Thoughts on Sigma from a Schizophrenic

This is gonna be a long read probably but I kinda really wanted to get my thoughts out on Sigma’s character story because it sounds like a lot of people are mad about Blizzard making an “ableist” character… I’m gonna say right now, whether they meant to make him so specifically mentally ill or not, I love Sigma. Anyways…

I am diagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder and PTSD due to trauma- if you dont know what Schizoaffective Disorder is, it’s basically Schizophrenia and at least one mood disorder (mine being both bipolar and depression) wrapped up into a nice gift box for your brain. Though we don’t know what exactly Sigma was left with after the experiment-gone-wrong, I think it’s safe to assume he’s damaged ( pun @ his one spray, ‘damaged’ intended :^) ) one way or another. A lot of people (easily upset, probably neuro-typical people) have been complaining that what we saw in the trailer for Sigma is extremely pushing it, making mentally ill people look like absolute jokes. And personally, I don’t see that at all.

(The only thing I actually don’t like, and most people I’ve seen agree, is the mask and straight jacket. That’s actually kinda crappy to see due to harmful “insane” stereotypes. I wouldn’t be mad if he was actually meant to be a parody or costume for halloween, but that’s different all together…)

Okay so. From what we know, Sigma splits. Splitting sucks! Split thinking is how people with specific mental issues think. Black and white, one way or another, good or bad. Sigma in the trailer shows him speaking nervously and confused about where he is and what’s happening, then splits suddenly into a louder more chaotic voice. I’d like to say the violence parts are about what Talon is doing to him- manipulating him and using his mental state as a weapon when he is least aware.
I can relate to this in a realistic, human (not video game character) way. With all the trauma and abuse I went though, I was and still am VERY easily manipulated by my abuser (Talon is the abuser in this situation). For me, splitting is god awful as well, not as violent anymore. It is mostly extreme happiness and euphoria! OR absolute anger by everything or depression- like ‘nothing matters I’ve failed everyone in my life’ depression. But!! I’ve been through enough help to be AWARE of it. Sigma is not. Sigma probably barely even knows what happened, let alone that he can be healed. Talon is making him be violent, not just his mental illness. They’re taking advantage of him in his weakest moments.

I think people are seeing him being an “evil” character as: Brain damage -> violent -> evil. When in actuality it goes: Brain damage -> abuse/control -> violent. I honestly wouldn’t even call him evil. He is not inherently evil, just used. I would go as far as saying Moira is more evil than him, because she works with Talon with her own free will.

Another thing I wanted to point out are his bare feet. I’ve been in a mental institution for recovery a few times and yeah, you get socks! But I really don’t like thinking of this massive floating lad in SOCKS. The feet/feet wraps are fine, he doesn’t walk anyways tbh lmao… Sock’s would be really uncanny. :,)

I’d ALSO like to point out his love for music… Now, I know that’s an astrophysicist thing, putting music to science, but honestly… A lot of mentally ill people I know, including myself, have special interests and hyperfixations that help them cope. Music is a big one for me. I’ve had to use music (and medication obviously) to drown out voices since junior high. I will say though, that seems like it has more lore to it than just that- but EVEN that is a really good addition to his character!

Sigma isn’t a bad character! Not every mentally ill person experiences the same thing, but that doesn’t mean his character is a reach or harmful. I relate to this guy in such a cool way I haven’t felt in a long time with character backstories. He is genuinely interesting and awesome to see in media, as long as they keep up with him being so well written. Unless Blizzard does a 180 and makes him into just a raw killer, I don’t see an issue with him. I never thought I would be so surprisingly happy to see a video game character I could relate to on a trauma level. (Now let’s just hope he gets saved by Overwatch and healed in lore. Save this old man pls…)

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Oh, i doubt that Overwatch will heal him. They didn’t hurry to cure Widowmaker, why should they heal Sigma? They didn’t save him from imprisonment.
I wish for the best Sigma character development, but Overwatch obviously will try to kill him, not to heal

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… Too well organized? What? I’m op’s fiance and I can vouch for the fact that she’s been diagnosed schizophrenic for years and that she’s… Medicated. And schizophrenia does not equal a certain level of intelligence or ability.

Aside from that, I think Sigma is a good example of someone who’s … well, he’s not schizophrenic, but he’s relatable to it? But anyway. Someone with that mindset who’s still able to do very, very intelligent things.

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I think the difference for Sigma is that he isn’t exactly brainwashed fully. He still has splits of calmness and mindfulness, and Id like to think if Overwatch saw he wasn’t completely gone like Widowmaker (and not a cold blooded killer like i said) they’d be able to help. But thats also just me hoping! I wouldn’t be surprised if Overwatch didn’t help if they didn’t know. I’d just be happy to see it of course! But I half get what you mean.

