16. all the things we’ll never be
Recently I’ve been fascinated with the concept of auguries, that ancient tradition of reading the intent of the gods through the movement of birds. It’s silly to believe that seeing twelve falcons instead of six means that you are the founder of Rome, but is it any sillier than my conviction that my failure to watch the final game between kt Rolster and Samsung Galaxy was the reason for KT losing the gauntlet and thus their spot at worlds?
To be a sports fan is to be superstitious, to believe that what you do in some way can affect the performance of your favorite players and teams; maybe even beyond that, to believe that your unfelt, unheard, unknown presence when simply watching a game can affect the very outcome of destiny. If I were to be irreverent, I’d say it’s the closest I’ve come to organized religion. Maybe it’s no accident that the most powerful vocabulary we have for sports are borrowed from religious iconography: the hand of God, the faithful that are rewarded, and so on.
No matter how far we’ve come or where we go as people, we really haven’t escaped the temptation of believing in fortune-telling. In moments of great heartbreak, we go back and assign false memories to the things that have come before. We give weight to things that were meant lightly and read into them a predicative power that they never had. They become auspices whose meanings become clear through the lens of hindsight.
As this year of competitive League of Legends slowly wraps up, I’ve felt myself turning back to those intros and outros of years past, wondering what futures they predicted, which hands of which gods moved like water through them, so that now, after so long, we can read their meaning like the variegated walls of a sandstone ravine.
There are the obvious ones, the juxtapositions clearly chosen and timely meant, like Blank turning his head to smirk at the camera as Zella Day sings “Even God is on our side,” or Smeb running at the camera and exhaling as Lorde, almost menacingly, chides him, “Everybody wants to rule the world.” But my favorites are the ones that seem like accidental prophecies.
Do you remember the intro for the summer 2016 ROX vs KT match? Peanut is introduced as Florence + the Machines croons, “You want a revelation, some kind of resolution.” ROX Peanut in 2016 was the revelation Riot wanted, an expressive face that played well into the player cams, so explosive on the rift that it seemed impossible all that energy could be compressed in such a tiny real life body. Now, it is 2017, and Peanut is on SKT, and surely whatever happens to them this Saturday in Beijing will be “some kind of resolution,” for us and for Peanut both.
Or what about the opening shots of Samsung White and Blue pretending to get ready in a locker room in the teaser for the 2014 LOL Masters final? How fitting that 2 Chainz raps over them, “Money’s the motivation, money’s the conversation,” even though no one knew then that they would all disperse at the end of that year, all chasing that mythical paycation in China. In hindsight, that shot of Spirit and Dandy exiting the room together over Khalifa singing, “I never feared death or dying, I only feared never trying,” has a special poignancy when you consider Spirit trying to break new ground in EULCS with Fnatic only to come home to Afreeca or Dandy finally giving up the ghost in LPL to go to NACS with eUnited. Faker at the end with his raised arm (one of the few consistent OGN symbols since summer of 2013) set to “only God can judge me now” was probably too obvious and on the nose even in 2014, but there’s a funny poetic justice to the splash of “AD Carry Deft+ imp” that appears alongside “even if I’ve got three strikes”: this November will be the third anniversary of both ADCs in China, and you can’t help but feel like time is ticking down on them both — has maybe even run out, for Imp.
As much as I loved the full spring 2017 intro, ROX16 constellations and all, I will never love it quite as much as the first teaser OGN released — Mata’s pensive face, under lights, as a storm breaks out in the distance, the words “REWIND” and “REBOOT” flashing across his face. It was futuristic, sci-fi-esque; it made Mata into a narrative within seconds, and did it with the deftness most music video directors would kill for. I loved it so much that I wrote this feelings diary entry back then, only to bury it as the season progressed.
(Was that an auspice? Have I failed myself, and in the process you, as an augur? I had already predicted failure; why, then, did I feel such heartbreak when the failure actually came?)
