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segadores-y-soldados · 8 years ago

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Overwatch: Apocalypse Now

TL;DR: Overwatch is slowly building a world of apocalypses and horror stories through references to mythology, literature, and pop culture. Through these, it continues a cautionary tale of “humanity’s greatest flaw is its own ambitious arrogance,” the same arrogance which caused Overwatch to fall. It has also presented a few different routes of “hope” to try and break the cycle.

More stuff to read, if you want: Soldier: 76 Fact Sheet, References, and Some Analyses Reaper Art Assets Reaper References Reaper and Soldier: American Cultural References Ana as the source of conflict

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” - Genesis 11:3 - 4

UNDER CONSTRUCTION: Like much of the still-growing city, the massive tower at the center of Oasis is still under construction and has no estimated completion date. Though the current structure is already one of the world's tallest skyscrapers, the final plans call for it to extend even further, easily becoming the world's tallest freestanding building. Not much is known about the tower's purpose, other than it ties into the city's massive data gathering and computational efforts. - Oasis Travel Tips

In the hype of Oasis dropping and the ever wonderful jump-pad, many people missed the very quiet and almost hidden lore about the city that was simultaneously released by Blizzard. The “Oasis Travel Tips” revealed that the “city of science” was controlled by a group of ministries governed by “a brilliant collective of eight of the world's leading scientists.” Among the lore dropped was the revelation that the Gardens map was intended to evoke the Hanging Gardens of Babylon -

And that “the tower” in the distance was a clear homage to The Tower of Babel.

For those of you who are not familiar with the story of The Tower of Babel, it is a tale from Genesis that explains why there are so many languages. In the story, all of humanity shared one language, and as means of this communication, began to build a tower to reach the heavens and God Himself. When God saw what humanity was doing, He destroyed the tower and scattered the people, giving them different languages so that they could not perform such a feat again. The lesson here is that the arrogance of humanity led them to believe they could build something as impressive as God Himself (or so some say).

While it is difficult to detangle The Tower of Babel from its religious connotations, the emphasis here is that “one should not be so arrogant” or the “higher powers that be” will bring their wrath upon you.

Which is precisely the overarching story that Overwatch’s lore is building. I’ve been wondering for some time how to structure all these disparate pieces of lore into something that connects to the major themes of “Who watches the Watchmen?”, “History repeats itself,” and “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions,” but with Uprising, we finally have a lot more tangible proof that the “grand theme” of Overwatch’s lore - both the “canon” lore outside of the game, and numerous “in-game” references - are building a new version of an age-old tale of the apocalypse and “the ancient horrors” lurking just beyond human perception. These “larger forces” are dropped through mythology and religious references, but also a number of pop culture and “horror story” references that litter the game. I’ve tried to collect the majority of them here. But to start with, we need to cover some background info.

1. The Nameless City of Oasis

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die."

I’m not gonna claim to be any authority on Lovecraft, but any Lovecraft or Eldritch horror fan should look at Oasis with a slight skepticism. Already we have references to the Tower of Babel with the map, and there are numerous in-game lines that imply that something vaguely sinister is going on beneath the shiny surface of the city.

Junkrat: “This place is a bit posh for me…” Symmetra: “The Vishkar Corporation would love to have a presence here.” Zenyatta: “What a fascinating place! Can science alone unlock the path to enlightenment?”

The most important one, however, is this set (I cannot find the direct quotes, so I’m basing this off memory but):

Sombra: “What are we doing here?” Reaper: “We’re here to see an old friend.”

Now this is extremely interesting. One of the prevailing fan theories is that Angela “Mercy” Ziegler may have connections to Oasis - she is depicted in the Recall short as being located somewhere in the Middle East, particularly somewhere in present-day Iraq, which is where “the city of Oasis” is located. In the Reflections comic, she is shown to be working on some sort of “active field duty” in a tent that is brightly-lit. In the “We Are Overwatch�� short, she rescues a young girl on the edge of a large city with multiple skyscrapers in the background.

