I’m a (barely-adherent) Kemetic Pagan, so I was super excited for an Egypt season ever since its Blizzcon tease, especially an Anubis mythic skin, who is my guiding deity.
It looks really cool, the effects are satisfying, and the different faces give it a variety of vibes. But I have one major issue: the voice lines are Cartoonishly Evil.
Anubis’s depiction as some evil God of Death is an artificial product of pop-culture, and a huge pet peeve of mine. Anubis is A god of the DEAD, and ancient Egypt largely viewed death in a positive light. Anubis, in the original stories, was depicted as gentle and kind, and sometimes even “cheated” the soul-weighing ritual to allow more people into a heavenly afterlife. It feels like the skin/writing team (who are nonetheless incredible artists) didn’t do enough research.
Mythics don’t have to remain beholden to the characters’ personalities. Ana’s and Mercy’s, for example, entirely re-invent the characters. But Anubis Reaper’s personality is just… Reaper II. Instead, imagine how cool and interesting it would have been to see a benevolent Reaper in the guise of a god?
I’m not insulted by this or anything. It’s fun to indulge in silly pop culture tropes now and then. But this skin could have gone above and beyond to be truly unique, and Overwatch’s one shot at putting Anubis in the game missed the mark (Pharah doesn’t count!)
I realize it’s an impossible request to rework an already finished skin, but on the chance that this reaches the eyes of a Blizz team member, I would absolutely double-dip for an alternate version of the skin that gives us an Anubis that’s not so edgy, mean, and stereotypical.
(Also please let us equip the glowy shroud with any of the base armor levels!)
Quite a fascinating read. Many religions that have Death Gods actually treat death in a positive light when you look at them.
I was ready to reply that Reaper is just a cartoonishly evil person so his voice lines with the skin make sense, but I like the idea of him sounding more like a deity and less Reaper.
But, then again, he’s running around with dual shotguns…
As myself and another mentioned in a different thread, Anubis is technically the god of mummification and the guide for the souls of the dead to take them to the afterlife (or feed them to Ammit), he’s not THE god of death or of the dead, that’s Osiris.
Further neither Anubis or Osiris is evil.
If they wanted to give Reaper an ‘evil’ egyptian skin they could have given him Set instead.
However, I do like the way the Anubis skin looks, I think it’s pretty slick. But the general desire of the modern world to see all gods associated with the underworld as ‘evil’ is pretty lame. Very few death gods were ever actually evil, if they had an ‘alignment’ at all it was usually neutral, or in the case of Osiris, he was/is the god of Death and Order.
I’m a Norse pagan, we don’t have an evil death god either. Far from it.
Yeah, it’s a bit odd that Anubis Reaper is being portrayed as some sort of hellbent Grim Reaper when Anubis is essentially just a spirit guide for those who’ve passed.
Even more odd because most cultures view death as necessary part of life to balance out the world, and Anubis’ part in that is no different, reverent, in fact.
I was thinking that Set would have been more appropriate (although I personally don’t consider Set a malevolent force, despite his quite negative depictions in original material).
I had a friend who a was Asatru. His patron was Loki, and he was in the same boat I’m in now (we knew each other before I went Pagan). Loki is always portrayed as evil or satanic (or a comic supervillain), but he explained to me that Loki represents a great many things, a lot of them good!
Good guys are allowed to have gnarly guns in this game!
Yeah, they cooked with that one. The face looks awesome.
While Loki is, indeed, the deceiver of the gods and the driving force behind Ragnarok, that’s because he is fated to be that. He doesn’t have a choice, just as Thor has no choice but to fall to the world serpent. And while Loki is Odin’s blood brother and not Thor’s, he and Thor often hang out.
Loki’s biggest problem is that he runs his mouth a lot. He basically stands in Asgard and accuses every goddess he sees of sleeping with every god in existence, including himself. But the Norse gods all did that kind of crap.
One of my favorite stories in the Eddas basically consists of Odin standing on one side of a river and Thor standing on the other and the two of them just yell back and forth about which one is on the better side of the river and why, and it culminates in Odin declaring Thor is too afraid to fart because if he does the frost giants will know where he is.
That doesn’t even touch on the time Loki tied his family jewels to a goat’s beard and had the goat pull him around the feast hall by his nards just to make Skadi laugh for a bet.
As an Asatruar myself, I tend to not hang out with Loki-worshippers that much though
I have my reasons lol.
Just think of it this way; Reaper is an edgelord cosplaying as Anubis because he thinks death makes him look scary.
I too am annoyed with “villainous” depictions of death, and I think it kind of infantilizes your audience. Our pop culture wants us to fear death, and treat speaking of it as taboo, but I think most people, even kids, are mature enough to see through that. There’s a reason villains like the Joker (who just represents disorder) are taken seriously, while the Grim Reaper has to take children on wacky adventures because he lost a bet.
I think taking the old stories as exact canon is perfectly legit, because what else are we gonna go by? But the way my friend approached them, and the way I do now, is more loose. I see them as stories written by people who, even back then, were susceptible to biases towards the gods and had many different interpretations, just as modern people do.
That’s probably an easy mindset for me, since Kemetic religion spanned such a vast amount of time that there is no concrete canon, and events and gods changed, disappeared, and sometimes fused over millennia. So I get to take my pick and form my own relationship with them.
