Ana Amari certainly looks amazing and greatly boosts representation for badass mothers and older women of color though I notice something.
Of her eleven skins: Five show Ana as her glorious mature-aged self, four show her with her face completely covered and two show her as young. In fact there are zero Legendary skins where you can see Ana’s beautiful older face.
And the skins with her as a young woman don’t really do anything surprising with her, it’s not like Genji’s showing him as pre-cybernetic, it’s just… well:
So while it’s fantastic that Blizzard has started to realize that women in their sixties are dramatically under represented in action games – it’s kind of a shame that they couldn’t commit to it the whole way.
– wincenworks
Ana is a very welcome addition to Overwatch’s cast (heavens know we’re in a desperate need for older women in media, especially games), though I can’t help but notice how, not unlike Zayra, she’s a very safe approach to diversity. While being 60, she’s at the “conventionally attractive lady with grey hair and a couple facial lines” side of old person design.
Also, the fact that Ana’s clothes look very realistic for a sniper make Widowmaker’s hypersexualization stand out even more. With changes Blizzard made so far, they’ve proven a couple of times how they can edit and add things to the game as they please, but are afraid to change all that much
Now the Summer Games special has come around again and let’s see what they’ve learned about their audience and what they want to see, and there’s a lot of potential, I mean in the new skins along, three empowered men (1, 2, 3):
Or is it with the new skin for the brown woman who got a new skin, Sombra (x):
Of course not, their promo strategy’s opening * is peak predictability:
Yes, apparently Widowmaker needed a shirt with no chest so she could show off her combat bikini and had to also have a garter:
Meanwhile Ana has two novelty skins at this point… exactly zero of them make it clear that she is an older woman.
– wincenworks
* Yes I am aware they followed with promoting Junkrat’s skin, in the most boring and unempowering way humanly possible.
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Every time I see someone say, “Who cares?” about either my own posts or those of other tumblrs on the subject of female representation in comics, I want to point out to them the over 5000 people who’ve subscribed to lesstitsnass (holy crap over 5000?!), the other thousands and thousands of people who follow eschergirls, all the other blogs that do redlines, The Hawkeye Initiative’s slew of participants, the multitudes of articles and comments on all the online magazines that discuss the subject, and say, “Them. They care. There’s a whole lot of them. So get your head out of your butt and try to see what they see.”
Okay, yes, baby steps, Blizzard has got a long history of being terrible and a lot unlearning to do. But they could at least try to show some self-awareness of this.
And it’s not only body diversity which seems to be a challenge for female Overwatch characters, so is their AGE!
D.Va is actually the youngest in the whole ensemble (19). Female characters don’t get older than 34 (Mercy), while male ones range from 20 (if you count Zenyatta, a robot) or 25 (Junkrat) all the way up to 61 (Reinhardt).
The overall design of D.Va is perplexing on so many levels, too. What new is she supposed to contribute? Yet another young, thin, conventionally pretty woman in a catsuit… something the game (and the industry as a whole) so totally lacked before! Even her silly pseudonym rubs in that she’s a diva. The idea of a Korean professional gamer-turned-mecha pilot is very cool (even if the backstory rips off Evangelion/Pacific Rim), but why make her look so generic… and paint her mech pink?
My most optimistic guess: one of many Blizzard’s CreepyMarketingGuys saw Zarya and said “So, we’re doing female tanks now? Okay, but next one is gonna be the SEXY tank! And make her more PINK!”
Remember when Blizzard was doing female characters better in Overwatch?
Yeah, me neither.
We will be doing a full post about the new Widowmaker skin, but until then, we just wanted to throwback to this post about all the effort Blizzard is putting into their diversity. It still doesn’t make sense for Widow to wear those clothes because,
a) she is a sniper and that top just screams nip slip; and
b) she’s a sniper, who’s she going to be ‘distracting’ exactly from 2 miles away?
It also just looks really ugly? It really looks like someone designed a practical suit for her, and then Creepy Marketing Guy walked in and told them to cut a third of it off, so they just did, without any design adjustment.
-Icy
edit: Since a lot of replies ignore that the original post is almost 1,5 years old and mentioning newer characters is beside the point Icy is making about Widowmaker, let’s quickly address this: We do acknowledge how Ana Amari is a cool non-sexualized old lady (even if squarely within OW’s established beauty standards) and Orisa is a cool female robot. That said, there are still problems with how old characters continue to be depicted and adding new heroes doesn’t change that.
~Ozzie
PS: Mercy is 37, not 34 – my bad. She looks neither age, regardless.
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Orisa
Many excited readers informed us of the new Overwatch tank character, Orisa, as well as her child prodigy creator, Efi.
