Tracer's Pose Controversy

Overview

[WIP]

Background

On March 25th, 2016, Blizzard forum user Fipps started a discussion thread in Overwatch's beta feedback page^[1] asserting that the victory pose of Tracer, one of the more well-known playable characters, is irrelevant to her character traits and therefore unwarrantedly objectifies her into a female sex symbol:

Then out of seemingly no where we have this pose:

WHAT? What about this pose has anything to do with the character you're building in tracer? It's not fun, its not silly, it has nothing to do with being a fast elite killer. It just reduces tracer to another bland female sex symbol.
We aren't looking at a widowmaker pose here, this isn't a character who is in part defined by flaunting her sexuality. This pose says to the player base, oh we've got all these cool diverse characters, but at any moment we are willing to reduce them to sex symbols to help boost our investment game.

Notable Developments

Throughout the weekend, Fipps' thread on Tracer's victory pose devolved into a lengthy and messy debate with hundreds of other users debating on a wide range of tangential topics, from Blizzard's art direction and marketing strategies to objectification of female videogame characters. On March 28th, Jeff Kaplan, the game director of Overwatch, replied^[2] to the thread by pledging to replace the character's pose, which inadvertently led to the escalation of an already tense debate on the forum.

We'll replace the pose. We want everyone to feel strong and heroic in our community. The last thing we want to do is make someone feel uncomfortable, under-appreciated or misrepresented. Apologies and we'll continue to try to do better.

In response to Kaplan's announcement, many users criticized the decision for what they perceived as a disproportionate response to an individual beta participant's qualm, some raised their eyebrows at the studio's seemingly arbitrary hypersensitivity to sexualization of cartoon characters, despite its gratuitous depiction of cartoon violence, while others complimented the studio for its receptiveness to community feedback and dedication to the details in portrayal of characters in line with their personalities. That same day, Kaplan's response made its way over to Reddit's /r/overwatch community^[3], where it further snowballed into a controversy by drawing nearly 2,000 comments within the first 24 hours of the post. In addition, a petition^[4] seeking to preserve the original pose of Tracer was launched by Redditor AetherPrismriv, which has garnered over 4,000 points and 2,400 comments over the same time period. During the following days, the controversy spawned several jokes and fan art related to the pose (shown below).

On April 5th, the game was updated to include a replacement for the original, which was followed by praised by the fans for being more fitting with Tracer's personality. A post on the Overwatch subreddit regarding the pose change gained over 2,900 points (89% upvoted) and 950 comments in less than 16 hours.^[7]

Search Interest

External References