Via Kotaku:
And Jeff Kaplan's super bland PR response:
https://kotaku.com/blizzard-explains-why-overwatch-still-doesnt-have-a-bla-1830241379
Of course, when Overwatch fans posted about this on the official forums, they got so much pushback that the mods had to close it.
BGG made a blog post prior to Kotaku covering the topic and hey have since received a ton of harassment and pushback. This is an important part of the article, because I could imagine people on Resetera will be saying the same thing:
But once the excitement started to die down, the discussion shifted: Ashe is another skinny white woman, people pointed out, in a game that still doesn't have even one black woman hero.
"On one hand, yay, new Overwatch hero! Looking forward to seeing what Ashe can do. On the other hand.... where is my black female hero, Blizzard????" wrote one fan on Twitter, echoing an almost endless avalanche of similar sentiments.
Those fans' disappointment grew when Blizzard revealed in a subsequent BlizzCon panel that Ashe had darker skin in a very early design. They couldn't help but see a pattern forming, noting that an early iteration of the character Mercy was also black.
There are also potential black heroes who've been on fans' radars for years, but who've yet to make it into the game.
Overwatch now has 29 heroes, which include men and women from all sorts of backgrounds that aren't often represented in big-budget video games. Doomfist is a Nigerian man, Pharah is an Egyptian woman, and Lucio is a Brazilian DJ. There are even black women in the game's supporting cast, like Orisa's creator, Efi Oladele. After all this time, though, black women are still conspicuously absent from the hero roster, even as the game faces criticism for a lack of variety in women heroes' faces and body types.
While writing this story, I asked Kotaku's Gita Jackson, who has also been looking into this issue, for her input. "Every time Blizzard has announced a new hero, there have been fans asking when there will be a black woman. There are so few playable black women in games in general that to be consistently overlooked by a development studio who explicitly wants Overwatch to feel diverse and international feels upsetting," she said. "They made a hamster and a second cowboy before they made a black woman. It just feels like we're not a priority, and while I can't tell them what to do, I feel like they're under-serving a part of their fanbase that clearly wants to throw money at them."
And Jeff Kaplan's super bland PR response:
Jeff Kaplan told Kotaku at BlizzCon that Ashe as we now know her was born of timing and sudden inspiration, which played a role in her appearance. Originally, she was just a supporting character in "Reunion," the new cinematic revealed during BlizzCon. It was conceived as a "McCree piece," but the Overwatch team saw an early, pre-animation version of the video created by the cinematics team and were taken by Ashe's look and personality—and also B.O.B. They decided that Ashe would be the next hero.
"We absolutely have intentions to make a really diverse cast," said Blizzard senior software engineer Julie Anne Brame. "But again, this came from cinematics, and she was just so special out of that wonderful cinematic. And it wasn't, like, out of all the things in the world to pick, we want to pick this particular character; it was 'Wow, that's a really special character that needs to come to life and really would contribute a lot to our universe.' I think that's what made Ashe stand out."
https://kotaku.com/blizzard-explains-why-overwatch-still-doesnt-have-a-bla-1830241379
Of course, when Overwatch fans posted about this on the official forums, they got so much pushback that the mods had to close it.
BGG made a blog post prior to Kotaku covering the topic and hey have since received a ton of harassment and pushback. This is an important part of the article, because I could imagine people on Resetera will be saying the same thing:
What were people's responses to the request? The common rebuttals both myself and the thread received are:
Let's tackle them shall we?
- "Sombra is Afro-latina"
- "Farah and Ana are Egyptian"
- "Erm Orisa…duh!"
Sombra is canonically Mexican, this has no bearing on her race as Mexican is not a race – it's a nationality. However there have been no overt indicators towards Sombra being Afro-Mexican in her short or her story video. Let's not conflate the term Afro-latina with meaning anyone with brown skin. Just as Sombra could be Afro-latina, she could also be Mixed or Mestiza.
The next response was that Ana and Farah were Egyptian and therefore Black. Firstly, it tickled me that now people want to say Egyptians were Black when, for years, the Black community has been screaming this from the roof tops to be met with white washing and obtuse reasons as to why Ancient Egyptians "just simply weren't Black". I digress, Ana and Farah are Egyptian and quite rightly could be Black however again I had to redirect people to the word unambiguous a term many people had trouble understanding.
"Unambiguously Black" simply means that by looking at a person there would be no question as to what race they are. Using racially ambiguous people as representatives for the whole of the Black race is a tired tactic used by media and brands. Just as there are 6 representations of white women in Overwatch in a variety of nationalities, shapes and sizes, there should be different representations of the Black women and other POC in game.