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Widowmaker is not completely gone, her feels are coming back.
This is so personal that Overwatch members don’t know that, so they don’t know anything about Sigma feels

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I’ve been treated for a really long time. I’m schizophrenic, not illiterate. Also, if you think I can’t be both, you have a small mind about schizophrenia, friend. Also, like my fiance said, Sigma is a good example of a mentally ill person still having a brain lmao…

Talking is harder sometimes, tbh. I definitely reread this thread 100 times while posting it to make sure it made sense though. Irl, when I talk, I ramble and am god awful at describing my thoughts!

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Honestly the majority of people with mental disorders talk like that (yeah I’m just about to barge in with a full on rant lol). I mean, here you have ADHD, where you get convulsions randomly along with the fact that your cerebral cortex is ~20% of it’s normal size, almost a pile of mush, meaning you ALWAYS forget things and get distracted no matter how hard you try, causing you to randomly bang your head rocker style in the middle of a conversation, lose track of what you were saying (my minimum is ~5 per conversation of forgetting) or just legit walking away and not knowing why (I’m extremely ADHD). Then you have generalized anxiety disorder, to sum up, which has all the social problems, like talking with the symptoms of social anxiety (which i just covered yay). With depressive disorders, You tend to have a lower heartbeat, talk much less and lower, in a murmur, and try to dissolve from social situations. I’m not an expert with PTSD so I’m going to stay away from that. Instead, I’ll move on to Bulimia and anorexia. With bulimia, you tend to equally project yourself as the centre of the room, and keep to yourself, meaning after eating a heck ton of food, they would dissolve themselves completely. Being the centre of attention and going away soon after, obviously, they are still going to get attention, to which they get defensive (my ADHD medicine gives me the patterns as to of anorexia and my insomnia medicine causes me to binge eat and purge, as to of bulimia). With anorexic people upon being confronted about anything referring to proportionality, they get defensive. Also, yes, I did just spend 30 minutes writing all this on my phone.

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Exactly! If anything, I type too descriptive and it gets annoying haha… I appreciate the feedback. :heart:

I am both on the autism spectrum and transgender… this is the only thing that bothered me, too. The rest just kinda seems like “mad scientist” trope, not making fun of neurodivergence

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I can see it being a bit trope-ish only because its a video game, Yknow? Like, its gonna be extra, like in movies too. Its entertainment more than anything. And thats understandable.

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I’m glad to hear your takes.

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Schitzophrenia doesent mean its impossible to be at all organized. Especially in text where you can be given time to look it through and clean it up several times if needed.

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Pretty sure that’s not how it works. I’m on a very low end of the spectrum, but I and multiple more symptomatic autistic people can talk at length, with great detail and finesse, about topics we are knowledgeable on. With suitably effective medications in place, I can imagine other, more serious mental variations can become less of a limiting factor and more of a different perspective.

Addressing the actual depiction of Sigma as a character- I feel mixed. The voice acting and visual effects seem like some of the most inspired performances Overwatch has seen yet. The feet thing wouldn’t even be a problem had a character designer not explicitly stated they were meant to mimic the look of an asylum patient. It adds a whole other context of self-harm and abuse that even I’m not sure I’m comfortable with. If they had just wrote it off as “he floats”, or better yet, incorporated it as an interest or compulsion he developed to cope with the fracture that split-second with the black hole caused, it would feel like it belongs with the character design. That’s really just it by the end. Not providing Sigma with bodily autonomy feels bleak and juxtaposes strangely with the rest of his design, which is intentionally made to look powerful and domineering.

P.S. While Sigma’s manipulation storyline is interesting and doesn’t automatically make him a villain, it’s a simple fact that a lot of people don’t read that far into things. In Gears of War the Locust are dying to an infection, they need to invade the surface to escape it, even after they promised twenty years to the human scientists to develop a cure. The Locust are still seen as villains, but they’re doing the same as everyone else- just trying to survive. In Splatoon 2, the Octarians are basically racially profiled as enemies, despite the fact that they’ve broken free of the mind control that had previously made them hostile. Just saying a character isn’t a villain, saying they’re manipulated, isn’t quite enough. Most people will assume things in spite of any deeper narratives, and that can and should be addressed. Regardless of that, Sigma still feels a bit like a repetition of a tried old trend, one that has been pretty stigmatizing for mental health issues. I hope I’m proven wrong.

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Okay, and i mean this with all due respect.

Imagine you are a fiction writer. You are developing backstory for a very dangerous individual, a dude that can hanress the powers of a black hole, so he’s not only danger to himself but to others. Where do you place this person logistically in a sci-fi world with a sci-fi “illness” to convey how dangerous and unstable he is? In a bed with flowers?

That’s just boring and bad writting.

Relating to him is one thing, it’s totally fine and cool. But calling that representation of mentally ill…bruh, seriously?