I know there is already speculation that, if Mercy is in fact located in Oasis, Reaper is “out for her.” Another version of the theory goes that Reaper is coming to see her to ask her for help with his current state of existence (note that I am not a fan of the “Mercy botched saving Reaper” theory because that has been effectively debunked by Chu).

Because if there is anyone capable of helping Reaper restore himself, it would be “the doctor of death herself,” Angela Ziegler.

We know from Dragons, Recall, Hero, and the Museum Heist that 1) ultimates such as the Dragons and Tactical Visor are canon, 2) Reaper is capable of transforming himself into smoke, 3) Winston’s in-game abilities - including his Rage ultimate - are canon. At the moment, there is no reason to believe that Mercy’s Resurrection ultimate is not canon. People will no doubt argue that I’m making a leap of logic here, but until confirmed otherwise, I’d say it’s likely that all Ultimates are canon.

And therefore this means that Mercy knows how to revive the dead.

More than anything, this means that if Mercy is associated with Oasis, that we should be giving a solid, hard look at what exactly this implies for lore. I’m not saying that Oasis “having Lovecraftian connotations is 100% canon,” but rather it is important to note that the types of references a story builds for itself almost certainly influences the type of story it wants to portray. The fact that Mercy has not one, but multiple skins that are related to “raising the dead in morally-ambiguous ways” is telling. She has two Valkyrie skins, the Imp and Devil skins, and the Witch skin (which literally carries “a book of life” on her).

Again, I already know these skins aren’t canon. That’s beside the point. The point here is that all of this combined creates a very ambiguous tone about Mercy and Oasis - the undercurrents of mistrust, the sensation that “something lurks in the city,” the feeling that “humanity is playing with forces it cannot control,” the idea that “a doctor who defies death” lives and works there, the idea that the “in-game embodiment of Death Himself” is going there to “visit an old friend.” These are all things that build an eerie sense of foreboding.

Exactly as Lovecraft would have wanted it.

Lovecraft’s Nameless City builds the groundwork “lore” for his Cthulhu mythology. The “nameless city” is a city in the Arabian desert, older than Babylon, implied to have been “lost” to the ages as humanity began to conquer the earth. The ancient race that built the city retreated underground, where they continued their worship of the Great Old Ones. The human protagonist of The Nameless City wanders deeper and deeper until he is beset by the presence of the ancient race and some form of the Great Old Ones, ostensibly for “intruding on a realm he had no right to access.”

“I think I screamed frantically near the last—I was almost mad—but if I did so my cries were lost in the hell-born babel of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped, for I fell to babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.”

Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place—what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night-wind till oblivion—or worse—claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing—too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours when one cannot sleep.”

Here again we have a reference that “humanity is toying with forces it cannot hope to control” - time and death, an understanding of the universe much larger than “simple mortal sentience” can bear. Above all else, The Nameless City is where the author of Lovecraft’s mythological Necronomicon first begins writing the book, which originally has an Arabic title of “Al Azif,” loosely translated by Lovecraft himself as “that nocturnal sound (made by insects) supposed to be the howling of demons.”

Demons being jinn/djinn, or “genies.” And there is one character in Overwatch who has a Djinn skin.

2. God Programs and Null Sector

It always struck me as odd that Zenyatta has not one, but four mythology references that are NOT Tibetan or Nepalese in the slightest. In fact, he has two Djinn-based skins and two Egyptian skins (Ra and Sunyatta) which always seemed better suited to Ana or Pharah. Zenyatta did not get a Tibetan skin until the Halloween special, where he got a death-based skin with a Tibetan skull cap (again - I get this is not canon, but it is telling that his Halloween reference was to skull artwork). I do not doubt that Zenyatta’s skins - much like the other skins in the game - are simply following “a rule of cool” but like Mercy’s skins, they should give us some pause. In mythology, the djinn are trickster-type creatures that can span a range of morality (again, very similar to Mercy’s Valkyrie and Witch skins), and their whimsical natures certainly match Zenyatta’s, even if their origin is a bit far from Nepal.

