Overwatch characters styling

Story Discussion
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Tl;dr: Some ow characters fashion discussion.

I have been wanting to do a post about this for a while, which is describing what the characters like to wear based on what we’ve seen so far and their personalities. While I completely understand that’s better for consistency to dress up the heroes in simple clothes in the comics, and to sell skins you need to dress them up in clothes that are either generic masculine for the guys, and sexy/cute for the gals. It is an important storytelling tool that I feel more games and series should pay attention to.

I’m going to describe some of the characters I wanted to talk about but if you want me to talk about a specific character just ask, if you also just want to talk about your favorite characters or to disagree, feel free to do so. It’s all for fun.

The first one is Tracer

I was amused when it was revealed that Tracer’s Punk and Ultraviolet skins ended up being canon in some way because, according to the comics, she is a big fan of rock music. That seems to be a depiction of a younger Lena, before her training as a military pilot. But even as we mature it doesn’t mean that we throw away our tastes and create a new one from zero, it all just transforms to match our new way of life. You can see that in her default design she keeps her ear piercing and her bomber jacket, so like I mentioned before, it’s the young punk Lena influencing the older pilot, Lena.

So, I think Tracer still rocks her leather jackets just with less studs, spikes, and more buttons and patches. But also, denim jackets with the accessories previously mentioned, and hand painted illustrations in them. She would also wear scarves, for the cool dramatic effect, but after too many times of it getting stuck to doors and chairs during timeline blinks, she decided to stick with neckerchiefs, which she also uses as headbands. For her bottoms, leggings with hotpants and short skirts could still be part of her wardrobe, but cropped pants would also be one of her preferences. When Tracer isn’t wearing her high-performance sneaker-crocks, Lena is wearing whatever is the version of the future converse all-stars or moccasins. When it comes to shirts, she keeps it simple.

Bonus: While Emily(Tracer’s gf), sounds a lot like Amelie, it’s also the nickname of the female statue that we see as the radiator topping of Rolls-Royce cars, that carries the title of Spirit of Ecstasy.(If this was intentional or not by the writers, how knows? But now that’s posted here they can probably say it is. lol)

Ashe

Another leather jacket wearing woman! Well, as teen she’s using a leather jacket, as an adult is more like a leather vest. However, the meaning is a little different from Lena’s, while both like to ride motorcycles and it’s a safety item, for young Ashe it could be interpreted as a symbol of her rebellion. She also leaves from being detained in ripped jeans (with a wallet chain) and a hoodie.

Ashe is from a rich family that worked as business consultants, and one important thing she must’ve learned from her family at an early age is about sending a message by the way you present yourself. Then it’s no surprise her main look consists of a white dress shirt and tie. She means business and wants to be taken seriously. Her hat and boot have more to do with her local identity and not practicality. Riding a motorcycle with a cowboy hat isn’t very doable and safe, but it’s good to protect you from the sun, and, more importantly, when you are wearing a hat with a wide brim if you want to look at someone in the eyes you need to raise your head a bit more, and it’s almost like you are looking down at them…

Growing up she must have been surrounded by named brands, but you could see in her clothes her trying to bring something of her self-expression and deviation in them. But as she became a criminal buying expensive clothes is an easy way to be tracked. So, I think every item she has is custom made, that way it’s all to fit her tastes.

Different types of hats are among her favorite items, and there are a lot of cool hat designs, but besides the cowboy hat I think fedoras are her favorite (image internet gave the general public isn’t the correct one, think of it more like Indiana Jones’ hat). Analog watches are also of her interests, she admires the mechanisms and precision on their builds and how reliable they can be. Old pocket watches add some dramatic flair to her looks.

The last thing I want to talk about are her tattoos that are made in traditional American style. What I want to talk more specifically are her rose thorns tattoos, that while might be cliché, it fits Ashe’s biker motif and her character well. Thorns show that she really shouldn’t be messed with and the flower that’s a symbol femininity, love, beauty and ephemerality. Which I found funny because, except for the thorns part, I wouldn’t define Ashe as any of those things. She’s beautiful, of course, but I don’t associate her character as someone to flaunt her own beauty.