That’s like saying that infected people in “the thing” movie are representing people who are infected with some type of parazyte or bacteria irl.
C’mon

I’m just saying context matters. Context is what makes something offensive or non offensive. No the thing itself.

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The Thing, if I’m correct, has behavioral similarities to the victims of rabies, or, in smaller animal life, the fungus Cordiceps. It’s harder to classify these things into mental illnesses because most if not all of them sap personhood- individuality, self-awareness, decision making- away from the host. They are simply husks, shells capable of reacting to stimuli and little to nothing else.

Mental illness is a much more personal thing, because the sufferer retains their personhood to a greater extent, but finds it altered or malformed in such a way that it can be societally or individually detrimental. It’s clearly something Sigma suffers from. Sigma had an encounter with something unfathomable- so beyond all units or modes of comprehension that the complete surreality of it has made him wildly unstable. The time distortion of a black hole may have even split his personalities across different timelines. Suffice it to say, he suffers greatly from his mental illness- it fills with obsession, confusion and anger, with just enough occasional euphoria from bouts of research or insanity to keep him going. The restraints of his asylum skin, the everpresence of his feet, both clearly illustrate a lack of autonomy, and that’s really disempowering and actually kind of awful. I restate, Sigma’s feet aren’t issues by themselves. But when the context (as stated by a character designer on the team) is he would kill himself or self harm with the laces, especially when the practice of denying asylum patients footwear is dead and gone even now, (and should definitely be by the time of Overwatch’s story) that can be seen incredibly insensitive and unacceptable.

When people see others suffering from mental illness chained up, muzzled, gagged, stripped of the shoes off their feet and dehumanized, it frightens them to consider their own mental health. It means they have trouble examining themselves, they deny any problems they may have, because they don’t want to end up like Sigma, and the millions of other characters like him that perpetuate stereotypes around popular culture at large. A character like that can make people afraid of themselves, and it’s something that must be handled with care when writing.

P.S. Sigma, in his current state, wouldn’t have even been intentionally dangerous. He wasn’t imprisoned for his anger, his anger comes from being imprisoned. To compare something like his condition to something so animalistic, like the Thing, illustrates how deeply that dehumanization runs in our culture.

No ofc not, I was just drawing a parallel in how sci-fi illness and illness can be compared but nobody takes sci-fi illness as his personal representation (unless it’s meant as a methaphor)

If a mental breakdown, depression and panic attacks didn’t make me sh*t my pants in fear of myself I wouldn’t have seeked professional help (honest to god)

When I had a mental breakdown, nobody asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital. I was taken there. Most patients don’t end up in a facility because they enroled themselves. And if they did, they probably didn’t look up video games to find a good reference of what they are going to get.

That’s just an opinion. And a very intellectually dishonest one. Or try to convince me that black holes in human hands aren’t dangerous. Also being dangerous is morally neutral. Being dangerous doesn’t have to mean you’re evil or something.

I wasn’t under the impression he was angry at all. Confused, scared, excited, eccentric? Sure.

Again. context matters . Otherwise you’d have to ban showing guns, gags, blood, violence and everything bad about humanity in all of media.

In Overwatch context, Sigma is not representing mental illness (to anyone sane enough atleast) he is representing the power/dangers of black holes - and even that is debatable since he is such a cartoon. And a pretty badass one at that.

P.S. Sigma got contained in a goverment facility because he is an exceptional individual with exceptional powers.
If he was just a mental health patient putting him in metal chains and gags would be ludacris.

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This. Sigma doesn’t have mental illness, he has brain damage.

black holes are believed to be gateways to parallel universes, or something like that (I’m no expert on them). A very popular sci-fi trope. So Sigma having conscious of other versions of him, seems more like a confusing/unbearable superpower rather than plain brain damage.
He looks damaged on the outside. But being in touch with your alternate self through black holes is no damage at all. Just an ability. That he has no control over.
Control over black holes however…
Maybe Talon used that to manipulate him, or the music. Only blizzard knows…

They were trying to “really sell the asylum look” Blizzard used mental illness stereotypes as a way to quickly convey their ideas.

They could had him strapped to a bed, trying to break out and sedated. There wasn’t a need for the straight jacket. They used because it’s still media shorthand for an asylum. Nothing more or less.

Personally I think the skin looks like a movie reference. Silence of the Lambs. I wish they had made a punny reference in the names. Both for the love of puns and to avoid evoking the unfortunate history of the term. I think it would have prevented a lot of the reactions

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You’ve connected asylum look to mental illness look so i have to say this (cuz i’m tired, and this is not personaly aimed at you):

Sigma is not mentally ill. Blizzard never called him mentally ill. His story doesn’t convey or name any existing mental illness at all.
Some people on overwatch called Sigma mentally ill, cuz they themselves stereotype mental illness with asylums.

There, I said it.

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