So I was watching the Dragons short again, cause I am working on a big post about Hanzo Shimada that is based in canon and I wanted to smack myself for being stupid and missing something obvious for so long.
The events unfolding between Hanzo and Genji are accompanied by a narrator telling the story of the dragons of the north and south wind, creating a parallel structure between two similar stories. The narrator is not just a random voice over because the narration starts with this.
“My family tells of an ancient legend…”
So, in context, that means that the narrator is a Shimada. The voice also clearly belongs to neither Genji nor Hanzo, so then who is it?
The answer is actually rather obvious for two reasons, one is thematic, the other practical. The practical answer is because there is only one other named Shimada in Overwatch’s lore. The thematic answer is revealed when Hanzo says “Life is not like the stories our father told us…”
The narrator is heavily implied to be Sojiro, their father. This makes a lot of sense thematically with the rest of the information that we have about the Shimada family.
A bit of lore that people often forget/ignore is that Genji’s bio has this line that describes their father.
Many within the clan considered the carefree Genji to be a dangerous liability, and they resented his father for coddling and protecting him.
This is the most amount of direct characterization we get about the man, that he actively defended Genji, despite how he acted. This, in conjunction with the story he narrates over the Dragons short, paints the picture of a man who valued family above all else. Someone who would grieve the tragedy that had befallen his sons. The story he tells, however, shows his hope that they might reconcile and their family can be whole once more. (Quite the contrast to the normal fanon interpretation of him treating Genji poorly in particular.)
This actually makes the fact that Hanzo ultimately killed Genji even more tragic, as it likely happened despite what his father wanted and taught him about family. In the end, he listened to the wrong people.
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