Bonus: Instead of talking about the historical figure her nickname “Calamity” comes from, that anyone can google, check out this underrated cartoon intro and cool design of the main character.

Pharah

When I was coming up with the idea for this topic, I was going to write about 2 female and 2 male characters. But I felt like I needed to complete the leather jacket woman trifecta.

Fareeha’s personality shows that she is professional and serious during work (keeping things to herself and always going through conflicts/strategies in her head), but warm and caring towards people she’s familiar with. This could come from her growing up having a mixed heritage and from knowing people of varied nationalities. She reveals or hide the parts of her depending on the environment as a safety mechanism and is good at reading others’ emotions.

I can see her as the type of person that buys clothes thinking on how she’ll match the different textures, fabrics and layers that she already has. Because she works in an armor layering is something natural to her. Blazers, of many colors, are among her favorite types of clothing because of how it defines her shoulders (also, her dad’s influence). While her clothes may look simple, they are deceptively expensive, mixing big brands and cheap clothes from the local market. She would just look for stuff that fit her body well and when it comes to shapes she would like more loose fits at the top and more tight fits for bottoms. Keeping with the shape of her armor. Also, V-necks, I know they put her in a normal round neck t-shirt, but I think she would look much better in v-necks.

She uses those hair adornments and likes aviator sunglasses so I could see her being really into different types of accessories like, rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, buttons, brooches, tie clips, cufflinks, chains, etc., and of course, a collection of sunglasses.

When it comes to fishing with her dad, playing soccer or basketball with friends she would have the complete gear for those activities. Cleats, custom jerseys, compression shirts and matching vests with her dad when they go hiking and fishing. However, when it comes to the gym she just wears old clothes that are comfortable, and customize them by cutting the sleeves of t-shirts or making sweaters into crop tops.

Bonus: Like I wrote in previous posts, she should have more tattoos, no person has a face tattoo as their first and only one. The same goes to Ana!

I could write more about her, but this post is getting too big already.

Hanzo/Genji

I’m grouping these two because, unsurprisingly, they share similar fashion influences. You see it in their younger outfits share the same anachronistic traditional samurai and ninja clothes, or their most recently looks in the lore. Even though ow2 Genji and casual Hanzo are from different fashion segments, they overlap, and we can see they have the same silhouette. Hanzo’s is more like a Japanese street wear, with the large pants, laced boots and coat with the high collar. OW2 Genji’s clothes are techwear, carrying a sport inspiration to it from the fabrics, with the neon green, black and gray colors, jogger pants and the geometric shapes in the coat with also a high collar (I wouldn’t surprise me if the artist that created his ow2 concept went on google and typed “urban ninja” for this design). Casual Hanzo also have some of the sport look in the quiver/bag he carries, and the in the kanezaka event skin we saw some techwear inspirations in his glasses and the patterns of his clothes, the problem is that it clashed with his old-style clothes, which lead fans to make fun of the weir combination.

Another thing worth mentioning is Hanzo’s tattoos. Japanese tattoos have a lot of history, and I’m in no way a specialist, but in my research, I discovered that at the beginning those big pieces, that covered the entire back or arms, and legs carried a kind of religious meaning, they would tattoo things that represented the kind of person they wanted to become or a promise. Over time, tattoos started to be associated with criminals because they received small tags on visible places and each type symbolized a crime. Later, movies created that association that we are familiar with, that the yakuza have those big traditional tattoos as a symbol of their strength, status or ranks. While some of them adopted the trend, it got out of fashion, because if you are a criminal, having marks that could easily identify you is not a very smart thing to do. These days, while there’s still prejudice against tattoos in Japan (and in a lot of places in the world) the things are changing with the new generations.
Now back to Hanzo’s tattoo, while we see in the animated short as part of his power, Genji doesn’t have one he’s also able to summon a dragon. So, Hanzo getting a tattoo could be an aesthetic choice! And it makes sense, we see him in his casual look with piercings and a shaved head, kind of referencing a samurai hairstyle. So, it would be safe to assume that he is into body modification. Maybe his style is more alternative in the end.

I could talk more about what I think would be a cool style for Genji, but I feel like whatever I type or criticize about him will make his fans throw a fit. So, if anyone want to know, just reply saying you want my opinion.

