I don’t even go here. I know, like, broad strokes over overwatch lore, have been playing the game for… three months or so, am very bad at everything, but something bothered me so much yesterday that I’m… meta’ing. Do you even do that around here?

Anyway, so, that D.Va animated short finally happened. And I loved it. But the youtube comment section sure didn’t. Which, you know, is normal, and to be expected, because I guess gamer bros are everywhere and they don’t get any more pleasant. So yeah, the short mostly showed us D.Va’s job as established so far, and yes, the guy got a bit too much spotlight for my taste. So the roughly 50% comments focusing on the guy and how we all lost another brother to the friendzone were to be expected and just worthy of rolling your eyes at, maybe.

But then people tried to rationalize their dislike. There’s nothing new in the short, D.Va has no depth or development, is a total Mary Sue because she can fix her own mech, the writing was bad and everything was sooo clichéd.

Which. I mean. You can think that. But then, when someone asked OP to name a short that ISN’T clichéd or badly written, OP named… Dragons. And. Whaaaaat.

So maybe it’s my anime background, or the above average amount of other Japanese media I have consumed over my life, but like. No. There is nothing not clichéd about two yakuza ninja brothers feuding, trying to kill each other, and one being burdened by the guilt over it and the other finding spiritual enlightenment. Well, okay, the fact that Genji was turned into a cyborg is somewhat unique to the franchise, and maybe this combination of tropes hasn’t been done quiiiite the same way before. But individually, all of these elements are… The most stereotypical kind of Japanese story you could tell a Western audience without getting into NSFW territory, and slapping a cool story about brother dragons on top of it doesn’t exactly help.

Also, I got every bit of information contained in dragons – sans the wallscroll brother dragons legend, maybe – from the game itself, too. Was the background of the Shimada brothers just not revealed when the short premiered? Remember, I’ve been in this for like 3 months. I know the basics. That’s it. But that short in particular didn’t feel like it told me anything that wasn’t available in in-game dialogue and the small blurps next to the skins in the hero gallery.

So compared to that, I feel like Shooting Star told and showed us A LOT that was not available in the game before. The MEKA squad and D.Va’s friend notwithstanding. Is D.Mon her sister, or is that just a thing they do?

Anyway, the short also established that D.Va has friends, a background with racing futuristic tech before getting her mecha, what the MEKA organization actually looks like, how current-day (…I think?) omnic attacks look, and, oh, yeah, that the MEKA squad is as much a combat unit as it is a propaganda tool to keep the public calm and that D.Va has PTSD from her work, and that her entire attitude? “Are you sure life is not a game” and so on? An act. She actually has more depth to her than being a gimmicky hot girl in a mech to appeal to the Korean fanbase.

(Someone in the comment section argued that one flashback doesn’t
mean she has PTSD but like. Dude. 7 minute short. Visual shorthand.
Every frame put in there on purpose. Things mean things.)

Like, this short kind of turned everything we knew about her upside down, didn’t it? Pretty much every quip she makes in game? Holy coping mechanisms batman. Assuming, of course, there is some sort of consistent long game going on and her dialogue was written with these motivations on the writers’ minds. And again, I am too new around here to know whether that’s how this entire shebang works or not. From what I hear, consistency is not exactly a thing between shorts and heroes and in-game information, and a lot of people are upset about that time everyone thought Mercy turned Reaper into Reaper and that it turned out to actually have been Moira and oh no how can they. So maybe this is one of those cases, maybe it isn’t.

(For the record, from what I got out of the voice lines and stuff, my take-away was that Mercy probably tried to save him after he blew up but didn’t make it/didn’t want to go there, and then Moira was like “fine, then I’ll just finish what you started” and, like, finished the job.)

(I mean can we talk about how Mercy’s and Reaper’s halloween skins reference each other?)

I mean, as mentioned before, gamer bros are everywhere and will always be rather unpleasant about these things. I’m sure the comment section on Mei’s animated short looks even worse. This just for some reason really bothered me, so yay, venting.