One thing we can say from the start is that Orisa is easily the first female-identified character in the game to whom “can I fap to her?” obviously wasn’t a design priority. So there’s no robo-ass or boobs to show and sexualize. That said, she’s a modified battle robot, so unless Blizzard lowered their standards to super sleazy, it was a given she wouldn’t have arbitrary secondary sex characteristics.
That said, Omnics having gender in the first place is pretty complicated issue, storytelling-wise, as some are considered non-gendered machines (Bastion) and other are mechanical people (Zenyatta), which makes it akin to “Why does Goofy wear pants, but Pluto doesn’t?” sort of philosophical problem. Though Orisa’s story, given that Efi converted her from one kind of robot into another, seems to explain her being female quite well.
It’s also nice to see how since the open beta, number of female tanks in the game rose from 0 to 3 out of 6, making it the first currently the only gender-balanced class in Overwatch.
Efi herself being an African girl is good in terms of diversifying cast, though we’re still yet to see a black female character who is also playable.
~Ozzie
If we are to engage in the oddity of gendered robots it’s good that the explanation be something outside of gender roles or excuses for literal objectification of women.
It would however, be even better if they remembered that while it’s important to have diversity in your secondary cast, it’s even more important to have it in your primary lineup. That and robots are not (yet) an audience for your games.
Amazing video. Should be required viewing for high school students. I may make it required viewing for my future college students.
“The Fighting Fucktoy” is my new favourite phrase.
See: Why male gaze is awful and needs to be addressed
This documentary was awesome and powerful definitely recommend that you guys watch it!
A subject we referenced a couple of times before, which constantly needs to be reiterated: there’s a crucial difference between female characters being primarily badass while incidentally sexy and characters being primarily sexy while incidentally badass.
It’s super disingenuous to obviously design a heroine’s look, personality and actions around (straight) male gaze appeal and repackage it as female empowerment just because she’s technically a powerful hero (or sometimes, a villain).
~Ozzie
This week’s throwback: Fighting F*cktoy or “How to make absolutely no progress in the way female characters are depicted and repackage it as empowerment”.
~Ozzie
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Okay, now we’ve all been assured that Mercy’s sexy witch outfit was not even a little bit sexualized or made to pander to a particular demographic…
…and that Blizzard only makes these special events for “fun” and certainly not as part of a larger strategy to make money and promote themselves…
…let’s talk about the other aspect of the Halloween event: White washing and placing a lower value on characters of color, especially female characters of color (so much so they forget that they’re skin is brown).
For those already frantically typing apologies:
Hanzogot to keep his tattoos, they even recolored them for him to better fit his “demon” persona (and his grey skin tone matches his regular)
So how many of you noticed that Pharah, Symmetra and Hanzo are
Possessed ,Vampire and Demon respectively but generic white guy Soldier 76 is “immortal”? That’s not generic “Immortal” that’s “homage to Michael Jackson’s Thriller” btw.
Now you’ve typed your bit about the Summer Games Event did you happen to notice how Mei got completely left out of that too?
Here’s the reality: Blizzard makes games with a very big focus on making money, and with Overwatch they’ve been promoting themselves as being more concerned about representation – but they haven’t been following through. Not for women, not for other cultures and not for people of color. It’s basically an going mess of glorification of white men at the expense of others, this leads to a certain demographic having a relationship with the media that’s well…
tl;dr: Blizzard’s depictions of women in general are terrible, but their treatment of female characters of color is even worse. Blizzard is pretty blatant about using brown skin tones as an optional accessory in their ongoing quest to make money via highly commercial video games and that is not okay no matter how many half-arsed excuses are made on their behalf.
We want to give special props to Christopher for calling out both how high saturation media giants like Disney tend to promise representation but stop short of even a token presence and how society’s fixation with gendering media and traits hurts children of all genders.
As a preemptive response to those who claim he’s misrepresenting media in general or it’s just Disney, let’s use a recent video game that claims it’s doing better representation for women.
Here is all the Zarya merchandise Blizzard has in their online store that isn’t a generic Overwatch/group item or labelled as “Men’s”
I’d like to show you their Mei merchandise, but they don’t have any. At all.
Yeah.
– wincenworks
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Okay so… there’s so much to unpack here but I’d just like to focus on
Dudes get cool costumes based off various power fantasy tropes, women get ridiculous outfits
Apparently people in this world who aren’t white or Asian are… weird shark monsters or horrible witchdoctor tropes.
Apparently the developers over the game do know how to make a badass female character though, just they keep leaving her out of group shots:
Meanwhile the creators of the comic seem to have created a new female character just for the comic, what kind of role does she have….