The Ra and Sunyatta skins, however, are really interesting when you consider the fact that the only “canon” God Program currently revealed is Anubis.

For those of you that don’t know, Anubis is featured in Pharah’s comic “Mission Statement,” where it is revealed to be a supercomputer Omnic dubbed “a God Program” that is capable of mind-controlling other Omnics.

Which, you know, is the kind of stuff that Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones are capable of doing.

What is not stated outright in the Mission Statement comic, but is instead implied (once again, by Reaper) in Old Soldiers and in other in-game dialogue, is that Helix Securities is somehow “messing around” with “something beyond their control” by doing strange and possibly unethical experiments on Anubis, and that Anubis “lashed out” against them (causing Helix to send in Pharah’s Raptora squad to put it down).

The only other characters to have Egyptian mythology skins are Pharah herself (shockingly called “Anubis”) and her mother Ana (“Horus”). It is implied in Old Soldiers that Ana is attempting to “find out” what happened in Mission Statement through a Talon associate Harkim (the man Reaper speaks to).

So what does this mean?

Once again, humanity is playing with forces much larger than itself - in this case, a literal supercomputer that rivals “gods” - and the effects of this trickle down all the way to Pharah, Ana, and Reaper, who have to struggle with the aftermath of this “small scale disaster.” Only unlike Oasis, where a lot of the “inferences” are “non-canon” or simply implied, Mission Statement is canon to the overarching lore. While the “Egyptian god skins” are non necessarily canon, we can see that Blizzard is pulling in characters like Pharah, Ana, and Zenyatta into a shared “background mythos,” much like Mercy and Oasis.

And this has direct implications on Uprising’s lore and background.

In the Uprising comic, we see that Null Sector arises from pushback against anti-Omnic sentiments in London, which city officials and Mondatta were trying to rectify when Null Sector attacked. Overwatch - more specifically, Commander Jack Morrison and his fellow leaders Ana Amari and Gabriel Reyes - are put in a position where they are forced to make a difficult choice: stand on the sidelines and watch the situation deteriorate even further, or take action and risk getting in further international trouble with their Director and the rest of the world’s governments. As most people know, they do the latter.

“Canon Overwatch lore” shows that a team of four - Reinhardt, Mercy, Tracer, and Torbjorn - go into King’s Row and deliver a bomb before taking down Null Sector’s main base and freeing the hostages. But what is extremely interesting are a number of the new interactions - both canon and non-canon - that can be found in the mode.

(Note that most of these are based on memory):

1. A Torbjorn-Tracer interaction in which Tracer protests that “Not all Omnics are like this.” Torbjorn responds along the lines of “Look around - this has happened before and this will happen again!” He seems to be implying that the normal King’s Row map - in which a group of attackers is trying to push an EMP to the Power Plant to disable “hostile Omnic forces” - is a result of the consequences of the events of Uprising, and even that Null Sector may return in the future. However, this also builds on the old adage of “history repeats itself” which once again is a major thematic issue of Overwatch.

2. Null Sector troopers will say the lines of “Error: Faulty Programming” when Zenyatta’s discord orb is placed on them in All Heroes mode. 3. Orisa has a new voiceline when being revived where she says “I think I saw the Iris.”

The last two are super fascinating because we have two new ideas being presented here. The first is that Zenyatta’s discord orb operates by disrupting mental or computational abilities and works by “disorienting” enemies, allowing allies to target them in their “mentally weakened state.” Even though this interaction is not canon, it once again builds on the idea of mind control/mind effect that Anubis and Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones have. Zenyatta’s standard lines about the ability - “Bask in the shadow of doubt.” “Darkness falls.” “You are your own worst enemy.” “There is disquiet in your soul.” - are among some of the most ominous and sinister lines in the game. With this, Zenyatta’s ties to the “background mythos” of “uncontrollable chaos” lurking at the edges of Overwatch’s fictional world get much stronger, especially now that it’s shown he can perform these same abilities on other Omnics.

