Sojourn Novel: Spoiler Zone

If you haven’t read it, leave the thread. But if you have read it instead: opinions? did you like it? opinions compared to other readings of OW? :grinning:

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I really liked it. But it was really short compared to the others.

The pacing is nice, Sojourn struggle with her body, the state of the world at the Crisis. I was surprised to see Overwatch formed so soon at the begining of the Crisis and that the SEP was there before the Crisis.

I liked Liao & Sojourn bonding time, and Torb being his grumpy self.

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Totally agree about the duration. in fact it annoys me very much that the kindle version is practically the same price without the paper costs.

I must say that the narrative around Sojourn, Liao and partly torb / Morrison is the best. I would really like to see more voicelines between Echo and Soj about Liao. Sojourn’s inner crisis as a cybernetic character is all the better. I think that’s the best justice to the character after that debut stream with a full hour of people always just hyping “black woman with railgun” without knowing any specific details about her in lore or gameplay.

The details on the omnic crisis are unfortunately reduced to multiple references already seen in various visual references: “Are you with us?” stort film, Torbjorn’s comic titan and Reinhardt’s cinematic. However, the general insight into Omnica and the creation of Aurora is interesting, but it hasn’t been explored at all. Even the first mystery around the omnium’s external communication remains a detail that is perhaps too silent. There is also the absence of age references for Sojourn, or at least I never found a dialogue in the book that defined Soj’s age at that time. Among the interesting but incomplete little details: the technology of the herons and the creation of Aurora. I’m very sorry that there was no kind of direct conversation from Liao about her creation that led to the closure of the works. Or worse still on the multiple reasons for the closure of Omnica despite the spread of robots.

I must say, however, that the book is not in the least cloying like Orisa’s but not too adventurous like Ashe’s. And this is a good balance penalized by too little space in the story. I can only say that it only fails to find connections to the outside world of OW: Ana, Adawe and the Australian omnium are only mentioned, and the perfect opportunity to better define military bodies in other countries of the world such as i Crusaders (we never had an “exact” definition of their military role before the crisis) or the relationship between Reyes and Morrison on the post of commander, which I don’t quite understand if Morrison has already replaced Reyes in the role.

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We don’t have more details because it probably has to do with Anubis hijacking this system (since we know it started the Omnic Crisis now) and we probably learn more with the PVE (so they d’ont want to spoil the “surprise” or something… but they did with Pharah’s biography ahah)

You can deduce it : Bonny is five y/o. Her twin sister Valentine had her just after high school (so, 18-19?). And Sojourn has been in the military for 4 years + (+ the voluntering at 16)

Sojourn is something like… 23 to 24 I guess?

That’s because they nedded a plot around why Overwatch was there at that special time, and make Torb & Liao co-exist & work together as a team (and also, show that Morrison had faith in Liao & was an optimist that rallied people together)

I thinks it’s pretty clear tho? Aurora was too advanced, a new form of intelligence and it threatened humanity. Also, no way they could keep selling robots if they are sentients, right? That’s basically slavery. I think it’s safe to keep the audits & flaws found in Omnica Corp and that this whole affair was just bad for OmniCorp.

Morisson is a Captain there. Reyes is mentionned as Strike Commander. The troop Morrison is leading isn’t THE Strike Team. It’s a special unit made to deploy their new Siege tech.


There is still a lot of holes in the story, but I feel it’ll get filled now that this novel is out (and that we can definitelly bury the cancel novel First Strike)

What bothered me most was the SEP programm, before we thought it was made as a response to the Omnic Crisis, but nope : it was already going full swing before that, the Crisis just exposed it. Seeing Morrison 3 months into the Crisis as a Captain of a special unit, after beeing bedridden for weeks with the SEP treatment? It feels rushed in a way? Idk, if someone can help me to wrap my head around it, i’d appreciate it!

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right, I forgot the info added on Pharah’s official page in OW2 website :sweat_smile:.

yes, but I meant in another sense: what happened physically to the Aurora prototype with the closure of the omnica, how did that robot then manage to arrive in Nepal or in any case… what she does in that moment from the closure until the unfolding of the crisis.

ah, I thought I had misunderstood it (I’m Italian, maybe I missed some terminology). I too found Morrison’s narration of timing extremely rushed. I love that there was a conversation with Soj about diversity within one’s capabilities in the military, but he didn’t quite convince me this social speed too about accepting Morrison’s bio-enhancement.

It’s still a big plot point, but we can try to guess with Stone by Stone : she was given personhood, and she travelled the world to know what made humans… well, humans. And her sacrifice is what awakened all the Omnics : she gave them all consciousness.

The things we don’t know are : how/when all he omnium got rid off/got cut off from Anubis - when/how Anubis was contained - and when/how Aurora sacrificed.

I still hope we’ll know more in the upcoming months, because Ramattra is definitely to Anubis.

I’m french, and i only listened to audible while taking notes :sweat_smile: I’m having a second read now that I have the book and get all the details I’ve missed the first time.

That’s why sharing with other about the book is important : to help us understand better or have a different point of view on things (especialy after YEARS of headcanons filling up the void)

Hypothetically, prior to Adawe’s proposal to establish Numbani. In the past I hypothesized that Zenyatta’s date of birth (20 years ago) was an ideal method to signal the moment of “rebirth”, IF the theory is confirmed that the “omnics” are only those who were created in the Omnic generation who over time they are decreasing their population (as mentioned by Ramattra origins)

Hypothetically, prior to Adawe’s proposal to establish Numbani. In the past I hypothesized that Zenyatta’s date of birth (20 years ago) was an ideal method to signal the moment of “rebirth”, IF the theory is confirmed that the “omnics” are only those who were created in the Omnic generation who over time they are decreasing their population (as mentioned by Ramattra origins)

But with the rewrite of the biographies I doubt they will canonize “20 years” as well as being too far from the 30 years since the omnic crisis. :thinking:

I feel like the Heron/Seige setup missions as well as the omnium infiltration (with the 5 access points) feel way too Videogame-y to not be Overwatch 2 PVE concepts - even if they’re ones which were scrapped at some point.