Bonus: Here is a cool video talking about the process of kimono dyeing that reminds me of Hanzo’s default skin:

There you go, I wanted to write more about other characters, like Reyes, Amelie, and Satya, but this post is already too long. So, I’m sorry about any grammar mistakes!

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Lmao! I’m not sure why you’d think anyone would have a major problem with you talking about his fashion; I think you just felt compelled to include a jab at the people who commonly defend him here. In any case, I myself am not the biggest fan of several of his design choices, so feel free to go off and I might even agree on some points.

As far as your ideas go, there’s nothing you could say that would be worse than putting him in a crop top and booty shorts or a French maid outfit. Those two concepts exist, so it’s impossible for you to have the worst :grin:.

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Nah, It’s mostly me being lazy at that point. I didn’t imagine this post gaining any attention because it’s too long, and what do ow fans care or know about design. I started writing it the end of last month but put that aside until recently. I just wanted to finish it because I posted the idea to some people here and they liked it.
Also, whatever I mention Genji in any of my posts people bait me into a meaningless discussion about him and derails the topic.

Deletes paragraph

/jk

If you want me to write about him I’ll do it later. I won’t make any promises because I’m busy today but I’ll do my best.

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Yeah, go for it. Whenever you feel like it, there’s no rush.

Genji mains typically wouldn’t care about his fashion sense, so it’s rare for me to see any serious takes on it outside of a decent artist interpretation of his casual wear every now and then. But, as you mentioned, that’s probably just the average person’s lack of interest in the idea behind a design. In 2021, there aren’t a ton of people still breaking down Overwatch characters.

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Genji(continuation)

I think a young Genji would dress in those Japanese old-school hip-hop-inspired street fashion that consists of (but not limited to), snowboard pants, cargo pants, hockey jerseys, baseball jerseys, work boots, sneakers, and those sweatbands. Why do I think that? Because I feel it would be a different take on the original idea of what being ninja is. I use the word that way because it originally meant “to be stealthy” or “to act sneaky” (not a direct translation), so anyone could be ninja it wasn’t a title like samurai is(which is the correct way to describe what he is). So by using more baggy clothes he could easy conceal shurikens or a tanto in his person, without signalling that “hey, I’m a trained assassin”. It would give him a more laidback attitude.

I understand what they wanted to do with his design in ow2, the storyboarder said that they gave Genji a hoodie to make his big reveal exiting in the trailer as if he was working disguised. The parkour style techwear makes sense to indicate that he is the mobility character. But it doesn’t tell anything about his personality. If they always wanted to give him clothes I would’ve prefered something that showed he has been through. My suggestion is something inspired by monk clothes, to indicate the time he spent with them.

There’s this cool story that I was told once that in martial arts in the past they didn’t use the belt colors. You would receive a white belt at the start and as your training went this belt would change colors because of all the dirt from falling into the ground, the sweat, and the blood from arduous training. At the end of years of training, it would be so dirty that no matter how many times you washed the color would stay dark, so you would’ve become a “black-belt”.

While I know many fans wanted a skin for him with a hoodie for so long. I think for him, clothing that symbolizes his internal journey and represents both omnic and human existence would’ve been cooler.

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That reasoning is actually pretty good, I’d never thought of that approach. Though I have thought about Genji’s style many times, and that’s very much like what I might do with his style. I always felt like he might identify more with a life and aesthetic on the street than as a scion of a rich and powerful crime family, though that’s potentially just an exaggeration of details from his backstory.

Genji’s skins are all very formal and by the books. With how present day Genji has been portrayed, these aren’t totally out of place, but I’d like to see more that conveys the aforementioned “laid back” attitude, whether it’s a present Genji skin or young Genji skin.

I remember being very excited about the new design simply because they had him in the pants. I was never a fan of the “cyber-booty” look that’s very common with cyborg characters, although I know that helps sell it and it’s just a personal thing for me. Covering his body completely takes away from the cyberized aesthetic, but I always wanted his original “Hanzo” concept as a skin.

In any case, the more I look at it, the more I agree that it’s missing a key element of character and it doesn’t really spark immediate interest, not unless you’re already very familiar with Genji as a character. It has the infamous LED lighting that lines up with his helmet, but then, the in-game design doesn’t utilize the hood as far as we can tell.

