Someone made the terrible mistake of asking for the long answer. I’m putting it here and not a text file so it gets formatted somewhat nicely. But I still get to blind you with my favorite fixed-width font.

Anyway here’s wonderwall part 1

Matt really wanted me to play League.

I was perfectly happy spacing out and just watching while trying to figure out if we finished that joint 5 minutes or 5 hours ago. But Matt was convinced that if he got the autist into League, then I could carry him in tournaments. “It’s like 5 on 5 chess”

It was pretty alright to watch if there’s nothing else around, but it’s like… it’s just more generic DnD-esque fantasy. Everything I’m seeing has been done before. Pick between yet another guy waving around a sword, yet another girl casting magic spells, yet another eldritch horror doing eldritch horror stuff, yet another ice archer, this guy’s got a really old gun, this chick’s got two guns, this guy’s a pirate, this guy’s a vampire, this guy’s a werewolf, this guy’s a clown, this guy’s Anubis.

I come through one day, we get absolutely fried, and dude leaves to go let someone in. His computer finished opening the client, and started playing a login animation. I’m staring at it, high as a kite and… Hold on, I cannot place this guy into a bucket. This doesn’t look like any fantasy trope I’ve seen before. This didn’t just get lifted from some Blizzard game or DnD book.

But I’ve definitely seen him before… Somewhere. There’s this overwhelming feeling that I’ve known him for years. Where have I seen this guy before?

Matt walks back in the room and I ask “Hey, where would I have seen this guy before?”

“Uh… I don’t think anywhere. That’s the new champion.”

“Like brand new?”

“Literally just came out today”

“That makes no sense.”

Dude packs a bowl while I continue to try and figure this out. I know, for a fact, I’ve seen this person before, years ago. Something’s not making sense. And on top of it, he’s smirking at me. Like he knows how frustrated I am. This kid knows something I don’t, and god damn it, I’m going to figure out what it is.

And I still can’t find what WoW themes they’re ripping off here. The background doesn’t ring any bells, the thing on his back looks sorta futuristic… maybe he’s from another planet or something? It’d probably explain the clothes and the tech… maybe.

A few weeks later, I’m watching Matt log in to League again. Did that guy teleport into the frame? And it’s nagging me even harder now… I’ve 1000% known this kid for years. Matt got first pick so he’s able to play the new guy, who’s free-to-play this week. And I’m looking at his in-game model, now even more sure I’ve seen him before. Matt caught me staring, and knew he had his opening. “So, if you didn’t want to play League because it’s all DnD shit, this kid’s definitely not DnD shit. Just try it, man.” “Nah, I’m good. Besides, seems kinda annoying. Who wrote his lines, Disney?”

“Hold on, I got something to show you after this match” “Dude I don’t wanna play this game.” “It’s really fucking cool, I swear.”

And yes. It was. Ekko’s trailer was, in fact, really fucking cool.

Later, dude wrenches me into grabbing the game. “ARAMs are for fucking around, you just do whatever, nobody cares about the outcome, it’s not super competitive.”

Look at that… I was assigned the new guy. What are the odds?

–

Next week on the train ride home, I grabbed some RP and unlocked Ekko. And, I guess, if I’m going to play this game, I might as well read the documentation on the character I’m gonna be playing. After finishing up the champion insights page, I give the comic a read.

Ever had to hold back tears on public transit?

Why is he blaming himself? Dude, look at all the effort you put in, you’re not guilty just because you didn’t notice fast enough. And why do you seem… blunted to this? Has this happened before? Does this happen a lot?

Wait… why do I care? And why do I, for the first time in my life, feel bad for having made fun of someone? Is it because all of those voice lines suddenly got put into perspective? That I suddenly got all the context behind the angst I was hearing? And like… how do you recover from sth like that? Life appears to kick you in the teeth with some degree of regularity and you still somehow put on that smarmy little grin. All of this and you’re still somehow a self-satisfied little show-off. How do you do it? And why do I love it so much?

Wait hold on… those pants… Stitched together from canvas or burlap or something… Please don’t tell me you’re an orphan, too. That wouldn’t make sense… Please for the love of god tell me you have parents. Look how hard you try for everyone, please tell me there’s someone who’s there for you. You deserve it.

Why am I anxious about this? Why is this outright concerning me? Holy shit I can’t wait to not be sober anymore.

And I STILL can’t figure out where I’ve seen you before.

“Now approaching: Aurora”

In the car, I’m already getting bludgeoned by wholesale amounts of perspective. I’m (relatively) sheltered as fuck and I hate basically everything. So why doesn’t Ekko? How has he not gone Uncle Teddy on all the people who hurt him and his friends? He’d have every right to! And how hasn’t he burned out like I have?

I make an executive decision: I’ll be there for him. Somehow. Again, he deserves it.

