Seraphine, League of Legends’ newest character, is a glitter bomb of fame and success within the game. But Riot went so far as to create real-life social media accounts for her character, and in those, Seraphine is a bedroom producer who lives in our world. She has a cat named Bao, she likes to do face masks, and she is a fan of K/DA. She is a café worker who wants to pursue music. Her Twitter became a venue for telling her backstory. One day she posts a cover of K/DA’s “Pop/Stars” and gets “noticed” by the group; the next thing you know, she’s flying out to help record with the group.
In the lead-up to Seraphine’s release, it all seemed like a fairly obvious promotion for Riot’s upcoming champion and skins, but things took a turn for the weird when Seraphine began to tweet about her anxieties. She suffered from imposter syndrome now that she was performing with K/DA, and she asked fans to send her encouraging messages — which she later pinned to a corkboard.
119 votes, 51 comments. 10.7k members in the SeraphineMains community. This subreddit is dedicated for League's starry-eyed songstress: Seraphine! Seraphine⭐🌊 on Twitter. March 2021 “when i was 5 i thought a mermaid was just something you could grow up to be”. Facetious Fans discover Sona Twitter Account where she is a failed LA artist that has thirty-two followers, spending her days drunkenly sending and deleting tweets directed at Seraphine from her parents' guest bedroom. 55.7k Likes, 1,983 Comments - Seraphine (@seradotwav) on Instagram: “is this working?”. Seraphine⭐🌊 on Twitter “top 10 cooking moments (gone wrong) (on fire)”.
i don't think i'll ever be fully ready. but i know there's people believing in me, and that's more than enough. thank you so much, i mean it sincerely. i'm gonna face this head on pic.twitter.com/j7xZ7gQHqC
— Seraphine⭐ (@seradotwav) October 11, 2020
In the replies to the initial request for encouragement, there was tons of disdain among the kind messages. “This is frankly fucking disgusting,” one read. “Hey, this is fucked up using mental health struggles and crises as a marketing ploy,” another read. Any user who replied with encouragement was also met with another reply noting that Seraphine wasn’t real.
“Something about a marketing account using self-doubt & mental health to come across as relatable is Sadge capitalism,” said Golden Guardians Academy head coach Barento Mohammed on Twitter.
While there were fans who still found solace in Seraphine, who related to her tweets, and enjoyed what she represented, others found her anxieties upsetting, especially in our current gloomy COVID era. She’s not a real person, and she shouldn’t be coercing people into feeling close to her using mental illness when she is a social marketing campaign for a video game character.
Some people compared Seraphine to Miquela Sousa, the fictional CGI influencer, since she was creating relationships with others, all while not being real. Her anxiety-posting was a startling reminder that brands and the characters used to promote them are not our friends.
the secret to good skin is LOVE pic.twitter.com/nYNJY27AH0
— Seraphine⭐ (@seradotwav) October 6, 2020While K/DA’s campaign was run by creative director Patrick Morales, all of Seraphine’s tweets were written by Bethany Higa. Higa used her own experiences to craft Seraphine’s story, making them relatable. But maybe a bit too relatable.
“Honestly, I wrote a lot of that story based on my own experience, as a young woman coming to Riot. It’s like one of my first jobs after college. I personally experienced self-doubt. I personally experienced imposter syndrome and all those things,” Higa said. “The intention behind the story was to show that sense of hope, that sense of persistence, and show her growing in confidence and overcoming those struggles and those fears that she might have.” Remote desktop free download for mac.
That isn’t to say that Riot Games is unwilling to admit the mistakes made with Seraphine’s later posts.
“I’m personally proud of the people on our team, like [Higa] who put very intimate parts of themselves into the character, but we also recognize that the story we chose had an unintended impact outside of the narrative that we were trying to tell,” Morales said. “Right now, what I could say is that we’re conscientious about how she engages her followers, as well as topics that may potentially hurt or mislead people.”
We don’t know what’s next for Seraphine or what Riot Games has planned for future champion promotions, but hopefully it won’t involve making a fake social media influencer and giving them relatable mental illness.
Riot Games is going through some growing pains as it expands. New IPs have come with their own hurdles, as demonstrated by Valorant's patch 1.11 rollback.
In addition to its new titles, Riot is still working to keep League of Legends, its original and primary cash cow, interesting and fun. League's most recent champion Seraphine has caused a huge stir, but unfortunately it was not in the good way. Many fans have not reacted positively to the character on a technical or story level, and an additional promotion for her that took the form of the character's social media account didn't help things.
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At first, Seraphine's social media presence seemed innocent enough, being a fictional influencer piloted by Riot games. A short story relating to Riot's ongoing K/DA Comeback event played out over Seraphine's Twitter, which saw 'her' cover a K/DA song, get noticed by the group, and start recording with them. It was innocent enough until Seraphine began exhibiting signs of imposter syndrome, something that many players took issue with. Riot has promised to be more careful with Seraphine in the future, but it's worth examining why this was an issue.
Many players took issue with Riot using a real mental health problem that many struggle with and using it for an advertisement campaign. The idea of the perpetually bubbly, pop-star from birth, fake persona of Seraphine asking for encouragement from people online annoyed many since the character wasn't real and this was an attempt to get them to engage with a corporate mascot. It doesn't help that many players already don't like Seraphine's lore due to its brevity compared to her K/DA storyline and a detail concerning a Hex stone that made Seraphine come off poorly.
That detail has since been retconned, but Seraphine's lore still hasn't been received well and her Twitter persona doesn't feel genuine knowing that it's part of a marketing promotion. For a character designed to draw attention to the K/DA event and everything that came with it, Seraphine kind of backfired. Add to that a recently found bug that gives Seraphine an unfair advantage, and it's no wonder her Champion Spotlight is arguably the most disliked one so far.
It's a shame too, because the intentions behind Seraphine were almost certainly good. Bethany Higa, who wrote Seraphine's tweets, used her own experience with imposter syndrome to try and bring Seraphine to life. And the idea of a fictional character's story playing out across a real-life social media outlet is not a bad idea for promotion or lore growth. Riot has gotten better at telling stories in interesting ways, so it's a shame to see this endeavor fall apart.
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MORE: League of Legends Patch 10.22: K/DA and the Biggest Changes
Seraphine Twitter Skarner
Source: Polygon
Seraphine Twitter Account