Oh, i completely fogot to mention that : in Deadlock Rebels, Ashe said thats the omnics (including BOB) disappeared during the Crisis.

But in Sojourn, they just… straight up attack humans?

I wonder for a while about it. Was it because of the proximity of the Detroit omnium? Was is something else that corrupted the omnics? Did other omnics disappeared after the start of the war? I’m kinda confused about it.

Maybe it’s that there’s not a major Omnium in the american Southwest? It might be that they went to the war front (Ie like we see Bastion doing in his short.)

In other news. Overwatch Writers. You’ve presented yourself with an opportunity to have an absolutely insane buddy cop situation with Ana and Gabriel as the two members who aren’t in the novel. It’d be Great. their dynamic seems like they’d be firebrand together when they’re younger.

So, I’m not finished with the book yet, but one thing comes to mind after the opening chapter. Given that civilian omnics attack the moment they get the opportunity, doesn’t that prove the robot racists right?

Like, for so long there’s been this attempt to humanize the ‘civilized’ omnics that were like B.O.B or (presumably) Zenyatta as unfortunate bystanders suffering the fallout because of their weaponised cousins. And as mentioned further up, in Deadlock Rebels the civilian omnics appear to report back to the omniums for reassignment/recycling or at very least sit out the crisis away from the fighting.

But given that now apparently all it takes is one event to turn all omnics into feral killing machines, isn’t it totally rational to lock them in their own sections of the city? Isn’t the segregation of omnics totally justified from the standpoint of public safety? Why are there even human sympathizers if the first thing the omnics did upon reaching self-awareness was immediately attempt worldwide genocide?

Maybe it gets answered later on or something, but it’s a really odd way to go with the start of the crisis, especially when I can’t think of another bit of media that shows it happening that way. It’s always been the omniums reactivating that started the crisis before now, though I might be misremembering.

Thing is : they didn’t have their self-awarness yet. They didn’t have their awakening (thanks to Aurora self sacrifice), and they didn’t have their soul yet. They were just advanced robots.

I’ll let you read a bit more before going on full explanation but some things are “soft-retcon” (and honestly, we only had like, one Atlas News article about the Crisis that had already been kinda soft-retcon with Reyes never being jealous of Morrison promotion anyway)

Well, I finished it, but I can’t see any reference to the awakening having happened or not. But since we do know that Aurora is responsible for the awakening, is it that far of a stretch to imagine this is it? It’s not unknown for omnics to lose their sense of identity when confronted with intelligences greater than themselves, what with Bastion going back into kill mode just from interfacing with a fallen omnic and the incident with Anubis.

Aside from that, this book is a wild ride. There are some really cool ideas that are mired in some truly dreadful plotting. Frankly, if this book was more focused on Sojourn playing 4D super chess against an omnium, it would have been so much better.

But rambling off the top of my head, some raw observations about the book:

  1. The Siege system is a great way to make basically all the battle chapters a slog. Any time the book threatens to be interesting outside of the quiet character chapters back at base, this system comes into play and reduces any fight into ‘defend the thing for twenty minutes’. Also, the solution to the robot apocalypse is… more robots but this time they’re dumb? In the same book where a commander is so against cyborgs he accuses one of being a traitor? Seems like it would never get greenlit.

  2. The time scale is really, really short for the actions being taken. The Crisis swings in the lore between being a multi-year protracted battle of global proportions causing untold death and trauma, or a minor inconvenience that can be solved in weeks. Only three months into the Crisis, Overwatch is up and running full pelt and disables their first omnium. Way to short in my opinion. Just the logistics involved in what is essentially D-Day against an omnium should probably take three months with the shattered logistics system, let alone taking back three cities full of killer robots and destroying the city-sized factory that creates them.

  3. There’s this big setup towards Campbell accusing Chase of being a spy/traitor, but the consequences of that action last maybe five minutes before it becomes irrelevant.

  4. If the omnics are supposed to be self-learning and always improving from every defeat and victory, why does Chase, in all her tactical genius, choose a bridge for her mission in Toronto after outright showing the omnics in Ottawa that massing troops on a bridge is a fine way to kill them all at once by just destroying the bridge? (I guess it’s not over a river, but it would probably still kill a few people and cause total chaos.)

  5. Why did they chop Bonnie’s legs off? She was on life support because she was drowned in the beginning, right? How does cutting her legs off help her breathe better?

  6. Hands down the best chapters are when Chase is just chilling back at base trying to come up with ways to fight the omnium, playing super chess and thinking about her life. Between that and her coming to terms with being different and embracing her differences, this book accomplished something I thought to be impossible; It made Sojourn a bearable and decently interesting character.

  7. That said, the other members of Chase’s team might as well be cardboard cutouts for all they add to the story. As far as I can tell the only ones that matter really are Noah and Helena, and even they really don’t meaningfully contribute to the story in a big way.

I’m sure that i’ll come up with some other thoughts later, but all in all my opinion is that this book was… fine. Inoffensively fine. It’s not good, but it’s short so at least it respects my time. But if they retconned this whole thing tomorrow I wouldn’t care about it at all, and I certainly wouldn’t bother reading it again, unlike Deadlock Rebels. If I wasn’t an Overwatch fan, I probably would have dropped it after chapter two.

So yeah. Disappointed. But i kinda saw it coming, so i guess not as much as if i was hyped.

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