She says she cannot trust anyone who is half machine.
But aren’t those things more like prosthetics? Why is he different compared to McCree, Symmetra, Torb?
As far as I know Genji’s mechanical parts are not acting on their own like omnics.
Zarya lost her homeland to the omnics. I guess many people died there. Shouldn’t she be happy instead that it is possible to safe lives and making their life better by adding those parts?
Those enhancements enabled Genji to start a new life and to fight for a good cause after all.
Zarya’s distrust of Genji makes sense because not only his body is highly modified with cyborg parts, he also lived and trained under omnics.
Humanity trusted omnics and as a result, the world was thrown into a second omnic crisis. Which, as we know, had a great effect in her life. So, I wouldn’t blame her for not trusting someone that closely relates to them.
However, that doesn’t matter much anymore. They made Zarya work together with an omnic in her comic and in the process she saved his life and, started to realize that not all omnics are bad and that they can be trusted(even though Sombra showed how quickly and ease one can take control over and subdue them). Yay for uncharacteristic character development! Again!
In their second interaction, she says “I know what you are. I’m only sorry you do not.” In her non-canonical heroes of the storm interactions, she flat-out calls him an Omnic. So that’s why. She sees him as no better than an omnic and she fears omnics.
On a side note, she doesn’t respect augmented strength, which is where most of Genji’s power comes from.
Still, I feel this is such a stupid thing to say. Imagine someone is on your side, literally in your team to fight to death against another group and the first thing she says is that she does not trust him… because he is a robot… Although he is not.
Even if you have a friend raised by… idk super racists or so, you still would give that person a chance to be different.
Maybe this is not the same because he chose to be there.
It’s more like this: you are a soldier and your city was destroyed by your enemy. Then this guy appears and says that he’s gonna help you, but he’s dressed as the enemy and when you question him he responds: “Well, while I was born in the same city as you, I lived a good part of my life abroad and during that time I got into a bad place. But our enemies helped me out and lifted me up, they also fed me, give me a house, helped me get a new purpose in life, I still have many friends on their side and follow their teachings!”
I think anyone with a sense of self-preservation would be wary of that guy(and he probably would be on your country watchlist of possible enemy spies).
You probably don’t feel that way, because you know Genji is one of the good guys, a hero, a cool ninja, and everybody likes him.
Well both that unlike McCree, Junkrat and other characters for Genji the prostetics keeping him on life support. Hes actually a cyborg. Not helping that he was trained by omnics.
But since the Searching comic in the new interaction “I know who you are. Im sorry you do not” it looks like she starts to understand what Genji goes through.
If she knows he was taught by Zenyatta and the other omnics (which shouldn’t be common knowledge, so I doubt she does), she should also know he is part of Overwatch. Well, I have to admit Overwatch does not have the best reputation in their world…
Still, it is on Zarya in my opinion. She puts all omnics into the evil category, although Zenyatta’s brother (Mondatta?) clearly stood in for peace and there are human-omnic relationships.
It would be known if 98% of all those relationships ended in omnics killing their partner while sleeping.
So, someone who went through a lot of pain and mediated on a mountain or so would be less likely to be an evil person than someone who is literally emotionally attached to a robot and shares the same bed with sad …thing.
Overall, its nothing unusual to have anything to do with omnics. They are even employed in many cities.
This makes me believe its just her own…prejudice.
(I am not arguing against you or anything, I just want to know how to feel about her. Sry if anything comes of rude).
I dont know how much canon this interaction is but in HotS if you kill an OW character with Zarya she says “Who needs Overwatch? We can protect ourselves!”
If I remember correctly, it was in one of the blog posts that said that Russia was never part of/supported Overwatch. They always fought for themselves.
Because religious and political leaders are notorious for being trustworthy. /s
Also, we know little about Mondatta teachings(probably because Blizzard wants to avoid controversies) so we are taking things at face value. Maybe there could be something insidious behind what he preaches? The writers in ow have the horrible habit of changing and justifying things in hindsight, so we may never know for sure.
Like I said before, her not trusting omnics is self-preservation. Omnics are not tied to the same rules and morals as humans by the principle that they are a different kind of being and existence.
Honestly, it’s very suspicious of people that feel the necessity of meditating or praying a lot to deal with their demons. Because all that indicates is that they are trying to hide the bad person that they actually are/bad things they did, instead of actually correcting their wrongdoings. Of course, we know Genji’s story is different because he is the perfect good guy with a troubled past, that is better now and left the bad in the past and reached a “higher humanity”.
I don’t get these points you are trying to make. We know little in the story about human/omnic relationships(except that all the depictions have been: white female human/omnic). We don’t even know how big the onmnic population is so any assumption is kinda vague.
I get how a lot of fans equate her views toward omnics as an allegory to racism/prejudice, but even though it seems to be the writers’ intention to represent it as something like that, they aren’t the same(and If I’m being honest, it’s irresponsible by the writers to pretend it is).
Is Zarya being unreasonable? Maybe. But self-preservation is relatable.
Don’t worry, at no point I felt like you were rude to me. You were just questioning Zarya’s point of view. I like it when people question stuff, instead of just accepting the most popular response that the fandom came up with and replicating it as truth.
