Messed Up Things In Overwatch Nobody Talks About

There's an old saying that goes, "the brighter the picture, the darker the negative." The more irresistibly good and pure something is, the higher the chance that person, place, or thing is hiding deep, dark secrets the likes of which we can barely imagine. While there's plenty of happy games with questionable, subversive elements, make no mistake, Overwatch is absolutely no exception. Yes, Overwatch is a colorful game with equally colorful characters, mostly out to save the word and inspire heroes to be their best selves. But look just a little harder at its characters, its lore, and the world that needs saving to begin with, and you will absolutely find something far less cheerful.

The game that has captured the hearts, minds, and reams of fan art of the gaming community does indeed have a dark side, and here is just a small taste of the distressing undercurrent permeating Overwatch.

Much like how no one talks about just how many severed limbs get racked up during the course of the Star Wars saga, no one really mentions just how many of our brave Overwatch heroes are not just sporting missing parts or cybernetic replacements, but parts that have either no explanation or a troubling one.

There's certainly no mystery to how Junkrat — the guy who shoots himself, ironically, in the junk with one of his own bombs during a victory pose — might have lost his leg (spoiler alert: he loves making bombs). We know that Ana had a cybernetic eye, and Widowmaker shot her right through it, resulting in a permanent eyepatch. We know that Torbjorn lost his arm during an assignment gone wrong.

The big mysteries, however, are McCree and Symmetra. It's up in the air what exactly happened to McCree's arm between his Blackwatch days and joining back up with the regular crew, but Jeff Kaplan has confirmed that Symmetra is legitimately an amputee, and her arm is indeed a replacement. It makes one wonder what exactly a Vishkar operative did that would've resulted in a full prosthesis, but Symmetra's adventures in corporate espionage in her own comic make one wonder a lot of things about her.

Moira is that special kind of scientific monster: she legitimately believes her work is ultimately for the good of mankind. The problem is her absolute refusal to submit to the system of checks and balances that prevent misuse, war crimes, and the like. That refusal is what led to the good doctor being drummed out of the academic community.

Where things get really unsettling is realizing that even after years of unethical experimentation and horrifying conclusions presented to the scientific community, Overwatch still saw fit to draft Moira into their Blackwatch program to  perform her research outside of the constraints of the law. We never quite learn what exactly Moira was working on, but whatever it was is enough of an ethics violation that discovering it is one of the factors in Overwatch being disbanded, as well as directly leading to the technology that turned Gabriel Reyes into an ethereal angel of death. That makes her possibly one of the most terrifying individuals in the game.

We could almost fill this list with just Widowmaker things. Her entire backstory is a nightmare. Having been the wife of an Overwatch agent, Amélie Lacroix is kidnapped, tortured, and brainwashed into murdering her husband in his sleep. She is picked up by Talon, her memory wiped, and changed into the expert sniper known as Widowmaker through a process that numbs her skin to all sense of feeling, and turns her into a sociopath unable to feel any emotion whatsoever.

Or can she?

The Reflections comic includes a panel in which Widowmaker visits the grave of her dead husband, and lays a bouquet of roses — awful curious for a woman who isn't supposed to remember anything about her former life or have any emotions. That leads to two conclusions, and it's hard to tell which is worse: the idea that Widowmaker remembers everything, to the point of having internalized regrets; or the fact that she knows everything, and continues the life of an assassin because she sincerely does not care.

Players love to contextualize Reaper's hostility and grim outlook as a simple by-product of an edgelord persona and maybe an overdeveloped goth phase in high school, but as it turns out Gabe might have a very good reason for being constantly pissed off.

See, the experiment that gave him his powers as Reaper — experiments carried out by Moira O'Deorain, we remind you — destabilizes his cellular structure to the point that they dissolve, but new cells are regenerated just as quickly, keeping him alive and tangible at will. Every time Reaper turns on Wraith form, he has destabilized himself to the point where his cells barely hold together. For those lucky enough to never come across such a thing, rapid cellular degeneration is the generalized cause for a whole host of terrifying afflictions, such as dementia, osteoporosis, sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, and lupus, and Reaper experiences this phenomenon every second of every day. It is essentially a given that Reaper, at the course of any given moment, is in incredible amounts of pain. When the man says, "This is my curse," believe him.

In the world of Overwatch, Hana Song, the MEKA pilot known as D.Va, is an internationally known superstar gamer whose face is ubiquitous as the heroine of South Korea. It'd be one thing if she got there just from being a badass pilot, but there's something mildly insidious going on there that's worth noticing.

D.Va got famous during Korea's stint with the Omnic Crisis, a worldwide war that, lest anyone forget, absolutely ravaged the world, leaving billions displaced, in abject poverty, or rampant crime. In Korea's case, when drone pilots weren't enough to destroy omnics, they recruited gamers to physically pilot the mechs. And yes, D.Va did her job very very well, but one gets the sense that her grasp on the seriousness of the situation wasn't the greatest. She is on record as livestreaming her kills during the war, later appearing on everything from movies to ads shilling energy drinks. In one light, it looks like stardom. In another, it looks like war profiteering. If there is an upside, it's that sustained losses might've taught her over time that fame isn't everything.

What's intriguing about Overwatch is that, yes, there are villainous or chaotic neutral characters, but no one who is truly evil for their own sake. Reaper, for his part, is hunting his former colleagues in Overwatch. Widowmaker is slave to Talon's ideology, whether she wants to or not. Sombra is out for herself, but ultimately trying to get to the bottom of a massive corporate conspiracy that ruined Mexico. Even Junkrat and Roadhog, criminals though they are, really are just making do after the Omnic Crisis turned Australia into the chaotic Road Warrior apocalypse most Aussies fear.

So imagine having this much going on in the world, and you, as someone with nearly infinite money, choosing to steal for the hell of it.

Such is the despicable nature of Ashe, whose parents are immensely rich oil tycoons — at a time when the rest of the world is still trying to cope with the effects of war. Even with all that wealth, she chooses to create a criminal gang to steal resources she can afford to buy ten times over. And yet, here she is, the one character in Overwatch with no ideology, no greater purpose other than greed, and no justification other than sheer boredom. That may not make her evil, per se, but it does make her a very special brand of detestable.