Rakan’s early character model was a pink Thresh with a giant Braum mustache for wings

It’s no secret that League of Legends’ design teams use temporary artwork while they work on new champions. When Kled was first thought up, he was represented in Riot’s development client as a Gnar riding a Hecarim. Xayah was switched between altered versions of Vayne and Draven.

Rakan’s placeholder champion, however, was particularly hilarious. He was a pink Thresh with a giant Braum moustache for his wings, according to the Xayah/Rakan AMA today on Reddit. Go ahead and close your eyes for a minute and imagine what that would look like, and then watch this video.

We hope that’s everything you wanted it to be and more, because it was for us. Whacky character models aren’t the only things that Riot uses for placeholders, either. Splash arts are also drawn up quickly until something official can be put in, and they’re all… interesting. Yeah, interesting is the right word. Here are Xayah and Rakan’s respectively.

No, before you ask, that isn’t a joke that we created in Microsoft Paint for the sake of this article. Riot actually shared those images in a post on the dev corner of the official League forums. We’re glad Riot likes to keep things upbeat, because otherwise it wouldn’t be nearly as fun to ask them questions like this.