Orisa’s new voiceline is extra telling because previously it was implied that “only enlightened Omnics” could see the entity known as “The Iris,” but now a “one month old” Omnic with limited experiences in the world has implied that she has seen it upon her death and “resurrection” (once again, we should be thinking of all the shady stuff about Mercy here). Since Bastion does not have the ability to speak any known human language (oh look, another lowkey Babel reference), Orisa is now the third Omnic character to confirm the existence of the Iris outside of Zenyatta and Mondatta.

3. Gazing into the abyss - Sombra, The Eye Conspiracy, and the Popol Vuh

I know that other people have already put forward the idea that the Eye featured at the center of Sombra’s conspiracy web is “the Iris” - personally, I’m not a big fan of the idea but I want to examine it because the motif of “eyes” is recurring in Overwatch. We have, at a glance (heh): 1. Ana and Pharah both having “eyes of Horus” tattoos.

2. Ana, Reinhardt, and Torbjorn are all missing eyes.

3. Soldier: 76 with his “enhanced vision” thanks to Tactical Visor.

4. Widowmaker’s “multi-view” camera headgear.

5. Hanzo’s “eyes of the dragon.”

6. Zenyatta’s Iris references.

7. Winston and Mei both wear glasses (and reference it).

8. Sombra’s Eye conspiracy.

9. Orisa’s new voiceline about the Iris.

10. Multiple characters in masks or headgear that obscure their eyes.

11. McCree’s “Deadeye” ultimate.

12. The literal name of “Overwatch.”

I’ve probably missed some, but in any case, the associated motifs of eyes/vision/watching things is constant and ubiquitous in Overwatch (even down to the name of the game itself), which wraps about around to the very blunt and obvious “Who watches the Watchmen” theme that the series has going on. With Uprising, we have the implied idea that “Overwatch has steadily overgrown its original parameters and started acting as ‘world police’ for justice and assistance.” It may mean well, but ultimately, Overwatch is directly told by Director Petras, the UK government, and public protests (shown on the news blurbs) that “its oversight and protections” are no longer wanted or needed, even if its intentions are good and pure.

It is not surprising then, that the idea of Overwatch “becoming too ambitious - even with good intentions” brought down the “wrath” of something even larger than it, something with the ability to move forces such as Talon, LumériCo, Volskaya, etc.

Something that “watches” the “Overwatchmen.”

Personally, I think the idea that the Eye Conspiracy being the same as The Iris is a little on-the-nose, especially since a lot of the “background mythos” is a series of obscure references that require semi-inane “connecting the dots” to find (am I self-depreciating here? Yes), but it is a promising theory, especially with the new stuff surround Null Sector, Zenyatta, and Orisa. So while I don’t want to talk to much about “what the Eye Conspiracy could be,” I do want to get into a little bit of “background mythos” around Sombra -

Because it too involves “deaths that cannot die.”

Dorado itself was rather blindly (hah) designed by the Overwatch team who, in their haste to make a “bright, colorful village map,” drew references from an Italian city by the sea (gj guys, way to double-check your sources). But the LumériCo power plant was almost certainly designed based on the Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Plant, which exists in almost the exact same location as Dorado’s maps (note that the in-game map within the LumériCo appears to be incorrect, as the Uprising map confirms that Dorado is supposed to be further south on the Gulf of Mexico). More than anything else, the LumériCo power plants are designed to evoke the pyramids of Aztec and Mayan design. These were massive stone builds of ritual, political, and social power that were meant to mimic the mountains that gods such as the Feathered Serpent, Tlaloc/Chaac, and Huitzilopochtli were believed to live on. They were also meant to be displays of power and regality by various kings, queens, and rulers.

So like the Temple of Anubis, the LumériCo power plant is a remixing of “real world mythologies” with the dev team’s “vision of the future,” a vision where humanity celebrates its diversity and the beauty of its multitude of ideas and histories with a “futuristic twist.”