Now I admit this may be a little too “on the nose” in terms of symbolism, but I would’ve liked something where, in addition to having monk-style pants, he decided to cover half his body is in a synthetic human skin and leave the other half of his body left uncovered.

Of course, I would probably want to remove the helmet in this scenario, and the designers seem intent on keeping it, understandably as it’s iconic. Assuming they’re hiding the lower half of his face for a significant reason, I might replace the helmet with bandages around his mouth similar to what you may see on a monk’s or traditional martial artist’s arms.

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I’ve said in topics in the past that I’m not a big fan of a lot of redesigns. Sure the new models are beautiful and detailed, but the characters lost some of their identities or had it watered down.

For example, with Tracer, they basically removed the pilot aspects of her look. I remember the artist said that he liked a design he did for her with a windbreaker jacket but it didn’t have the pilot theme to it. But the current one also doesn’t have that. Her eyewear doesn’t even look like goggles anymore, just high-tech glasses. Her jacket is a normal grey/brown leather jacket. They made her look like some kind of “tech sprinter”, similar to her summer games skins. The only good parts are her new leggings and shoes.

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They probably could’ve kept the same jacket and made it look more raggedy/worn by this point in contrast to her clean new outfit. Not like she was ever a fashion queen anyway with those croc things. I would think it has sentimental value to her, otherwise, why would she be wearing it in the first place? She had a strike team uniform before that. “She just liked the style” is a sufficient answer to that, but it’s not as interesting.

Then again, I shouldn’t act like I’m very familiar with the consistency of pilot jackets; maybe they felt like it was close enough? The new one does feel more…subdued, if that’s the right line of thinking. Combined with the loss of her goggles, the pilot aesthetic doesn’t speak as loudly.

I think about Tracer and Genji’s unused concepts somewhat often. I imagine they’re unused for a reason, and I wouldn’t expect them to be picked up suddenly for the redesigns. But I very much wish they would come the game for an anniversary. This one in particular:

Needless cleavage and heels aside, I’ve always loved this aesthetic. The pilot theme is even heavier here, maybe even too heavy for their liking.

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Yeah, she even has a custom patch in it. That’s a way an artist can tell us that she’s attached to it.

The jacket is really close to what we got in the finished design and I love the pilot helmet and goggles. The problem, and the possible reason why they didn’t go with this design, is that rest look too busy and the color palette isn’t very appealing/distinct.

Tracer’s, and Lara Croft’s, pilot designs are inspired by Amelia Earhart who kinda became the mold for the female adventurer.

(Tracer has also other similarities with Lara Croft, besides the initial inspiration, like the dual-wielding pistols, being British, similar names, close friend named Winston)

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With that in mind, they could at minimum put the old patch on the new jacket somewhere, unless it is and I just missed it.

Yeah, I think you’re on point with that “busy” assessment, and I noticed more as I was posting it. Particularly, what eventually becomes the chronal accelerator looks confusing and bit over-designed, and the neck tie doesn’t add much. I like the palette, but being that she’s the bubbly poster girl of a very colorful and vibrant game, I admit it wouldn’t work nearly as well as her current color scheme/palette. You don’t want your mascot being drowned out.

I’ve heard nothing but great things about Lara Croft and how she’s a gold standard for protagonists, so that doesn’t surprise me. Tomb Raider is one of those series I’ve always thought I should try, but never committed to doing so.

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It seems that they replaced it with some typography of her name printed, which is a shame.

I don’t know much about the old games, but I super recommend the new trilogy.

The first one Tomb Raider(2013) is my favorite of the 3. It has a great story and characters. It has horror elements to it and the camera seems to be stalking Lara, which helps with the creepy vibe. It has a Japanese-inspired story, and since you are a Genji fan, I think you’ll enjoy that.
You can get it very for cheap during sales. They even gave it out for free once.

The second one is Raise of the Tomb Raider. The story is not as good but still has great moments on it. The gameplay is improved(I loved doing executions).

The third one is Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The story is the weakest one, but the setting is really pretty. Some new gameplay stuff but nothing very significant. It’s good if you just want more of the series.

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