Earlier this month, Blizzard Entertainment announced its was bringing all its lore in-house with the creation of a Blizzard Publishing. In the press release, Activision/Blizzard promised to not only bring new content to fans but republish fan favorite titles from the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo franchises. For a company that enjoys making money hand-over-fist on properties that are old enough to drink legally, it makes sense. But there is one Blizzard game that’s new on the block and, as such, doesn’t have a rich vein of out-of-print canon to reintroduce: Overwatch. That hasn’t stopped fans from filling in the gaps, vigorously.
For those not in the know, Overwatch is team-based first-person shooter versus game. But unlike your Call of Duties and your Titanfalls, Blizzard went in different direction. Instead of slightly different variations on soldiers, you can play as an elderly woman with a healing sniper rifle, a man with a weird affinity for pigs, or even a highly intelligent gorilla. One of the fan favorite characters is dual-pistol wielding Londoner Tracer. As fans clamored to pair Tracer with any number of female characters in fanfic — including fellow Brit Widowmaker, the Valkyrie Mercy, and buff tank Zarya — Blizzard refused to commit to whether or not Tracer was canonically queer. The closest the development team got touching on the subject was when artist Rachel Day spoke to Kotaku at BlizzCon:
“We’re here to build a very diverse game. We’re looking globally, we’re looking for all different kinds of people, different body types, all of that. Maybe we’re not telling any romantic stories at the moment, but it’s a possibility for the future for sure. I don’t think that we’d want to exclude anybody from that kind of interaction.”
In that same interview, lead hero designer Geoff Goodman confirmed there was at least one LGBT character in Overwatch, but declined to say who. The today the free official Overwatch comic “Reflections” confirmed Tracer’s queer sexuality is now canon. It’s a holiday miracle! Less of a miracle? Her girlfriend is not a fellow hero, which means dozens of ships are now sinking. Aw well, we’ll always have Tumblr.