But what it also implies is that Portero - the CEO of LumériCo - is imposing himself as a psuedo-ruler in Mexico.

And that’s not just me “reading the inferences” like with Oasis or Mercy. This is outright what Sombra calls him in the Sombra ARG.

“Long live the King!

“The King Guillermo Portero of LumériCo invites cordially, his loyal servants, to participate in his crowning event and to celebrate his infinite greed and treason toward the people of México. We gave coordinated the publication of info that demonstrates that Portero is a viper, that have for a long time ripoff the riches of our country for his own wealth. He has corrupted our government, turned our sisters and brothers into beggars, and he won’t stop until controlling the whole country under his dominance. But we, Los Muertos, won’t tolerate the celebration of his reign of corruption. We’ll demonstrate to our new conquistadores (conquerors) who will take the reins of the future of our country! On November 1st, we’ll dethrone the King Viper and we’ll celebrate the recovery of our home.”

Surrounding Sombra and Los Muertos is a mythos of revolution and resistance, notably against a “new world oligarchy” of which Sombra perceives Portero to be “only the start.” In Infiltration we see her take on Katya Volskaya through blackmail and “trickery,” and in her Origins video, Sombra outright declares war on “The Eye Conspiracy.”

“I’ll find out who really runs the world. I’ll find their weaknesses and how to exploit them. And when I do - I’ll be the one pulling the strings.”

Whether intentional or not, Sombra’s arching story and its motifs parallels one of the major Mayan mythologies - the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh. The Hero Twins are symbols of life and death, war and peace, day and night. In the most famous version of their adventures, the Hero Twins take on the lords of Xibalba (the underworld) and “beat them at their own games” using information, trickery, and cunning. In some versions of the myth, they go on to become the Sun and the Moon, and watch over the world for the rest of eternity.

We have seen Sombra challenge “the reign” of Portero and through her leaks, she forced him to resign under public humiliation. We have seen her start to make a move against Volskaya Industries. And we know, from her interactions with Reaper, that she is semi-aware that “something is going on with someone in Oasis.” Michael Chu has stated that Sombra’s interactions with Reaper are canon, and therefore, “the shadow” and “Death himself” are relatively close (as implied by the “you don’t mind if I call you Gabe, do you?”/”stick to the mission” interaction).

Interesting here too, again whether intentional or not, is the idea that figures who represent or are associated with Death - Sombra, Los Muertos, Reaper, Null Sector, Zenyatta, Anubis, Mercy - are “pushing back” against much larger powers, resisting against those who “watch the Overwatchmen,” and trying to reclaim power.

4. I’m not the one with the statue.

Before there was Lovecraft, before the Nameless City, before the Cthulhu mythos, there was Shelley’s Ozymandias.

“I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Surprise, surprise - a Very Important Statue of a Very Important Character in Overwatch got referenced in Uprising. Surprise, surprise - this same statue was depicted from The Very Beginning in the Museum Heist short, before Soldier: 76/Jack Morrison had even been revealed as a character.

Surprise, surprise - this very same statue is implied to have been blown up in the Swiss Base explosion (you can actually see a “trunkless leg” in the Soldier: 76 Origins video).

And - surprise, surprise - Ozymandias is the “superhero alter-ego name” of Adrian Viedt in Watchmen, the “true antagonist” of the story and whose jaded, misguided morals designs an “impending disaster” in order to try and force humanity to unite against it.

“Before Manhattan leaves to create life in another galaxy, Veidt asks him if he "did the right thing in the end". Manhattan replies that "In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends", leaving Veidt in doubt about how long the peace will last.”

In Watchmen, there are constant themes of “history repeats itself” and “humanity’s arrogance and desire for personal short-term satisfaction outweigh idealism and hope for long-term peace and prosperity.” And of course the ever prevalent theme of “Who watches the Watchmen?”

