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Building a Better Ashe

About a year ago I took a pass at redesigning Ashe the Frost Archer from League of Legends with the help of Ainsworth "Apple_Cork" Lin (https://www.instagram.com/apple_cork/ || https://linktr.ee/apple_cork) who I commissioned for the artwork.

We took Ashe through a number of ideations and various approaches to her character design, which you'll find below the Read More cutoff.

If you want to watch the video version of our design process (it's pretty good!) you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fi5fuv1nLs

Goals:

The goal was to create a version of Ashe that puts less priority of simply making her "appealing" or look pretty, and more on doing storytelling for the kind of role she plays in the story of the Freljord.

Original splash art for Ashe, the Frost Archer

Ashe as she exists now is basically a riff on the Drow Ranger from Dota, complete with WarCraft 3 style Hot Elven Ranger getup. She's a queen of the frozen north, but she runs around in a miniskirt, thigh-highs and a paper-thin cloak because

this design was originally put together to be running around sunny Elven forests on Azeroth, and got interpolated through Dota into League of Legends without ever really reconsidering the concept

it was designed for League of Legends at a time when worldbuilding and character storytelling simply were not priorities in their character design - characters were broad recognizable fantasy archetypes being thrown together Smash Bros style for a fighting tournament

Late 2000s high fantasy character design in gaming had a default preference for Sexy Cleavage Babes for female character design that permeated the entire design space, especially at Blizzard, whose influence formed the basis for League of Legends

Over a decade later, Ashe has been fleshed out as much more of a real character, with a place and role in the world and cosmology of the Freljord far beyond her original archetype. Now she is specifically constructed as a counterpart to Lissandra's imperious, manipulative, sovereign mysticism and to Sejuani's martial brutality. The Avarosa are the only faction in the Freljord (and one of the very few in Runeterra) who argue explicitly for a softer life with less violence and struggle as the ideal. Ashe wants to reform and abolish the blood-soaked warrior culture of the Freljord and replace it with communal mutual aid and sharing, with tribes pooling their collective resources rather than relying on constant raiding and warfare. She's also a notable champion of the Hearthbound, the "normal" people of the Freljord who are not blessed with Iceborn blood or noble lineages.

The Avarosa have successfully recruited a huge swath of tribes to their cause, and through collaboration and a focus on agriculture and mutual protection have become the breadbasket of the Freljord, able to extend their political reach simply by offering new tribes access to reliable sources of food.

The power and rhetoric of the Avarosa thus rests on

A rejection of martial warrior culture in favor of a culture of nurturing and mutual care

Embrace of vulnerability and "weakness"

The promise of plenty, of full food stores and protection from failed harvests and the bitter winter cold

So, the design goals are:

Contrast Ashe visually with both Lissandra and especially with Sejuani, who is her most direct opposite.

Tell the story not only of Ashe herself, but of the faction she represents, and represent its values in her design.

Make her unique and recognizable against the lineup of other League of Legends characters in a way that currently she simply isn't.

Early ideation:

Here we start by identifying silhouettes and the basic ideas of costuming that we want to run with. Since League of Legends women also generally have a bad case of Chronic Sameface Syndrome, we also explore a bunch of different face shapes and ideas for distinguishing Ashe physically outside of costuming and body shape.

Refinement:

We pick out a smaller number of variations to play with, and Apple_Cork explores various options for the costuming.

At this point we've settled on two main ideas: a "Warrior" Ashe, who is characterized by the hard life she's had to lead. Her struggles and suffering, especially the loss of her mother and the betrayal of Sejuani, are the emotional impetus that leads to her reaching the ideals of the Avarosans as an antidote to and rebellion against the Freljord's bloody history. We decide to use the A2 and A3 variation as a base for this, with addition of details like scarring and a somewhat bulkier musculature. This runs the risk of making her physically quite similar to Sejuani, which is a trade-off that might be worth it since the two of them are repeatedly positioned as sisters (even if not by blood) in their stories, and are very alike in their experiences and traumas, even if they've reached opposite conclusions from it.

