"On one cataclysmic day, entire districts on the River Pilt collapsed below the western sea level, and thousands suddenly found themselves fighting for their lives against the clashing currents." Riot's biography of Janna is the history of a city told through the one being that outlasted every version of it, and that sentence is the day the city remembered her. Zaun had stopped praying. It started again when the ground went.
Who they are
Since ancient times, the biography says, people have prayed to the winds that sweep across Runeterra, sailors for weather and the downtrodden for change, and sometimes the wind seemed to answer. Seafarers would see a bright blue bird just before a healthy tailwind; others swore they heard a whistling before a storm. As the omens spread, some claimed the bird became a woman, with tapered ears and flowing hair, who floated above the water and directed the wind with a flick of her staff. The faithful called her Jan'ahrem, an ancient Shuriman word for guardian, because she always seemed to appear in moments of great need. In time the name wore down to Janna.
Her worship spread along the Shuriman continent's coasts, and nowhere was it stronger than in Oshra Va'Zaun, a seafaring city that depended on calm seas for its trade ships and raised statues and shrines to her in thanks. When the Shuriman empire took the city, the devotion continued for a time, and then the emperor decreed against false idols and the statues came down. Many kept praying in private; god-warriors, the text observes, could not protect a ship from a storm. Janna kept helping the vulnerable who called on her, and when the empire fell and the remaining Ascended turned the green lands to desert with their wars, she shielded the city, by then known as Zaun, from the turmoil. The empire and its Ascended are in Shurima.
Over the centuries Zaun's ambitions grew. Its people dreamed of cutting a canal through the isthmus they lived on, to join the seas around Valoran and Shurima, and prayers to Janna faded as the digging went on. The excavation made whole parts of the city unstable, and on the day the districts along the River Pilt collapsed below sea level, thousands of drowning people who had forgotten her called her name. She did not hesitate. An immense gale swept the city as she took physical form; walls of air held the flood back while people fled their drowned homes, and gusts cut through the smoke of the fires. She saved many. Thousands still died, and every survivor saw what she had done. Through the rise of Piltover and the struggles of modern Zaun, her faithful wear bluebird medallions and pay reverence to the winds, and the biography ends with a promise: whether Zaunites are fighting for breath in the Zaun Gray or standing against the chem-barons, Janna will not abandon them.
Where they belong
Riot's faction pages put Janna in Zaun, and the biography is a history of that placement: the city was Oshra Va'Zaun when it first prayed to her, a Shuriman possession when her statues fell, and the Zaun of the collapse and the Gray when it prayed to her again. No race is listed for her on Riot's pages; the biography's word is wind spirit, and it never says what she was before people named her.
Riot lists four related champions, and the biography names none of them:
- Ekko: not named. The link Riot draws is Zaun, not a scene in the text.
- Jinx: not named either.
- Vi: not named.
- Urgot: not named. The text's only enemies are the sea, the smoke and, at the end, the chem-barons as a class.
In the Riot MMO, as a guess
This is speculation. Janna is a god, in the sense that matters for a game: she has no body until she chooses one, no home but the wind, and a record of appearing only when thousands are about to die. That rules out a quest-giver and a boss, and leaves the third thing, a presence. Zaun in an MMO can carry her the way the biography does, in bluebird medallions on the people, in shrines torn down and rebuilt, and in a scripted moment when the wind arrives and a player watches the walls of air go up. A designer who wanted her to speak would be adding to the text, which never gives her a line. Whether a champion can be a force rather than a person is at the edge of the question in will champions be playable.
What we do not know
Whether the era the game chooses, the open question in when is the Riot MMO set?, changes anything for her. The biography has her present in every age from the first Shuriman sailors to the modern Gray, so the era decides only which Zaun she is protecting.
What she is. The text calls her a wind spirit and reports what the faithful believed, and Riot has not said more.