Here is what I thought then, and here, in the aftermath of KT’s failure to reach worlds, is what I think now. It may be that Samsung White and Blue were not the best we’d ever have. Certainly their legacy cannot stand up to SKT’s, now that SKT will play their third worlds final — in a row. Maybe part of the reason why we mythologize that iteration of Samsung is because they broke up so soon after they thrashed each other. If they had given themselves the time and stayed together, who knows what heights they could have achieved — and what depths they could have fallen. The loss of that possibility is what makes them irresistible, like Haruki Murakami’s 100% perfect girl that you pass by on a spring afternoon. Maybe in a few years that same mythology will pervert the ROX Tigers mythology. (Maybe, in fact, it already has.)
The reality is that bits and pieces of the Samsung machine have been coming together and coming apart for years, and none of them have ever done what Samsung White was able to do in the end. Mata and Dandy, Mata and Looper, Deft and Pawn, Imp and Heart, and finally this year’s Pawn, Deft, and Mata — a litany like someone trying to brute-force the combination lock holding closed the door to victory.
All of it reminding us that no matter how much we rewind, it will never be a return. We can only ever reboot. We can only ever start over.
Samsung White and (or) Blue will never come back. It will never be 2014 again. We will never again be the people we were in 2014, and the person I was in 2014 will never be who I am now. We can mythologize our regrets and those could-have-beens; in fact, we should. It’s in that frisson between what we weren’t able to do and what we think could be possible that dreams are made. We take the ghost of the could-have-beens and project them in front of us, hoping that our real bodies will walk through those projections and help them take corporeal form. In 2017, a team we might have thought impossible in 2014 — Smeb as a lauded toplaner? Score in the jungle? Deft and Mata as a botlane? — came together. In 2017, LCK welcomed back a full team of returnees: Huni and Marin in the toplane, Spirit in the jungle, Pawn in the midlane, Deft and Mata in the botlane. In 2017, we believed in new beginnings.
Life moves on, and we must move on with it. 2014 has disappeared, just like the death of that jungle/support synergy and the advantage of Mata the word god and the sister team system. We can’t bring it back. KT failed to do what it set out to do — beat SKT, or even get to worlds. Lee Jihoon, the man who has been with KT’s League of Legends team since the beginning, was even forced to move on. Of the returnees featured in the spring intro, only Huni got to where he wanted to be, and even he suffered through the summer split, suddenly relegated to playing SKT’s second-fiddle toplaner. Life changes us, just like the meta, the patches, the infrastructure of the leagues and the teams change the game.
It’s moments like this I think of the SpoTV 2017 summer intro and outro, a surprisingly abstract work full of players standing in front of entryways, trying to escape from their liminal spaces. Malrang opens the door to reveal the other more established LCK players, the goal he is haltingly moving towards. Teddy’s entrance is a literal stairway to heaven, aiming for the top and a Jin Air plane joke in one. Crown readies himself at his own threshold, as if cracking his knuckles and working up the courage to walk through. Score opens the door into an expanse of sea, a man looking for an unattainable rest— or maybe a man who must literally walk on water to get to his goal.Marin, of course, opens the door only to lead us back to SKT. The outro seems to mix and refract these symbols: JAG in a swamp, BBQ trying to climb towards the rising sun, Pray with his hands folded as time moves backwards, a slot machine coming up — improbably — all ROX Tigers, Max watching all his ammunition fall, Score halted at the closed door, a gear grinding away in a broken machine, the heart of Crown and Samsung a drawbridge across a moat. And finally, SKT, the castle that lies at the end of a murky fog. The players are anonymous, faces cut off or shrouded as silhouettes. Perhaps their faces and their identities aren’t the point.
Because when the camera pulls away, we see where we are. All the players stand at the bottom of a million staircases, waiting to ascend. We are in a room of dark nothingness, with only one door out — the one that goes through SKT. We must push through. We have to push through.
We know it’s up there, and we know we can.
And so, we keep climbing.
2018, here we come.