And since Overwatch straight up rips off Watchmen, it’s not surprising at all that these major themes have worked themselves into the “background mythos” and outright lore of the game, its characters, and its world. Of course, Overwatch attempts to portray its version of Ozymandias - Jack Morrison/Soldier: 76 - in a more...morally acceptable light, framing his decisions as “doing the right thing but ultimately sacrificing his ‘empire’ for it.” If anything, Uprising shows Morrison as a character “setting out on the right track, but ultimately brought down by the corruption of the larger forces in the world - the conspiracy that invades his organization, that seemingly ‘brings down and blinds (hah) his friends Ana and Gabriel,’ and that literally attempts to kill him.”

Of course, when you read between the lines of the Uprising comic, we can see that “the rest of the world” has begun to perceive Overwatch a rather different way - as a policing force that has started to overstep its bounds, impose its ambitions of “peace” upon the world “through means of trickery and deceit (Blackwatch) and even outright control methods (Overwatch Strike Team),” and aims to “reach for the impossible.”

And so we come to the idea of “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

Much like the Tower of Babel, much like Mission Statement, much like the Sombra ARG, we have a recurring “background story” where “the larger powers that be” are fighting (from their perspective) to “keep humanity in its rightful place,” to restrict and lay low its ambitions and “arrogance,” to show that - no matter how well-meaning - overstepping one’s bounds will result in disaster and strife. If Overwatch could not achieve global peace “through its Strike Teams and Blackwatch,” then how can anyone else?

If the Ozymandias of the poem could not maintain his empire and his power, if even Time Itself brought him down and ruined “his works,” if even Time Itself could wear down on the Nameless City, if even after twenty to thirty years of hard work for peace could not solidify Overwatch’s worth in the world -

Then what will defy Time Itself?

What will break the cycle of history repeating itself?

Overwatch has set up a few “routes” - all of them paralleling each other - out of this “background mythos of endless horror and despair” it has built for itself.

The first is Recalled Overwatch - the “Neutral/Chaotic Good” route. In this Route, Winston and Tracer have begun to rebuild the fallen Overwatch from the rubble, in direct defiance of the Petras Act. We know that, in due time, Genji attempts to join them (after Dragons), and that he invites Hanzo along. Other agents who receive the Recall notice are Mercy, McCree, Reinhardt, and Torbjorn. This is the route that will “do things the right way this time,” where “the darkness” is fought back with “the light,” where “discord and disquiet” are overcome by “harmony and tranquility.” The uncertainty here is that there is nothing which prevents this route from repeating the same history as its predecessor.

The second is the Old Soldiers - the “True Neutral/Chaotic Neutral” route. In this route, we have Soldier: 76 and Ana setting off on their own, looking for “answers” to the “war that never ends.” What exactly Soldier and Ana are looking for is unknown - arguably, they’re looking for a way to bring down the conspiracy that ended Overwatch, but this is never stated outright. The problem with this route is that since there’s only two of them, they may never find what they are looking for.

The third route is the “Even Death may die” - the “True Neutral/Chaotic Evil” route. This is the route that, in my opinion, is by far the most interesting. It is the route that follows Sombra, Reaper, and Widowmaker. We know for certain that Sombra is out to find and control “the larger forces that really run the world,” and arguably Reaper “may be in on this plan.” Widowmaker’s role in this is uncertain. This is the route that probably parallels the Hero Twins - descending into “the underworld” to fight “the Lords of Death” with tricks, cunning, and intelligence, besting them at their own games. This is the route that would counter “whatever Great Old Ones exist” in Overwatch’s world with their own abilities - Sombra’s hacking and systems, Reaper’s inability to die, and (if she’s part of it) Widowmaker’s sniping abilities. The issue with this route is that there is nothing preventing these individuals from being “corrupted” by the same forces that “corrupted” the Eye Conspiracy and led to the fall of Overwatch.

One thing I want to stress is that none of these routes are necessarily “morally or ethically correct.”

