In League of Legends, there are 119 characters, or champions. By my count, 79 of them can be defined as “male”, with the majority of the would-be-genderless champs (Blitzcrank, the robot, and Malphite, the stone giant, for example) being given the nod toward male based on voice or lore. That means that 40 fall under the female banner. Of the 79 males, if we use a pretty narrow version of humanoid (two arms, two legs, a face, skin, the need for clothing), I find 32 of them to land in that category. Of those 32, taking out the demons or those with un-classifiable race, it appears that 26 of them are white (or arguably white). And of those 26, only a handful have “strength” as their defining trait (as opposed to shadowy, agile, cunning, or magical) – I count 10. And then we can narrow it down a bit more with the “rugged” trait, to find that really the champions to fall under the typical “lead male” class are Darius, Draven, Garen, Graves, Jarvan, Jayce, and Tryndamere – and even some of these are a bit of a stretch. Not bad! LoL rebuffs the stereotype of the lead male and retains only about 6% of their champs in this category.
How about DotA 2? The game is often heralded by its fans for being more gritty and darker, and having less “realistic” elements. The game clocks in at 107 characters, or heroes. DotA 2 is a bit less specific on the genders of some of its ambiguous characters (Io the wisp, Phoenix the… well, phoenix), but there are 70 or more males. Of those males, if we use the same definition of humanoid, we find that only maybe 25 can count. Many of these have red, blue, green, or other non-race-identifiable skin, so when we narrow it down to just the white heroes, our number drops to only 17. When we try to identify which would be categorized as strong, we shrink the figure further to just 7 (sorry Pudge). And with our final filter to narrow our search into heroes that might be handsomely rugged, I find that only a handful of characters fit the bill: Kunkka, Beastmaster, Omniknight, Dragon Knight, and maybe Lycan. Just 5 heroes of the 107 (about 5%) fall into the classic lead male stereotype.
Clearly, both of these titles do a great job of opening up to fantasies outside of the normal area of comfort for other popular video games. We’ve answered a couple of the questions we asked earlier: we know that both games are fine with putting forth alternate fantasies. But which do the fans prefer? According to stats on lolking.net and dotabuff.com, none of the champions that fit the ‘lead male’ role are in the top 10 most popular characters for either game over the past month. It is appropriate to note, however, that a couple heroes that contain most of the features of the lead male stereotype do hit the top 10 in both games: Yasuo (has an agile, slender frame rather than a strong frame), Lee Sin (asian), and Jax (humanoid but not human) in League of Legends, and Bloodseeker (humanoid but not human) and Axe (red skin) in DotA 2. Based on these popularity charts, it’s clear that fans are open to picking some of the alternative fantasy options – as long as they don’t deviate too far from the stereotype. A quick look at the 10 least popular champs on LoL shows that they are all either non-male, non-human, lack strength, or lack the rugged handsomeness – only the white, male Malzahar gets anywhere close to the stereotype. But the designers of the game are fine with it. A recent quote from “Meddler,” a Lead Champion Designer for LoL, revealed that “Our thinking on monster/creature champions has changed over the last couple of years. We still see clear personality and strong theme as really important, but are happier exploring those through creatures, not just humans/humanoids, than we were in the past. Some of that’s a conclusion that, given the size of our champion roster, we no longer feel that every champion must have broad appeal. A somewhat niche concept, that appeals really strongly to some players and not at all to others, is fine or, potentially, ideal when you’ve already got more than 100 other champs to choose from.”
View Part 2 of this article on cpgaming.gg
Follow Brian on twitter @EGguitar