Overwatch is easily one of the biggest and best games of the year, with an excellently broad and inclusive range of characters to play as in an excellently produced multiplayer game. It’s exactly what you’d expect from Blizzard, and millions of people love it.
To celebrate the holidays, Blizzard released an online comic last night with a simple message: this is the time of year for family, friends and loved ones.
You can read it here and it’s quite a sweet story, as Tracer dashes around London at the last minute, trying to find the perfect present, but always being just a fraction of a second too late or putting other holiday shoppers first, letting them buy the scarf she was looking for instead – perhaps the real message is that you should try and do your Christmas shopping a bit earlier?
So far, so heartwarming and inoffensive, but then this happened:
That’s right, Tracer is gay. Predictably, some people just don’t know how to deal with that. I mean… how can someone with such an amusingly clichéd cockney accent be gay? Then again, Blizzard have maintained for a long time that some of the game’s characters are gay.
Sleepyrogue invokes some of the backlash to the US presidential election by coining #NotMyTracer. “The comic that Blizzard just released I refuse to believe,” they write. “I refuse to believe that Overwatch has become a platform for gender-politics propaganda.”
On the other hand, Krusher99 thinks Blizzard need to go further:
I am a 23 year old male and I am dating my 17 year old sister. I applaud you announcing a character as gay. But there has been very few games where people like me are properly represented. It would be great if you had brother and sister relationships or brother and brother relationships or sister and sister relationships. Let our voices be heard. We have been kept in the shadows long enough
Because, you know, incest and homosexuality are totally equatable.
But hey, it’s alright really, it’s actually just a big joke by Blizzard. TracerLove13 writes, “I think Blizzard wants us to think she’s gay and wants to tick people off.”
Some of the many threads lean towards lampooning the comic or those that are offended by it – faux outrage at discovering Torbjorn has a family seems to be quite popular – but honestly, it feels like there’s a lot more positivity surrounding the reveal, just that there’s impassioned debate about it. For some it’s that this has been revealed months after the game’s release, for others it feels rushed – though I personally think it’s given just as much time and space as a heterosexual coupling would have been – and so on.
Speaking to Kotaku, Blizzard said:
As in real life, having variety in our characters and their identities and backgrounds helps create a richer and deeper overall fictional universe. From the beginning, we’ve wanted the universe of Overwatch to feel welcoming and inclusive, and to reflect the diversity of our players around the world. As with any aspect of our characters’ backgrounds, their sexuality is just one part of what makes our heroes who they are. From the very beginning of our work on Tracer’s story, it just felt right to make this an aspect of her character.
Incidentally, Blizzard decided not to release this comic in Russia, so as to avoid falling foul of local laws prohibiting “gay propaganda”. They told Eurogamer that they “preemptively decided not to publish given the climate in Russia and Legal feedback.”
It is rather cold in Russia this time of year…
Sources: Blizzard comic, Blizzard forums via @randileeharper, Eurogamer
TheShepanator
This isn’t news, who cares if a bunch of nerds don’t like a comic.
The big scandal back in the day was star trek re-using explosions to save on their CG budget, would TSA have reported on that too?
Stefan L
I doubt it, because Star Trek was only a TV series at the time.
The Lone Steven
Tracer is a lesbian? I er……I need to erm…… conduct an indepth investigation on what kind of smutty things she and her lover get up to.
Pervert Steve aside,
Really? really this is newsworthy? So fecking what if a character is gay/lesbian. It’s 2016 for crying out loud! We saw this “OMG THAT IS SUCH BULL!” with Mass Effect doing gay and lesbian characters. We saw it with Dragon Age:Inquisition.
Honestly, who gives a feck? So what if a character is gay or lesbian or trans or whatever! 9 times out of 10, it is usually written well and is not the sole defining character trait.
I am actually wondering why this is reported as it feels like something that belongs in the news snatch.
Back to pervert steve in the back!
Jim Hargreaves
We’re just poking fun at some of the silly responses. The comic reveal, like you say, isn’t what matters here.
The Lone Steven
Fair enough but kinda feels like it is Newsnatch material.
But that said, fun news is always welcome. :)
(Unless it’s Tuffcub’s defintion of fun then that is disturbing news that only he knows where it came from. :P )
Alos88
That tweet about the brother/sister thing made me do a double take. I’m not sure that’s the sort of representation that Blizzard will ever want to be a part of.
NicholasHeathfield
Check back in five, ten years.
Nate
Nothing like the holidays for everyone to have a total sense of humour failure!
blast71
ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING!!
(That Christmas jumper she’s wearing, I mean)
The Lone Steven
Maybe, it’s disgusting on purpose so that Tracer does er…..
smutty stuff to her girlfriend.
