Cecilia: That article reads, "They wanted to find a way for it to be revealed naturally and make it part of the unfolding story."
I feel that the comic did that. Tracer buys her partner a scarf. Her partner likes it. They kiss. The comic moves on. I think it was handled quite well, although the idea of Blizzard announcing a queer character feels sort of…. gimmicky.
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Cecilia: I like that. I think it's good that you can let lore matter as much or as little as you want.
For some people, it will mean a lot that Tracer dates a woman. For some, it's like, okay, I really like fucking up backlines, so I'll pick Tracer. Boom. Whatever.
Heather: For myself, I go the other way. Queerness or other traits are integral parts of people's character and being. The idea that we could separate them so easily troubles me, to be honest.
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Cecilia: But then how do you toe the line between sensationalizing it and not saying anything about it at all?
Riley: I mean, that's one of the really hard things about writing nuanced queer characters, or 'diverse' characters of any type. How to not be reductive or dismissive.
Gita: I think, Cecilia, the problem arises when you take a step back and see what, if at all, Blizzard has done in terms of queer characterization. And it's just this: Tracer kissed a woman. The rest of it is on the backs of the fans, which doesn't make me feel awesome.
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Cecilia: Right, but what's the solution?
It's easy to talk about what we don't like. But I'm just so happy that the token
Overwatch character is a queer woman. I think that's great. Blizzard thought about diversity a lot for
Overwatch and it shows in the game. Sure, it's a marketing technique, but it doesn't feel forced or gimmicky aside from how Tracer's queerness was teased.
Gita: Well, Heather wrote
this awesome piece for Giant Bomb about a possible solution: hire more LGBT to tell their own stories.
Heather: I think an important thing to stress is that presenting something isn't necessarily as involved as integrating it. How that integration occurs can take many forms.
Riley: The solution I always offered, which is going to read as weird, is this: Trans people—and 'diverse' characters in general—are people. Your characters want the things people want, which is pretty much anything under the sun. How that lives out in the world of a game is tricky, maybe, since characters in
Overwatch are, by nature, reduced to being able to do very little besides shoot, but that's where I always go to.
Cecilia: At some point, we have to say "Good job."
Gita: Well, I don't think this is that point.
