#Yordkes

[mousathe14]

One of the weird little design ideosyncrocies that are simultaneously an unintended accident and a big ol’ bag of sexist double standards is the sexual dimorphism of the main Yordles.

So once upon a time, like, not just before The Great Lore Retcon of 2014, but like within the first year or 2-ish years of League, way before I started playing or even heard of it, everything was still in a primordial soup of design. They created two species of little creatures: Yordles and Meglings.

Yordles are like little hamster people and Meglings were like little blue goblin people. But since they both lived in Bandle City, young Riot decided it’d be easier to just make both things a single species.

And it happened that our earliest playable Yordles were guys and the earliest playable Meglings were gals.

Tristana(released 2009) was a megling

Poppy(released 2010) might’ve been a megling, records are unclear

Satan Teemo(released 2009) is a Yordle

Which is why nearly every female Yordle looks significantly more human than the males.

Like, it’s taken years of design updates, new textures and splash art and animations to get the girls to have bigger pointer ears and get fuzzy skin. But Depending on what you’re looking at it can be really hard to see the fur.

See Trist and Poppy now

But yeah, it is an interesting and distinct feature of the species now, I guess. Male Yordles are significantly furrier and more animal-like with hamster noses and ears and have more natural brown and tan colorations. Female Yordles appear to be of a lighter fuzz and are purple and blue with more human noses and human ear placement.

My only issue is that they’re sort of sticking to it and it feels odd. It’s like all those jokes about media being bad about sexual dimorphism for stuff like orcs where there’s these giant monster orc dudes and these smaller human-y orc ladies. It’s a well worn much hated trope.

The most recent Yordle champion to be released was Ved who came out last year and she has finally squared the Yordle design circle, mostly. She’s got the big ol’ furry hamster ears with the hamster placement all the previous male yordles have, and she’s got the hamster nose, mostly. However she is still not as furry as her male counterparts.

The only Yordle to have previously crossed the color-fur-line was Rumble, who was released in 2011.

To this day, Rumble is the only male Yordle who is blue.

Which, you know, if anyone has any trans headcanons they’d like to throw into the world, there’s your basis. I don’t know who’d want to claim Rumble of all yordles, but more power to ya.

Where am I going with this? I dunno, just some observations I guess. Sexual dimorphism and design is always weird.

It’s almost forgivable with the Yordles because they sort of accidentally stumbled into it rather than going in with sexist intentions of making the women less monstrous because of no good reasons.

However, it’s not a path they’re backing away from. I feel like, much like their new obsession with appeal, they may not be as incentivized to make female yordles be nearly as hamster-y as the males, and I guess all we can do is wait and see how they handle these in the future.

Development history + character design + world building is interesting, ain’t it?