Thank you for removing the noose

Most Americans know exactly what it references… it’s the professionally offended cringe fringe that are ruining it for the rest of us.

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It’s childish, immature rubbish like this that makes me question, “How has humanity survived for 2020+ years?”

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No social media, probably.

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I can’t believe people still assume that it’s for racism. It was to make other sprays suicidal. And now Blizzard took that fun away. I hope you are happy >:/

I still dont get what was racist in it as EU person. I think we were hanging people no matter the skin. More or so base on the “crime” i guess as it was one of medieval way to kill people.

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Me too I play a ton of Cree and faced many of them and I didn’t get tbagged then spray …

I mean, the noose itself wasnt racist, I would have suspended the people who use it in a racist way, but Blizz decided to get rid of it all together.

I think in times like this we should all consider what happens if everything, mild as it is, gets censored, how many things we enjoy will be too. Im not a POC so I dont have any ground to stand on to defend the things you might find offensive because of history, but I think we should punish those who offend not just censor the words they say and pretend those people aren’t offensive anymore because they cant speak.

EDIT:

I personally always thought it was a lasso.

Is noose that mcree rope?
Whats the racist part??
I mean its not like you can only use it for black ppl.

You mean hate instead of hatred??

It’s supposedly because nooses were used in the context of lynching black people in the past.
The problem is that in the context of a “Western” movie trope, the noose has a completely different connotation, that is NOT racist in nature.

But context is too complicated for the cringe fringe.

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Generic Noose

Can be interpreted (emphasis on ‘can’) as:

  • Racist [Lynching]
  • Execution [Hanging]
  • Misleading [Original message was movie reference]
  • Widely Misused [Hanging spray combinations]

We don’t know the exact reason why they replaced it. They could’ve done it for the above reasons. Maybe they had different reasons. It doesn’t matter. There’s no point arguing on things we don’t know. Let’s just accept the new spray and move on.

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Unfortunately you’re trying to talk real-world sense on a gaming forum, where most people don’t understand that it’s a better decision to avoid someone taking the noose the wrong way than it is to keep an entirely pointless spray in the game.

Either way, it’s gone, so let the weebs cry if they want. Blizzard made the sensible call.

You confuse “understand” and “agree”
Most people don’t AGREE that its a better decision to avoid someone’s subjective feelings being hurt over removing something from the game.

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I would like to think that most people understand the difference between fiction and reality. I assume that they do on some level because they play a game where we kill people with guns. We don’t feel the need to remove the guns from the game because we can make that separation.

Why can’t we do that with a noose?

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You said the noose was referencing a specific movie, right? Maybe they removed it because that reference wasn’t clear enough and people kept seeing it at something else?

Must just be a lack of education on your part OP… but the Noose has absolutely nothing to do with racism. It’s entirely about Old Western Justice… just because an Extremely small amount of players used it on black heroes & used racial slurs doesn’t mean it should be removed, it means those players should be reported for abusive chat & suspended… context is so easily ignored in 2020

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It wasn’t referencing JUST one movie - the noose is an iconic part of the western genre.
the only people capable of “confusing” it for something else - when taken in the context of Mccree as a cowboy outlaw - are people operating in bad faith.

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Yep. The only ones offended by the Noose spray are ignorant & are addicted to being offended or just enjoy pretending to be upset by it. Nothing to do with racism, entirely about Old Western Justice. The spray shouldn’t have been removed, the people using it coupled with racial slurs should be suspended…

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Perhaps, but it is still fiction either way.

Look on Netflix or whatever. All the movies are about someone doing something nasty. Our stories, our movies, our computer games. It’s everywhere, but that’s okay because it’s all fiction.

Yet, now we’re censoring fiction. I don’t like it.

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I mean like, a bunch of other people have stressed this in other posts on this subject since this is only like the 60th thread about it.

There was not a concerted effort to ask blizzard to remove it.

Plain and simple. There’s more noise about removing the police skins in general than there was about removing this one spray.