The other idea is "Warmother Ashe." The Freljord is organized around matrilineal tribal leadership, with a significant emphasis on the social role of motherhood, with the leader of the tribe conceptualized as its primary mother figure. Most Warmothers we've known are hard-bitten, violent and domineering matriarchs, emphasizing the war bit of the name, and since Ashe represents a decisive break with that tradition, we want to create a design that puts emphasis on the mother part of the idea.

So an Ashe who is visually soft, associated with typical traits of nurturing motherhood and who visibly rejects struggle, deprivation and violence as part of her identity. The C1 and C2 variations form the basis for this character.

Both designs are intended to provide a strong visual contrast to the stark black-and-blue statuesque angularity of Lissandra, as well as the armored, hard-shelled, segmented look of Sejuani

A note on body politics and character design

It is generally Problematic™ to equate any one body type with any one set of personality traits, whether positively or negatively. A lot of common character design associations and shorthand is based on body stereotypes, and on a systemic scale, they can reinforce existing social bigotries.

The most common example: character design often employ the idea that good people tend to be beautiful and evil people tend to be ugly, and that a person's inner moral character can be read in their physical traits.

This is a trope with an extremely bad history, especially when it intersects with the politics of beauty, with eugenics and with racial caricature. Whiteness and the constructed features of whiteness are often used as the basis of beauty ideals, while traits and features associated with non-whiteness are considered ugly or undesirable, and thus in visual storytelling these traits can become markers of moral degeneracy or evil. Disney villains do this all the time, to various degrees of Problematicness.

I bring this up here because we decided to use a fat body-type on one of our Ashe designs specifically to code the design to be associated with softness, kindness, motherly nurturing and so on. These are positive traits, and it is meant to establish her as a contrast with Sejuani who is hard-edged, muscled and brutal. But also, yeah, fat bodies being associated with those traits is a reductive stereotype, just the same as associating highly trained, skinny and fit bodies with emotional coldness, lack of kindness and violence is reductive.

Character design is a tightrope walk between using available associations and stereotypes to create coding and shorthand so the audience can easily read the design on the one hand, and trying to redefine and re-associate traits in creative ways to create better storytelling on the other hand. League of Legends is a game that relies very, very heavily on existing and known archetypes, and we redesigned Ashe on those terms as well. It is fair to criticize our redesign for those trade-offs, within reason, and within the context of the problems of the design it is intended to improve upon. League of Legends as a franchise is generally unwilling to allow fat bodies to exist in ANY positive context, and especially not in women, whose visual priority 9 times out of 10 is to be conventionally beautiful and skinny above all else.

Final designs:

Warrior Ashe This design hews closer to her original design, employing the skirt, waist-wrap and thigh-high boots, albeit updated to look more appropriate for the fashion culture and environment of the Freljord.

The emphasis here is on Ashe as a war-leader and fighter, and we've added facial scars and her design generally features more hard and sharp lines and metallic accents to give her a more hard-bitten and warlike look. This is an Ashe who has led a heard and difficult life, marked by fighting and struggle.

Warmother Ashe This design pulls away hard from the original design, with only really the hood and cloak and white hair as identifying feature of the old version. She wears a lot of fabrics and furs, and is generally designed around stoutness and visual softness, and does not share the hardness or angular facial features of Warrior Ashe. Her clothes are finely embroidered with her tribe's iconography and she has pendants and trinkets associated with the various tribes that have been integrated into the Avarosa, or perhaps gifted to her by allies or friends.

She still has leather chest armor, albeit covered up by her cloak, and a shoulder pauldron, but it's ringed by fine feathers making it more of a showpiece. Same with the archery bracer, which is ostentatious and the bright brass makes it contrast with the rest of the design, which is meant to give the vibe of "this is a thing she puts on when necessary" but not a natural, integrated part of her fashion. Compare and contrast with the bracers on Warrior Ashe above.