I’m all for more representation but I feel like anyone that is upset about it is taking things a bit too far. The human race in general is so diverse and even trying to ‘box tick’ every single imaginable idea, person, race, sexuality, gender, concept… is going to be an impossible feat so for the ones preaching representation, what about all the people, skin colors and other various kinds of things that won’t be represented ever. You literally can’t represent everything but they can certainly try to tick as many boxes I suppose.
Edit: Sojourn looks amazing and I can’t wait to play her hopefully next year.
As someone who isn’t American looking in…It does often seem as though many Americans put a borderline disturbing amount of importance on “race” when really it shouldn’t matter at all to anyone.
Much of it comes down to what do you consider equality. Not everyone can agree on what that means and even within a group of people seeking it not everyone will agree on what it should be.
For myself, I’d prefer a completely gender neutral type situation where in English we have no pronouns at all that describe gender. Though some people would say that’s not right. Some people are born men and wish society would treat them as women.
Which means my interpretation of pronouns is actually annoying to someone else since using pronouns like he and her is a way of someone not born a woman to express themselves as otherwise. My preference to ignore wanting to use pronouns is going to upset someone.
I think it is good to have positive role models, and I think it should represent reality to some degree.
You can point at each individual thing and say “well, it isn’t IT’s job to provide one” but once you have a massive disconnect as a whole to the reality of your population, people should ask for representation where they can.
I think you need to ask yourself: do they benefit from said representation?
Which the answer really is: no. Blizzard don’t gain or lose anything if they do or don’t add something to the game.
The game’s premise has been to put a light twist on stereotypes of different countries through their characters: French femme fatale, Swiss Medic, Japanese Ninja, Korean Gamer/idol, American cowboy and so on.
But outside of those base line stereotypes that fine out the stories and personalities, this or that hero being from here or there is meaningless. Sombra could’ve easily been Japanese as her original design, Lucio could’ve been Canadian and it would make very little difference to those heroes.
Players asking for this type of hero - isn’t necessarily because there NEEDS TO BE REPRESENTATION, but it feels nice to see the game give nods to cultures or countries that don’t often get shined upon.
The dutch also don’t have a long history in western culture of being enslaved and having their positive contributions to society erased, ignored, or accredited to someone else.
As someone who is multiracial (black being one of those races and have several friends who play Overwatch that are black, it’s definitely asking for representation.
That’s really hard to do, however. At least in Western culture. Most black people who’ve grown up in the American or European continents can’t trace back where their cultural roots came from. And using “well x person is from y country” feels like a cop out. There’s a long history of being othered and shunned within your own nation for not being the majority race that’s difficult to explain. But it leads to an insecurity in who you are and how you look.
Even if you don’t resonate with the character they make, Overwatch is supposed to be a superhero game where the best and brightest of the world are on display. It’s a nice feeling seeing someone who looks like you being involved in this and not being treated as lazy, a thug, criminal, uncultured or some combination of the above. And it wouldn’t even be that huge of a deal, but it’s kinda just aggravating when you remember that Mercy’s original concept was a black man, and Ashe was a black woman. And the characters we have now are fine but it leaves you wondering why they couldn’t keep them as they were.
It should, yes. But it shouldn’t be written off as someone asking for boxes to be checked in a game where almost 5 years later we still don’t have one and won’t get one until the next game comes out.
I never understand why more people don’t see this too. Orisa is still a “Black woman”, her VA is a Black woman and her identity is based in Africa and even her design is African. Just because Orisa is a robotic character, doesn’t mean we should only see her as is. People tend to see Orisa, like Zen, as a robotic hero, and they forget their origins and background. Now Orisa should be know for her literal status, a robotic hero, but also should be know for that she has African blood and is in fact, a female.
This right here. I’m with you too, it still baffles me why people don’t see this in Orisa as well. They only see her as an robotic horse and ignore her origins and background.
As I acknowledged above, Orisa has a lot of cultural Yoruba references. An Orisa is something of a herald-spirit in the Yoruban religion. And, yeah, they did Nigeria, and a large swath of West Africa, right by doing so. But I also think it’s difficult for people to relate to non-humanoid characters. Humans are the most commonly selected characters in role playing games, so much so that Larian Studios scolded people playing an alpha build of Baldur’s Gate 3 for not fully exploring everything the character creator offered.
Another thing to consider is that “black” is not a monolith. We expect people to understand the minutia of European ethnic groups, including white Canadians, Americans and Australians by extension, but so often lump those of African descent together. That’s all just “African” or “black”. African Americans often have no real cultural connection with various African cultures given how those connections were deliberately severed and erased as part of process of enslavement. And so, an Orisa or Doomfist isn’t going to really connect with them the way that a Sojourn or a theoretical black US character would.
And all of this is really easy to trivialize when we’re not part of that ethnic group. As people of white European descent, we’re catered to quite a bit. We don’t ask for characters that look like us, or share identities with us, because those representations are almost always provided up front. “Get over it” or “stop asking for it” is really easy to say when you’ve got a banquet laid out before you.
haha and the woman we have also is the stereotypical tomboy type with “short hair” Is it impossible to believe that someone who looks like Mercy can also be LGBT?
I thought we were at the point where we can look past skin color? When I hear representation I usually think of nationalities or beliefs, not how much melanin someone has in their skin. McCree could have been a robot and I still would have considered that the old western american rep.