The response from a lot of people is, generally, that it’s probably better that it’s gone, as it does have a lot of racist implications in the context of the United States South- and McCree’s apparently from Texas now so, yeehaw dude you’re in the South proper now, not the Southwest. McCree’s cowboy persona is an ahistorical anachronism that’s based off of movies instead of any real “wild west,” which in reality was a lot gayer and filled with more poc than any white people like you’d see on the silver screen.

That said. Can people look at a noose and say, yeah, that has racist implications? Jury’s out, but I certainly don’t trust at face value that there’s nothing there at all in some people’s feelings it can be read like that.

McCree’s original design, back from the Overwatch artbook, before they brought him over to Overwatch, featured a confederate flag, another strong symbol in the United States that is unable to be removed from the concept of white supremacy, especially in the American South.

What people often cite is yeah, the lone noose reminds a lot of people of lynchings, as lynchings were especially done with nooses. You can easily find all sorts of modern day examples of people using the noose as a symbol of it, there was a huge number of idiots who put one on a stuffed president obama as a symbol of their racist hatred of the man. As someone who is from the south, who has family who was that part of the South in their lifetimes (and thank god they’re dead, they were horrible human beings who’d want me dead too) Lynching, to me, is a symbol of vigilante ‘justice.’

Justice being misused purposefully in that sense. The people who did it, thought they were enacting a type of justice. A justice that held that black people weren’t human, weren’t deserving of a legal trial and could be murdered without recourse. A justice that was based on the idea that whites were better, purer, smarter, and arbiters of truth. A lot of lynchings were done on the assumption of a crime, usually a crime a white woman accused black men of. So it was justice to them. A justice they thought they deserved to dole out.

On a completely separate note, McCree’s character is someone who is an arbiter of justice that he determines, and works as a vigilante on his own time. Again, a character that was originally designed with a confederate flag symbol.

I love McCree’s character, don’t get me wrong, I’m not accusing him of being racist. I’m just encouraging a more thoughtful discussion on the subject than resorting to hyperbole about removing guns from the shooting game, or how roadhog’s hook is ‘essentially a noose’. Rather than blindly saying that nothing was amiss, perhaps we should more closely examine this link and wonder how far away the two actually are. This narrative of vigilante justice, vigilante racism, how far away are the two in American literature, in the American consciousness, in the American south, which is where a lot of McCree’s character design takes inspiration from. The glorification of the past, an ahistorical past especially, makes me deeply uncomfortable. I have a blood tie to that group the “daughters of the confederacy.” My grandmother tried to rope me into it when I was 10 or so. Speaking of a glorification of an ahistorical past, look no further than them, which is why I’ll never ever touch that pile of garbage with a 9 foot pole.

So, while yes, the spray was definitely intended to be a reference to a movie, saying that others are being ridiculous for seeing other meanings in it is in bad faith. There is a history there, and a character designed as taking inspiration from said history is going to naturally carry a different amount of weight than if the spray had been on someone like Sigma.

Many people keep coming back to this idea, that there’s some meaning inherent to the noose. Be it a symbol of suicide, a symbol of racial terror, a symbol of hanging criminals at the gallows. That’s the thing, though. When a symbol has multiple meanings, none of them are the “true” meaning of that thing. All of them exist equally in the consciousness of the public. None of them are inherently more true than the other. No one has tried to say that the noose only represents racism in the United States, but trying to say that it doesn’t at all have that connotation is just as ridiculous a statement.

Again, there was no big scale movement to remove it. Blizzard didn’t even release a statement as to it’s removal and replacing. This whole temper tantrum on the forums is all based on an assumption that they thought that perhaps the symbol’s meaning in the context of the American South shouldn’t be ignored in favor of it’s meaning in the context of the American silverscreen. And they might not have removed it for that! It’s their game, they’re not required to justify replacing any asset in it.

But, on the whole, it’s probably a good thing that it’s gone. There are plenty of other symbols to pick from that don’t also hold a meaning as a specific tool of vigilante racism in the United States.

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Sshhh leave those games alone please dont even mention them or cancel culture will target those :frowning: