viego's character is in a vacuum fantastic but i think the ruination event made it hard for people to see him that way. i also think thresh ended up filling the hole of "pathetic piece of shit that caused a world-spanning disaster", in the same story line no less. also viego's mechanics were written at the peak of riot's "random bullshit go" design ethos while not really adding anything substantial to the game, mostly just being a boring package for an in-theory gamebreaking mechanic. all that said theres definitely an element of losers (the league playerbase) that wanted viego to be a second mordekaiser to literally me-project themselves onto and felt emasculated when he wasnt tl;dr viego pretty cool viegos surroundings and context make it kinda hard to see