Liquid Rebirth: Breakdown of Episode 18
By Andrew Ross
Liquid Rebirth is a YouTube series that follows the LCS team as they strive to become the best team in North America.
The 18th episode of Liquid’s Rebirth series came out today. Some of you might not have the time to watch it, so here is our nice little breakdown of the most interesting things from the video.
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This episode was titled “Captain,” and the first half of the video made it clear that Piglet is the captain the video was referring to.
The intro begins with the team’s support, Matt, talking about his relationship so far with Piglet. He dismisses the notion that Piglet is in any way a bad teammate and even says, “He’s not a selfish player. He’s a very good team player.” However, Piglet is a legendary player who has already won a world championship before, and that does come with a lot of pressure for any of his teammates, but even more so for the person who is supposed to support him. Matt opens up about this and says, “I have to play to his level. It’s pretty much up to me whether or not I’m going to mess up laning phase usually. It’s kind of nervous. It makes me feel uncomfortable.”
Matt and Piglet have only been a duo for a handful of weeks now, so hopefully Matt can overcome the anxiety that is handed to him from playing with Piglet. Feeling like you need to be at your best for your teammates is a great thing, but nobody should go into a game with that much pressure on their shoulders. Who knows, maybe Piglet will watch this episode and go tell Matt that he doesn’t need to lose his mind over the possibility of losing the laning phase.
Piglet is a quiet person who holds a lot back, but he did open up about being the leader of Liquid. “I need to do more and try to never show bad form to my teammates,” Piglet explained before adding, “Truthfully, last season I barely listened to my own team, and I also got very frustrated. But now as a person, I am completely different and even my skill has improved.”
Hopefully Piglet truly does feel this way and it isn’t some act he is putting on. There were a lot of times in older episodes that you could just see he was a toxic person to be around, but he hasn’t shown us that side of him lately. Maybe he came to the realization that he is the leader of a young team and he won’t get anywhere with bringing them down. Seriously, it’s nice to see this form of Piglet.
After a lot of these monologues, we see the team preparing for their week five game against Could9 (a game that they would go on to lose). Usually these pregame speeches are very generic and they don’t give us the viewer much to get excited about, but this was very different as Locodoco (Liquid’s head coach) had some creative words on Could9. While standing in front of his team, Locodoco said, “Do you know how to lose an argument with an idiot? First they will argue with you and bring you down to their level. Then if you argue at their level, they’ll beat you with experience. That’s what it’s like playing C9.” He then goes on to say how Cloud9 will be looking to do all these cheesy things and that his team shouldn’t lose to them.
As a viewer, it’s fun to watch Locodoco give us that type of material, but I’m sure not a single person associated with Cloud9 appreciated hearing those comments. You have to watch what you say when you’re being recorded all the time, Locodoco!
The final thing really interesting in this episode was Jokasteve’s (Liquid’s general manager) comments on Renegades after his team beat them in week five. “It felt good to just get revenge on them. We have sort of a little history with Renegades. I just don’t want to see that cowboy riding a horse graphic anymore. I think it was good to just come out and have a solid performance against them. If we would have lost to them, I think we would have been internally questioning our roster,” were Jokasteve’s words after the game.
Woah, those are some strong words right there. First it was Cloud9, and then Renegades – and that’s in only one episode! The rest of the NA LCS better watch out, because these guys are hungry.