Er…. I need to……
hazelam
gotta love how the anti censorship gamergaters were praising russia when the news seemed to indicate they’d banned the comic.
the same gamergaters that said they would suddenly not buy For Honor when they announced there would be women and people of colour in the game.
says a lot about gamergate don’t you think?
and it says a lot about the intelligence of the bigots complaining that they always bleat about how this sort of thing shouldn’t be in the game.
firstly, they’re wrong, and secondly, it’s not even in the game, it’s in a tie in comic you can read for free, whether you have the game or not.
and those asking why make her gay, what’s that got to do with anything?
then why make her british?
how does that affect the gameplay?
what’s being british got to do with a game character?
you know, i kinda hope the next character they reveal to be gay is Mcree, and give him a black dude for a boyfriend.
really fuck with those bigots tiny little minds.
a gay cowboy will really piss them off. ^_^
Tuffcub
I’m tempted to say “its just a thing, people are being stupids” but given just how shit and hateful 2016, it has got me a little worried.
NicholasHeathfield
Hateful 2016? What specifically..?
hazelam
what, other than the two major political campaigns that were a victories for bigots?
there’s the rise of the far right parties in europe, there’s states in the us that have laws that allow open discrimination against people who are gay, or anywhere on the LGBT spectrum.
seemingly not a week goes by without some innocent unarmed black person getting murdered by the police in the us.
the continued massive scale of human right violations in the middle east, russia and the “civil war” in syria.
western nation supply the arms that are killing civilians over there and when they flee, they get called criminals.
trump seems to be planning a new holocaust.
oh and the year began with the death of David Bowie.
that not enough for you?
proof there’s no god, Bowie gets cancer and dies, trump doesn’t.
beeje13
Open your mind Hazelam it’s not all black and white, good and evil.
I’m referring to what you call victories for bigots, everything else you said I agree with you.
Old School
There we go again, misinformed and uneducated lunatic calling everyone who has a different opinion a bigot. Guess what, snowflake, I voted for Brexit, as did 17 million other people, are you saying they’re bigots too? People from all walks of life voted that way, whites, blacks, Asians, Muslim, Sikhs, etc.
Get the fuck over it and stop calling everyone a racist. People like you are the reason Trump was elected.
Old School
And you actually just said Trump should have got cancer and died… Why? Because you disagree with him?
Wishing death on someone for their views. Liberals…
The Lone Steven
Or maybe, take the political stuff elsewhere? Tis a gaming website dedicate to games, whatever smut Tuffcub is legally allowed to report, games and opinions.
hazelam
ok, i phrased that wrong, i meant it was a victory for two bigots, trump and farage.
two undeniable bigots.
i didn’t actually mean to imply that everybody who voted a certain way was a bigot, though with the trump victory, i believe bigotry had a great deal to do with it.
i hope you didn’t believe that 350 million for the NHS lie.
and i don’t think i ever said i wish trump was dead.
i just lamented that we live in a world where somebody like Bowie gets cancer and dies and somebody like trump becomes one of the most powerful men in the world.
that said, if i had the choice of who died, trump or Bowie, trump would be six feet under before you can say “conflict of interest”
and it’s not just because i disagree with him.
it’s because he’s a lying, incompetent, sexist, racist, homophobic scumbag who,s cheated and scammed his way through life, thanks to his rich daddy, and he’s going to fuck over the lives of millions, possibly billions, all while lining his own pockets and the pockets of the corporate scumbags he’s putting in his cabinet.
and if you hate politics and gaming ever mixing, i hope you like playing, basically nothing.
well, maybe nintendo.but then even the Zelda games involve a despot trying to take over a sovereign state, so that’s out the window.
what are you left with?
Pokemon has dealt with environmental issues.
you sooooo can’t play Tetris.
maybe you’re left with Pacman.
looking forward to the now Kojima game?
not if you don’t like politics you aint.
the “keep politics out of gaming” thing always annoys me.
you’re reducing gaming to the level of childrens toys with that attitude.
you prevent gaming from dealing with real world issues and you hamper the creativity of the creators.
one of the puproses of creative media is to reflect the world in which we live.
take that away and it’s just toys for children.
i would argue that’s not the attitude of somebody who truly cares about gaming.
it demeans both the creators and consumers of the medium.
now i don’t know about you, but i have no problem frequenting a site that talks about childrens toys, especially if they’re Transformers. ^_^
but i kind of assumed TSA was about an adult form of media.
The Lone Steven
Or maybe, I was trying to stop a major argument from occuring?
Politics and gaming yadadadadada…
It’s christmas, it’s not really the time to go into politics. At least, use the abandoned ruins that is the forums to discuss it.
beeje13
Agreed, Merry Christmas to all!