#lucio santos dos correos

[doctordragon]

I gotta ask about your reblog in the Fyeahcontroversialcharacter reblog. You said "reblogged" with "I agree with 90% of this, except that Lucio is less fighting against order itself and for total freedom, and less in a... "... But your post there was empty. What were you trying to say? As the guy who upped this, I'm very curious.

I’m really tired tonight from exams and a fencing meet but I’ll do my best to explain what I was trying to say (and I’m sorry if I come across as angry,,,,)

First things first, I love Lucio and Symmetra both so much. I feel like they have one of the best possible unused story arcs in all of the Overwatch lore, and I would love development for both of them. Lucio is probably the character with the least amount of canon content about him, and Symmetra only has a comic, which I find unfortunate because their story is so intricate and well made.

The post from the controversial character blog I reblogged was a defense for Symmetra against people who hate her character and think she’s a bad person for being manipulated so easily by Vishkar. I agree with most of your post, except the post bashed Lucio as “romanticizing the steal from the rich and give to the poor Robin Hood trope,” but as someone who’s pretty much in love with Lucio and has 62+ hours on him, this really upset me because his reasoning behind stealing Vishkar’s technology is so much more complex than that. Also, the original post pretty much argued that Symmetra had little to no character flaws, which is wrong as well. However, I agree that this is no reason to hate her, especially because all characters should have flaws like regular people. 

Essentially, what bothered me about their argument is that they implied to put Lucio at fault, when his actions were clearly justified. Yes, stealing Vishkar tech may be illegal and against what Symmetra may want, but his actions had clear reason behind them.

In order to justify Lucio’s actions, we first need to understand where he was coming from. Lucio was born in Rio’s slums, which were poor but bursting with culture. He began to create music, expressing his freedom and creativity. He put on small shows with his music, but eventually worked his way up to larger audiences until he was eventually the world famous musician that we know today. However, soon, Vishkar which is a clearly corrupt and evil organization (I’ll get to how terrible they are later) wants to move into Rio. Lucio has seen what Vishkar has done in Utopea, where they have repressed creativity in the name of order and perfection. Lucio has made his career in freedom of self expression and love. Of course, when Vishkar comes with its order and anti freedom philosophies to his home city where he made his own music and self expression, naturally, he’s gonna be fucking pissed. 

So, what does he do? Anything he can to keep Vishkar out of Rio to preserve his home city and culture. Lucio first begins a resistance in Rio against Vishkar and their moving into Rio, using his songs and music to motivate people to stand with him. However, even as a famous musician (we don’t know how famous he was at the time), he probably doesn’t have access to a shit ton of cool technology or any way to actually take a real stand against Vishkar other than his music. So, he decides to steal their technology. Vishkar is an incredibly rich corporation (they made an entire CITY) and will likely be able to easily replace whatever Lucio stole. I feel like it’s implied he stole it more for the symbolism of using Vishkar’s technology, which used to represent order and to Lucio, lack of creativity and culture, as his way of expressing his creativity (again, through his music). Not to mention, he reprogramed Vishkar’s tech against them, which is also symbolic in its own way. Lucio is an artist, and I doubt he did any of this by accident. 

In your post, you said that he was simply stealing from the rich to give to the poor, which in essence is true, because he was stealing to protect the people of Rio from being oppressed by Vishkar, but truly I believe his motivation is more complex than that. If we’re going by dungeons and dragons alignments which I love a lot, I’d say Lucio is neutral good.

Now, onto Symmetra and understanding where she’s coming from as well (I think you covered this in your post but my memory is bad and I’m lazy). Symmetra was also born very poor with a natural creative talent, except hers was in visual spacing and design, likely due to her autism. Vishkar, seeing her talent from a young age essentially kidnapped her away from her home and began teaching her to become an architect. She became the most skilled architect in Vishkar by using her culture’s dancing alongside Vishkar’s light technology. However, she was manipulated by Vishkar into thinking that they’re not a morally corrupt and evil company (which again, I’ll get to later). Vishkar uses her natural love of order and how it is the correct vision of human society to make her believe that what she’s doing is right. Symmetra doesn’t think she’s going against people’s wants and wishes by taking away their freedom, she only thinks she’s doing what’s right. 

Naturally, (as you pointed out) when she sees that Lucio stole technology from Vishkar, she’s going to be angry about it. Symmetra has every right to be angry at Lucio for stealing technology from Vishkar, because yes, he STOLE. He’s a thief, and in her book, that makes him below her and her order and all. 

However, just because of Symmetra’s situation, it doesn’t mean that she’s not a flawed character. The interaction that really gets to me is this one:

Anyone who’s read any dystopian society that claims to be a utopian society knows that repressing people’s freedoms, self expressions, and imaginations is a bad idea. Symmetra’s view of a perfect world is against what all of the people affected actually want, and if continued, could easily lead to revolt. Despite being confronted with it, Symmetra outright denies that people need to be free. She refuses to change her ideas about order. 

Not to mention, she only ever question’s Vishkar’s methods of achieving a perfect world, not the idea of a perfect world itself. She questions their willingness to kill people and blow up a building, which Symmetra didn’t want to do because she doesn’t like killing. After all, she wants what’s best for humanity, and killing people is clearly not a good thing for humanity. However, she continues to completely believe that the best future for humanity is the utopia Vishkar wants where culture and creativity is suppressed in the name of order. That’s why this interaction really gets to me. Symmetra thinks freedom and creativity is an illusion, anarchy, and only does harm. Even though she is beginning to understand Vishkar to be corrupt in her comic, Symmetra still doesn’t ever wonder about what they’re trying to achieve. Yes, this is likely because of them manipulating her from a young age, but I still find her rigid ideology and unquestioning of Vishkar’s final plan to be a flaw of Symmetra’s.

This flaw, and the fact that she is still with Vishkar even after being exposed to their cruel and terrible punishments, are Symmetra’s flaws. Don’t get me wrong, she is a character that truly believes in good and wants what’s best for humanity and the world, but her perception of what is good is very skewed and she refuses to right it, despite being blatantly confronted with what’s wrong with her ideals. Maybe it was just because Lucio was the one who confronted her, and she looks down on him as a street ruffian and a thief, but Symmetra should at least begin to understand that her envision of a perfect humanity is not what people want out of it. 

Finally, onto Vishkar itself. Vishkar is a terrible, evil, corporation who’s only goal is to gain money and power. By creating cities using their architects, they’re obviously getting massive amounts of both. Their methods of supposedly creating a better future for humanity include blackmail, killing, manipulation, and false publicity. Not to mention, they literally kidnapped Symmetra from her home as a young child in order to use her as a pawn to create their architecture, and manipulated her into thinking what she was doing was the best path for humanity. Again, Vishkar’s vision for the world is not really what “Utopia” looks like, as repressing people’s freedoms and ideas is not how to create a perfect society. Lucio mentions that the way Vishkar got their technology that he stole was acquired by very questionable means, and he claims he wasn’t in the wrong for stealing something acquired by such methods. 

So yeah, since I don’t remember much about the original post and I don’t feel like looking it up, here’s a lot (but not all) of my analysis on the Lucio, Symmetra, and Vishkar potential arc that’s been set up. I hope more gets developed sometime soon because I feel like there’s so much unused story and character development involved. 

rumor has it there’s an upcoming lucio short so maybe that’s when we’ll actually learn more about all of this conflict