We weren’t joking six years ago when we started calling Genji “Michael Chu’s self-insert character.” There was a lot of evidence pointing to Genji being given a less-than-impartial treatment by the lead writer. Of course Michael Chu did just come out and say that Genji was his favorite character, which wouldn’t have been an issue at all if he had been more professional about it… but:
Genji got more lore development early on than pretty much the entire cast.
Multiple characters received very little character development outside of their impact on Genji’s life. Hanzo in particular had virtually no personality or story beyond being “the guy who hurt Genji” while Zenyatta, despite being a crazy cool robot monk, had no presence in the official lore beyond being the person Genji who trained/enlightened Genji.
Mercy, despite being allegedly a genius child prodigy who joined Overwatch as a teenager, invented multiple life-saving technologies, and served in active combat on multiple warfronts, was pretty much just presented as a Girl Next Door for several years.
Genji starts getting psuedoromantic interactions with the game’s resident Hot Blonde Chick despite there being no apparent chemistry between those two characters. Rumor has it that Michael Chu kept trying to push Gency stuff through even though the rest of the writing team didn’t think it was a good idea.
And then of course, once Michael Chu left Overwatch, Genji and Mercy stopped getting new shippable interactions, which does lend some credibility to the idea that he was singlehandedly forcing a ship which just happened to involve his “favorite character” and the game’s most eligible waifu.
So yeah. If current writing team doesn’t really favor the ship, then that should be reason enough for them to stop writing it, but it sounds like there might also be a bit of a bad taste in some of the older writers’ mouths.
Let’s be real, they’re not focusing on the gay one because lesbian content is a lot prettier and easier to sell. Well, in theory anyway. Since they spent almost six years teasing Genji and Mercy, there’s been a relatively significant backlash. I didn’t know there were still so many dedicated Gency fans.
What is this post? All of these points read like nasty old rumors spread by toxic Pharmercy fans in 2017.
First of all, there are no “older writers” left on the team. I have tried to find one, but every writer I’ve looked up, started working as narrative designers after Michael Chu left in march 2020.
But let us say every one of them were still there and it turns out Michael Chu really was a tyrannical evil dictator in the writers room, forcing everyone to write Genji as the coolest, strongest, hottest hero with an attractive blonde gf, instead of letting them write the cute wholesome Pharah and Mercy romance which they originally wanted to do, there should still be an obligation to the story they’ve built up over the many years that Genji and Mercy were teased. It’s so unbelievably disrespectful, not to mention bad writing, to just trash the 6 years of work that was put into the game over a personal grudge.
And btw, Mercy was so good in Storm Rising, all her voice lines oozes so much personality. She’s so far from just an accessory to Genji that you pretend Chu wrote her as. Can’t say the same about OW2 Mercy though, where she giggles like a schoolgirl every time Pharah does something and is unnecessarily mean to Junkrat.
Ya i hate when people act like mercy is just a toy she has great character writing and i would love a comic of her before she was in ow it would be such a good read
… you just said the equivalent of “why do you care to complain about the damage of soldier 76 if in real life it only takes one shot to kill you?”
just to remind you that actually here we are talking about a narrative that takes place within these pixels in the same way as we are talking about a ship from a book, a movie, etc.
we are in a narrative section and we are talking about a “canonical” situation that has been changed, among other things one of the few things in the lore in which there was actually an affective situation and that it is being noticed that it is changing. so what? the web is huge. maybe the only stupid is who visits and replies to posts that they are not interested in investigating.
How do you know a narrative decision has been changed? Maybe mercy never liked genji or that genji never liked mercy, or heck maybe you guys have to pay for a genji and mercy relationship to be canon, like every thing else blizzard sells. My opinion still stays, just like yours, shippers are annoying…have a nice day.
Hmm I don’t know if Kiriko could be shipped with Pharah since Kiriko hasn’t really teamed up with Overwatch or haven’t been part of the Null Sector or Talon Campaigns yet. My Guess being is that pharah’s girlfriend might be someone else that isn’t Mercy but someone that she dated during her missions in Egypt. That’s my only guess I could think of.