Matt comes down to open the door between ARAM deaths. While waiting for him to be done, I pack a bowl and start reading the forums Q&A that ended a few weeks ago. And I let out the kind of relieved sign you get when you narrowly avoid a car accident. I’m that relieved that yes, at an absolute minimum, he’s got parents who love him, are still alive, are still together, and still see him… when they can. If nothing else, he has that. Maybe that’s why he’s still a good guy despite the constant incentives around him to not be.

“THANK FUCKING CHRIST.”

“What?”

“He has parents.”

“…Who has parents?”

“Um… Ekko”

“You like League now, don’t you Squidward?”

“It’s just the one guy. He’s cool. I like him.”

–

The more I read, the more I like him. He’s just a little genius inventor latchkey kid. Despite all the shit he goes through, and the absolutely whacked out shit that happens around him, he still finds a way to be just a kid. If he has to, he’ll put on the vigilante hat, because seeing people be wronged pisses him off. But outside of that, he’s out to have a good time, with the people he loves, while he still has them. And maybe these things happen at the same time, because why not have a little fun setting things right?

And that’s what I think I love the most, and what I’m most afraid of losing in him with um… recent developments. He’s amazing in every way, and yet he’s still, somehow, relatable. Because he’s not a big action hero. He’s not secretly the only reason the world still turns. There’s no “everyone owes him their lives and they have no idea”. He’s just a kid in Zaun, like any other… he just happens to have built a time machine. Personally, I’m far more interested in what a snarky, arrogant, yet big-hearted and kind little punk does with a time machine, than what Hollywood Messiah #71519 does with one. That’s why OG Ekko inspires me, but TV Show Ekko does not.

Something really inspiring is the building-things-from-scraps angle. Anybody can build something with off-the-shelf parts that are meant to go together. It takes a genius to take potentially nonfunctional things, whatever you’re able to find, and just… screw with it until something cool happens. Repeat until you’ve found a way to get from something cool, to something useful. That’s Ekko. That’s the difference between an engineer and an inventor. An engineer takes existing concepts and makes them “usable”, deploys them, optimizes them, scales them, etc… But an inventor (like Ekko) observes a phenomenon, something novel, weird, unexplained, etc., and finds a way to harness it into something practical. And he does it all himself.

Even the time manipulation is both fresh and straightforward. Time travel fiction is always so filled with plot holes and inconsistencies and it’s so hard to be immersed in it. Ekko’s Z-Drive doesn’t introduce paradoxes or any inconsistencies. He sets a point, he can roll back to it. Easy skeezy. And yet it’s so versatile. Combat, rescue, espionage, even trying to get a girl, such a simple building block can do so much. And at no point will you ever go “But wait that means that this other thing never happened which means that they never got the thing so how did they go back at all and fja ls;kdfj af”… It just works. Even The Box from Primer, one of the best time travel movies ever made, feels clunky compared to the Z-Drive.

While I’m staring at the wall thinking about this, something hits me like a sack of bricks.

Kids like Ekko exist. Right now. There are impoverished children, right now, who intellectually outgun 99.99% of the population. It’s not a “maybe” sort of thing, it’s a statistical certainty. In fact it’s statistically certain that there’s thousands of them throughout the world. And for reasons entirely outside their control, they largely can’t do shit with it. It’s like driving a Ferrari through mud. There’s enormous horsepower but everything around it is dragging it down.

Previously, I’d been into the free and open source software (FOSS) movement (You know, the GNU in GNU/r000t) because I like customizing my computer, having total control over what it does, knowing what it does, and also because fuck Microsoft. But what hit me in that momemt is: Tech being free and open means that a kid like Ekko, if they can get their hands on some old ThinkPad that someone just threw away… well, that kid now suddenly, for once, has the exact same footing as everyone else, at least in that one little sphere.

On Earth, we don’t have hextech. Just tech. But our boring frumpy non-magical tech is just as powerful. And FOSS means that this power belongs to everyone capable of harnessing it. You don’t need to have connections, you don’t need to ask anybody’s permission, nobody can keep it from you for arbitrary reasons. The Google and Amazon “silicon-barons” can’t hoard it. Don’t take money, don’t take fame, etc. People around the world, who might not even speak the same language, can build a little something, and everyone else can build on top of it, glue a bunch of little somethings together… literally whatever you want.

Through all of this, he resists the pressure to leave his family, his friends, his Zaun, and go join some guild/clan in Piltover. Because Ekko doesn’t want to be a part of someone else’s agenda. Being as gifted as Ekko comes with pressure from everyone around you to do that whole “change the world” thing, and he rejects that entirely. What kind of a “gift” comes with those kinds of strings attached? Sure, he wants to fix problems in Zaun, but there’s no huge grandiose intricate plan. He takes it a day at a time, and lets the small things add up. Tomorrow’s the last of his worries. And hopefully… that means he won’t burn out like I did.

And as I stare at the login screen, Ekko nods with the most petulant sneer you’ve ever seen. I’m slammed with a wave of both relief and abject fear as a realization hits me:

I just got thoroughly owned. It was over the moment I looked at him. He didn’t lift a finger and he got #. Payload ran and look at that, it’s not my brain anymore.

But I won’t have it any other way.