's right.

#5: Viktor

Viktor started as an idealist who wanted to end suffering. Every step he took toward that was reasonable on its own terms. He just kept removing the parts of himself that hurt until the person who had the ideal in the first place was gone.

Worse, he did it to himself, gladly, one improvement at a time. There's no villain who ruined Viktor. There's a good man who solved his own grief by deleting the capacity for it and calls the result progress.

#4: Maokai

Maokai was a forest spirit until the Ruination killed everything around him and then refused to let him die with it. He's the last living thing on the Shadow Isles, kept awake by the same magic that took everyone he grew up beside.

He's spent centuries trying to undo it (alone) on an island where nothing else has any interest in being undone. That's a very long time to be the only one who remembers what the place used to look like.

#3: Renekton

Renekton volunteered for the worst possible job in Shurima. He went into the tomb to hold something terrible in, knowing he'd be sealed in with it, and he did it to protect a city and a brother he loved.

Then he was down there for thousands of years, and the dark and the madness took everything except the part of him that remembers his brother didn't come. He's out now, he's still that person underneath, and he can't stop hating the one thing he'd have died for.

#2: Nautilus

Nautilus was a diver whose own crew cut his line and left him on the bottom. Taking him back up was inconvenient. The armor kept him alive down there (the worst outcome available).

He came back years later, still in it, looking for the specific people who did it. It's the most human story on this list: no gods, no curses, no magic that went wrong. Just somebody who was abandoned by people he trusted and had a very long time alone to think about it.

#1: Amumu

Nobody else here comes close. He's a child, he's been cursed so that anything he touches suffers for it, and the curse is specifically about loneliness. The one thing he wants is the one thing that hurts other people.

He's also been at it for thousands of years, wandering, still looking for a friend, still trying. Every version of the story ends with him alone again, and the game has never given him a single win.

What makes it stick is that Riot keeps the joke going anyway. He's a sad mummy in a Halloween skin who cries in his voice lines, and the tone hides how straightforwardly cruel the setup is once you say it out loud.

Conclusions

The pattern across all ten is that almost nobody here made a mistake. They got sick, or slept through it, or trusted a crew, or volunteered for the job nobody else would take. The story happened to them and then kept going.

That's also why the roster works as well as it does. A game with this many champions could easily have made them all warriors with a grudge, and instead a decent number of them are just people who lost something and are still walking around Summoner's Rift carrying it.

For the ones the story turned into something worse than sad, there's our undead champions list, and the ones who ended up with more power than anyone should have are ranked in our strongest champions in lore post.

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