I'm not necessarily with dragging Blizzard for this, but what's with all the pushback from fans? Blizzard introduces new heroes to Overwatch all the time. Just make one a black woman. it's not hard,the world seems designed to put in anything you want. As always, the more fantastical your setting the less plausible it is for there not to be black people present lol.
Indeed. The pushback is quite odd. People seem to be acting like a black woman character is a completely random request, on par with I don't even know, asking for a character that was born in Antarctica or something based in some of these responses I'm seeing. Whereas of course there's absolutely nothing random about it, given we ain't talking about some obscure nationality or anything, but just the skin color of millions of women across the world.
The pushback also seems to ignore a lot of the context. Like reading through the stuff in the OP, I had no idea about it since I don't usually get into anything revolving around the lore or the history of the characters or anything, but it seems to be the case that Blizzard has contemplated making multiple characters black women at certain points in the designing and planning phase, only to decide against it each and every time. That's the kinda thing that makes this stuff sting, them thinky about it but just happening to pass over that particular option multiple times now.
Add onto that the characters that they have added in the time since the game's released, including stuff like a freakin' hamster of all things, and yeah, that together with there being designs for black women heroes that were scrapped, if I were a black woman, being a lower priority than stuff like that wouldn't exactly be the best feeling in the world, that's for sure (though unfortunately not very surprising either since another piece of the puzzle is just how few playable unambiguously black women characters there are in games).
Of course, nonetheless, Overwatch does have a very diverse set of characters, especially compared to lots of other AAA games. But bringing that up only serves to highlight the discrepancy all the MORE, not less. Because Overwatch has this diverse group of characters! Wonderful (and indeed it is)!
But then at the same time, doesn't it make it all the more odd that they're missing something so fundamental and basic, like an unambiguously black woman character. Given that we ain't exactly talking about something rare here in real life, but rather the skin color of millions upon millions of women, the fact that Blizzard has so many characters in Overwatch now, that it indeed does have such a diverse cast makes the absence of such a character kind of more odd if anything, not less.
It really couldn't serve as a better demonstration of how low a priority something like having representation for the skin color and ethnicity of millions of women in the world appears to be, especially with the context of it being something Blizzard's considered but just happened to pass up each time
So putting that all together, not just one piece of it, bit putting it all together like the articles in the OP does, it definitely does seem like it's high past time for their to be a playable unambiguously black woman character in Overwatch but as disappointing as the pushback is, it also isn't really surprising in any way.