After all -

It depends on how you see it.

There is a lot here for the development team to play with. It’s taken them quite a lot of time to get their feet on the ground, but now that they have an increasingly solid foundation to work on, they can build their bizarre and beautiful world however they want, with increasingly interesting and oddball references. With Uprising, we got stuff as wonderfully whimsical as the Selfie and Baby highlight intros, the Contra sprays, the Null Sector skins, etc, but we also got stuff as eerie and surreal as the Zenyatta discord orb lines, Orisa’s “Was that the Iris?” line, the strong implication of Null Sector using reprogramming to make Bastions and OR-14s fight against their will, and Torbjorn’s lines of “this has happened before and it will happen again.”

What the Overwatch team is building here is a series of “range of canon” background mythologies (some that are “non-canon but merely background white noise that colors how the players view the world,” to “these are kinda sorta canon and you should be paying attention to how we use these references,” to “these are outright canon and we will be using them blatantly for whatever we want”) that develop the world in a set of unique ways. Even for the stuff that “isn’t canon,” it still exists in the game and it still tints how players interact with the characters, their personalities, and their story arcs. Reaper’s Mariachi skins and Zenyatta’s Djinn skins may never matter “in the overall story,” but they still show small “slices” of personality that reveal something new about them. Similarly, Zenyatta’s lines about his discord orb may never “make it to canon,” but they still demonstrate that “something dark” lurks within them.

And this is, arguably, both the strength and weakness of this style of storytelling: anything and everything is open and available for use. You can design a world where a map references the Tower of Babel and more or less imply that “the doctor who defies death” lives there, but you can change this at the drop of a hat. You can create a robot monk whose abilities rely on amplifying “the disquiet” in other characters’ souls, but then say that his statements on these abilities are not “canon.” You can craft a narrative surrounding three old comrades who have had a major falling out and then leave massive gaps in the explanation for this problem. You gain freedom, flexibility, and openness in exchange for lore that stands on a foundation as steady as shifting sands.

So yes, I know that like half of this essay or whatever “isn’t canon.” But if Mercy’s Witch skin has impacted how you view her, or knowledge of Watchmen has impacted how you understand Overwatch as a whole, or hearing Orisa’s voiceline about the Iris has changed your perception of it, then does it matter “how canon” it is?

If it has impacted how you see it

Then it has already influenced how you interpret it.

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This doesn’t even BEGIN to cover all the apocalypse references made by characters like Roadhog, Junkrat, Ana, Reaper, etc. There are, frankly, a massive amount of voicelines that - once again - shade how the player perceives the characters and the world of Overwatch at large. This doesn’t even cover backstories like Reaper or Mei or D.va, that latter of whom straight up has Godzilla/Evangelion references in her background. And this doesn’t even cover stuff like the battle of Eichenwalde, or Deadlock, or “HAL-fred Glitchbot” (who is literally a reference to HAL and Alfred Hitchcock, both elements of “Hollywood horror”), or even the issues around Los Muertos. There’s a ton here that shows that the Overwatch devs are dropping apocalyptic and/or horror references as varied as Mad Max to Apocalypse Now to 2001: A Space Odyssey to Neon Genesis Evangelion to The Headless Horseman to “the grandfather of all sci-fi” Frankenstein to “the grandfather of American macabre Romanticism” Edgar Allan Poe.

The “background mythos” of Overwatch is filled with horror story references - everything from The Raven, to Thriller, to Psycho. Behind the bright colors and beautiful maps are canon stories that imply something darker - a God Program being contained against its will, a yakuza clan that “needs to be reigned in,” a city “building the tallest tower in the world,” an arms-dealing gang “coming back into power,” an EMP being delivered to “hostile Omincs” - and a whole slew of “non-canon references” that display something even deeper, “even darker” that lurks beneath them all.

#overwatch #overwatch lore #my essays #my writing #i don't even know what to call this #sorry to drop this on yall on a sunday night #lol #references #ideas #inspiration

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