My friend followed Loki as a symbol of breaking down barriers (personal and societal), and the fluidity of gender, among other things. In a similar vein, I mentioned I don’t see Set as an evil entity; to me, he represents destruction, but as an integral part of nature, a necessary step for creation, rebirth, and change. He’s very much akin to Shiva from Hindu religions. Set is famous for slaying Apep the snake, an entity of darkness, so destruction doesn’t have to be a bad thing
Yep, absolutely it does. I think that’s part of my annoyance, not just that pop culture gets Anubis “wrong”, but that they transform him into something worthy of eyerolls.
About the voice, ngl, 99% of the voice lines in this game are cringe, they only ones (if any) you hear, are the meme ones: “and they say”, “oh yeah”, “in the desert”, etc.
I dont blame the Voice actors (except Sombra maybe), cuz probably they have a director or something.
Note: Add Venture’s “Chungus” voice line and everything is forgiven.
Well, I’m guessing you didn’t see my retelling of Set and Osiris’s story in another thread (not as long as the Loki/Thor story). Was speaking with HanaSolo about the difference between Set and Osiris/Anubis and I wrote:
Here we have the god of chaos and destruction, jealous of his brother Osiris, the god of death and order, to the point where he’s like “Hey, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna trick my brother into laying down in this box and then I’m gonna throw it into the Nile. But oh wait, that’s not good enough so after he’s been gone long enough that we know he starved to death floating around in the open sea, I’m going to dismember his body and cut it into fourteen pieces. THEN, I’m gonna scatter those pieces all throughout Egypt. And his wife, bless her soul, she’s going to go find all his pieces and put him back together, but I made sure his junk got eaten by a fish so he might be resurrected but he’s also a Ken doll. LOL aren’t I awesome?”
Anubis is just like “Hey, you got everything you need? Yeah? This is a nice set of pottery your people buried you with! Glad to see your heart is as light as a feather.”
So yeah lol I can’t say I see Set as the good guy either. But I guess in the end at least Isis made Osiris a… goldmember?
How about Christianity which features a wonderful story about the time Yahweh and Satan had a bet about whether or not Satan could torture a poor innocent guy into forsaking the name of Yahweh?
And the poor guy loses everything. Everyone in his life dies. His kids die, his wife dies, his crops fail, he’s starving and sick and still doesn’t denounce Yahweh so then in the end Yahweh is like hey yeah good job not cursing my name let me just give you some replacement kids and a replacement wife and a new farm, who cares about what you lost as long as I won my bet with Satan…
Is it wrong for a guy to ask for a skin without cringe voice lines though? xD
I didn’t see, but it’s a famous episode, so I’m aware of it! I don’t take a very literal approach to the myths. It could be that the ones who conveyed the original story truly believed Set to be a villain, or it could be that he was simply used as a literary device to represent an evil act, due to his proximity to scary/unpleasant concepts. The gods are complicated figures; there’s good and bad to most of them, and that’s expressed in a wide variety of ways that sometimes contradict and conflict with each other across time.
This exactly. Their personalities don’t align at all. One is confident in their abilities to the point of being arrogant, while the other is the type to guide lost souls to the underworld.
YES. This. They didn’t even try to pick a skin that would make sense. Instead they just picked the most basic skin concept “god of death” for “death guy” and that was it.
So many cool ideas and they wasted his one and only mythic on this…
Not to mention that Ramattra fits this whole concept better on every level. He’s like a Sheppard for omnics, his ult is like a sandstorm, and he’s regal in his mannerisms just like you would expect from a god.
I am.
Hell, I’d sacrifice the 80 tokens I spent just for them to release Ramattra mythic and take back Reaper’s for a different theme. Anything would be better than this.
Honestly, reading the brief bio for Osiris, he kinda fits Reaper really well. Betrayed, God of death (for real this time), and resurrected. He even hits the same pose that Reaper does in his heroic emote.
The issue is that Osiris is, above all, god of order. That doesn’t fit Reaper at all.
However.
Osiris carries the Pharaoh’s staff which looks like a shepherd’s crook—Ramattra’s staff.
He is also always depicted with his arms crossed over his chest, just like Ramattra does with his omnic arms when he’s in Ravager form.
Osiris also cannot procreate because when Set cut him up, his relevant part was eaten by a fish so his wife Isis crafted him one out of gold (hence why I made the goldmember joke above). And that’s why he’s the god of death, actually. Because he cannot create life.
One of Ramattra’s big things is that the Omnics are a single generation species… because they cannot procreate.
Well, I mean Reaper was all about justice, but became deluded by the experiments done on him, warping his sense of good and evil. Hence why in the retribution mission he shot the guy who bombed the Overwatch headquarters. Reaper does have a code he abides by, so it’s not really random evil acts for the sake of being evil.
Though, whether justice and order are the same thing is a different story.
This also seems very reminiscent of the experiments done on Reaper. Both the soldier 24 program and the experiments done by Moira left him mutilated. I would not be surprised if the experiments made him incapable of “creating life” lets say.
Though he already has a wife and kid since before the experiments, so maybe not.
Either way, Osiris would’ve at least fit the theme better than Anubis and Ramattra would’ve fit the overall theme better than Reaper. Double fail by the devs.
