Who Does Your Brand Main
Take a moment, and think. Whether you play League, Dota, OW, or any other character based game. Who is your main? What champion do you gravitate towards. I am going to talk here in terms of League. I personally, am a Zilean main. I love this champion to death. While I tend to bounce between roles and champions quite a lot, Zilean is like my home who I always returned to. I just find the idea of an old man who refuses to die while insulting Volibear to be hilarious to play. When I am interacting with my friends within the League community, I am always introduce myself as a Zilean main. In a recent discord tournament, my Zilean constantly saw itself on the ban list. Go into any in-house, and you will hear me cursing my opponents for banning away my Zilean. Zilean is, intrinsically part of my brand.
Champions who we play a lot or talk about a lot become a part of our own personal brand, and those who interact with us will immediately tie these champions to us. Within friend groups and small communities, a well known main for a champion becomes almost the persona of the champion, thought of whenever a champion is locked in. For some community figures however, this connection to their main becomes a common connection between hundreds of people within the League community. Figures like Tyler 1 and Yassuo are intrinsically tied to Draven and Yasuo, they have made such an impact on those champions that, the public figure and the champion almost go hand in hand.
That brings us to crux of these weeks thoughts. A fight between two jungler mains, and what it takes for the community to revere you as a main of a certain champ.
On Jan 2nd, Parkes (@parquesomedia), a reporter for Inven Global made a Tweet asking which Rioter loved their main more, Captain Flowers (@CaptinFlowers) or Jacqui Collins (@JacquiCollins_). The poll itself, is fairly irrelevant for the purposes of this argument. Flowers has a much larger outward facing audience, so he obviously ended up taking come the cake. What is interesting here however, is to see how these two community figures have managed to, in totally separate ways build their brand around their champion. Not only this however, neither brand was built with pure mechanical skill on the champ, but instead, with how they interacted with their audience about the champ.
Captain Flowers is a pretty well known community member, the LCS caster who is a fan favorite shout caster. His reputation for bringing lots of hype to any cast is only matched by his love for Skarner. His affection for the scoripion can be seen through basically anything he does. Seriously, watch any game with Skarner in it. He will somehow find a way to include some fun Skarner interaction you didn’t know of, or a distaste for Skarner builds not deemed “Chad.” He will tell you exactly how hard it is to gank Zoe, and what cooldowns need to be burnt in order to do it. He will tell you all about the Skarner tax and how it impacts peoples builds. The community has memed Flowers connection to the scorpion, and Flowers in turn, feeds into the community’s love between Flowers and Skarner. In this way, Skarner has become an intrinsically part of the brand of Captain Flowers.
Skarner also has taken a role as the NA classic, a champion that basically no other regions plays as much as NA. With Flowers being seen as the biggest NA hopeful behind Ovilee (ex. The LCS vs LEC mediocre Rap Battle), and Skarner being the NA pocket pick, the two of them suddenly had a secondary connection in the community.
This entire love of the scorpion however, was not built off Flowers rare skill as Jacqui jokingly says. It is instead build off of harnessing his excitement towards the game, and raising it every single time Skarner is in the equations. By Flowers own admission, he hasn’t played ranked seriously in years, and while he may have at a time been the best Skarner in NA, that is largely a none factor in his association with the champ now.
Jacqui was a legitimate contender in this debate however, and built a very good case for herself. What she lacked however, was the same platform to build the brand from. Captain Flowers has been able to build this brand over years of casting to thousands of viewers each and every week. Jacqui has a Twitter following of 15k, and that is about that. So, how has she managed to build her brand to be tied into Evelyn?
Jacqui is nice enough to layout the frame work herself in a tweet, but I would argue that, in reality, she has done a lot more than just what she lists. Unlike Flowers, she basically relies entirely on Twitter to build her brand in the community. However, she dedicates every inch of that space to Eve.
Cover Photo? Evelynn
Bio? Evelynn
Pinned Tweet? Evelynn
Profile Picture? Black and Purple…..or Evelynn
Like any fed Evelynn in Summoner’s Rift, she is everywhere. Even the media call that got put out had an Evelynn gif attached to it. The love for Evelynn does not come from way too much knowledge about the champ, or by rank on the servers. It instead come from the aesthetic of Evelynn and the character of the character. While Flowers has become the persona for Skarner, Collins has embraced the persona of Evelynn as part of her brand.
Where does this leave us though, we never answered the poll. Who is the bigger fan? Well the answer has to be both. Their brands are both unique and well established, and both of their mains are keystones of their brand. At the end of the day, people choose their mains, because they reflect themselves in some way, whether that be in gameplay or in look or feel. Our personal brands are additionally, extensions of who we are as people. So, it only makes sense that, our mains would become part of our brand. They are an embodiment of our personality, and a way to show a love for the game to our own communities.
